 We've been trying to work on pattern. Yes, we've been talking this morning about pattern because just like my wedding speech, I didn't really prepare for this also. That was a bad move. I know. So welcome to the UTO Professional Symposium. If you got in... You're a professional. And we expect you to act that way. So that's the extent of our pattern. Welcome to the Under the Rules Symposium. Thank you for making your way here early morning, in between ASPA, before arts presenters, and taking the time to be with us to have some conversations and to see old friends. And Mark. Yeah. All right. I wanted to thank a few people. There's going to be a lot of thankings at the beginning of the thing. First of all, we've been having a great time putting this festival together. And it's due to the staff of the public theater. And we also have our own core staff. And I need to acknowledge Andrew Kircher, who is our associate director, partner in crime, and program associate... We'll be back in a minute. We're responsible for getting these tickets. The production manager, John Rene. Company manager, Barry Bradford. Is he still... He's probably at the airport right now. He's probably at the airport. In our producing apprentice, Margarita Bergamo-Mangini. Is that the right name? And the under-the-radar interns, Emily Capri and Madeline Barak. And the baby in residence, Frankie Ting. And my partner, Megan Block. Thank you, Mark. And then we also have to thank our supporters and funders, of course. You know, for the public theater, the Louisa T. Merz Foundation, and the continued support of Ford Foundation for the festival, Robbister and Clark, the W Trust. Elect Equity, Mark Krueger, the Trust, the Face Foundation, Cultural Services at the French Embassy, the Chilean Embassy, NIFA, and all the supporters and the partners of the festival and the shows. It's incredible the amount of love that we get from the partners, and it would not happen without them and you. Thank you. There used to be a guy that would come around here quite often, and he'd hang out in the back of the Joda Club and listen to new bands, and he'd slip in and out of theaters. He lived down the block. And so many of our artists owe him a huge debt, and he made so much of this work possible that you're going to see this weekend. And just by his example and his fierce artistic independence, and I wanted to dedicate this festival to David. Thank you. And to start us off, I would like to welcome Louise Castro, who's the acting commissioner of the New York City's mayor office for media and entertainment, to tell you a little bit more about what's happening with the mayor's office and to welcome you to New York. He was most recently an executive with HBO programming, but a real friend of the public from his time as executive director of the land-thropic initiatives at Time Warner in New York City, where he created and oversaw the Time Warner New Works New Voices Fund, a fund for best-in-class artist development programs that support emerging playwrights and screenwriters. So I'd like you to welcome Louise Castro. Morning, everyone. How are you doing? Good morning. Excellent. Great. Listen, it is really my pleasure to welcome you here today to the Under the Radar Symposium. And to those of you who've come from out of town, the artists, the producers, the presenters, I'd like to welcome you to New York City. First, let me thank Mark and Mayen and everyone at the Under the Radar Festival. For the past dozen years, Under the Radar has helped redefine theater making. It's given a platform to countless diverse and boundary-breaking storytellers. You have been an integral part of fostering diversity of voice, perspective, and aesthetic in the arts. And we thank you very much. I'd also like to thank Oscar, Patrick, and all of our very good friends at the Public Theater. I cannot begin to articulate the impact that the public has had on theater and the careers of artists here in New York City and frankly globally. The Public Theater is an institution, an integral part of New York's cultural fabric, and a reflection of what the arts in New York are, diverse, original, thought-provoking, and vital. I also want to thank APAP and each of you, the presenters and producers here today. Your dedication to finding and showcasing cutting edge makers is helping give voice to new generations and shaping the future of the art. Mario, thank you for what you do and what APAP does. This marks the first time that the Mayor's Office is working with APAP, and we are proud and excited to be a part of this year's conference. And what better place than New York to host these important gatherings? New York is home to a diverse and talented community of artists. Diversity and creativity go hand in hand. They are the cornerstone of the work that you do, the work that we all do. Creativity and diversity, a background of experience, of aesthetic, of perspective are what challenge the status quo. They are what enable us to see and create things differently. Here in New York, from Broadway stages to theaters and presenting organizations throughout the five boroughs, theater is a rich, vibrant part of our economic and cultural life. Through the Mayor's Office of Film, Theater, and Broadcast, we seek to advance New York's theater industry. We work to highlight the impact that theater has in New York City. We seek to support and promote career opportunities in the industry for New Yorkers of all backgrounds. And we seek to build partnerships to help make theater experiences available to all New Yorkers and to visitors alike. Here with me today is Carla Hope Miller. She's our Director of Theater Strategic Partnerships. She'll be attending the shows and conferences today and throughout the week. And so I encourage you to find her, talk to her, and learn a little bit more about the work that we're doing. So just, I want to say again, thank you for the work that you do to provide opportunities to the makers here and promote live performance at its very best. Have a wonderful symposium and conference. Thanks, Luis. It is my pleasure to introduce under the radar's original and most constant partner, Mario Garcia-Duro, who's the CEO of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. This is Mario's sixth year in the job and it has been a pleasure working with him and his staff. Before Mario was running APAP, he served as Director of the Arts Community and Presenting Program at the National Governments for the Arts. And I first met him as the Artistic Director of San Francisco's Yerba Buena Arts Center. Mario was a visionary and a great spokesman for our field and it's an honor to welcome him to our stage. Thank you, Mario. Hello, everyone. Happy New Year. So it is, you know, I am such a big gay gay man. Like, big gay. And it is so hard. It's not hard running the conference. It's not hard doing this. The hardest thing in my job is finding out what color lanyard we have so I can match my top. That is really hard. It's like secret information. It's really hard to do that. But anyway, welcome to all of you. Thank you, Mark, for that gracious introduction. Congratulations to Mayan, Mark, Oscar, Andrew. And thank you, Luis, for your warm words. Congratulations to Under the Radar for 12 years. Can we hear applause for that? The only downside of that is they're just going to start going into puberty and it's not going to be pretty. I could just die right now. Anyway, formally on behalf of arts presenters that are born, I want to congratulate Under the Radar for the amazing work. We're always delighted to work with Under the Radar and their staff. And this is my official first step as we head into our conference. I wanted to invite you all to tomorrow's session. We have a speed dating from 9 to 12 at the Hilton. So please come and join us for that. And in closing, I just wanted... I feel like I'm with friends and family here. These are friggin' crazy-ass times. And it's combining... If you're watching and listening, there's like nationalism, paranoia, fear, anger, overt racism, and willful ignorance on so many topics and issues. So at these times, it's so critical for me to work with organizations like Under the Radar with colleagues like yourselves and also, most importantly, to nourish the voices of artists at this time. So I applaud all of you and our artists for the work you're doing. Thank you. God bless and I'll see you again. Thank you all. Thank you, Mario. I am very happy to introduce to you my friend Jeff Chang, although we were just speaking backstage and we've only known each other for a year or so, and the Youth Speaks Conference in the Bay Area. But it feels like I've known him for a longer time. I remember sitting next to him at that conference and feeling like a little fangirl because this was the guy who literally wrote the book on hip-hop. Jeff Chang has written extensively on culture, politics, and the arts and wrote the book on hip-hop with Can't Stop Won't Stop, a history of the hip-hop generation, which won the American Book Award and many other awards. His new book, Who We Be, the Colorization of America, was released in 2014, and both books are fantastic and grossing and eye-opening reads on the political and economic history of the U.S. through the lens of arts and culture. Jeff has been a four-fellow in literature and he co-founded Culture Strikes and Color Lines, and he has written for The Nation, New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Foreign Policy, among many others. And he currently serves as the Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University. So please welcome my friend Jeff Chang. Hi, how's everybody doing? Good, good, good, good. Thank you so much to me, and let me just get this one here, to Mark, to the amazing staff here, the public, the UTR staff, and APAP staff for the kind of vacation. There's no way to sugarcoat this. So let's just get right into what Mario's talking about. We are living in crazy-ass times. These are times that have been defined by names. Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, by hashtags, Black Lives Matter. Americans right now, a post-show that Americans right now are more concerned about race relations than at any time since 1992, which was, of course, the Los Angeles riots. And the previous spiking concern around race and race relations was 1965, over a half-century ago. It was the year of Selma. It was the year of the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Immigration and Nationality Act, the peak of the civil rights movement, the last time that this nation had a consensus for racial equality and cultural equity. Not incidentally, it was also the same year that the National Endowment for the Arts was formed. And then in the summer, the Watts riots broke out. And that moment begins to mark the start, if you will, of the post-civil rights era. It's an era that's been defined by this rich, vital culture born of the demographic changes made of the civil rights legislation and of politics at the same time of racial backlash. And so 1965, 1992, 2014, 2015, 2016, every generation seems doomed to return to the question of Rodney King's, can we all get along? And we find ourselves in strange paradoxical times. We have a black president, and yet we still have to affirm that black lives matter. We see in our media, in our culture, a rainbow country full of happy faces, but all indices show that we actually are experiencing intensifying racial inequality, cultural inequity, and re-segregation. It doesn't seem so long ago, 2008, right? To be exact, that Obama, Barack Obama, presented himself as a symbol of reconciliation, literally a black and white man colorized into red, white, and blue with the word hope attached to him. And so when he's running for office, people start using this strange word, right? Post-racial. And when he's elected, many believe that we have suddenly thrown off the weight of history, that we've launched into a new era of colorblindness. But just as soon as they did, the backlash sets in. And so, Obama becomes a symbol of all things other, right? Not just black, not just the product of miscegenation, but also suddenly a Muslim, a socialist, a quote-unquote illegal alien. And the cultural wars were now back in full swing. And this is something, of course, that he alluded to in the State of the Union address the other night, saying that his biggest regret was the rancor and the strife that he was leaving behind, that he could not help to reconcile the polarization in the country. And so, instead, here at the Obama era, and yet it's not hard to find a crazy picture of Donald Trump. But here at the end of the Obama era, we see Trump, we see Carson using racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, using anti-immigrant, anti-black calls to move to the top of the Republican polls. And yet, I think that in times of trouble, right, in times of flux like this, I think, like Mario, that we here in this room somehow manage to be at our best. We do so much of our work in the shadow of the mainstream, sort of in the subterranean reaches of the national consciousness, that we see things before they're happening. And so we know that cultural change always precedes political change. And that's part of the reason that we do what we do, right? We like the visionaries of Occupy, of Black Lives Matter, the young dreamers. We felt this in our bones. This lack of resolution, this growing social conflict, this desire for transformation. And now that these justice movements have begun to transform the way that many in the public see possibility, we find ourselves once again called to act in our art and in our practice and to push it even further. And so we've seen this amongst fellow artists what they've been doing. So four years ago, Kendrick Lamar was just another kid trying to sling his mixtapes, trying to get a herd. And now he's become one of a handful of artists like fellow musicians D'Angelo, Kamasi Washington, writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Claudia Rankin, Roxanne Gay, the directors, Eva DuVernay, Ryan Coogler, contemporary artists like the How Do You Say Yam in African Collective, Kara Walker, who have helped us have better see the moment of justice movements that we're living through. And in turn, justice movements have helped us to see issues of equity in the arts world. And so we can think of Viola Davis's extraordinary speech at last year's Golden Globes, right? In which she called out Hollywood on its exclusion of women of color from starring roles. That the only thing that separates women of color from anyone else's opportunity. Or we can think about Spike Lee's comments earlier this year when he received an honor, or late last year when he received an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement. And he said that it's easier to become president of the U.S. as a black person than to become the head of a studio. And so here we are, right? In the middle of a moment that's rife with tension but also rife with opportunity. And how do we get here? And where are we going? For that we can start with young folks, the thermometer of our society. The first fact to note is that this generation, despite being the most diverse generation that the U.S. has ever seen, has grown up during an era of resegregation. Over the last 25 years schools have been resegregating at an alarming rate. And so it shouldn't be any surprise that we've seen the return of student protests to campus from Oberlin in 2012 to Missouri in 2015. Young people demanding a renewed attention to questions of equity. And they've brought out the other haters, right? Todd Gittlin, a former student protestor, asked, why are today's students so fearful? And he suggests they're too coddled. They're too sensitive. They're not adequate to the task of building social movements. The neoliberal Thomas Friedman wrote yesterday that we're living in an age of protest. And he said, there is surely a connection between the explosion of political correctness. I'm going to put that in scare quotes. Emphasis on the scare of political correctness on campus, on college campuses, including Yale students demanding the resignation of the administrator, whose wife defended free speech norms that might make some students uncomfortable. And the ovations Donald Trump is getting for being crudely, politically incorrect. These are contradictory arguments, right? Are these student protestors? Are they a mob of anti-free speech bullies? Or are they a fearful mass of coddled and oversensitive whips? What are they? Of course, they're neither, right? There was a sage philosopher. He once said, these children that you spit on as you try to change their worlds are immune to your consultations. He said, don't tell them to grow up and out of it. Where's your shame? You've left us up to our next in it. And so haters, afraid of change, always draw these false equivalencies to equate student protest against institutional racism with the ending of free speech. As if calling out racism and demanding change is the same as issuing racist calls to extremism. Critics like Gitlin and Freeman, they act as if they have no idea how power works. Students of color can only build power insofar as they band together. And then they can still be ignored. And they've been ignored for years. And that's actually the definition, right? Of racism, right? Institutional neglect. It's a definition of power. And so when students protest, it's not anti-free speech. It's a practice of free speech. Discomforting power is not the same as power enforcing discomfort. Speaking up against injustice is exactly what democracy is supposed to look like. So students are calling us to see more clearly that achieving diversity is not the same as achieving equity. They were speaking out in Missouri against their own invisibility, a contradictory kind of invisibility. It depends upon them being seen only in a certain kind of way, as added value. The value that they provide is diversity to the university. It's not the same as being seen and valued for their full humanity, because that would require that the university believe that they need to act on their needs. And instead, the university's only act when justice movements push them to do so. And so student protest across the country are performance, right? Directed at power. And they're also performance of power. They're a proposition about how to get everyone in the community to think about community and make necessary change in a time and a place where the language of diversity has grown comfortable and stale and empty. Because just getting everyone into the same branded clothing is not transformative, right? It's diversity turned to conformity, right? So what students are saying is we have to move beyond the mere appearance of diversity to the practice of equity. And so they ask us to confront issues, again, of access, right? Who has access to the means of the production of culture? Who has access to cultural knowledges? Of representation. Who is represented in cultural production in the structure of cultural production? How does the representation, misrepresentation or underrepresentation impact the notion of quality, right? And the reproduction of inequality and power. Who has the power to shape culture and cultural production? Who has the power to allocate resources in an equitable manner? Seeing these protests in a lot of ways has been a very personal thing. I work on the campuses, of course. And in these students, I see a lot of what happened to me when I was a student during the period of the late 80s and the early 90s, a period that was marked by culture wars part one, if you will. It was a story of my generation to come of age after the civil rights movement in the post-civil rights era. We were then the most diverse generation that the nation ever seen. And I was part of the first class at UC Berkeley that was more than half a non-white. And we were the fruits of civil rights victories. We were the fruits of the multicultural uprisings. We were manifesting their victories in the appearance of our own bodies, which turned upon these campuses in larger numbers than anybody had ever anticipated. And as they do now, liberals and conservatives joined in a critique of student protests. They called us anti-democratic. They called us oversensitive when we were calling for access and representation. And then these critics expanded their efforts to critique artists of color, queer artists, feminist artists. And they were successful in destroying the second grade U.S. effort to establish, excuse me, a truly progressive cultural policy. They used these attacks against students, against artists of color, queer artists, feminist artists, progressive artists as a way to push towards a privatization of culture and to attack multiculturalism. In some ways, they were incredibly successful. So this is a graph of NEA funding, which all of you, many of you I'm sure know very well. 1966 to 2015, the blue graph is the numbers in nominal value, right? And the red graph is in adjusted real numbers, adjusted for inflation. And so the peak came within the first 13 years of its founding, right? The U.S. committed more to the arts than at any time since the New Deal. And at its peak in inflation-adjusted numbers, the NEA received equivalent of nearly half a billion dollars in 1979, half a billion dollars in 2015 numbers. And so the result was its creation of rich ecosystems, arts ecosystems, all across the country. And in fact, an infrastructure that leads to a lot of the progressive art, the multicultural explosions that we see happening during the 1980s and the 1990s. But as a result of the culture wars, actual funding drops by one and a half between 1985 and 1996. And cultural policy is effectively all but negated. And so arts and arts ecosystems, arts organizations and arts ecosystems find themselves under severe pressure, especially the performing arts, right? A field which we all know has been always strongly subsidized because we believe in the power of performing arts to bring community together, to entertain and to edify and to often pose important questions. But after the culture wars, the new national cultural policy was essentially if you can't get corporations to buy it, you don't deserve to be making art. The value of culture was reduced to merely its economic value. Again, this is the moment of the privatization of culture. But something else is happening at the same moment. Even as the ecosystems that created multiculturalism were being starved and dried out, a new generation brought some of its energies directly into the mainstream. And so in some ways, hip-hop popularized multiculturalist ideas in a broader way than even the multiculturalism movement have been able to. It grew its own audiences. It grew away to the new affect and the new aesthetics of a new generation. 1993, the hip-hop insurgency, the student insurgency, these insurgencies of multiculturalism together pushed these ideas into the mainstream. And so this is a cover of Time magazine. This woman was created from a proto-photoshop program. They basically took pictures of people from all these different races, put it across the top and put it across the bottom and try to figure out what their offspring would look like. And so they pulled this picture out, right? This is the love child of all the races of the new nation and she looked a lot like Soledad O'Brien. And they called her Eve. Multiculturalism in 1993 was suddenly edgy and hip and, above all, sexy. But not coincidentally, this is also the moment where multiculturalism feels like it's beginning to lose its cultural edge. And it gets attacked, right? In 1993, Whitney Biennial, again, the attacks that we're seeing in Congress. Soon, the novelist Paul Beatty is bemoaning everything's multicultural and nothing's multicultural. And so we end up leading the 90s with this mixed legacy, right? Artists boldly continued to move towards cultural desegregation in the arts in the mainstream, continually surprising arts institutions and the arts elite by finding new audiences, by gaining success amidst changing demographics. While the ruins of the culture wars continue to smolder, which we see in the withering of thousands of arts organizations, the disappearance of a lot of artists, the withering of valuable rich arts ecosystems, and this rising elite hostility to claims for cultural equity. So what do you do when your revolution has been co-opted, pushed out, marginalized again? You might turn to subterfuge and misdirection. And so partly as a joke, partly as a brilliant strategy, Thelma Gordon starts calling the artists the turn of the millennium post-black. A way to create a space for black artists in an environment that could be ideologically hostile. Or you might just bum rush the show, right? Like hip-hop did, finding its own audiences until it could no longer be ignored. So again, over and over again, demographic change strikes these arts institutions that say they're committed to diversity as surprising because the reality of diversity always exceeds the rhetoric of diversity. And this is how we survived the turn of the millennium and the Bush two years, right? In which top-down multiculturalism was less about attaining equity than about promoting a kind of wartime jingoism. And pundits would again soon be triumphal. They'd soon be talking about the rise of this post-war, or post-racial, excuse me, era. As if after 9-11 we had somehow all passed into this colorblind state of grace. But the larger narrative was always there. Sense of predictions had held that halfway into the millennium, 2050, the U.S. would become a majority minority. And so 2050 suddenly seemed intriguing or terrifying, depending on who you were, at least until projections found that it was going to happen sooner. 2042, the year it all goes to hell. But what did it mean, right? What does it mean to be majority minority? What does that even mean? What does that sentence or what does that phrase even mean? It meant that we all have to figure out this new question, which is if we're all minorities, how do we form a new majority? And that question right now is a political problem that people are spending billions of dollars, right, and lots of our TV time to try to figure out, right? But in a much broader, much more enduring kind of way, this cultural, this question is not just a political question, it's a cultural question. If we are all minorities, how do we form a new majority? And so this is why Roberta Uno's formulation that we have to attend to the impacts of changing demographics and changing aesthetics has been so crucial to understanding the post-911 years. It turns our view towards a shared future and what we will make of it. How will we apply our creative powers? And what activists and artists have given us now is a directive to address inequality and inequity. And to make it clear, if we don't do so, we're going to be drawn back into this bad cycle of crisis, reaction, backlash, complacency, crisis. Just as we have been after 1965, after 1992, right now what we have is the opportunity to get it right. So I want to add one more point here regarding cultural equity and the current crisis as it's being seen in the world of nonprofit arts. In the past decade, a lot of attention has been devoted to the decline in audiences for the arts, particularly in the performing arts where declines have been the most prominent. And so let's be clear. Non-white attendance has held steady, white attendance has dropped, yet whites still make up 75% of the audiences. And so why is it that arts institutions who are most concerned about declining audiences continue to program and cater to the portion of their audience that's dropping off the most intensely? And this is reflected in the way that foundation money is distributed. Of every foundation dollar, 11 cents goes to the arts. More than 5 cents goes to arts organizations with budgets of more than 5 million, which make up just 2% of all arts organizations, right? The 2%. One cent goes to arts organizations serving underrepresented communities, and less than half a cent goes to arts organizations for social justice work. In other words, the crisis in the arts is intimately related to the nation's crisis around race and justice and equity. The patterns of inequality in foundation funding and arts funding in particular are in fact worse. They're more severe than patterns of income inequality, which we all know, of course, is getting bad and worse. And so I want to close this talk with the story that maybe takes us back to the stakes of the struggle. It goes back to 1956, the end of 1956. It's been only 28 months since the young preacher Martin Luther King Jr. had been heading the tiny Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. It's been only 10 months since the local NAACP chapter secretary, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat on the bus, precipitating the Montgomery bus boycott. And it's been just eight months since King has been arrested and his home bombed by white supremacists. But at this moment, boycotts are spreading across the South. Some municipalities are explicitly outlined segregation, but Montgomery's white elite vows to hold the line. And so King, as the head and the spokesperson of the Montgomery Improvement Association, he's suddenly a national, even international figure. He tours the U.S. to explain the association's cause and raise money for their efforts to tell the nation why he and the civil rights marchers found it, quote, more honorable to walking dignity than to ride in humiliation. And so on September 27th, he finds himself the single black passenger on an airplane flight to Norfolk, Virginia. First, he flies to Atlanta. It's a connecting flight. And his flight to Norfolk develops generated trouble, and it's forced to turn back. This time he's having his conversation with a white passenger next to him. He's having what we call now the race conversation, right? And the two men are connecting. They're connecting across the gap of segregation. And as they de-play it in the head back into the terminal, they are informed their repairs will take three hours. So they're giving lunch tickets to go to the airport's restaurant, which is called the Dobbs House. Let's talk about the Dobbs House. This concession was already notorious for African-Americans in the area because at the entrance to the Dobbs House is a portally white bearded black man in an old suit who's sitting next to a high veil of cotton. And there's a low table next to him with a box of cigars and a dinner bell. And so his job is to greet guests and sometimes entertain them with a song or a tale. And so in Jet Magazine, they said this was a Remus Alfonso Smith picture. And they wrote a caption saying, Negroes using airport facilities during airport stopovers have turned this site disgusting. And so when King told the story to the audiences, he admitted that this image, the image of this man outraged him. It was an image of inferiority and it got him incredibly angry. So the Hosta area, the head waiter separates King from his white companion. And he leads King into a small curtain background in the rear of the restaurant. And so King realizes what's happening. And he starts protesting. He says, I'd rather starve than eat under such conditions. And so he goes back into the main dining room and takes a seat and waits in vain for a long time to be served. So he's getting angry, right? The white hostess is apologetic. She's saying I'm embarrassed. The black wait stuff is coming back and they're saying we'll help serve as witnesses if you want to sue. We'll see the manager. And so this is a small fight, right? By the standards of what's happening with the Montgomery bus boycott. But it's not insignificant. It leads to an epiphany for King. It becomes a central story in a lot of the speeches that he gives in the years before the March on Washington. The manager says to King, I'm bound by the laws of the state and the ordinances of the city. It's not me, it's the law. And King says, hey, I don't know if you've heard but the law has changed, right? Public facilities have been desegregated. But the manager's like, eh, whatever. We can't serve you here, right? But now everything's the same. Everything's equal back there. You'll get the same food. You'll be served out of the same dishes. Everything else. You'll get the same service as everybody in this main dining room. King says, I don't see how I can get the same service here. Number one, I'm confronting aesthetic inequality. I can't see all these beautiful paintings that you have on the walls out here. You can imagine what kind of paintings these were if the man outside is sitting next to a bailout cotton, right? So he's being sarcastic, of course. But he's serious about aesthetic inequality. He's seen all of the work that Mamie and Kenneth Clark have done, the beauty standard experience in which black children, given a choice, choose white dollars or black dollars. And he says later on, you see equality is not just a matter of mathematics, it's a matter of psychology. It's a quantitative something. It's a qualitative something. So he's restating what Ralph Ellison had said not so long before, that as a personal color, he was invisible. He was invisible in the sense of not being seen, but he's also invisible in the sense of not being seen in his full humanity. Law or no law. And further than that, he's been separated by the head waiter from his white companion. Their entire conversation has been disrupted. And so this separation prevents trust, reconciliation, redemption. It denies the possibility of neutrality, the creation of a beloved community. We're living in a time of growing inequality and intensifying resegregation. I think all of us in this room have dedicated ourselves to fight the condition that King put towards that night. Our work is to fight the aesthetic inequalities that King spoke of, or to flip it to fight for cultural equity. To fight to be seen in all of our difference and in all of our humanity. Fighting racism now is about changing the way that we see it. How do we see beyond diversity to equity? Such that we aren't content with a simple kind of Noah's Ark approach to diversity, where you get two of each, right? And you put them on the boat so they can escape the rising floodwaters, right? Which are being caused by climate change, of course. How do we see each other in our full humanity? Such that the unjust death of one is more the same as the unjust death of another. And we, in fact, make a commitment not just to stopping death, but to honoring and loving life. If we can truly see each other, perhaps we can form a more equal and just community. And that's something to believe in and it's something to fight for. Thank you very much for listening to me. Jeff's going to hang out with us for a bit so you can talk to him personally if you want to add during coffee and just kind of come to some of the shows. Now, this is a festival about risk, so we're going to really risk something. We're going to try to do something a little bit different. We're going to head into our breakout sessions and it's part of our meeting. We are going to break out into groups of six This is a chess piece given me up. There's a lot to think about. There's a lot going on these days and I think this is a room of some of the smartest people in our field and I think let's use that. Let's use each other to think about and consider how we're presenting in the world today. So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is introduce yourselves. You have five minutes for the whole group and please take one minute each to share your name, current affiliation, and one response to the following prompt. And if you really knew me, you would know. If you really knew me, you would know. Anyway. So the second part, you summer all of the following questions as prompts to get a conversation started and we're going to have these, you don't have to write these down, they're going to be on your table. How do you view the role of arts institutions in realizing cultural equity in social change? And based on these views and your own experiences, what sort of non-monetary resources are needed to advance this work, either in your own organization, or across the field at large? Specifically, how can performance be utilized as a platform for ideas and for social change? Are there examples that would be really good for folks to know about? Again, these discussion prompts are printed and available in your breakout rooms. You'll have one hour to discuss this and share amongst yourselves your experiences, challenges, and success, and process. And I think there's a lot to be learned. When we come back, if we have enough time, we're going to take just headlines from your conversations. And that's like five minutes once we come back. At the back of your batch, you will find your room assignment, which is either library on 1M or Joe's Pub. You will also have a table number and in that room where you will meet your group and have this conversation. When we break from this plenary session, we ask you to head to your assigned room and find your table. And we have people ready to direct you and help you with that. You pick up a coffee and a Danish on your way to the room. Please get to your rooms by 10.45 a.m. And we'll be giving you notes when it's time to give you an idea of how the hour is going. So, come back in here and we'll see you in about an hour or so. Okay, thank you very much. Heather and I are starting the questions. I'll see you in the library.