 to how silly it is, but this session is being live streamed by Hal-Round, so we do have to be speaking into the microphones in order for people who are not physically here with us to hear us, so that's why this is happening. Great, thank you all so much for being here today. On behalf of the conference committee on climate, I welcome you to, I think our last session in the track, we made it. Yeah, to this breakout session, we're really excited to dig in and talk with you more, but first, let's start with Land Acknowledgement. Good morning, everybody. Can you hear me okay? I'd like to share with you a land acknowledgement that was prepared by Ronnie Pinoy and Tara Moses of our conference committee on climate. Many of us in this room are visitors to this land we gather on today. This place, this community owes its vitality to generations who have come before. Some were brought forcibly to this land and some came here in search of ownership or simply a better life. And some have lived and stewarded this land for countless generations. In a spirit of making erased histories visible, we begin today by acknowledging that we are standing on the ancestral and illegally occupied lands of the Seminole and Mikosuki peoples. Hichidi, Timukwa, and Takesta peoples have also cared for this land. The Seminole and Mikosuki peoples are not relics of the past, but they continue to steward this land with care, vitality, and tradition. Their relations are numerous throughout Turtle Island and they are continuing to grow. We pay respects to their elders, past and present. Please take a moment to consider the many legacies of violence, displacement, migration, and settlement that bring us together here today. And please join us in uncovering such truths at any and all public events. Additionally, in the spirit of reconciliation, you can honor the indigenous peoples of this land by donating to the Boys and Girls Club of the Seminole Tribe, visiting the Mikosuki Indian Village Museum here in Miami, supporting Seminole and Mikosuki artists, including theater artists such as our fellow committee member, Tara Moses, of Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. And learning about the peoples land your theaters occupy, you can do that at native-land.ca. These are only a few suggestions of the many ways we can move towards reconciliation. Thank you, Elizabeth, and thank you to Ronnie and Tara for that crafty, mad acknowledgement. So to offer you a little context for the work that we're doing here at this conference, the committee, which is composed of Ronnie Pinoy and Annalisa Diaz and Jeremy Picard and myself, Lanny Thu, and Oat of Doubt and Tara Moses as well, we're really interested in seeing, we're very aware of how in the face of the climate crisis and in the movement towards climate justice, we really need a holistic shift in culture. And so how do we enact the values that we want to see in our ideal future society in all areas of theatrical practice? And so beginning from artistic practice through production and including institutional culture and organizational culture and funding and our built environment and how do all these things unite around climate justice? So that's just a little frame for how we are all going to talk about this today, that we really view this world work as holistic. And we also view the work that we do as in solidarity with other movements that are happening for justice in the country led by people who have been doing this work for generations as Elizabeth has said. So in light of that, we have gathered some awesome people on this stage today who all work in different and yet incredibly interconnected ways to move us towards a more just and equitable society and sustainable society. Does any of my members, do any of my members wanna add anything to that? No? Great. And then, right, I was just gonna do that, yeah. So, I just, so today the way we were thinking about approaching this session is we have four kind of guiding questions and then and people who know they're kind of gonna kick off answering those questions, but we really welcome you to be a part of the conversation. So if you feel like there's something that you hear where you're like, I have a lot of experience in that or I have expertise in that, please offer it to the room because we're here to learn together and we, no one is an expert in this work. So, awesome. Can I take a minute to just have each of the panelists just quickly say your name and two sentences, maybe who you are, yeah? Maybe we'll start with you. And I think you need a mic. Good morning everyone. My name is Lauren Turner and I do two things. I am the executive director for a company called International Wow, which is a social justice and climate justice oriented nonprofit film company. And I'm also the founding artistic director for No Dream Deferred, which is in New Orleans, which is a theater company. And so that's kind of my orientation to this work. Thank you. Aqai, Kitasalavan, Nusa Weywank, Montauksanuk, Chinakaksanuk. My name is Kitasalavan. I am a Montaukid and Chinakaka person. And you should know that because that is where I start from. I am currently the program director for theater at New England Foundation for the Arts, but in my past life, because I've had many, I was also an environmental justice attorney. That is also how I approach my life. Hi everyone. I'm Rani Pinoy. She, her, hers offer. And I am Laguna Pueblo and Cherokee. And I'm coming to this gathering wearing a number of hats. I'm an associate producer at Octopus Theatricals. I am also one of the team behind Brownwater Arts. And I'm also a musical theater composer. I'm looking to advance some of these conversations around equity and climate justice through that work as well. Oh, and I am an advisor for for a New England Foundation of the Arts National Theater Project and very delighted to be a part of that group. Rani, as she heard hers, the things that I shared, which I'll talk about more are basically our groundwater arts, the welders. I work in DC to traditional territory of the Piscataway Nation as a playwright and performing artist. And I'll tell you more about that later. Is this on? Hello? I was told to eat the mic, so I'll talk. Hi, I'm John Fontillas. I feel very kind of out of sorts because I'm just an architect. I'm sort of kind of, I work, I'm not a theater person, quite honestly, but I have worked with a lot of theater people, so I do know what you go through. I am actually doing right now a new facility, designing a new facility for a professional theater called Golfshore Playhouse over in Naples, Florida. But I've also worked at Lincoln Center Theater, a theater for a new audience in Brooklyn. My firm, H3, is a division of Architectonica and Hometown Miami Firm, architectural firm, but we do many theaters across the country in terms of our work. Hi, I'm William Hector. I'm a playwright from Miami here, and I'm working on a play I think is probably kind of relevant, so hence why I was asked to be here. And... Hello. Hi, I'm Jeremy Picard. He, him, his. I am the founder and co-director of Superhero Clubhouse. We're based in New York, the traditional territory of the Lenape people. We work at the intersection of environmental justice and performance, and we will, I'll be telling you a lot more about that momentarily. Awesome, and I'm Lanny Fu again, and I'm co-director of Superhero Clubhouse. Elizabeth Dowd, I work with Klamakasi Miami and Fundarte here in town, and I was born in Seattle, Washington. I'll tell you about my project later. Cool, so to get started, I'm just gonna kind of ask the questions and then call people up to answer them, and then we're gonna ask that each person who speaks takes five minutes, and I'm gonna try to time that, so don't be aggravated by the sound of my phone, please. So the first question we have is, how do you approach your artistic practice through the lens of climate justice? And for that, I am actually gonna turn to my fellow committee members to speak on that. Elizabeth and Ronnie and Annalisa and Jeremy to kind of touch on that as a way to get us started and then to have others join in. Great, so who wants to go first? Yeah, I'll dive in. Yeah, so I'm gonna speak just a little bit. I feel like climate justice is a commitment throughout my practice as a producer and I do consider that an artistic practice, but just for the sake of time, I'm gonna focus on groundwater arts and an effort that I'm a part of together with Annalisa, Annalithra, and Terra Moses, who are all at Groundwater Arts. We are collectively working on a document called The Green New Theater, and it is meant both as a resource and a collective organizing movement-building tool that we are hoping to build with the field, so with all of you today, hopefully. It was inspired in part by AOC's Green New Deal, and imagining that those tenants as translated for the American theater. So it talks not just about actions you can take to reconcile with climate justice and the stories that we put on stage, but also how we embody those stories ourselves in the change that we initiate in our organizations themselves and as communities and how we flip the switch from thinking individually around this work to thinking collectively around this work in order to make change. So we're actually gonna be leading a webinar where we're hoping to elicit feedback and comments and build that document together on Tuesday, June 18th. So please follow Groundwater Arts and you can find the exact time for that or see me after the session. And our hope. Yes, and thank you to Hallround for your help with that. But really what we're hoping to do is advance this conversation around this feeling of it just feels like such an overwhelming problem. I can't do anything about it. When there is so much in a spirit of positive energy and hope and action that we, within ourselves, within our institutions and in coming together can do to make change. So it's really meant to be a tool for action and a way to catalyze all of our collective energies and emotions into a space of change. So I'm really hoping you'll join us all for that. Hello again. Now that this mic is on, I don't have anything really to add to the Green New Deal, Green New Theater document other than please do actually join us. We want every, I've been, I don't know how many times I've said this over the last week, but in the words of our friends of the people's climate movement to change everything we need everyone. And that we really do actually believe that. And I think one of the things that has been exciting to me about sharing this work at this conference is that artists really do have a very particular role in movement building and especially around shifting the narrative. So if you talk to climate scientists they're all sort of like, we have the facts, we have the evidence and it's not working to change people's minds. So they actually will look at us artists and they're like, hey, you all know how to tell stories. Can you help us shift the narrative that is happening to actually implement policy change because the solutions are on the table and we have them. It's just a matter of like building political will and building power among the people to implement those changes. So that's I think where we have a really profoundly possible way of interacting with these movement spaces. So please do actually join us with that. Yes, I'm gonna talk a little bit about my welders project. So as I mentioned, the welders is a playwrights collective in DC and I am a lead producing playwright in the company and my project is ongoing right now. It is called The Earth That Is Sufficient. Our website is sufficientearth.com and it is an iterative performance project that is happening a lot in DC but also sort of all over the world. I was interested with this work and inspired by Adrian Marie Brown's Emergent Strategy which if you haven't heard of that, please do check that book out and read it like deeply. And so Emergent Strategy is like an organizing principle that has been around for a while but Adrian really did an amazing job at sort of condensing what people have been saying and theorizing and working with for many decades now. And so I was sort of like, what if we did this in a theater practice? So what if instead of capitalist modes of production that we all work inside of, like what if instead of aiming for a production which I'm a playwright, right? So I was like, instead of having a script, does that mean I have to stop? Two seconds, okay. So instead of having a script, instead of having a script, what if we build the sidewalk as we're walking which is the same way that we're facing the climate crisis, right? Like we don't know what the world is gonna look like so we're kind of having to build things as we emerge into this space of we don't know what's gonna happen. So we're really looking at how do we do that artistically? So it's a devising process but can I share the thing about the mushrooms? Is that okay? So the whole process is structured as a mycelial network which is the underground root structure of mushrooms and the idea is that the process itself is always ongoing. So like this is part of the process that you being in this room and learning about this work is part of the process and then only when the conditions are right does a mushroom emerge and we're referring to our performance events as mushrooms. So we just did a spring round of mushroom performances in the DC area online and then there's one of them ended up being a short film which you can see on our website and then the second phase of the project will happen at harvest time. So that is like August and September for us and then the final sort of phase of the project will happen in November in DC. You'd all totally be welcome to come see it but again that was intentional because we were interested in thinking about our relationship to time and seasons rather than sort of like arbitrary production dates. So we were interested in really rethinking all of the ways that we move through the world. Thank you. Hi everybody. I am so thankful that you've all decided to join us this morning for this important conversation and I'm also happy to see many folks in the room that have been in the other sessions of the climate track. So thank you for showing up. It means a lot. I have been based in Miami for the last 25 years and I landed here after living and working in Latin America and the Caribbean for an extended period of time and I've continued to have work in those other regions during my time in Miami and Miami could be considered an independent republic on its own and really part of Latin America as it is part of the United States of these Americas and I mentioned that because my work has been really influenced by that transnational conversation and experience. I worked for many years with the National Performance Network which is based in New Orleans. I worked with their Performing Americas program which is an international cultural exchange program that I was, has recently suffered a sun setting because the money dried up and it was very successful in creating international exchange projects between the United States and Latin America and the Caribbean whereby artists and arts projects and ideas could cross borders and we were facilitating that work and that really was impactful for me because it reflected the life that I live and it also spoke the many languages that I work in and speak and also was doing the work of artist mobility and anti-racism in a really particular way through the arts. So my personal artistic practice has been in performing arts for most of my life and about 10 years ago really started to gravitate towards the work of, I would say, environmental arts or talking about climate change. It was just naturally where I wanted to be spending my time in terms of creating narratives but I felt extremely lonely because I didn't know anybody who was doing the work and I think that my friends thought it was kind of cute that I wanted to do those kinds of projects and a little corny on the side and so I started to think about and it seemed so obvious to me that the work that was happening in social justice, anti-racism, areas of social focus that were so important to me, it seemed like a completely perfect combination, a completely perfect way to put all these things together and so I started meeting people that had the same notions and it was a really wonderful sense of community and coalescence. So the project that I've been working on for the last five years, besides my own artistic practice, has been called Climacazi Miami. I thought let's make a platform where other artists that are making this work can come and have conversations and let their artist practice lead the conversation about climate change and environmental justice. It's been a very modest platform, we've been doing it for five years and it looks at the intersection of the Americas so focuses on artists from North America and Latin America and the Caribbean so not excluding other areas of the globe but just looking at how Florida's a natural kind of channel for those cultural expressions and I guess I just wanna say that I feel that my artist practice is something that I'll always do, creating narratives, my own work but facilitating the work of other artists that are doing this feels equally important to me so I'm like, am I a presenter? Am I a arts producer? Am I a practicing artist? I feel like I'm all of those things and this movement also allows me to be that and also to be an activist and I think I'll just close by saying that I grew up being, I was involved in a lot of environmental movements, conservation and things like that and they were very white spaces and continue to be very white dominated spaces and so in the arts world I didn't have that experience, I had the experience of diversity, I had the experience of understanding that I could be led by communities of color and also have completely different epistemologies be privileged and so what I'm finding is that this moment is actually where that the arts wisdom is kind of, I feel like it's taking over the environmental movement in a way or something. I don't know, it's a notion I have and I'm so happy about it. Thanks, I'm gonna speak about superhero clubhouse but I just wanna say that Lanny is my co-director so first, if you wanna jump in during these five minutes, grab it but also just note that I'm mostly, I'm speaking more but this is very much a partnership. So you may have seen these on our little climate table if you haven't. We recently put together an eco theater manifesto. This is really the product of about 12 years of work of experimenting with this intersection in New York City mostly and so just to break this down because I think it's a good way, well first our mission is we unite ecology and theater to enact justice, cultivate hope and inspire a thriving future and the reason we're called superhero clubhouse because we want to cast artists and others who are making this work and fighting for environmental justice as larger than life as already empowered, already possessing everything we need and also clubhouse as an inclusive, creative, playful gathering space. So we really wanted to project and manifest into the world a space of hope, empowerment, play as opposed to this is very serious and heavy and dire and doomful. So that's our mission. We're a community of artists and scientists and environmental professionals so we work with a lot of different disciplines and cross-disciplinary collaboration has always been a really big tenant of our work. Here, I'll just break this down. So just as a summary, because I think this gives us a sense of how we approach it, the beginning of our manifesto gives us context that, okay, so we're in a world of a climate crisis and the real issues here are about our historic oppression. So it's our history of oppression is intertwined with our history of environmental degradation and the same people who suffer from the oppression that we're fighting and other social justice sectors is the same, are the same people who are suffering as a result of climate change and will continue to do so unless we rebuild our society, which we will. And so that's some context and then we break down our four categories of what we think it means to make eco-theater. So we say eco-theater is holistic. The short version is that we unite or orient content process and production towards environmental justice. Eco-theater is as diverse as a thriving ecosystem nature survives on diversity, art and culture survives on diversity. We have to have many, many voices at the table to make great art and to make a better society. Eco-theater holds complexity. We recognize that there isn't a binary really at all and most everything but certainly when it comes to climate environment and all of the different factors and power structures we're dealing with that there isn't really a simple answer and isn't a clear way forward. We're making the sidewalk as we go. I love that. And so we eco-theater reflects these complexities. We make work using impossible questions. All of our pieces are rooted to that and so it keeps us from, it allows us to love the audience and acknowledge that we're all in this together and nobody, we don't have the answer so we're not up there on a platform telling people an answer so we're all thinking critically together. And also we impose material limitations on our production processes so that we can re-envision our relationship to resources but then also forgive ourselves when we fail. This is also a way that we approach climate justice is to relieve ourselves as individuals and organizations of the pressure to save the world by recognizing that our material impact is quantifiably irrelevant compared to industry but our social and cultural impact is immense. And by embracing that, what a relief to be artists and to know that the work that we've always done is actually still the work that is most influential and impactful when it comes to climate justice if we can reorient the way that we do it and what we're talking about. And on that note, the last tenant is that eco-theater is hopeful. This has always been very important to us that we counter the news and stories that were overwhelmed by on a daily basis of apocalypse. We think that apocalypse is a privileged narrative and so that we have to hold both in our hands. There has to be both an acknowledgement of loss and suffering and also in the other hand an acknowledgement that there are millions right now working in the same direction that we are. And so how can we push those narratives? How can we uplift hopeful stories not only in the content of our work but in the way that we talk on a daily basis to each other? How can we hold both of those things? Yeah. Thank you. Thanks, dear. Awesome, thank you everyone for sharing a little bit more about your work. For each of these questions, we wanted to leave a little bit of time maybe a few minutes to see if anyone in the room has anything they wanna add and share in terms of their own artistic practice that you think might be useful to offer. So this is the time for that if you have a comment or a thing to share. And at no pressure if you don't. This is actually a question for all of you who just spoke, sorry, for those that haven't, I can't wait to hear you speak. I really, and especially what Jeremy just left off on about hopefulness and eco-theater being hopeful, I was really wondering if any of you committee members or all of you committee members, I don't know if we have that time, want to speak about your own personal practice of hopefulness in the face of climate change and in your work in climate justice and maybe as in it can be as an actionable thing, what do you do when you wake up in the morning to get yourself out of bed or what do you do in those moments with other practitioners when you're talking about this work? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so if anyone has a thought to share about the question posed, anyone? Yeah, I mean, one way that I feel like I try to manifest hopefulness in my own practice is by thinking of it as pulling levers. Like that's the way that I think about action. What are the systems and structures I can help to influence a change of lens? So for instance, how can we put in our riders that we require a move away from bottled water so that the institution we go to may make a change that may last beyond us because that's gonna be a lot, if you're moving to a water cooler system, of using filtered water instead of bottled water, that's probably something that's gonna stick around if you make that change. So what are the ways that rather than thinking of my work as an individual, I try to think about what are the levels to push and pull to make collective change and also help other think about themselves as active participants? You don't have to think about yourself as giving up something to then devote your life to climate justice. You can instead infuse your commitment to climate justice into the work you do. Thank you for that, Ronnie. And I just wanna suggest that maybe for the sake of our time together that we move on to some of the other questions that we wanted to address and then we can come back to this question and if people are stewing on it and have more to say. So the next thing that we wanted to talk about is just to hear about some specific climate-focused projects that people are working on and we've asked our playwright, William Hector, to speak to that to kind of kick us off and then if anyone wants to join in. Thank you. So I recently got a grant from the Knight Foundation to do a play called G7-2070. That's a G7 conference set 50 years in the future. So by that point, pessimistically, realistically, Miami's gonna be real underwater. Like the coastal ridge, which like runs about, like if you're in the grove, like you'll see, you can kind of see it's like the closest we have to any elevation whatsoever. Miami, but that's gonna be all that's left. Everything else is gonna be like at worst, at best, a fetid swamp. Wait, we're supposed to be hopeful. But yes, but anyway, the idea of this is to really make like almost a little model UN thing, like a real immersive thing where people, there'll be different countries. There'll be the US, Russia, China, Europe, Disney at this point will be an independent nation because you know, why not controlling the Southeast? But so the idea of you come in as a delegate, come into one of these countries and you're gonna have to make decisions because I think as we're talking about, I was just thinking of like the division of the microphones. Like that was very neat and elegant. Like it's unfortunately not gonna be so easy to divide up other resources. We won't have everyone, we won't have a strong leader and everyone just be like, yeah, yeah, that's good. I like that. Cause like something I've been reading a lot about recently is geoengineering, which is both something that gives hope. Cause it's like, okay. You know, it was both pessimism and hope. Like even the German, oh, I look this up cause it's something like like Dutch climates plan or something. But even according to their plan, and this is a tangent that will come back around, the carbon levels they're reducing and this is with, you know, German discipline, real commitment to it. It's not gonna be enough to actually meet their Paris climate agreements. And you know, that is a cause for pessimism, but it's also like, there's alternatives. There's not alternatives, but there's other things to do. And so one of them is geoengineering. But with geoengineering comes a lot of perils because of, for one hand, it's something that one country could do that could affect everyone a little bit, like nuclear war, one dedicated country could be like, we're gonna do this. And then the other thing is, it's easy to think of it as just, we're gonna fix things. We're gonna put things back in the box. But what, once you open that door, like what's the good temperature for China isn't necessarily a good temperature for India. And so in terms of keeping hope, I don't know if this is somewhat perverse, but like, you know, when I see that conflict, I'm just sort of like, that's kind of worrying, but that's great theater. That is really exciting, like that is. And so the hope is with like the del, with a story where, you know, you are immersed in it, you are the delegates, you're making the decisions. Hopefully, you know, you're really affiliated with your tribe in that sense. You're like, if you're with Ethiopian government, you're like, all right, this is me. This is us, like we're gonna work on this. Like I want our country to win. Yeah, which is probably the wrong attitude. But like, to see like, what are the compromises you're willing to make? What do you agree to? What do you not agree to? What do you sacrifice? What are you willing? How do you actually reach agreements with people who might have different goals? And how do you, you know, win, win, I guess win, wins a bit, win, lose situations where everyone wins a bit and everyone loses a bit. And so, you know, if at the end of the show, like I kind of wanted to have multiple outcomes, you know, if it ends with like nuclear war and like that's the end of that play, like, you know, hopefully people will walk away with a little bit of like, oh, we should have run things differently. Like this should have gone differently. Like we should have thought about things in a different way. And, or if, you know, if it ends well, people can be like, this is a way to go forward. So hopefully they'll be entertained, enlightened, maybe a little afraid. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you, Hector. Lauren, I wanted to call on you to see if maybe you wanted to speak about No Dream Deferred a little bit. Sure. Yeah. So currently, No Dream Deferred is still, we're still collectively dreaming about the best ways to activate folks around storytelling as it relates to climate change. One of my personal missions as it relates to climate change activism is to broaden the intersectional thinking around climate change. I believe that white supremacy is the father, essentially, of climate change. And in order to really start to work together, we have to start to dismantle white supremacy. And so one of the things that is so great about what we're talking about here is the hope, right, and the joy. And I'm also a scholar of emergent strategy. And I'm right now getting really deep into pleasure activism. It's a really good read. It's a lot of sex. But it also has like a larger guiding principle around centering joy and how that is a new, especially for a lot of people of color or historically marginalized people, feeling deserving of that. In this movement, this climate movement, one of the things that gives me a tense joy is that if the goal is also to start to dismantle white supremacy, then at every step along the way of the process, someone's getting closer to being free. So as we're moving forward, every little inch that we move forward, someone's being freed. I just had this conversation with Josh Fox, who's the Artistic Director for International WoW. We are right now in the process of, for International WoW, we're building a platform, a social media platform right now that focuses on intersections and focuses also on climate justice and environmental justice, social justice. And a lot of times, you know, I'm new to this whole activist climate change circle, especially the New York activist climate change circle. And I just wanna say, they're a whole other thing, right? And it's different from like artists, right? So sometimes we have to like check each other, which is fine. But we were talking about why everyone is not responsive to this idea of this like apocalyptic emergency. And I remember at the time, there was an article that had just came out. I think Grio just published an article that said that the average lifespan of a black trans woman is now 35 years. And so I said, Josh, you know, you can't, we can't keep speaking to this emergency. You know, if you are a 33 year old black trans woman, you have another whole emergency that you're dealing with, you know, and so I think the work for me is really about connecting people to how this impacts them and to getting them to understand that we're fighting this one thing. And these are the different ways that it's impacting us. And also, you know, bringing in a lot of my, you know, Afro-futuristic art practice fits very neatly into this work as well because Afro-futurism, you know, being centered on just the simple fact that like black people exist in the future. Revolutionary, but what does that take? You know, Adrian Marie Brown talks about adaptability, right? So like being able to adapt to some of these climate emergencies is actually fun to think about, especially if you're into science fiction. So like, what will we need? I mean, will we all need like a fish bowl, you know, head thing where we've got like water and air? Like I don't know what we're gonna need in the future to survive, but that shit is fun to think about. It's sad too, but it's also gonna take a lot of creativity. You know what I mean? It's gonna take a lot of us collectively dreaming about how we're gonna continue to survive and also acknowledging the ways in which we're already built to survive. So I think bringing a spotlight to the leadership, the ancient wisdom, the wisdom in the land that already exists, the technologies that already exist, highlighting those, bringing forth people who should be leading us in this conversation is going to be integral to us actually being successful. And also one other thing that I was thinking about while you all were talking, understanding the difference between what's needed to build a movement and what's needed to build awareness are two different things. So in building awareness capacity, that's a whole other like strategy, right? But what takes a person from awareness to wanting to lead or wanting to be a part of a movement? I think in the past movements have taught us that people have to see themselves, some part of themselves reflected in movement leadership. They also have to see cultural relevance in the movement. And so these are just, I think being very specific about what we're asking for as we're continuing to make art around climate change and also what we're asking for as we're continuing to build this movement around climate change. It has to be clear. Yeah, so that's it. Awesome, thanks Lauren. Thank you. I'm kind of feeling like based on the time and the energy that maybe we can just roll through these other two questions real quick and then we can open it up and have a bigger conversation. Does that sound good? Cool, so the next question we have is about how your theater is adapting, how is your theater adapting to climate change kind of physically and literally? And I think John is gonna kind of kick off that conversation for us. Well first I wanna say how inspiring it is to hear all your stories of advocacy and activism. And it's really something to not just command but just really say it should be a way of life, a discipline that we all embody is part of who we are because theater is leadership. It is something that is a way to get other people thinking in a different way. I will say as an architect, I'm a little bit more on the pragmatic side. I'm kind of at the reactive side. And for this project that we're doing over Naples across the state, we started about two years ago and frankly the very first meeting that we had scheduled had to be rescheduled because the week that the meeting happened, the very first meeting we were gonna sit down with the theater departments and talk about what their wants and needs were. Hurricane Irma came in and completely devastated the area of Marco Island south of Naples. Naples was on watch thinking that they were gonna get a cat five hurricane. It eventually came down to three when it came on land but Gulfshore's entire facility which is a actually converted community center and a rehearsal space was safe but somebody had left the door open and the hurricane force winds drove all this water into their entire rehearsal space and effectively just wiped out the entire zone. I mean, you think something as simple as that really? Somebody just locked the door but their entire first show of the season was completely gone. They had a festival of new work that they had proposed. They had an entire teen education program completely derailed. And initially, I don't know if any of you have been to Naples, I will say it's not as diverse as this group to be quite honest and most of the subscribers are in their 70s and 80s and sustainability was not something that was on their mind but to a person, the board and we were talking about what is the trigger or what's the thing that kind of takes people into really thinking about this seriously. For them, it was like living through this situation and I mean, I hate to say it. I mean, I lived through Sandy and it really after Sandy, Cindy in my apartment in Brooklyn thinking it was gonna come Sandy coming across Coney Island, right? Directly in was an eye-opener. I mean, once you're facing that sort of disaster, you know, viscerally, you start to think about it in a different way. To go short of credit, since then, though two years ago, we've been starting to develop the design with all the different departments, the scenic department, the lighting department, LED lighting, making sure that stock and custom materials are stagecraft or really thought through and budgeted in a way so that they can recycle things. I will tell you, one of the biggest problems offshore has is that their shop, unfortunately, is about five miles away from their theater, meaning they have to truck everything back and forth and the real estate prices enables or such that they're gonna have to be priced out and they may have to go to Benita Springs, which is a 30 minute drive away. So we're really trying to find a way to get the shop into the new complex because frankly, it's unsustainable. If Gulfshore had to pay that money to truck things back and forth just to get a prop and you have to drive 60 miles round trip, it's ridiculous. So we're really trying to focus on that. As well as Kristin Curry, the executive director, has asked us to really look at using landscape around the building. As it means not to substitute for the lobby, but really have everybody kind of gather indoor, outdoor and so we can reduce the air conditioning mode and not have to have the air conditioning up on high. And little things like that just really creates a thing out. The one thing I just wanna sort of end on is that there's a concept in architecture and design called embodied energy. I don't know if any of you have known that. And if you think of a water bottle, that we get water in, that we drink outside, they're in the lobby. If you think of all the things that had to come together in order for that water bottle to exist, a oil derrick somewhere, taking oil out of the earth to create the petroleum needed to create that water bottle, the machine that is pressing these things thousands of the time in some warehouse somewhere and then trucking it to some other facility to get it filled with water, versus a clay cup. Something very simple that natural material made out of clay, fired in a kiln somewhere that is much better than a factory. And the idea that everything that we touch has this trail of stuff and energy that has been put together to create that thing. And the ideal is to find things that don't have such a huge footprint in terms of energy. Because that's a way to, as we live our lives, we wanna have a light touch on the environment and we wanna make sure that we don't have all this baggage that we're trailing around giant industries and such to create the things that we use every day. So I mean, it may seem kind of trivial in the sense of choosing a bottle of water versus using a cup of water, but there's a huge impact on the environment that comes from that. Thank you, John. Thank you. The last question we have is kind of about how do you program and fund work on climate justice? And so I think Kira's gonna speak to that a little bit and then if Lauren, you wanna jump in as well, yeah. So like I said, all of my lives intertwine and they all come down to any number of things that influence who I am as a funder. And so I can only speak from my experience in the program that I run. I am an Indigenous woman. I'm a former environmental justice attorney and organizer, which is how my program is organized. And those of you who are experienced, it can testify that this is how I run things. And I can't speak for other funders, but I do know that within the group of advisors who are the people who are deciding on who will get a grant, that there is a very strong sentiment that comes down to nothing about us without us. It's not for us, it's with us. And so as you're looking at projects that come in that have a climate justice focus or a social justice focus, any, you know, falling within that very mixed, very messy sphere, who's telling the story and how are they telling the story? And so if you were to come to us as a group of individuals funding this project, and you want to talk about, you know, the destruction, the uranium destruction of communities in Indigenous America, don't come to the funder without explaining who's involved, who's story, who's telling the story, why are you telling the story? And that is actually the only way that I think as theater practitioners that we can make effective change. And I think that it is reflected in how we have been funding projects. It's actually pretty difficult to get an environmental project through our panel because what we are seeing is a lot of projects. Oh, this is a big important problem and we need to educate people. And I'm sorry, I already know what the problem is. I live it every day. I don't need you to tell me what the problem is. It's a messy problem that has been getting since the dawn of civilization. We have been affecting our climate. It is not surprising that it's gonna take a bunch of dreamers, and I mean big thinkers. I love Afrofuturism, I have to tell you. It is inspiring. It's gonna take a bunch of us to find a messy solution to a messy problem. But funders are aware, regardless of what they say, oh, we're not, you know, regardless of what they say, they know it's a messy problem, they live it too. Unfortunately, I do think that there are a lot of funders who see the big, sexy project and they're going to fund that. I am glad that we are not that funder. And I'm hopeful that however long I remain in this position and whoever comes after me will continue that perspective. In fact, I'm trying to figure out how to fossilize it. But if you are proposing a project to a funder, regardless, you have to be clear about that because we are human beings and we live in the world and we see what's happening and we know that if you are trying to tell a story that is not yours, it's called appropriation. And we're aware of it. And yes, we can tell in the application. And I think I'm gonna leave it there. Like drop, yeah. Thank you. Lauren, feel free, maybe just take a couple minutes. Yeah, thank you. So yeah, for a lot of international Wiles work, we receive funding through high net worth donors. Who are very scared about what's to come. And some of the trends that I've noticed so far in making art around climate change is that there is a lot of co-opting and appropriation that takes place. And it comes from once again, going back to how it's like the rules of white supremacy are running this movement in a sense because it's kind of like, I actually had this conversation with someone where they said that the premise of people who are being affected the most or have some of the more longer wisdom around how to lead or how to approach this climate crisis aren't always the best people to do that work. And I was very confused as to why that would be the assumption or even this idea that in groups like in New Orleans, for example, there's a group that operates and it's a predominantly white group with some indigenous leadership and some African-American leadership. And so I find instead of relying on some of the indigenous leadership or African-American leadership, they've implemented this idea around consensus but not in a way to support the voices but in a way to kind of limit how much leadership is available to folks. So I don't know, I just feel like it's tricky, it's messy and that people are not in this particular movement are not used to having to take a seat and let other people lead. But yeah, so a lot of high net worth people, celebrities are able to kind of fund the work that International WOW is doing right now and then I think our responsibility is to then kind of figure out ways to disperse and not disperse, that's the wrong word, but share in our model, in our leadership model. Mika from the Oregon Chictors, that's awesome. Hi Mika, how you doing? Come on over, you're great. If I can introduce Mika a little bit. Thank you. Mika was supposed to be part of the conversation about like physical challenges to institutions and Mika was gonna share a little bit about the fire situation over at OSF and how it's like actually already, like the climate disasters are already having impacts on our budgets and our buildings. Totally. Can you do that in five minutes? I don't know, I can just say it's a bad thing. With a mic. Done. Live streaming to hell round folks. Oh okay, I'm just cursing and y'all got. Hi everybody, Mika Cole, she, her, hers. I am the producer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival so I oversee all of our shows that are in our three main spaces, including the shows that are produced in our Elizabethan theater. And what I can say is that, so this is my, I'm in my seventh season at OSF and I think we've only had one season in that time without smoke. And obviously we've watched the problem get progressively worse. So the issue is that Ashland is in a valley and so when there are surrounding fires, what happens is that the smoke rolls in and it stays in the bowl, right? And we're sort of waiting on just like nature to blow the wind out. So the air quality becomes significantly compromised for our patrons, sure, but for our performers who are outside. And we've had to cancel shows. And canceling shows is not a thing we do. So just to give you an example, like the sky, I mean the sky could break open and water and the revelations could happen. And we would keep going. People continue to perform in just like impossible rain when it's freezing, when it's super hot. So canceling a performance is really devastating from a morale standpoint I think for the performers and the audience. But also from a financial standpoint, last year I think we lost about $2 million from tickets. And we are in the process right now of talking about revamping that space, right? Like tearing it down, building a new theater that has a retractable roof. And we're working with a consulting firm on that but here's the issue. Whether we have a better space or not, it actually doesn't matter because people are very wonderful, loyal, dedicated, largely wealthy audience, will not want to travel to the area as this continues. And so because we have, our audience is very privileged, it's a destination theater, right? So they choose to come and book a hotel and take two airplanes or whatever it takes to get there. And they're just gonna go somewhere else, right? So those are just some of the ways it's impacting us. We don't have a solution, it really is an existential crisis. And one of the things we've been talking about is like literally picking up the outdoor season and taking it somewhere else, right? Like are we taking it to California? Are we partnering in Utah? Like just closing down that space and moving it but the problem is the other two venues are still running at the time and the air quality is also compromised indoors. We spend a lot of time in the summer on the phone with like the National Weather Center and the Department of Forestry or something like that, right? Just trying to predict what the quality of life is going to be on any given day in order to really take care of our artists. So yeah, so that's just, I don't know if that's helpful. But yeah, it's the end of the world. I don't know where. Thank you for sharing that. That's, I hear the struggle, yeah, yeah. Please, yeah. I was just gonna speak on going back to projects. One of the things we're doing is speaking of fire. We, International Wow is doing some filming right now in Paradise where there are tons of like horrible stories. I mean, horror field stories coming from Paradise of people that we're interviewing who are, you know, packed up their car with their children to try to get out last minute and we're seeing their neighbors burning in their cars on the highway. So just, I'm just adding that information because I think that when we're talking about a lot of times in rooms when we're talking about climate change, we have to find the joy but also this dynamic of also realizing that people are dying, literally dying. I mean, it's not somewhere else, you know, it's here. So I just wanted to, because it's one of the projects we're working, I'm thinking of all the stuff. I'm like, I didn't even mention anything that we're doing right now. So I just wanted to add that, but yeah. Thank you, that's really important to mention. Thank you. So I'm looking at our time and we have just under 10 minutes together. So I wanna open it up to more comments and questions and whatever, but I just wanna say before we, before I do that, that we as a committee have compiled a list of resources that include frameworks and Green New Theater and Manifesto and other opportunities and plays and artists doing this work. And so if you would like that list of resources emailed to you, please leave us your email address before you go today. Yeah, great. So then I guess just open it up to other comments. People wanna add to sections that elaborate on things or if anyone in the audience wants to offer something as well. Yeah, let's. Xavier Cortada from Miami. Just two days ago, India was at 120 degrees, right? And lots of casualties will continue to happen across the globe. And I think that although I've learned for the first time the idea of calling an emergency feels like an act of sort of colonialism, right? I think I heard that discussion in an earlier group we had two days earlier. I just want us to think of ourselves as cultural leaders as creating a sculpture. And there's two ways of making a sculpture out of a piece of clay. You can take a block of clay and you can chisel out the negative spaces to yield your sculpture. And that's a real effective way of sculpting, right? I think a lot of activists in form work works that way. You sort of are carving out your space, you're screaming, you're asserting that you need to be heard. That's exceedingly important. In fact, that's essential for society. There's another way of sculpting and that's additive sculpting. That's adding pieces to that chunk of clay and bringing other pieces of clay in. And I just want us to understand, please, that immediacy requires additive sculpting as much as it does the other way of sculpting because we need people to act today to solve the crisis today. I know that sense of urgency sounds like I'm trying to have you focus on an environmental agenda as opposed to a broader one, but we need to find ways of using art, I think, to bring in audiences who don't want to talk about the issue by reframing an issue. And I also think that what we really need to do as corny as it sounds is in that process, teach people to love one another and to think about India. And I know that by thinking about the future, it differs being focused on the present, but I also think we need to think about the future because what we do in the present so informs that future. So what I'm trying to say is that culture is the only language that can communicate these very complex ideas and emotions and build common ground and have people come together and that activism doesn't always get us there and that there needs to be a soothing way that allows people also to be disarmed and to engage in conversations. And I know that that's hard to hear when you get kicked all the time, but we have to find a path. And I think culture gets us there to allow bigots to recycle, right? Or reduce. And I think the angle is that if you get someone to care about something more than themselves and they're progeny, they're immediate household, then you begin to teach them how to love and care for others. So art gives us that vehicle to do that. And that's what I want us to also think about. Continue carving into your block, continue demanding spaces, but please leave room for that additive sculpture too. On that note, there's a couple of resources that I wanted to share in case folks are like, I want my theater to start engaging in this right away, but it's gonna take time for us to identify playwrights that we wanna work with or the content that we can use or how do we have a reason to get people in a room? Obviously there are lots of reasons, but there's an initiative called Climate Change Theater Action that is being run by our friend Chantal Bilodeau in the Arctic cycle. It is every other year in line with the COP conferences. There are 50 playwrights from around the world commission to write a short one to five minute climate focused play. And then these plays are open source to anyone who wants them for free. And then you can choose whichever plays you wanna work with and then do your own event. You can fully produce them, you can do a reading in a living room, you can bring in people to talk surrounding that event. The purpose is to sort of have these nodes all over the world that are doing this at the same time. It's so it's happening this year between September and December. Again, if you go to our Climate Change table, there's a published book of some plays from the past that Chantal edited. Yeah, and then also there are five short plays that we as a committee chose to offer as an example if you wanna read some of those plays to get a sense of this initiative. But that has, we've heard a lot of stories over the years from Chantal about how this initiative has really helped organizations and groups be like, ah, great, I'm gonna take this and we're gonna use this as a jump starter. So that's a resource. The other thing to mention from our side, Superhero Clubhouse recently started a fellowship for environmental justice and performance. Right now it's centered in New York. Maybe eventually we'll get lots of money and be able to do it elsewhere. But if you're in New York and you are someone who wants to do this, it's a paid six month residency for two individuals from different disciplines or backgrounds to collaborate on a new piece about environmental justice in some way. And so basically we're providing the money and the structure and resources. But those applications will be open probably later this year and it'll, we're hoping to start it in January. That's a little TBED. Just to say that you can really be anyone, like this year we had a spoken word poet and a climate scientist make a piece of performance together so you don't have to identify as a AIMA theater maker. Hi, I'm Adam. He and his actor, writer, whatever, artist. I kind of wanna speak to, what's your name? Chelsea's question about hope and share a little bit about, because I've been really struggling with that as well, two things that have been helpful. One is there's like an anecdote of there's a bunch of starfish on the beach. They're trapped on the beach and this little human sees that there's a bunch of starfish on the beach and he goes and he starts throwing them back in the ocean and there's thousands of them. And this old man walks by and is like, what are you doing? Like you're not gonna save them all. And he goes, well, I can make a difference for this one and for this one and for this one. And that kind of incremental changes is really helpful. And then the other kind of lens that is really helpful is the love, like entertaining the love for humanity and fellow humans as well as like kind of this weekend I heard something that really resonated with me, which is the body of Mother Earth. And somehow like it makes the, I had this thought that like we're not actually victims of natural disasters like humans are, it's mother nature, not fighting back but kind of equalizing. And that somehow makes it easier for me to process of like understanding how angry she is and how she's kind of retaliating and having empathy for the body of Mother Earth is really helpful. So I'd share that. We are the session, it's 1230. So the session is kind of officially over. If you need to run to another thing, please feel free. But I think that we should all feel free to stick around and keep chatting if we have things we wanna share with each other. I'm gonna leave this out on the table if you wanna leave your email to get that list of resources from us. Any final words from any people, anyone? No, yes. I did wanna add that I'm part of a group that's gonna be in Mexico City starting Sunday and it's with the Hemispheric Institutes Encuentro in Mexico City. There's organizers and artists from Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, Chile, different places in the Caribbean, including North America. And the theme of this year's Encuentro is called The World Inside Out, Humor, Noise, and Performance. And it's looking at this idea of how do we maintain our humor and our, I just think that, not cynicism, but just this ability to laugh in the face of this as we move forward. And I think celebration is really important. And it doesn't mean that you're not taking it seriously. I don't think that those, I think you can sit with defiant joy and also be really effective in the resistance. And I was in Brazil a couple years ago on the day that they impeached Gilma Husev, who was the first female president. And it was basically a mini coup. And they had in the plaza in the big spaces in Brazil, it was in the capital. And they had Samba de Histancia. And everybody came out in the street with Samba instruments and everybody was dancing. And it was just like, this is how we're gonna deal with this. It was beautiful. So I just feel like Samba de Histancia. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. And I just wanna take a moment to say thank you so much to all our guests that joined us and all of you who are in the room today.