 Thank you so much for coming to this conversation and especially after what was a really great trip to a thousand miles playhouse, but it's hump day in full the land which is day two or three day adventure so we're really happy to have this conversation with you and for the opportunity to share some thoughts and hopefully do some co-design around the question of climate change. We have some specific parameters, it's not around the vastness of it although it does tend to fall into that occasionally. And also just a shout out to Hal Rount who's live streaming this. Thank you for all the live streams throughout the full festival and to being such a fantastic partner throughout. Both Chantal and I had worked separately with Hal Rount even before we met so there's a lot of tributaries and crossing over so we're really thrilled for this shared cross-border initiative that's happening so thanks to Hal Rount. Yeah so today climate change co-design Chantal can you talk about your experience and history and how you've come to this question of climate change first and then we can give you a bit of background for the conversation. Yes so I am originally a playwright and I in the last so I started you know as any playwright would writing plays about different subjects but then over the last ten years my work has focused entirely on the intersection of arts and climate change so and this manifested itself I guess I was interested in climate change in my personal life because I like to be outdoors and I like to go hiking but it was a trip to Alaska in 2007 that made me make this change and the reason it happened was because the trip was a year after Al Gore's first movie An Inconvenient Truth came out so the climate change was much more in the mainstream conversation and being in Alaska where the changes were evident and people were experiencing them firsthand way before we you know in the rest of the Canada and the US were paying really close attention made me want to start investigating further so after that trip I got a commission to write a play and because I'm originally from Canada I started looking at what was going on in the Canadian Arctic and so I wrote this play that's set in the Canadian Arctic and in the process of writing this play you know I did all of this research got really fascinated by what I was learning and I figured out that I discovered that there was much more I wanted to say that I could fit in one play and it was a way also to like because I had to remove all my really interesting research from the play and it was like so good so if I wrote more than one play then I could do that in some other work and so then I started looking for a container like if I'm going to write more plays about this what is it going to be and I came up with so in the Arctic there's this body non-government and non-governmental body called the Arctic Council and it's eight member countries all the countries that are within the Arctic so I decided okay I'm going to write one play for each that's set in each of these countries so that gives me a sense of the what's similar and what's different and also because it's going to take me a while to do this when we look back on the whole body of work we'll have hopefully we'll have a sense of our evolution with this subject over time so so that was the beginning and I'm extremely slow so two plays have been written produced published but I'm still on the third one and so that's in ten years so I have to hurry up if I want to get to the end of eight before you know I'm all gray and done with writing but in the process of doing that then I so this was ten years ago and I felt pretty isolated because there were not that many people around me there's nobody around me who I could tell was focused on these issues so I then I started creating other things because I was looking for things and not finding them so the first thing I created was this online platform called artists and climate change where artists from all discipline who engage with climate change issues will write about their own work or be interviewed and we have somebody doing podcasts now and so that was a way of finding who else was doing this work and a way of creating a sense of community for us but also a sort of database where people could find us and see the work that was being done like this is important a lot of people are doing it here's you know here's where you can find it and then next after that I wanted more playwrights to engage with this question I wanted more work to circulate and I wanted more voices to be heard so along with two co-founder we created this project climate change theater action which happens every other year so the first one was in 2015 2017 and then again this year and the model of a theater action already existed it was care that's which who created it around different issues but we sort of she and she was one of the co-founders so we took that model and then we sort of expanded on it so what happens is we commissioned so every two years we commissioned 50 playwrights from around the world to make sure that all continents are represented and they each write a five minute play that engages with an aspect of climate change and then we take this collection of 50 plays and we say to anybody if you want to create an event like in a window of like 12 weeks that coincides with the COP meetings the United Nations COP meetings you can have access to these plays for free like it's royalty free you can do whatever it can be like reading with your friends in your living room you can do a really public event you can add more material as long as you use one of the plays from the collection you can add more plays by local playwrights you can do you know you can have singers so it's it's really really open and it has been a way to sort of bring more activism into the work also because we ask people who will present events can you include an action as part of your presentation so in an action again you can decide what that is it can be some people have collected donations and then given that money to environmental organizations some people have brought in the the league of something voters to talk to people about about the importance of voting and looking at the the platform that their representatives have to deal with climate change sometimes it's about food so it's a whole range of things and that's number three and then the last of the initiatives was another thing I was looking for that I couldn't find was bringing artists together who engage with these issues to talk and further the conversation because I mean it's nice to think about this in isolation but if we want the work that emerges from these concerns to become more and more sophisticated we have to be able to talk to each other and also we have to be able to support each other and to maybe have a common vocabulary for how we present ourselves to the world so three years ago I was looking for something like that I couldn't find it and and so I created what we call the incubator which is a five day long mix think thank workshop where we bring in speakers every day and then there's a series of conversation and exercises that stems from that and I just did one in Alaska a few weeks ago and then there's one coming up in July in New York City and this is how I actually met Sarah because she came last year to the incubator that was in New York City cool yeah thank you so one of the things that I do in my life is I'm the associate artistic director at the National Art Center English theater and I started there in 2013 and when I arrived Jill Kiley some of you met asked me to think about the question of at that time it was referred to as First Nations work in Canada and that led to the creation of the cycle of which I've created and led now the third cycle but the first was one that culminated in a in a two-year project looking at the indigenous body of work First Nations Inuit and Métis and as a as a happenstance and a glorious happenstance gave birth to the indigenous theater department at the National Arts Center which is launching in the fall of 2019 that wasn't the plan but it was the inevitable outcome it is the the core of this land these are the oldest stories and these are the ways that we can reconstruct an idea of who we are together on this land at this time so that was a two-year wonderful life-changing event that got named the cycle once I realized that year one was about meeting with certain people working in a very very intimate way and then moving to a second year where we would work with a much larger group of people expand the field as it were and then move it into a public format at the end in the first cycle I worked with a wonderful playwright director elder and artist Yvette Nolan and we together devised an approach which in the first year at the time this was I guess 2014 seemed really terrifying whereby we invited 12 leaders from the across sort of the indigenous realm of theater performance and we invited 10 institutional leaders I think I have the math right but the goal was to outnumber the leaders with indigenous artists and leaders and to silence with purpose the institutional leaders and turn them into listeners and see whether the indigenous leaders would feel comfortable enough to speak if they knew that they wouldn't be interrupted through the course of the two-and-a-half days it was held at the Banff Center it was an extraordinary time there were incredible outcomes not the least of which was we posited kind of with purpose but this question of let's look at the indigenous canon of work and janny lozan who's an incredible performer and director and writer in her own right at the time said did a whole sort of breakdown of what canon represents in the english language and from that moment it shifted to the indigenous body of work and there was a re-energizing around gathering of various data around all the works that existed to the point where within a year there was over 400 works that were known that were accessible that were facts material facts of the amount of work and people had to suddenly go oh really you know when artistic directors or presenters or people were like well I don't know where you know that serves in some ways silence that particular question and in the second year we moved to Manitoulin Island to a Dabajah Majig storytelling theater which is just off of Kwame Kong reserve and it was the it was a shift that was not planned whereby we did the investigation on indigenous land we were invited on to indigenous land to hold this conversation and this question and and we worked in a much different collaborative model than what we'd set out to work with at the outset because we understood from an institutional perspective through institutional thinking obviously not all of the areas of blockage but at least some of the areas of blockage were kind of unblocked and the ways in which we approached the questions around indigeneity and how that it was connecting to what was understood to be Canadian theater performance were opened up the conversation opened up and there was quite a quite an expanse at the end it culminated in a thing called the repast which was a two two and a half day public event that was live streamed and is still accessible on the NAC website some very wonderful conversations a lot of deep critique learning and engagement and and some incredible performance that people at that time weren't allowed to see if they weren't in the room because of the Canadian Actors Equity Association which has now since changed but at the time indigenous performers couldn't show their work because of those association stoppages so a lot of things to be sort of sorted out over time I'm giving you a little bit of this background because it sets up the mission that we hope for this co-design session today the second cycle was looking at deaf disability and mad arts through an inclusive lens I began the work with Alex Balmer who's sitting to my left and we started in year zero before the cycle began with something that we termed the Republic of Inclusion which we did in Toronto for a day with the key goal of trying to understand what the various intersections were that were making it difficult for people coming at the question of disability arts and inclusion from being able to communicate in any kind of balance or harmony with one another we worked on this afternoon with Jan Derbyshire on a co-design for how to re-establish a long table from a Republic of Inclusion model which ended up culminating in three hours to build a 20 minute long table which happened with basically the setup that we're sitting in now no table and I can't remember what all the other things that were there that were so different from what we began from but most critically and I think most importantly was that the voice that ended up closing the session was a person who would identify as non-verbal and that was the loudest voice and the most critical voice that ended that session so to me in terms of looking at how to sort of come to these questions and shift the power dynamics areas of co-design end up being emblematic to me of a of a really good process to move forward because there's no way that I and I think I or Alice could have come to that together that was a feature of all the people in the room coming up against one another's needs that ended up giving us enough confidence to move forward into the second cycle which again this is through the National Arts Center and I shifted to co-curating with Cyrus Marcus Ware who is a visual artist primarily and performance artist a trans man who was one of the founders of Black Lives Matter Toronto incredibly engaged activist who was also doing his PhD in environmental studies at York and I bring this up because when I started the cycles I didn't know that each cycle would end up dovetailing almost always into the next conversation that no conversations could be separate from another which ended up leading through the that two-year cycle into a performance outcome called the Republic of Inclusion again live streamed where we worked with artists from across Canada and all over the world in what was termed a psychedelic symposium by its by its conclusion we worked with electronic musicians videographers and in the final day of that event we worked towards co-designing a space that would make it possible for everyone who was present in the room to participate to their fullest desire in a culminating song performed by the musicians who had been with us throughout the duration of the time um so we go into each of these things with with a goal bring us to the final cycle and it is the final cycle which is climate change reimagining the footprint of Canadian theater um when I started working on this and knowing that I would be doing it about four or five years ago um more often than not people would ask if I heard of Chantal Yvido who I had heard of but I had not met and we didn't indeed meet until last summer when I went to the incubator in New York and spent five days um basically having my innards rearranged um my uh my um my sensibilities surrounding um how I walk upon the earth altered and very odd because I was doing it in one of the largest um well the largest north american city um and uh and going to see Broadway shows at night and looking for you know images and ideas about climate change in SpongeBob which there were many in any case um this final uh cycle had its first for a um in April in uh in Banff and Sophie has been working with us as uh as an assistant curator and um and we hope will be joining us next year so the trophy you meant earlier um and uh what what we did was um we gathered with about 12 institutional leaders from across the country and eight inspired nine inspires from the United States, Canada and the UK and and Australia and sorry and something that's very important and critical to this question and something that I have learned over the course of this time um I'm queer and so I've been to um one queer conference uh called the Q2Q conference in Vancouver which was the first of its kind in Canada um and I I when I was there as being an organizer of so many of these things I I was aware of what it feels like to be the object under under review the person under review um and and what I come I've come to learn with these cycles is that when we looked at the indigenous body of work there was albeit it's massive there's 600 plus nations on this land um it's a particular group of human beings who are dealing with a particular set of questions even though they're coming out from very diverse places um when we moved into the second cycle and looked at deaf disability and mad arts through inclusive lens um the exponents the variables were massively expanded and so it meant that the intersections were so uh so incredibly vibrant and alive that to to be candid and frank it was very difficult to get to theater because how how when there's so many different um desires needs um wishes and uh ways into the question of what what it is to perform when we get to climate change uh there's absolutely no human being and as Milton raised the other day no being who is outside of the question so it's it's an expanding and expanding and expanding way to kind of think about the narratives that we are holding as humans at this moment in time so to that end it changes everything and so it meant to me that when we had this third cycle that there was nobody in the room who was actually an expert there was nobody who could bring a lived experience of climate change um people could bring different ways into their lived experience of climate change absolutely but there was nobody who could say i have a lived experience of climate change um and therefore this is the this is a perspective that will have a much broader reach we all had to bring our own uh cognizance and understanding and questions about what our own lived experience of climate change is at present what our fears are that it might be into the future and what our knowledge of what it was previous to this conversation however there are some really inspiring people who have been doing unbelievable work of which the honor i feel getting to work with Chantal on this is already extraordinary but then bringing into the mix um a psychotherapist who's dedicated her life to grief studies as it pertains to the environment or climatologists who have who went into the academy because they wanted to learn about the climate and realized if they're interested in the climate that now de facto means they have to be climate change people which they're angry about that which was such an awakening for me um Allison Tickle who uh to kelville works uh with jewish bicycle in the uk who has made enormous policy changes that have gone right through the whole artistic infrastructure of how arts organizations are making work thinking about work and the criteria and the and the um the places that they have to meet to be able to even get funded to do work um she came out as a cellist and has now dedicated her life to doing that even your story chantal of being a playwright and then moving into this because there was a need to kind of really push this forward so these inspires brought to us some real knowledge and our job now along with the inspires moving forward is to to um to move into year two and year two is um divided into hubs and we're looking for some values and so i'm going to talk a little bit about about that and then hopefully i won't have to say too much more um we're calling the public um conclusion of the third cycle hub space and we're looking to um perform and exist within likely eight hub spaces um across canada the uk australia and the united states for those of you who are here for choir choir choir you saw a very um elemental um beta test of some of the thinking that we're planning for um hub space 2020 which we're planning on culminating as part of folda 2020 um the notion is is that there will be eight spaces retreats in uh in various cities um across uh like i say canada the uk um i don't want to say across the globe because it's so not in those particular countries um but they won't be at office computers they'll actually be in retreat spaces um and we're looking at how to uh investigate uh lessening carbon footprints um what it means to work in smaller groups um kinship what it means to work with two scientists two artists two students and an artistic coordinator and maybe a tech person um in each of these spaces um and what it will mean to connect from melbourne to the callowate if bandwidth makes it possible to uh st john's newfoundland to vancouver to boston to um london uk and to have some shared conversations about what the lived experience in those areas are um and then to create works based on the time that is shared together over about a nine day period those nine days will culminate in the public hub space that will be performed in theaters mainly here but in theaters in those other cities in a concurrent and ongoing way so part of the co-design question is how are we going to do this what do you guys think what are some of the digital um questions one what are some of the community questions two what are some of the pitfalls you may imagine three what are some of the cool things that you can see or and then on the other side we have values um we're developing a statement of values that we hope to make public and to what we plan to make public and transparent but we hope to be able to continue to update it over the time that we're working that will help cohere for us the ways in which we're making decisions based on uh who's traveling and how are we dealing with the cost of travel uh both psychically um in our hearts how we feel about the impacts of the planet how we're dealing with um carbon offsets how we're dealing with it publicly um for those of you and i imagine most people here are interested in this question uh it's very very easy for people to shut us down by saying well you flew to a conference you don't really care about climate change for example and and we have we've had that um of course um but there's other ways to shut us down too um oh you're doing climate change theater that means it's going to be political and i'm going to be bored and you're going to tell me from your uh usually left-leaning perspective that it's bad for me to use my car um so we're looking at ways to disabuse people of this notion um um you are the piece that you just showed in uh at the playhouse you know that first piece of you amid all of the weather those weather systems i mean gorgeous nothing to do i don't know if it has to do with climate change for you but for me it's so so beautiful and brought me to a place of just sitting in my world and thinking about what it means to to live and breathe on this planet so those kinds of works um bringing those forward that's part of the goal of this hub space outcome and why we want it to happen in so many different places around the world because bigger stories right now seem to be gathering bigger moths and maybe we want to be gathering some bigger moths around this question at this time i think does that give a pretty good answer yeah um great now what we should start with like one question yeah so uh we we have um uh as i say we have a statement of values and so some of the statement of values that we've thought of in very basic terms just to get us going are if we are to travel we need to ensure that we do x or if we are to create we need to ensure that it includes something um if we already use a certain material we need to understand its impact when planning meetings we need to take uh the following into account so those are some i don't know starter ones um would a question be does that lead you to think about any others um i've got one yeah yeah oh elixir um uh it's elixir if we are to include the most diverse participation we need to do x if we are yeah if we could write that yeah we've got a white board just behind me so we'll be adding to that as we go could you repeat that if we are to include yeah or yeah if we are to include the most diverse uh level of participation we need to do great thanks i just have a question i guess based on all of the streaming experiences which is how to make the act of streaming a dialogue a true an effective dialogue um because i think some of the situations have been uh more successful than others in terms of it being an ongoing two-way conversation rather than observing something happening in another location yeah this is a great thing i would love to talk about just some really good minds in the space who have really good um intel on that um i will just start off by saying that last year at fold we had a uh a two-way conversation with uh the strafford festival around um some design elements for uh Robert Lepage's uh coriolanus and uh we worked with um martin who was working with us here and the national art center and strafford he was able to send the same um what i call a conversation box to strafford and we had the same one here which meant that the two boxes were speaking the exact same language to one another and therefore it made for an immediate back and forth conversation there was no um kind of translation um when we did choir choir choir we didn't have the um literally the financial resources to be able to do that and so the the the conversation boxes were also speaking a slightly different language and as a result the delay comes up because of that it's possible with uh the right amount of money and support to be able to have boxes that will speak the language and so long as the internet capacity is good enough um to to to expect a pretty fluid two-way conversation that's the goal for the hub spaces not for the retreat parts for the hub spaces we imagine that we'll need to move back from say a more idyllic out of the city um venue and move into a theater or university setting where there's canary or higher end um connectivity and then to get those boxes that speak the same language to be able to do so but i think it's not just about even the technology but it's about like i thought choir choir choir was really interesting the other night because i actually cared about the people in the other places whereas in some of the other experiences uh like uh lucky ju uh i kind of felt like i could be watching a newscast in a way uh and that it was kind of great you know when it became a question of do you want to get a coffee mug or something like that you know then it felt a bit like a dialogue whereas even with the technological glitches in choir choir choir there were moments because they constantly brought those other people into the room those other places into the room we were in and because uh we had moments like when somebody said does anybody know anybody in any of the other rooms and then somebody brought their baby out you know that that that you i felt like i had a connection with each of those rooms of people and um and then it was really interesting when montreal when they left i kept thinking it's heartbreaking i'm looking at an empty room like why did you leave you know and and i felt like in a way even though there were glitches technologically that i was emotionally engaged because of how the choir choir choir choir people moderated the dialogue in a way so i think that that was a really interesting kind of lesson that you see. Kevin? This is Kevin speaking. I just i've uh not totally related to those things. I just have a question about the intent behind the like the questions and that is there like an intent behind the work in terms of um is the work intended to encourage change or to reflect what's going on i i guess that's kind of a question that i would have before i could pose about these. Right that's a great question i mean you sometimes will reimagine the footprint and each of the cycles have been dedicated towards towards change however for me personally i would place the caveat that with respect to climate change changes changes in the word is in the is in the is in the thinking already so there's been so much compelling writing and i i suspect there's going to be so much more as as the realities of what we are witnessing and uh that that i feel very personally uncertain as to what needs to change um and i don't feel like i will ever be enough of an authority to know in any macro way what needs to change so what i as a dramaturg at heart and most interested is understanding what's going on and trying to get a sense of what's going on and i don't really know what's going on i mean i i go to thousand miles playhouse which you know i started working there when i was a kid and to to to look at that doc i mean it's it's it's it's it's really frightening it's it's i just can't understand it you know i i i know what's happening i we talk about it and i can rationalize it but so to your question i think these values are for me it's such a great question for me there are ways to be able to say i understand your critique this is how we're working i hear you and maybe we can adjust as opposed to yeah i guess that's okay you said the offer one yeah um from uh i took this uh green new deal event this week and one of the ideas that they brought up was like we we have to move that the speed that's required so i guess like we have to move at the speed that's required so i guess my value would be if we are to move at the speed that's truly required by climate change we have to x um if we have to move at the speed required by climate change and i wonder if there's a follow-up but move helpfully or move responsibly at the speed yeah this is Ramona speaking um that reminds me of a quote that um adrian marie brown has she's uh the author of this will call the emergent strategy and she says move at the speed of trust um which is something that uh i think is um both like hand in hand and a counterpoint to that a little bit and sort of specifically speaking of doing work um with specific communities right like you you move at the speed that the trust between people is is developing because if you move too fast before there's trust there then uh then the work sort of falls apart or you know you run the risk of of doing harm um so yeah i think balancing like the the necessity with the with the human trust it also feels like it's about a code of values that are adoptable by people in different theaters with different intentions they may not be doing all climate change work but they could take the value of we're recycling our sets now or we're going to do there there are actions that the theaters can take we're going to use all led lights instead of using the old lights we're going to like what are the different steps as a field that we can take to lower the carbon footprint of what we put into the world as creators i didn't get to a value i was speaking about i was speaking about a thing to do with the values i think that like a way to enlist um you know a code of conduct from our our field i think there was some i wasn't at tcg so somebody who was should speak i understand there was a lot of stuff around climate change and that there was some discussion around these this issue particularly about as a field what we could do were you there i know the people who put it together yeah it's a and a new green theater they're trying to put together based on the green deal right something that would be like you said code of conduct for the field of large yeah yeah i'm christine it's charles speaking i wanted to propose maybe if we are to retreat for the first conversation we should consider x because the idea of retreating is interesting with such an enormous part of the world's population are living in urban centers and that's perhaps one of the key drivers of climate change and industry so as we retreat to a natural quote on quote environment are we un-including the majority of some populations who live in urban centers is there like a gentrification question of who can go to that retreated space safely and monetarily and have that conversation and what is the way that that space is managed like a lot of parks not in a non-sustainable way the way they burn energy in the winter just to heat the buildings which are not cost-effective so there are some things to think about i think for the first week would you be able to if we are to retreat for the first because we are to retreat we should consider x just in with what john was saying i thought fire fire fire was amazing but there was an element of there was a central location and satellite locations that were commenting on or were responding to the central location and in a decentralized conversation like climate change i would be very afraid of having an Ottawa driving the ship and having people feeling like they were subsidiary conversations well interestingly that's a great great question and interestingly next year if this works Kingston will be the the place that's the small like the smallest center of any of those and so the i don't i don't see a center which is really interesting and other than other than a command central which of course becomes a center and becomes a way in which a conversation is considered but really yeah there won't there won't be a there won't necessarily be a bigger audience here yeah and you know Vancouver some of the feedback was Vancouver felt um like they felt that the show was happening for us but Toronto didn't because they knew the the bands a well they knew the duos are well so there's that too about relationship we have a question which is that uh in in looking at the different hubs um is it that we're trying to deal with reducing transportation and the reason i ask is that i've come from Toronto so it's possible Toronto would be a hub but i'm having a totally different kind of experience because i'm in this physical environment and it's a great physical environment uh and it's taken me out of my normal pattern so i could drive my super fuel efficient car and pack it full of people and still like i i would still have a very different experience physically being here than i would have physically being in Toronto so is it is it that we are trying to reduce transportation or is it that transportation is one element of which there may be others that we're trying to reconsider in thinking of a new shape or a different shape i mean if i understand your question i think yeah we're interested in seeing what the new shapes are we we've moved headlong into technology or we've moved headlong into technology travel is um is absolutely a privilege and we can now measure its its carbon its carbon costs um maybe uh i'm sure i'm not the only one in the room here uh if infrastructure goes down i don't know which will go down first will we travel or will be the internet i don't know but this is another way of thinking about connectivity across you know across distance um i also know that i was initially inspired by the question of artists that i was working that i was making work with in uh in a caluit and um they told the story of the way in which they make work which is this at the time it's it's already begun to change a little bit but at the time they said we're cabaret artists because we can only gather to make work for one day with somebody from another community because for me to fly from the caluit to pond inlet to be with my closest artistic uh creator is three thousand dollars and then for us to travel to another place is another three thousand dollars and then if say we do a show with fifteen artists all fifteen of us have to travel down south to Ottawa before we can start to tour across Canada and be seen so for me at that time and that was at the beginning of this whole site the very first cycle actually i began to think well what are the ways that we can think differently about that um obviously there's an enormous environmental cost to not not travel extraction resources so many things that are happening that probably within this room are somewhat out of our control but maybe offering other ways to think about how we can communicate and make work and co-presence which i really hope me i might speak a little bit about to know if there's more potential for co-presencing across this um if the offers of technology um yeah also i guess i would add that um there's there you know like if you hadn't come here and this had happened and you had joined from a from a long distance it would be different but there's going to be no this here so people are going to gather in each of these hubs and that's where this stuff is going to happen so maybe that makes it slightly different each hub is a locality yes and each hub is creating something on its own it's not from your desk i think that's you know because computers you know you're like oh yeah sure i'll go to that retreat and you know but it does force a movement out of your out of your pattern which yeah yeah so um it's a um a couple of things i'm gonna do a little bit train of thought um well i'm i'm interested in this values and then also practices because i feel like as things shift sometimes they build practices but the context around us shifts and our practices are actually no longer helpful so like how do so the framework of if we are to we need to do i'm struggling with that a little bit right like what do we need to be what do we need to think about what do we need to um uh um consider um which gives us a little more creativity a little more flexibility around practices down down the pike um and i was really responding to something you said sarah about um when folks come and want to try to remember the word you said but basically like knock it down knock that's it like this isn't real isn't real and there's a a brilliant writer of Mississippi uh named kaisy layman and i had to look it up to get it right he says there might be rigorous honest work to be done by grounding our critiques at least partially in our complicity and so i started thinking about how do you hold complicity and vision simultaneously and so i think if i if i lean into your this framework like if we have to hold the complexity of the climate change or even like it hold the complexity of um our relationship to climate change we need to do yeah if i could just build on that a little bit when um Ramona you were um quoting from immersion strategies um move at the speed of trust i was thinking well do we need to do kind of a whole think session on what trust like what trust means in terms of moving that speed forward you know like what does this what is this group what would trust look like in this group versus trust in another group and then what would the speed then be of like it might take this group i don't know 62 days and 15 minutes and it might take another group three minutes i don't know you know and um but that yeah elaborate a little bit on that sure um and thinking about organizing um around um issues you can be in you can have a you can be political trust with someone i trust their vision there there that they're moving in the similar that we are aligned in what we're moving forward i might not be having dinner with them though right like there's this difference between like personal trust i trust you to do um it's like trust accountability right i trust you to um stay inside these parameters of the work that we're doing together that we have agreed on like this and they like how do you unpack what trust is but um i feel like sometimes the this this phrase moving at the speed of trust becomes this this like well a personal feeling right like i i need to like you in order to work with you or which is not bad you know we should let the people work with us and i'm wondering around with people i don't like from a political analysis i just want to say you know that that feels to me and and this is a conversation with the folks and i've been having a difference between what it means to build political trust to move and organizing agenda forward and then what it is personal trust around like your family your friends and who do you think both ought to be included in this value or one or the other i would say for sure being clear about the difference so that this idea like using the same word i mean that's what maybe think about it so i'm saying what how do you define trust and so i think that for me is at the core whether it's political personal or all different kinds of trust that may be out there that you know people aren't naming um but just being clear amongst the folks in the room of what that trust entails and what that means um yeah and i actually think what's saying sage's question about complexity i think is probably getting to what i was thinking and she's probably said it much more articulately but i when we were talking about hubs i was thinking yeah you know it's because this is such a complex area and uh if we are honoring um the respect for travel and meaning in spaces that will bring probably similar people together because of proximity um it would be i think really useful to have to ensure that we have um access to the conversations that are happening in other locations that we don't have proximity to because inevitably where we are living and where we gather is going to have an impact on what we talk about so i was just wanting to ensure that there's some way that the complexity of those conversations depending on those locations is shared widely yeah well i mean to unpack the uh the vision at this point for that is that the public outcome at the end hub space uh will be a two day starts on a friday evening and culminates on a sunday morning at lunch basically a two day extravaganza which will share across eight spaces those personal ways into a particular a particular set of questions that are arrived at by each of the hubs and throughout the year of building towards that that we that we set in motion for each of those groups to look at so it's the the scope is um the scope is really large but the but we're hoping that each hub will hold its own kind of ground literally as to how they're uh they're digging into the set of questions that get asked and by set of questions i should say that you know it's this is a theater inquiry um it's it's you know it comes out of uh what's called english theater at canada's national art center so we we're come to this question from the perspective of theater slash performance but we don't even have performance in the name of what we do so you know theater so a part of it um kevin matthew wong spoke earlier last year his show chemical valley project was here at the first boulder and it just happened in in charado and it's a piece um that centers around questions pertaining to climate change apathetic fallacy that anita roshan is doing tonight that centers around it work that um shantel has done um focuses on that um just saw some work this afternoon and some of the work that was shared in the us canada exchange part of the the job of this is also to share the work that exists it's already really cool really exciting and so that people are like don't fall into thinking that it's going to be a bunch of people with i don't know placard saying down with trump or whatever you know like that there's such a sophisticated interesting way into it some of the br were you know boy check that you've shown certainly i think there's so much there's so many different ways that are creative engagement i think can can blow people's minds in the best possible way so it's not just about conversations the hub spaces at the at the at the end it's really about a a meeting place of conversation and performance and hopefully a really good party and that's the part i haven't quite figured you know like how how there's going to be a party that can happen in some simultaneity or some shared i don't know something that people can really feel that it's that they're affecting one another in the way that i was affected during choir choir choir and that there is like a sense of something happening at the same time for people yeah i threw this is ancela um i threw a large party with uh winnipeg reiki back and i would be so happy to help you with that great yeah no really because there are some fun interesting ways of getting people chatting and playing in parties with oceans between them with love great i want to say this is sophie i put on the board um without it's easier for me to write it and then say maybe but i i've been on the board given the resources of the project can we create and make available a rubric for other companies to take up if so we need to x i guess that's sort of an idea of like oh how can this project actually create possibilities for others to follow yeah that's on my mind a lot and i'm involved in a transnational performance project that is addressing the climate crisis right now and um and we convene uh over the internet to create together and one of the things that i'm like really sitting with and its attention for me is like the internet is not carbon neutral right and i feel like that hasn't been entered into this conversation i think we proceed often with this perception of it being a neutral space a carbon neutral space and it's not and so um i think how to address that inside of any and and that may be an impossibility when we are increasingly connected and trying to create work across often imposed borders uh that address global context how to contend with this very actually material fact of the lack of neutrality of the ways in which we're convening and the impact of that and how to even measure that and that's not something i figured out at all and it's not something that we've had extensive conversations with in in this particular project that i'm referring to but i think there's a tension there um and i think and and drawing from that project what we have adopted is emergent strategy as the design principle from which we are working creating relationships addressing our um shared and divergent political concerns and finding ways to create aesthetically uh depthful work across vast locations both like our positionalities in relationship to the complexes of power and our positionalities in in geographic relationship to one another so um and i wouldn't say we've like adopted the entire text but there are certain principles inside of that work that really are guiding the foundation of how we are endeavoring to work together um and what does it mean to work in an emergent way uh is i think a big um it's a it's like a very fruitful problem to address to ourselves um yeah so i don't have a synthesis of any of that sorry if i could respond to your first your first point um uh ian garret who uh we met the other day from prog he was part of the uh he was one of the insiders at the summit and and he raised um he actually has the data on the cost of uh technology and it's far from mutual and in fact um i had a real crisis uh the day that i learned of that because this whole thing was very i i also led that session the first day about digital utopias like i was the word i was like it's amazing there's no paper there's no travel it's amazing and then he just laid out all the information i was like it's terrible so actually one of our goals for next year is to be able to make that um information um accessible and uh and sort of have the the formulas available for people so they can understand it because he went through just very in very limited fashion you know what it is for me to send an email to you sitting across the room with rest to share google docs or any of that stuff it's it's far from neutral so it's a really important point and and a difficult one um but it brought us that's actually it was that that conversation that um gave rise to us thinking about a statement of values because uh sage i think you raise the word complexity but like it's just to move into one one step here raises the other with the other foot the other question you know so um yeah i don't know maybe the statement yeah it's just a it's just a help me for dealing with this and then in terms of the emergent as design um i guess one of the questions that has come up for us on this land is you know we we tend to use more and more decolonizing or indigenizing but i i don't i don't believe the leadership exists um necessarily in this room and so it's trying to understand how to focus how to how to who's not in the room as coal coal always say and and uh he's a i think you're a creator and director from toronto but but how do we how do we how do we find the right guides through the question of this of this moment i guess is uh it's part of the question so if emergent strategy is one i think maybe it would be great to learn more from you on that i'm happy to share the document that we created that is how we're trying to approach this project and i'd be happy to share that widely it's not super deep but it's a yeah it's like a one picture thank you yeah i'm happy to have conversations too um this is west i mean the two things i would add like to add as far as guides um one um i mean i think sage can attest to this because you are quoted in the book several times um but um emergent strategy is actually the book document of like beware the dandelions which was our performance and so that actually was developed in parallel with each other and um a lot of the metaphors and principles actually came out of the research that we were doing when developing that work so like i i always love to just like go over and like talk about some of those things that come out of emergent strategy and like our collaboration with adrian um as she like wrote and in like we created like an artistic expression of kind of those principles um but the other thing is like i would like to offer another guide um that i've been involved with the process over the past three or four years um that came out of the ally media conference is um these guiding principles called the design justice principles and so it's just a set of 10 principles that i think um overlay very well not exactly with everything for like piece by piece but are a good way to like think about when you say about like leadership in the room one of the principles are the prioritization of like people most impacted um and thinking about who is considered an expert how expertise is taken into consideration um and in uplifting and valuing lived experience in this document of like how all these things fit together when creating the document such as this thanks a lot for me i think that um point of speaking um that if we um want a real change we should probably i think that's like a general but we should think about changing society changing politics changing economy changing politics and economy economy is uh not that easy i suppose uh but um i think um from our perspective uh we can um change society i mean we can try to change um knowledge and um and attitude of people um so um how can we um do it so that these kind of activities reach um big scale or a lot of people so i suppose my value would be and i believe in change and um there are some very good examples how certain campaigns changed uh attitude of people for example Bogota started to be not so violent city we can several good decisions but so my question would be if we are to make a great impact of uh on society or people regarding climate change uh we should do x if we are going to have peace again uh to make an impact on um society or big amount of people or if we are to reach with our goals uh to make a big number of people um that just made me think of a TED talk that we watched the other day by my name is Helen Narage from the UK she does huge large scale large scale public artworks and she had this one piece that she produced by a company um out of France Royal Deluxe does giant puppets and i i just bring it up because talking about all of this i've been feeling really really stressed out and what you said Kevin it's like overwhelming and i'm like i wouldn't go i wouldn't go to this because it's an echo chamber and i'm like i i just feel i feel so useless but when you said what you said when Jack i felt ah we're artists we can imagine an alternate future we can playfulness and creativity can we and then i realized well maybe maybe we do have a place in this and i thought of this piece and her work just because she turned she shut down London for four days to bring in a giant like bigger than a building i don't know if it's eco friendly they built this puppet that was so huge and to like an elephant and a little girl and they she engaged with the city for four days and people like thousands and thousands of people all came into the streets to engage with the work and i just was like people were crying and were so moved and i yeah i just imagine like for me a hub somehow sounds like an echo chamber but how do we get out of the echo chamber and into the streets or outside of that to inspire or to play i don't have any values i'm just talking and then when millions are in the streets then something can happen yeah like i mean all those all those things are so much about like joy and connectivity and people feeling a sense of shared value or shared like that we're here like that we're all here and and i suppose that's part of the the attempt it's it's interesting here you say that that you're like you see this and you think i wouldn't go because it would stress me out too much i mean our hope is that at the outcome it's about joy and celebration not because it's like oh great climate change is happening but more because there's well in part an acknowledgement can offer a sense of power and and movement but more to to bring more people into the conversation but yeah i hear you like i think oh god well maybe hugs this you know maybe that's too much of a closed image i don't you know i don't know yeah our colleague who's watching along on the live stream just wanted to put another sort of guide into the room it's the work of the climate justice alliance which is an alliance of grassroots groups centering marginalized communities across the us and they have a just transition framework which details their thinking and work on moving from extractive economies and world views to regenerate slums or regenerative ones and it's a climate justice alliance that word and that's from jacks gill who's going to be back around later if anybody's curious we have about five minutes i i've i've loved this i mean i feel to have an opportunity just to ask a question and i i i don't i i have no idea what other people feel about how to take on the question of climate change but to be able to sit in a room and at least talk about it fills me with a tremendous sense of gratitude just to be able to bring it forward and i and also to be okay with feeling unintelligent about it i feel like i constantly say that stuff in public and it may sound disingenuous but actually i just i i don't know i'm trying to learn skills with which to talk about it and to be able to set up frameworks in ways that we can't talk about it um in the early or the late 90s i ran a theater company in toronto called buddies in bad times theater and um and uh a very specific queer mandate and i had a distant relationship in some ways with the um sort of identity based locality of it at the time and my dad was an engineer and so i've since learned that they're at a you know some academic whatever but anyway somebody's smart was already talking about this but at the time i was just thinking about structures for desire and for me these cycles are structures um where a lot of energy is being put in play so that we can have these difficult conversations and hopefully not feel completely dis disengaged but hopefully feel utterly engaged at the end i mean that's the goal and so i see these cycles as actually durational performances that start at the beginning of the question and maybe conclude not quite sure at the end of the two years or at least maybe our creative part of it concludes and something new happens so um that's me so just thank you for being willing to um think through these things with us it's very useful um it's very in progress so these all these different things are going to um inform how we move forward and if you'd like to be not if you'd like to be involved if we can call on you we'd really like to but if you have any thoughts that you feel you want to share after they come up please do because uh we'll take them yeah can i do a little plug that the green new theater crew who one of them is my one of my dearest collaborators um they actually have an upcoming zoom call on june 18th that you can log into um and it'll be from 3 p.m to 5 p.m EST and i will um get that information and then share it on the slot great but um yeah like just as you were talking their first principle was posted and their first principle is community accountability just if you're interested so um just to know that this conversation is really active in multiple localities and i think that's exciting