 We're about to get started. And I just have a couple announcements, and then Ken will come up as well. Or no, and Ken won't come up as well. That's right, thank you. Come on up. I just want to remind everyone that these are amazing mugs. Keep calm and trust the dramaturg. And they are for purchase and registration. We do not want to have to ship them back. So Ken is actually, there we go. Some modeling, thank you. Great, all of these selling points. The other thing I want to remind people of is that we actually do have three copies of the New England New Play anthology, which was mentioned at Hot Topics. And this is a suggested $25 donation. But once again, if you really love it, just come up to the registration. Let's see, otherwise, I think we'll get the day going. We have our banquet coming up tonight. There'll be more information about that. Don't forget to sign up for Pride. I'm going to be sending out an email to everyone with all of the information about our rendezvous point and all of that stuff today. So make sure you get your name and your email on that list. And we're going to be making a Pride banner at lunch today. All right, that's all I can remember at this point. Stay tuned for more info. And I'm going to bring up Brian Quirt. Thanks, Corriana. Thank you for everything that you've been doing and for surviving your wicked cold this week. I missed everything. Congratulations. Good morning, everyone. It's my great pleasure to introduce Phaedra Scott and this session on the Bly Creative Capacity grant project that she has been working on over the course of this winter. This is the third of our three Bly grant sessions this conference. There was an excellent one in the upstairs room yesterday about the Spiderweb show and their CDN studio. A number of you came to that. It's a really remarkable project, and I urge you to go to spiderwebshow.ca to learn more about that project that was funded last year. There's a number of other people who've been here this week who were funded in the previous years, and I just wanted to acknowledge them. And if you have a chance to speak to them while they're here about their projects, which have been remarkable, and many of which are ongoing, but are heading towards conclusion, Philippa Kelly and Lydia Garcia were funded in our first year to create a diverse dramaturgy online handbook. Janice Perrin, who's not here today, but was funded in the first year as well to work on a piece called Memory Rings as a dramaturge. Heidi Taylor and Jan Dorbyshire from Vancouver were working on a project called A Hacker Approach to Inclusion that will also have an online component that we will disseminate. Katalyn Trasigny created a book about dance dramaturgy that has been published since it was funded. Last year, Sarah Elkesheff from Playwrights Workshop Montreal who is also here this weekend, created a piece with physics professors in both countries, the US and Canada. Kelly Kerwin created a piece in Brooklyn. Sally Olive, who's been here and who led two sessions yesterday, was also funded last year through the Bearded Ladies Cabaret. And then last year, of course, was Sarah Stanley in The Spiderweb Show. So I just wanted to acknowledge and congratulate all of those artists with the projects they've been applications for next year are to go visit it, consider an application for yourself, for your organization, or perhaps for other artists' organizations who are doing innovative, boundary-expanding dramaturgy. I came with us last year on the Bly capacity grant to make it. That brings us to this year's recipients and Phaedra Scott's proposal. Thank you. So I just want to start by saying thank everyone in LMDA. Thank Mark Bly specifically for creating this Bly capacity grant. And there's a lot of art to survive. That was financial security and sustainability because it was one of those times where you realize about, I think it was something like in the 90s, there were about 17 black last year, there's one. It's actually been really, which is why we are with the grant hiring a programmer. But it's a person in Greenwich who is a friend of mine and a player that I've worked with many times. So I have received her permission to put this on the website for the purposes of this. It is blacktheatercommons.org. Peter actually was with that comment. And that was something that I was thinking about. And the idea of it is that this should only be supplemental, this kind of resource, and that having a resource is like, you're just not reinventing the dramaturgy to be getting paid. The website will be getting paid through all of these other things. And I also really hope that every dramaturge who is engaged to do this gets a flat fee based on the LMDA contract. A dramaturge who is engaged to create the after-packet portion will be paid a fee. That's what's going to be of $300. And so that of like research, like do this for free and then maybe this, in addition to getting paid to do this work, you're also going to continue to be paid for the work that you've already done. Understanding that what some of it is is volunteer right now, but that we have to pay each other. And she's been really fantastic talking about structure, about how this website could possibly function of being like, all right, let's just do exactly, like everything, have everything and then figure out what we can't do later on. And so this is what you see when you go to Black Theater Commons.org sections of designers. This is, I became very depressed. What I did when I started doing it was going through order by state. You go to the Black Repertory Group. Here's the mission statement that is on that theater. This is one that... This might not directly answer your question, but it might be nice as an addition to the research if there were articles you could pay to reprint in your program or pieces of this that you could for an extra fee to the original author, re-include in your program. That's something that I think would be really valuable to, especially to include other voices in the program of the theater who might be doing the play. Yeah, Adelshine is taking notes for me. So I wonder if maybe there's like some kind of peer review stuff we can steal from the scholarship and academic world in this. Especially if it's plays that are being produced repeatedly. Maybe you're like, okay, find a dramaturg and a director that worked on this and cross-check each other and get that kind of sign off. Or maybe it's somebody like you or someone else in the organization that is reviewing it the way like a supervisor in a literary management role or something like that. Yeah. Just because it's so individual, then you have somewhat a cross-check for work. Hey, so I was thinking to myself as you were, this is an amazing resource, by the way. Congratulations. Thank you, thank you. It's like really amazing. So, yeah. Thank you. So two things I was thinking about. One is, one has to do with images and who holds rights to them and how do we, because I feel like in the realm of dramaturgy, often the images that we are harvesting for use in the rehearsal room are not images we're seeking rights for because we're not publishing them, right? So we're sort of like scraping images from anywhere, trying to sort of help our collaborators see the world of the play in some specific way. So in this, I think you are spot on, that the images are highly important. And then the question is, if that's a section that becomes a paid section, who are you gonna pay for those images and what kind of time is gonna be required to track down the rights to those? I mean, that is like a whole time job of itself. So I'm curious about that. And then the other thing I was thinking about is your question of what sections have to be represented in any given resource, right? And my impulse, though I don't know that this is helpful, my impulse is to say no required sections, I mean, except maybe for like a blurb or something that like, right? Because I think one of the things that happens when we sort of shoehorn plays into preexisting structures is that plays that have weird needs don't, are not able to be inside a flexible container to accommodate them, right? So I'm almost curious, like how do you build something that has the rigor that you're looking for that also is wildly flexible so that a play that is like totally non-traditional or like is a devised piece or is a movement piece that wouldn't have figures in it or historical references? Like, like how do you make sure that the resource you're creating is able to accommodate any and every performative moment that you wanna document? I don't know the answer to that, sorry. Yeah, neither. Couple of things, good morning. First, thank you for engaging with the question that I had the chance to ask earlier in the conference about the kind of population and money flow. And I'd love to stay in a long conversation about that, when and if you are interested in that. Yes, yeah, I'm sure. Second thing, I wanna tie together what Ilana and Sarah offered because my thoughts are related to theirs that I too found, as soon as I started thinking about plays, the possibility of categories that served all those plays seemed to eliminate itself. And in its place came the idea based on HowlRound's intensive editing process with the written material that is published through HowlRound's various venues. And I wonder whether instead of a template of categories, instead a, if you wanna put material into this part of this site for potential purchase later, you know that you're engaging in what's going to be a long, rigorous, intensive dialogue and development process with an editor dramaturg or the dramaturgical materials so that it may be possible to have each plays and dramaturgs offering be much more individualized but still reach that level of rigor that you're craving. Third thing, and then I'm gonna sit down and shut up. Because I work now primarily as an educator. I look at this and say, A, I would love to make my students a resource for your making of this resource in that I could imagine that if at some point as you work through this and develop it, you could use squadron support to research and or make and or organize a thing. I think my students would be a wonderful resource and the opportunity would be a great resource for me to put in a course for them. So please use us if we can be useful to you. But on the other hand, I'm not gonna want my students to use this because I want them to develop the skills of doing their own research so that eventually they will be qualified to provide material through this resource if that suits them and the resource. So I'm starting to think about how to introduce Black Theater Commons when you're ready to roll it out and yet also embargo it. So it's not like one stop shopping for student resource or for student research. Thank you for permitting the length of this comment. So I have some specific information about those Bay Area Black theaters for you. I'll catch you, yeah. And some that you don't have on there yet. So number one, number two, I know I'm gonna try, I've got all this. I also spent a lot of time in the classroom and one of the things I thought immediately was I would pay to use an article from this for classroom use. I think it may be problematic to fund the website, the amount of money you would need to fund this website might be problematic to fund specifically just through dramaturgy because there are only so many plays happening in a year. And there are jillions of plays happening all the time. So how many people are producing any one play for which you have dramaturgy on the site? But a zillion of us are teaching plays in the classroom all the time. And often, am I gonna teach this player, that player, what am I gonna put on my survey course if I find an amazing article? I'm like, okay, I'm gonna teach this one and then I have this great article. I would absolutely pay to use an article in my classroom. And this will be my last thing and then I'll sit down and shut up, which is that I absolutely would pay for an ally membership. I think that's absolutely fair to have it be for black artists, members of the Black Theater Commons free and everybody else pay a monthly fee. And I would also like to see a higher monthly fee for organizations. So, I mean, I would force my variant, right? Because it's, there's nothing more useful than this and I just wanna say this is a genius move and I just tweeted as much. Thank you, thank you. So, thank you. And I had an idea about how to review the plays. I wonder if you'd set yourself up for a financial challenge if you hired an editor who would then be devoting a ton of time and would then need to be paid as well. So, I wonder if as a part of the package of an artist delivering a packet, it also review two other packets so that if I'm doing my math right, two separate dramaturgs from the one producing the packet would review the material. And then, I don't know if that might be too much of an ask for the compensation that you're thinking of giving, but just a thought. Yeah, I think that's a wonderful idea. And like right now where I am in the process is that I am not planning on actually doing anything. So, I was a few minutes late so I missed the intro to this so I apologize if you covered this. But I have a question in terms of the scope of what is trying to be provided. I mean, I know personally for myself as a dramaturg, I rarely just give a packet. Like most of my actor packets are workshops or activities or things that engage the cast with the information instead of giving them something to read. So, I'm wondering about whether the intent is to simply provide like the research aspect of what could potentially go into an actor's packet or if it was supposed to be something that was an all-inclusive, like I as a dramaturg would take this and say, and just give it, or, yeah, those are my questions. Yeah, or would I just distribute it as is or would I have the, if I bought the packet, would I then have the flexibility to like change it and enlarge it or, yeah. Yeah, I think that's the ongoing like kind of lawyer-y kind of question that we're going to be engaging with. I also forgot there's one section of this website that is not on there, is the media, which will host like live streams of, as well as that video component of like, hey, here's this workshop that would be a part of like the other, like- I'm Brad Rothbart. I wanna thank you for all the really wonderful work you're doing. It's quite amazing. And I also, I have two ideas. One is that the paucity of information on a lot of the black theaters is not an impediment as it is, but it's also a reason for this to exist. So I would say take it as a first principle rather than a problem to be solved in terms of getting this work. Also, along that line, I would say that to say rather than trying to have a lawyer or someone source every image and make sure that you're using it legally, to say, we as a small organization have done the very best we can. If you see an image, that is yours. And you wish that to be taken down, we will do so, just let us know. Oh, we have one minute left. Oh, okay, I'll go quick. Hi, Leslie, she, she, her, hers. This is thinking circles out a little further. I'm just curious, I said I'm a big fan of Asian American museums because it's work that's history that's been created and curated by and for us. Have you thought about partnering with African American and black museums? Such a great resource. Yes. And maybe for funding with them too. Also, something I'd love to think down the line with you about is in our community, more than 50% are mixed heritage now. So the Cata Consortium of Asian American theaters and artists, Latino commons, theater commons, and I know native and indigenous are starting to organize. I'd love to, for us to have a conversation about how we're all getting together and representing multi-racial folks. Yeah, because I was actually speaking about like Afro-Latinas, you know? Yes, yes. Like there's Latinx theater commons and now black theater commons. Yeah, yes. And I can't wait to start like, let's do it together. Yeah, we have things heard in our community too where we all, the intersections are incredible. So that'd be awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Please look at the website, email. Thank you.