 that come with creating and touring ensemble theater work and also to experience excerpts of work by local artists. It's a really wonderful opportunity for the National Theater Project panelists, advisors, and also for the staff to learn about the theater world in the region and also to foster a space where the local theater community can get together for conversations and deep relationship building. This year, the region we are focusing on, clearly, is New England. We did an in-person one-day gathering on November 1st in Hartford, Connecticut and then we held a virtual day on November 9th. Hopefully some of you were able to attend. And today is the last day of the virtual convening. The panels during the virtual convening portion focus on cross-state topics that elevated from conversations we had with theater community leaders in New England. We're featuring performances by artists from each state as well. So we hope you can join us for as much as you can. And we encourage you to utilize the Huvva app to continue or start conversations that are relevant to you. Also, if you missed the exciting conversations and performances that happened on November 9th, you can watch most of them through HowlRound. Most of today's panels and performances will be live-streamed and uploaded there as well. And I'll add the link in the chat. Here it is. Please share it with people. Yeah, we're so excited that you're here with us and look forward to sharing this final day with you. Thank you so much for being with us. And I will pass the mic to the Sandglass team, Shoshana and Eric. Welcome. Thank you, Meena. Thank you, Nifa. I am here to do a land acknowledgement on behalf of Sandglass. My name is Shoshana Bass. She, her, hers pronouns. And I am a light-skinned woman with curly brown hair about my shoulders and a black cashmere sweater because it's cold in Vermont today. And I'm sitting in front of a white and yellow curtain in my home, which is a trolley car. I'd like to just start the land acknowledgement by looking out my window. We've had our first snowfall of the season today. So that's very always a vivid time for me to remember the connection with the land we live on. Sandglass Theater acknowledges that we are located on the unceded lands of the Pentecost, Wabanaki and Abanaki peoples. We invite you to join us in acknowledging the Pentecoke Wabanaki Confederacy and Abanaki community, their elders, both past and present, as well as future generations. Sandglass Theater also acknowledges that it has founded upon exclusions and erasures of many indigenous peoples. This acknowledgement demonstrates a commitment to beginning the process of working to dismantle the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism. I'd also like to add, as we step into watching our excerpt of Babylon, we would like to also acknowledge the displacement of people around the world who have had to leave their homelands as a result of legacies of colonialism, greed and violence. Thank you. Sorry, technical difficulties on second. There's in a red sweater. Speak English. Did you come alone? Has anyone undressed you? How do you get food? What's in your pocket? Do you speak English? Washington, D.C. What do you see when you look at this boy? A journey. A lost boy. A courageous boy. A desperate boy. A puppet. A hard worker. A drug mule. Did you check his shoes? An economic problem. A drain on our resources. Not our problem. A refugee. He's not technically a refugee. An asylum seeker. An immediate danger. A thug. A gang member. Is that what you see when you look at me? A train on the school system. Someone who doesn't speak English. Ignorant. Undocumented. Illegal. Afugitive. A child. I was traveling west through Onea onto New York when a waitress in a red sweater said to me, I used to live in Texas. And the crime is so bad down there, you should get rid of those people. Those illegals. They steal the gas right out of your car at night. They steal anything and they turn around and sell it at those flea markets. They don't pay taxes. They take our jobs. They have food stamps. And then they get money and send it back to their families in Mexico. Undocumented immigrants do not receive food stamps. I was just telling you what she told me. Well, and then she said, they walk around with big bundles of cash in their pockets because they get paid under the table. Don't get me wrong, she said. They're hard workers. Some of them are nice. I used to live next door to a family of Mexicans. And then she went on to tell me, down there in Texas where I used to live, it's horrible. There are snakes everywhere. Coral snakes, rattlesnakes, cotton mouths. Some of them are so small, they go right under your door and into your house. And the little ones are even more poisonous than the big ones. That's what the waitress in the red sweater said. In El Salvador, the word for mother is mi mamita. The word for buddies is mischeros. School, zocole, soccer, it's football. Comic book is historietas. The word for this train is la bestia, the beast. Sustain me, bless, sustain. Sustain, bend back to us second. How much money are you carrying? What are you fleeing? Who is trying to harm you? Do you speak any English? The English word for saviak is my friend. The word for jamma is university. Kenyue is smartphone. Dave is football. Or soccer. Chai is tea. Barouge is chicken. Ecliojabal is rosemary. It's for the chicken. Yes, I speak English. I have a master's degree in computer science. There is war in my country. War. Why are you mumbling? Are you a Muslim? What are you saying? What are you saying? Show us the straight path. Oh, she forsake our land. Tears to clean your merciful. To face darkness and storms on the sea. No peace, bullets. No transport was found. And when at last our boats neared the harbors of Greece, they stopped us and turned us around. It is death to return to our country of birth. And on no other shore can we land. Suspended between two nations on Earth, no one wants a Syrian man. I stand here before you. I stand and I say, tears not for profit we flee. I stand here before you in my language I pray. For these words are sacred to me. A straight path. My BB is my friend. My love. My lover. Bosse is kiss. Is this part of our story today? How? How is this our problem? Could we imagine that things are better? Could we imagine that wars could stop? Could we imagine that we are not helpless? Could we imagine that powerful countries stop destabilizing regions for profit, stop the supply of arms that cause people like these to have to suffer torture, flee their homes, see their loved ones killed, their families destroyed, their cultures crushed? Why is no one talking about the sale of arms? Where did the arms come from for the wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Burundi, Rwanda, Congo, gang wars in El Salvador? This is about our own history and the harm that we have brought elsewhere that now rolls back on our own beaches. Normally this is the point, Lailani speaking, where I would say taking a moment to come into the space. That's probably going to be a slightly longer moment than usual. I didn't pre-screen our materials, and parts of that story were deeply personal to my family and my own experience, so I will definitely need a moment to pull myself together. And as we enter the space, just naming again Shoshana and Eric are our presenters from Sandglass. And I will turn it over to you when you folks are ready to provide any context or insight and then we can handle the Q&A if you prefer. Thank you so much, Lailani. And yes, everyone, take care of yourselves and what you need to do. Just a little context of the rest of what you just saw, a small excerpt of what is five stories, well, maybe six stories because there's a caterpillar as well who has a story that goes throughout the whole performance. We want to acknowledge the many people that were part of making this happen, the whole company of which there were many versions. The ensemble was very much part of the devising of the work. We worked together with USCRI Vermont, which is a resettlement agency here in Vermont and the generous contributions of people's stories who were resettled in the area that helped in the development of this process. We also want to mention Brendan Taff, who was the composer for the songs you heard. Eric was the writer of the texts of those songs. And Ines Zellerbass made the puppets and the cranky that you saw, cranky is the rolling panorama. And Brad Heck and Willow Ferrell were the filmmakers that worked with us during COVID to transform what used to be a live touring production into this film version, which we have been touring in a new hybrid model along with a workshop that we teach that was also co-developed with the resettlement agency here in Vermont. Thanks to National Theater Project, NIFA and to the DARS Duke Building Bridges program for allowing us to commute some of our touring money and development money into making the film, which we did because of the pandemic. I'm Eric Bass, he, him. I'm a man in the 70s, white skin, Jewish gray beard, sitting in an attic room with a white ceiling sloping down on one side. And I'm the director of this project. Thank you both. Thank you for that context and for naming your collaborators and bringing them into the virtual space with us. I will defer to you if you would like folks to post questions in the chat, if you would like folks to popcorn off and ask via audio or if there are specific questions you would like to post to the audience. The other option is I am more than happy to certainly lots of feelings and questions arose for me. So I defer to you all on how you'd like to engage for the next 20 minutes or so. All those options work. I think people should comment or question as they are comfortable with. Great. So let's start with, if you have questions or comments, folks, if you can place them into the chat to start with just because I know for attendees from last week we didn't really use audio very much and I don't know, folks might be in their car or doing whatever. If you place it in chat, I'm happy to elevate comments and questions to Shoshana and Eric. And I would like to hear more, just sort of get the ball rolling about the process of changing from the live touring to the video, what that was like. You had mentioned that was part of the process for us to be able to engage today. Sure. We did our last live performance in 2020 on March 12th, March 13th, everything shut down. We literally were on stage on the night before the, I don't know what to call it, before the hourglass flipped over. I mean, it was time changed. And I remember actually standing in the back of the room while the ensemble did, I think one of the best live performances that we have ever done and looking at the audience and saying, this is the last time I'm gonna see this, like this in a long time in an audience, people sitting next to complete strangers. I mean, it was like a theater audience, it was a full house. That was back in the days where we thought we were just gonna have to switch from shaking hands to touching elbows, right? And then the story went on from there. We were well into the pandemic before we realized that this was not gonna turn around. And we had to come up with another plan. And so we came back to Kita here, National Theater Project and to our funders at the Doris Duke Building Bridges Program. And we said, we have all the stirring money and we can't tour, can we commute some of it, not all of it, some of it to create the movie and then tour in, as Sushi said, the hybrid model where the whole ensemble doesn't tour anymore because the ensemble in fact had to break up after making the film. One of the ensemble members lost his visa and had to go back to India. One of the ensemble members had a child. One of the ensemble members moved out west, another one gave up theater altogether and moved into writing. I mean, we all, there was no way to hold, I mean, Sandglass as a company is alive and well, but this performing ensemble was held together by touring and when touring stopped, people had to go their way. So the film, so doing the film was a remarkable experience because we did it at the height of COVID when everybody felt the most threatened by the pandemic, getting the performers here in Vermont, getting them all put up in places where they had to actually quarantine here for a week before we could come together. People were living in the same farmhouse, but couldn't be in the kitchen at the same time. They had to stay in their rooms most of the time. We'll take a walk alone. So when we finally came together in one room after the quarantining and everybody looked at each other and said, this is the moment, we all took off our masks, it was very, very emotional. Shoshi, you probably can talk more about that as being one of the ensemble members on stage at that moment. Yeah, not only that, but then singing together and breathing very, when you're on a puppet, you're in each other's armpits and there's no way to not inhale the same air and then to sing these songs that are very powerful songs already and have the space together, it was very profound. And I think we all felt just a step closer to the displaced experience in a way that really brought us back to these stories through something that we weren't expecting. Thank you, thank you both for that. There's lots that I would love to draw from but I wanna elevate a question from the chat from Marty. What were the conversations and responses you recall when the audience was primarily people who personally experienced some elements of the stories in the piece? There is a story, the first of the stories that we tell and I should say just briefly, there's an opening section of all the puppets arriving on this mythical beach, this metaphorical beach together and there is a closing section in which some people are led through the gate and some people are denied access. And in between there are these five stories plus as Shoshana says, this metaphorical story of the journey of a caterpillar. One of the stories, the first one is the story of an Afghan mother and it was told to us by her son who lives in Vermont. And I mean, her story in its simplest form is that the Taliban come to her village, they have only moments to decide what they're taking with us as they flee. They flee up into the mountains covered in five feet of snow. This is a true story as we've heard it and the one thing that she takes with us is a 50 pound bag of flour that she carries on her head because she doesn't know how else to feed her children that she has with it. When we did the show first in April 2016, was it so long ago? We did it as a work in progress and it was very, very different. I mean, it really was a work in progress and we involved the whole community. 400 people came to performances to see this and give us feedback. And one of them was the man who told us his mother's story. And yes, he was retraumatized and he said, but that's okay. He was somehow very, I don't know if proud is the right word, but it felt right to him to see the story on stage. He then came on, actually onto our board for a while. Stories are different. We did one performance in Portland, Maine for a high school class in which all of the students in the class were born outside the United States. Most of them had come to the United States quite recently. A number of them did not yet speak English. And it was another very, very emotional show. And so when we started to talk back afterwards and we had checked in with the teacher both before and after the show as to how they were going to handle a possible traumatic experience. And we felt, I would say reasonably reassured that everybody was in good hands. But the first question we asked after the show is just to ask the audience what countries people were from. And people shouted out the countries they had come from Guatemala, other countries in Central America, countries in Africa, and shouted out their countries with such pride and such a strong feeling of a statement of who they are and where they came from, how they came to be there. That I felt that, well, we were, I mean, we were ourselves really, really deeply moved to be able to be part of that. Shoshana, is there something you wanna add to that? Yeah, I mean, the piece was not made for people who have had this experience because they know much better than we do. And for us, the goal is to just open hearts enough to even start to have a conversation and have really found that it works. But I think that for the most part, the people who have attended, who have gone through these experiences, come and say, this is like so nice, this show. It's not even any of the hard stuff and have come with a lot of, yeah, like thanking us for telling the story and feeling that they haven't seen their story told before and feeling confidence that we felt more confident with the validation from people who had been through this experience that they, it always is a tender thing as not, none of the actors ourselves have been through a refugee experience and we reach for it through the show and we don't take on those characters. That's why they're cast as puppets and we have conversations that we experience within American communities that are happening and kind of reflect for ourselves. Each company member has a monologue similar to the last one you saw by Sahu. And so there's a lot of finding where our permission is and it was in those relationships and experiences of having people attending who had been through similar experiences that we found permission and we found the right relationship. So that was a very important part of the process. Thank you. I don't see any additional questions that in this moment in the chat, we do have a few minutes left, so encouraging folks to use that if they arise. And a question that I have, I would love to hear more about part of the last thing you had said, Shoshana, sorry, this is Leilani speaking and jumping off, there's a comment here, amazing, powerful work. Thank you, the puppetry was so moving. I would love to hear more about what you had said around using the puppets, right? This moment where these are true narratives that people have experienced that they are not the experiences of the puppeteers and the ensemble and how you're using the puppet to help with authenticity. Yeah, Eric will surely have a lot to say on this too as a director, but the puppet is, it doesn't contain one person's whole story, it isn't that person or contain that person's one whole story, it is the capturing a moment and an essence of something. So when we did our interviews, we were listening for the imagery that kind of contained all these stories but in a very simple image as the bag of flour on the head or the pair of shoes that Kevin, the boy from El Salvador is holding because we had heard a story about someone explaining how many miles one actually needs to walk to walk through an entire pair of shoes. So that became a very clear image that kind of contained all these stories. So we worked a lot with that and the puppet really thrives off of that metaphorical world. And because it's a puppet and not a live actor, we are able to do things like the way we just throw Kevin around like he's just a puppet and use that as a metaphor for how we treat people who are going through this process and that dehumanization process that happens. And we can also, because they're just puppets, I think the audience affects the audience differently. A puppet is an empty vessel as it were that with a live actor, I think we're so cautious to project anything or associate anything from our own experience onto a live actor because we don't want to make, because there's ego involved, not in a bad way, but there's like human ego. And so with a puppet, there is a permission to, the audience really needs to invest in its life for it to live. And there's a permission to just fill it with everything that's coming up for you as an audience member. Not only that, but it's essential to the life of the cast participate in its animation, its life. And then that does something really interesting that we talk about at the end of the show that the audience has spent an hour participating in the willingness for these lives and then get to the point of the gate of some that get through and some that are rejected. And then we kind of ask, some people maybe invest more in these puppets than in any of the real stories they hear in day-to-day life. And so there's a moment of reflection about that, but I think that it's a really profound way in to talk about issues that our experiences that we can only reach for and not fully understand and have the permission to keep reaching for something that we may not fully ever understand. And that for me is something incredibly hopeful and beautiful and a way that we work on our empathy as human beings at the same time as remaining apart from something. Do you have more to add to that? Dad, Eric? Dad, he's my dad. I said dad, just so everyone knows. I would just say, very briefly adding to that, the actor reaches out toward the audience whereas the puppet invites the audience to reach toward itself. And it's not that those distinctions are so cut and dried, but it's a basic sense that it's the audience who really has to bring the puppet to life. And so it frees us from essentially telling a story. Everybody in the audience essentially brings whatever story they want to to the suggestions that are made through puppetry. The only other thing I would say is that it's perhaps important to say is that while I wrote the texts to the songs, all the other texts in the show came from the ensemble. Thank you for uplifting that last part. It's wonderful to get to engage with ensemble-based artists throughout this whole month. And I appreciate you naming and continuing to bring your collaborators into the space. I'm personally, as someone who does not know a lot about puppetry within the umbrella that is theater, the way you all have described puppets as an invitation to the audience to really co-create, which is what theater is about in so many ways has been really beautiful and moving. I want to elevate for Shashana and Eric that there's all kinds of wonderful commentary in the chat if you would like to take a moment to read that while I help guide folks to the next space. I just don't want you to lose out on the feedback from your peers in community. For our attendees, this is, I'm going to share with you the link for our next session. Our next session is a mentorship pipeline panel and begins at 12.15. If you would like to learn more about our friends at Sandglass, you can go to the Huvva app and to the agenda. There are profiles for all of our performers that include whatever materials they wanted to share, website, excerpts, context. So Shana and Eric, you can continue adding there all the way through the rest of the month. And I encourage everybody to reach out and connect. Thank you again for that truly beautiful piece and for your general, or drive up to Vermont. They're right there in Vermont. I'm very much in virtual space as you can tell. Thank you Eric for grounding me back in physical community. Thank you all for joining us thus far. Shashana and Eric, if there's any last thoughts or comments you wanted to share with the group, the floor is yours. I really appreciate those of you who took your time to join us this afternoon, this morning. And thank you Niva for everything you do. Thank you. Thank you all for joining us. Thank you Eric and Shashana. Again, we will see you all at 12.15 at our mentorship pipeline panel, which will be facilitated by Mina, who you all heard speak earlier in providing context for the convening. Thank you all. That's all I have. Thank you Shashana. Thank you Eric.