 Hello, I'm Reena Dutt, I've produced Red Directors Lab West. For those of you who are low-sided or listening in, I am a South Asian American director with dark skin. I have shoulder-length black hair. I'm wearing a red shirt and I have a white virtual background behind featuring our series title, Directors Lab West Connects and our hashtag, DLW Connects. Directors Lab West is a 20-year-old volunteer-run organization that every May provides an eight-day intensive full of workshops, panels, masterclasses, and more for emerging and mid-career theater directors and choreographers from all over the world. This year we jumped a hurdle and took advantage of this digital medium to mark the lab with Directors Lab West Connects. We are overwhelmed by your response and thoughtful questions from this week. Welcome to our eighth and final day of conversations crafted for you by theater directors and choreographers live-streamed by our partners at HellRound to their website and to our Directors Lab West Facebook page. Join the chat, tell us who you are, where you're tuning in from, and type in your questions for our speakers. And we'll be answered in the Q&A that follows. Thank you to Brittany Balance for providing ASL interpretation. She is a fair-skinned woman with her hair in a bun, glasses and a green sweater and a black background. Now I'd like to welcome our speakers, Sabra Williams and Laura Carlin. Sabra Williams has received international acclaim for her work as an actor, host, and co-founder of the Actors Gang Prison Project, including being named by President Obama a champion of change in 2016, and being honored with the British Empire Medal for Services to the Arts and Prison Reform by Queen Elizabeth in 2018. Sabra is a co-founder of Creative Acts, a social justice initiative that uses the arts as the tool for transformation, as well as a visiting lecturer at UCLA and a Bellagio Rockefeller resident fellow. Thank you. I am a light-skinned woman of color with long, dark, brown curly hair, and I am wearing a grey t-shirt with a pink logo that says Creative Acts, and I'm sitting at the entrance to a closet in my access room. Thank you. Welcome. We're so happy to have you. Laura Carlin is a choreographer, teacher, and advocate for empowering people of all ages and abilities through dance. She founded Invertigo Dance Theater in 2007. She has created over 40 works for the company and has been presented at venues such as the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, The Broadstage, and the Ford Amphitheater. Laura is a founder and leading teaching artist for dancing through Parkinson's and storytelling through movement, and she believes dance is for everybody and everybody. Laura. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. I am especially pale in this light. I have red curly hair that is pulled back, and I'm wearing a green romper and a funny, I don't know, pashmina that I found on the floor of my office, and glasses. Thank you for your description. Thank you so much for both of you being here. We're very excited about this. For everybody out there, you can find their bios on our website at directorslabwest.com, and you can also find bios for our entire week of panelists at the same place. So we'll be in conversation for the next 30 minutes discussing the power of theater and dance in systems-impacted communities. So before we shift into questions from the Facebook chat, which please put your questions there, I just want to launch into a quick question for you guys, and we'll just roll with this. Just a moment before we do a question, and I know it's sorry, we didn't plan any of this, which is why Rena looks like why, but I realized that I haven't done a big Zoom event yet, and I wonder if we could all just take a breath together, because normally when I do directorslabwest workshops, we're in space or we're in community together in a very direct way. But maybe we could all just, wherever you are, can we, is that okay, Rena? Oh, that's wonderful. I love it. Exactly. Same thing. Perfect. Excellent. So wherever, Sabra, do you want me to leave something or do you want to do it? No, just one unified breath. Okay, great. So wherever you are, just plant your feet into the floor or your sitz bones into the chair. Take a moment, soften your focus unless you're driving, in which case, sharpen up and everyone at the bottom of your next exhale, take a pause. And then when you're ready, take a deep inhale, let that breath fill your throat and your lungs, your belly, hold it for just a moment, and then soften and let it go. Thanks. Thank you. It's been a very trying week and so I'm very excited about this conversation with both of you. Yeah, thank you. So let's start with just sharing. I would love to hear you share a little bit about your work and your work with systems impacted communities and perhaps define it for our audience as well since I feel quite a few people might not understand what systems impacted communities are. So I would love to hear from both of you how you define it and how did you find your way into it? Sabra, do you want to kick it off? Sure. Hi. I have to start by saying, especially as a person of color, I'm sitting in this house on stolen Tongva land at a time when this country is on fire and I have to honor my indigenous brothers and sisters and say to my Tongva brothers and sisters that I know so well, we will do better. So thank you for that. Everything I say today is to honor the lives of people of color who have been killed on the streets of this country, including the most recent George Floyd, and I'm sure he won't be the last. So everything I say and do today is in honor of our people. And I will also say it's in honor of the people who are behind bars right now who are terrified, who are in grave danger in this state alone in California. We have nearly 900 people who are positive behind bars and it's just beginning. We've had nine people die at the California institution for men and they're completely invisible. So when we talk about this virus of racism and the virus of the corona virus, they both apply the most to people who are behind bars. And that's what I mean by systems impacted, people who have been impacted by the systems that have been set up by white supremacy in this country and across the world, whether they be behind bars, formerly behind bars in the foster system, children's prisons, people who are targeted and arrested daily and people who are traumatized by that are also systems impacted. So that's what I mean by the communities that I work with. I'm an actor, an artist, and an immigrant. I'm the mother of a young man of color. And we came to this country in 2002 to shake our lives up. And boy, do we shake our lives up. Came here to work as an actor. I did not expect to have an activist made of me by America. And I started off, I joined the Actors Gang, which is Tim Robbins Theatre Company, as an actor. And I had been doing some work before in the UK with the English Shakespeare Company, just performing plays in prison, that's all. And so when I started doing work at the Actors Gang, it's highly emotional, physical work. And I noticed the effect that it was having on me. And I thought it would be great for prison work. And so I went to Tim and said, do you have anything I can be a part of? And he said, no, please invent something. And the prison project was literally born by me googling. I was straight off the boat, like prisons in California. And I saw Pelican Bay and I thought, oh, that sounds super pretty. It's not pretty. It's the only supermax prison in the state. It was too far away to start at. So we actually start at the California Institution for Men in 2006, just bringing in a version of the workshop that the Actors Gang does every Sunday night with a whole bunch of exercises that I knew that I'd been doing as an actor. And the first day that we did it, we went in for four hours, no clue what we were doing with a bunch of guys who also had no clue what we were doing. And it had such a radical transformation on their lives that we knew that we had something we had to continue. And so over the last, you know, fast forward 15 years, I left the Actors Gang a couple of years ago and started Creative Acts and really wanted to work back with the young people who are incarcerated because they are the most invisible of the invisible. And in LA County, they're allowed to vote, but we knew that they weren't being engaged. So called to find out if they were being registered even, turns out 600 of them were registered, but only 35 voted. So we knew we could do better. So we went into all nine children's prisons and, you know, did an arts workshop that we call Art Attacks. And of those people, 86% of them voted in a primary election, simply because the arts were a much more effective way for them to understand their power and the tool of voting to make change in the community. So that's one of our programs. And then the other one, we're doing this crazy virtual reality reentry program to help people who've done life sentences have a better experience. So when they come back, they can hit the ground running in this fully computerized society, which I can talk more about later. But yeah, that's what we're doing. Sabra, I'm just so in love with you. Feeling's mutual from when we first met backstage. No, well, so Sabra and I actually met each other at, if you want to talk about an incredible blend of community and art, we met backstage at Independent Shakespeare Company where she was igniting the stage and where my company in Vertigo Dance Theater has a partnership every year and we perform with them. So, so I just, I love the web. I found it in Vertigo in 2007, which is 13 years, which is incredible to me that we're a teenager now. And in Vertigo is a local, it's a Los Angeles based dance company. We blend high impact, highly kinetic movement with theatricality and we at the core of our mission is along with high quality, artistic creation woven into that is community and connection. And that's really the heartbeat of what we do and that plays out whether we're on stage or in studio or working in classrooms with our community partners, working with students, or whether we are doing our dancing through Parkinson's or dancing through life programming. And I've been working within activism and working and thinking and moving in that circle. I mean, I think since middle school, I was the sort of pain in the ass. I was the pain in the ass middle schooler that like didn't like friends because it was raised in a little bit. Just not a cute look for a lot of people in like the late 90s, early 2000s. But I have been involved in queer rights activism for a really long time. And I have a dual degree from college. My first degree was it was an honors degree of choreography and production. And my second degree was actually queer rights and social movements. So the plan coming out of college was to go to law school and be a queer rights attorney. And instead I am a choreographer now. So I started a dance company, obviously. But I think what that's meant is there is that that heartbeat of looking at creating space for stories where otherwise that space might not be curated, looking to invite people into the work, into their own bodies, into witnessing things on stage where they otherwise might not feel invited. And when I say systems impacted, I think that Safer did a beautiful job of articulating it. And what I would add is that there's a lot of messaging about who art is for, whether it's dance or theater or any kind of art form. And who is valid when they're practicing it and who is valid when they're witnessing it. And I think that making sure that we are constantly examining that and challenging it is is part of looking at systems impacted. And also it's just everything is so intersectional that we're constantly coming from an intersectional lens. And I think one of the reasons that we really use systems impacted is I don't like underserved. I think it doesn't mean, first of all, it's such an overused word in its grant language. It's a way of elevating yourself when you are writing a grant. Like I'm going to work with underserved populations. And I think that there's a saviorism that is just ever so slightly a connotation for me in that word. And it also puts the onus on that community of their underserved, as opposed to saying there's greater systems at play here. And we need to examine those and we need to be challenging those and conspiring against those systems. Nina, do you mind if I just add something? Please. I think that what you said is super important, Laura. And in fact, to me, it's one of the most important things about what we do in this country at this time. And that is I work with thousands of people who are incarcerated or who are returned or who are systems impacted and of those very, very few, maybe a handful have become artists or wanted to be artists. And I think that the issue in America as an outside eye, even though I am now an American as well. And this one right in the book about it is that America seems to see the arts as for artists or for entertainment, but does not in any way understand the absolute crucial importance of the arts for people who are self-described non artists who do not want to be artists in any way. And that's why we have to have the arts in the core of the school day, just like math, English, you know, anything, the arts have to be in the core of the school day, because it gives a different way to learn in this very, very narrow way we have of educating people or of being successful in education in this country. And so what I've seen is that, you know, people I remember getting a call from somebody who had done the program six years before. And he called me. He'd been out six years and he called me. He said, oh, I just want you to know I'm sitting in my office today. My boss is being a douchebag, and I am using every tool you ever taught me six years ago to stop myself from, you know, smacking him upside his head and leaving his job. And I think that, you know, that's what the arts are for centrally must be for. And we just if we understood that we would fully fund the arts, the government would fund the arts and it would be in the core of the school day. So I can't emphasize enough how important what Laura said is and it's everything. It's our responsibility as artists. So sorry to interrupt you, Reena. No, no, I'm going to try and speak slower. I know I speak super fast. Well, I want to bring it back to this idea of social culture changing by by what we do. Our conduit of communication and diving into communities because there's dance, which is nonverbal. And then we have performance art, you know, nonverbal, meaning it's a way to connect through our bodies and through our experiences with each other, right, with our breath. And it's something beautiful to think about. And I really want to know how do you because the work is so much about diving into a community to bring arts to help grow as a culture and as a fabric of our society. How do you translate your work from from being a performer into into the work you do with with your organizations? For me, there's no difference. You know, Shakespeare talks about it, you know, he talks about the theater being a mirror, holding a mirror up to society. I think that that's another issue that we have of separating the art from the social. And, you know, I think especially at this moment in time in history, at this pivot in history we're in right now, all artists need to be on the front line. And not necessarily, I don't mean by that being on protests all the time, although we should be able to. I mean, what I mean is like self-examining, you know, why am I an artist? What can my art do at this time? I personally, you know, when I'm performing, when I'm playing, I don't I am also in the community. Like when I'm speaking, these are not written people. These are in my head. These are characters that I play are people who really have lived in maybe just a different space than I live in, but they really have lived. And so when I step into their life, I'm also stepping into their community. And so I just I don't see any division at all. And what do you think, Laura? I think that I've been I wasn't going to talk about this because it's not fully formed in my brain. This is so vulnerable. OK, this is a thing. This is like a messy process I'm in the middle of biting into. So this I'm going to wander into it. I've been thinking more and more about, you know, as the artistic director of a company, one of my primary joys is to create staged work along with the community engagement programming that we do. And I've been thinking more and more about what I've been trying to do intuitively for a long time with a bunch of our different stage performances and what I'm fighting against. And what I'm fighting against is this idea of the stage performance up here and as this this main event and that everything else that happens in the process, any community engagement that happens that I as sort of supporting that or leading up to and lesser than. And it's so hierarchical. And it's what I see as, you know, in a lot of ways, it's a really patriarchal way of organizing our thoughts around the art and then the community engagement that there there is that hierarchy. And corporate as well. And corporate, yes, which is also when supremacy, which is also patriarchy, which is also well, I can't believe I just want like a massive intersections of oppression. Anyway, so I'm trying to now take this idea of the content of the show as inspiring community engagement that surrounds and feeds into and interacts with in a really genuine way, the work that the artists are doing. The drama, Turkey, the the rehearsals, the creation process are all informed by and informative of the community engagement that's happening. And that's just really being something that we've been doing for a while, but not articulating. So kind of allowing it to be more not even horizontal, you know, taking it out of a vertical hierarchy and not going to a horizontal thing, but just sort of this messy, spirally way of thinking about it. In the Shakespeare Company, where we met, which I'm a member of this amazing company, theatre company, one of the things that Melissa and David, artistic director of Melissa, the artistic director of Independent Shakespeare Company is that they've really been wanting to find ways to do what you're talking about. And one of the things we did that makes me super emotional. So I'll try not to cry as I've been crying the last week. One of the things we did I thought was so beautiful is inside prison, I feel like, you know, we hold the space for us to together in partnership with people who are incarcerated to create a safe space and joy and creativity and play. And so what I was thinking was, wouldn't it be amazing when they came back, could be involved in creating a space for us to play? And so what we did at Indie Shakes is that we had in partnership with the Antiprecidivism Coalition and alumni that I know had invited them and paid them to come and build the stage, because every year the stage has to be built in Griffith Park for our summer festival. And so we had we've been doing workshops inside halfway houses, you know, people coming back. And then we were also able to employ them to build the stage. And for me, it was super emotional to be walking on the stage where they've created the space for us in return to be able to play and be creative. And then they are all sitting in the audience. I don't know, it was just so beautiful. And now we're looking for ways to be able to invite them also to play on the stage and to build out something that is this given take of creativity. And just to really try to reimagine because that's what creative acts is, that we're trying to reimagine this space. So we're trying to use an art space approach in corporate worlds, in, you know, arts organizations to teach people how to become teaching artists. And even in our own organization, we are really, you know, it's a laboratory, right? So we're really trying to create a flat organization. Everybody's paid the same. We all get the same hourly amount. We all are like equally involved in what we create at Creative Acts. And obviously, the buck still stops with me. I still take responsibility as the executive director. But that's it. Apart from that, that's it. And it's such an exciting relief kind of from, you know, so many arts organizations are super hierarchical and super corporate. We sit around tables discussing the arts just like you would if you were in an office. And what we're thinking is what happens if you throw the table out the window in arts organizations and use the arts in the process. And that's super exciting. And we've been doing that even at the mayor's office of reentry. We like basically did that with them as well, with a bunch of bureaucratic people as well. It's awesome. And I feel that on a I love going into spaces where they are not expecting, you know, to be pounced on by artists. We do it with our Dancing Through Parkinson's programs. I'm constantly going into and also my teaching artists and our team. And and we've been doing Dancing Through Parkinson's for 10 or 11 years now. And and going into spaces with neurologists or conferences and having an entire conference of people who work in neurology and neurobiology. And standing up on stage and being like, all right, everyone, stand up and take a breath and reach and and watching. I think it's really delightful to watch people understand and light up that that movement or storytelling is for them. Even if it's as you know, as we were talking about earlier, even if it's not on a professional level, that there is that there is space for joy. I think that one of the things when we talk about systems impacted or, you know, we're under resourced, you know, we we really use language that is that presses down that that literally like oppresses the communities that we're working with unless we're really careful about that language and it is and that affects the way we as artists can often come into communities, whereas I think it's really important to come in knowing that there is space for joy, that there is space for creativity and that it is our job as artists to curate that space to open it up because joy, the idea that you have the capacity for joy can be a really intimidating one or one that sparks a reaction if if it's not done right. And I think that it's our job to curate those spaces and to allow for them. You know, I think often most of what we're doing is giving permission. You know, yeah, I completely agree with what I always say. And it's 100 percent true. I get the most joy in my life being in prison, and I know that sounds completely insane. But if there's so much joy and this agape love in the room when you create a safe space for people to play and do difficult work, it is the most joy I get in my life. Yeah, I agree. And I think that that's it's something I look for in the work I make for stage and it translates into the work that we do in workshops and in classes. I think that there's space for humor for a long time when I started making work in Los Angeles. The sort of general style that was going on at the time was real serious because a lot of people in Los Angeles were real serious choreographers who were worried about being like taken for like the commercial world and they were worried about being seen as lightweights and wanted to be taken seriously. And so I was making work that incorporated humor. And so I was known as like the funny oh, you're the funny one. Well, yes, there there's humor in the work and there can be humor in the way we teach and there's space for that. But really, it's often through allowing people to laugh that you that they that we relax that we that we reconnect to our humanity. And from there, we can address deeply rooted traumas that we can address deeply complex questions. And we're doing so from a place that isn't so tight, isn't so bound, isn't so afraid because we've taken if you're laughing, you're breathing. So I love this. I love this. We're at 11 30. So I want to bring back a couple of ideas and also integrate some questions that our audience had today. And one of the questions is in regard to covid in our current epidemic, we keep talking about, you know, being together and the togetherness that our work is in this current pandemic, where we're physically separated, but obviously together and being able to communicate ideas. How how do you feel we can integrate the work that we're doing now into and make it profitable emotionally and decidedly during the pandemic, considering that we have digital access, but not everybody has this access, right? So how has the pandemic affected your work? Do you see ways of moving forward? There's one question specific where Alicia Brady, she's new to directing and she's finding herself loving and incorporating movement into the communication of performance, also feeling a true disconnect with covid and the Zoom virtual theater world. So what would you advise in terms of doing the work in this in this environment that we're in right now? Well, I'll start with what Invertigo has been doing. And I actually came back to work from maternity leave on the day that the beat kind of dropped on covid-19 in the U.S. I think outside of the U.S. it had been it had been a known a more known entity for a while, but I came back on the day that our office went remote. That was my first day back at work and I sat down at the computer and in my very empty office and everything had changed, not just because I had had a baby, but because the entire world was different, you know, in a moment. And what we do, you know, and I think Sabra, it's probably true for you as well, is feels so physically or dependent on physical presence in a lot of ways. And and we really had to take a moment and pause, especially with our Dancing Through Parkinson's programs and Dancing Through Life, because these are some of our more medically vulnerable communities. People with Parkinson's are at incredible risk. And so we actually, I think a week or two before had suspended programming, in-person programming. And then, you know, we had a meeting with all of the teaching artists who are these incredible people and these women had lost, you know, in 48 hours, they've lost their entire season's worth of gigs, their entire livelihoods. And yet they were on, you know, this video conference saying, well, has anyone heard from Jack? And, you know, I know that so-and-so had surgery and does anyone know how she's doing? And oh, I know that, you know, this person doesn't have internet at her home and I'm worried about her, has anyone called her? And how can we start making sure that they're moving because, you know, people need to keep moving? And there was just such an incredible amount of love. And that was, that was really so heart-filling for me. And within two weeks, we had Dancing Through Parkinson's online. And this is a group when we talk about, you know, oh, the arts are so much more accessible in this time of COVID because they're online. And that really assumes a technological access and it assumes a sort of digital nativism that doesn't exist for everyone. And so actually getting Dancing Through Parkinson's online was not really about getting the teaching of it online. Our teachers have had to learn how to teach. We have now classes on both Vimeo and Zoom and we're looking at other platforms as well. But a lot of it is kind of a parallel process to getting people into physical space. It, you know, when we used to have people call the office and ask about Dancing Through Parkinson's, most of what we're talking about is how to be in a dance class, how to get there. Where is the parking? What do I wear? What do I need to bring? What do I need to know? I'm not a dancer, you know? And most of what we're doing is allowing them to feel like they're invited into the space and training them or giving them resources to get into that space. Cause once they're there, we're all teaching artists, we're all fine, we're gonna do a great job. It's getting them in there and then creating that space for them. And so actually what we did is we had one of our teaching artists was quarantined with her mom and her mom is kind of in the age range that a lot of our DTP participants are. And we made a video that is her signing her mom up for Zoom and we train people on how to use Zoom. And so that's like a part of the program is creating the structure that allows them into the space. And we're looking at ways to address, you know, technological access and wifi, which by the way, it should be like a publicly available thing now and forever, so just saying. And I think that was a big deal for a lot of people because they felt like they were being trained and given access, but we're also looking at what can we do, you know, is there a way we can have a phone line that people can call into and just listen to the class. And so, yeah, I'll leave it at that. I have a lot more thoughts, but I want to have her go. I will just say that I'm noticing that we just as humans who are living at this time in the world, we just want to know the answers. Everyone wants to be the first with the answers and we just want to know how it's gonna be. And like, you know, I feel like this time it's a time of not knowing and we shouldn't know and that we have to sit in not knowing, you know, and to experiment and fail and experiment and succeed. But I think that half of the lesson of this time is to just be like, I don't know and let's see, let's see what happens. And so for us, all the prisons are closed as they should be because the only way that virus got inside was by people from the outside bringing it in. So all the programs are canceled, all visits are canceled. We were a week away, I think, from starting our virtual reality program in maximum security. And so, you know, it was, that's not something that we can do remotely. So what we think we're gonna do with that one is to do the pilot in the community in a halfway house. So it's the same population of people who've done life sentences on multiple decades and they're not quite back on the street yet. So they're just one step out of prison. They're still incarcerated, technically. They have ankle bracelets. So we think we can do it in the community which actually might be better because we can film it more easily and, you know, respond better technically in the community. But for our Art attacks for the UV program, I hear that now they're doing the education online, their school online. So we're gonna try and piggyback on that because last time we did it through their education program. So we're gonna try and steal an hour, three days a week. Get it, get that hour. And go around and drop off all the art supplies at each of the prisons. So they have good quality art supplies for what we're asking them to do. But beyond that, I don't know. This is a time for us to self-reflect, I think, and to imagine and to be radical and re-imagining. And, you know, I will say that when I saw a picture, I think it was the Berliner ensemble who I know and love. We were on tour with them at one point. And I saw their theater, how they're gonna open up with like two seats, one seat. I actually had a physical reaction. I actually felt nauseous and super sad. I don't really know why. I don't think it's a matter of compromising what we've done before. Theater needs a radical makeover, a radical makeover. It is way too corporate. It's way too profit-based. It is run by people who don't reflect the community that most of the theaters are in. And the work that's being done as a result is often not relevant or not. That's why we can't get audiences in, right? Or they can't afford to. So I think it's time for theater to have a massive re-imagining and a massive time of not knowing. And I know my friends- I mean, that's what's so exciting. Sorry, I'm trapped, you don't got it. Zoom is so weird, because you can't kind of- Yeah, exactly. Absolutely groovy back and forth. But that's what's so exciting right now in the grief and in the loss. We are invited to crack open. As long as we do, because that's not our nature. Our nature is to try to go as close to normal as we can. And the thing that I will say, I miss the most is, I miss audiences. I hope audiences understand how important they are. But this back and forth with audiences that we get to do on stage, I'm a former dancer, so whether it's a dancing or theater, then nothing can substitute for that. And we shouldn't try to make it. And so I don't know how we're gonna do it. And nobody really knows, even if they say they do, no one knows. So yeah, I miss my audiences. And I'm super grateful more than ever for anybody who sat in an audience. It's just a beautiful thing. And there's, I think that they're within that, I think it's really important that it's in the same way that we enter into communities. If you are coming into a community and you know what they need and what you're going to do to address those needs, you don't. Does anybody know? I don't. And that's sort of the hierarchical patriarchal, reaching out, the outreach. I will reach out to you. I've had 15 years of being educated by the best teachers in the world. And I see that Raina wants to ask us something. Sorry. I think Raina wants to reach out to both of you because we're at time. I know there's so much to talk about. And this is such little time to talk about all the things that are encompassing our lives and our art and our work during this time. Briefly, one question we are asking all our guests is, is there anything that you would like to share about what you've learned about quarantine? I know we've touched on it in a couple of different ways already. But anything that you specifically are hoping to incorporate because of this quarantine. Go ahead, Sabra. Let me just think for a second. If you have something, you want to go ahead. Sabra and I are both thinking, I'd love that this is the one question we had in advance. And we're both like, hmm. I know, I kind of patience and vision. I think when I'm personally in something difficult, well, for many years now, I've tried to develop a 300-year vision. What can I do now that in 300 years is going to have a valuable effect to people who'll never know me. I'll never have existed. I'll be dust in the ground, not even that in 300 years. And so on a smaller level, when I'm struggling, I try to think, what about 30 years from now, me looking back on this time from 30 years? So in a way for me, that takes out my immediate emotional response and enables me to approach it with vision. So in 30 years or, you know, well, I won't be alive in 100 years, but, you know, let's say in 30 years from now, how will I look at what I did at this time? How I responded to this? And it's very interesting being a world citizen, you know, coming from Europe and having everybody nearly over in Europe. And my husband is Ugandan. So like having that kind of different view on America, other countries are so often like, why are Americans freaking out about wearing masks? Like we just put on a mask and just do it and get it done, you know, and, you know, meanwhile we have the highest rate. So I think that for me, this thing of being outside and looking back or outside the country and looking at the country that I live in is super helpful in terms of reimagining and being radical and courageous and not being swallowed up in this moment and being honored by this moment. I'm honored that I am at a time in America that we might actually make a change to, you know, 400 years of systemic abuse and racism. I'm actually working on, I don't know if I should say this publicly. I'm working on a truth and reconciliation process for America right now. We cut that, unless we address the indigenous genocide and slavery among many other abuses, we can never go forward. We're always yoked to the past. So we have to, and as an artist, it's my responsibility. I can only do a tiny little bit, but, you know, it's my responsibility to light a spark for that. Yeah. Did you have anything to add to that, Laura? Well, I've learned that I'm just very in love with Zapper and we're gonna run it. I know. This all intersects with having a new baby. So I feel like I've learned, you know, we talk about quarantine time, how, you know, March was 700 years long and, you know, April was 25 seconds. And I think that, you know, having a new baby messes with your sense of time anyway. So I came into this with a really, everything is now sort of like double warped time. And so I think I'm learning both patience and impatience with change, with the rate of change, that I'm learning the moments that I can let surrender to what is happening. And then the times that rage and that there is an implacable, you know, when rage or an implacable rejection of the way things are, is not a time for patience. I think I'm trying to learn when to be patient and when to push against something and push forward and crack open with an absolute uncompromising need to move, to reject, to shift, to cause this ripple effect. And that's, and it's interesting because I don't wanna come from a place of reactivity. I want to come, you know, if I am pushing forward, if there, you know, that it comes from a place of hope and generosity and leveraging privilege for whatever it's worth. And urgency and patience. I have to say one very quick thing, you know, I promise. I'm sorry, it's super important. A friend of mine, Shaka Sinkor, posted this thing on Facebook, like near the beginning of this, where he asked people who have been incarcerated to give advice to those of us who have never been in a lockdown or never been in a restricted, I don't like to say lockdown, a restricted space. And by the way, people, it is not like prison. Stop saying it's like prison. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He was asking people to give advice who've been incarcerated to those of us who have been privileged not to be incarcerated. And it was such a beautiful moment because of course the advice was amazing, but also the beautiful thing about it, I was like, yeah, who's got the power now, right? They have the power. They're the people who are centered at this difficult moment. And they're the people who know how to deal with this. And it was just such a revelation and just so beautiful. And I think that this is opening up space for people who have not had power before. So thank you. So I just had to add that. Well, we're literally at time and I don't want us to get kicked off the sentence. Thank you so much for being here, your words and your work and contributing your time. It's just, thank you so much. Thank you. You're super grateful. Thank you. And thank you, Brittany, balance our ASL interpreter who brought our discussion to the broader community. We're so thankful for that. Since this is our last conversation and it's such an important one to me and to a lot of people. I wanna welcome back my fellow Directors Lab West Connects producers. So pop on, magic. My producers are Sheree Adams, Douglas Clayton, Ernest Vigarola, Martin Jago, Cindy Marie Jenkins, Randy Trayvitz and Diana Wyon. Hello everyone out there. We can't thank you enough for tuning in, whether this was your first time or your eighth. Over the past eight days, we've had over 6,500 people tune in from 37 states and 21 other countries. We are so grateful inspired by your response to DLW Connects that we're discussing the possibilities for future virtual events. And like the other seven conversations this week, this will be archived and available with closed captions on both howlround.com and directorslabwest.com later tonight. And you can head there now to watch any of the conversations you might have missed. And we encourage you to share them online and off with your fellow theater and dance artists. We want to again express our collective thanks to all our speakers whose generosity of craft and spirit has made this possible. Ann Catania, Sheldon Epps, Ann Bogart, Jessica Hannah, Ann James, Carly D. Wextine, Laura Lawson, Diana Wyon, Daniela Atencia, Gianna Formicone, Makiko Shibuya, Avivit Shaked, Scarlett Kim, Maddie Barber, Backelman, Luis Alfaro, Laurie Woolery, Sabra Williams and Laura Carlin. Thanks to our directorslabwest colleagues, Anthony Rufalo, Susan Dalyan and Elizabeth Suzanne for their assistance in connecting us to our wonderful ASL interpreters, Jess Whitehouse, Robert Cardoza, Aviva Levy, Ellie Stryfer, Jennifer Brazell, Danny Casey, Alan Whitborg and Brittany Bellens. And now we want to extend a huge thank you to our partners in this venture, HowlRound. So thank you, Vijay, Matthew, Thea Rogers, Jamie, Galoon and Travis Amiel and the whole team at HowlRound. A special shout out to Travis who's actually been with us every single day behind the scenes making this live stream possible. And also behind the scenes and definitely want to give a shout out to our production coordinator, Emily Claes. Thank you for sticking with us and continuing to coordinate when we decided to make this virtual jump. And we'd also like to once again acknowledge our longstanding partners at the stage directors and choreographer society, Pasadena Playhouse and Boston Court Pasadena. We're excited to be back next year. We also want to say hello to all of our alumni out there, it's been a great opportunity to reconnect with all of you with 20 years of labs under our belt, you are now over 600 strong and it's been a real joy to see so many of you in the Facebook chat every day asking questions and reconnecting with us and with each other. And speaking of next year, if you haven't attended the lab before, please head over to directorslabwest.com, click on email sign up and you will get notification when the next application is online and of all our future virtual events and offerings. And also please do like our Facebook page and follow us on Instagram at directorslabwest. For 20 years we have produced an eight day, 12 hour a day in-person lab full of workshops and panels, master classes, performances and more based in Pasadena, California, bringing together emerging and mid-career theater directors and choreographers from all over the world. It's been our pleasure to continue our mission and reach out and broaden our connection by offering these additional eight days of conversations crafted for and by theater directors through choreographers through DLW Connects. And we couldn't have done it without you. I wanna quote Sabra and saying, I hope your audiences realize how important you are. And we couldn't have done it without you. Thank you for joining us from all over the US and the world, several countries and for being an integral part of our community. We look forward to, as Anne Bogart said, sharing some time across virtual space again. Another quote I wanna do with Anne Bogart, also slow the F down and sharing time with us. Until then, from our home to yours, we wish you all well and safety. And we, as we've said before, we hope these conversations spark many, many, many more. Thank you so much. Bye everyone. Thanks everyone. Bye.