 Hi everyone. Welcome back. It is now time for our second presentation of the day. It is my honor to introduce Sahay Jo and Ibar, who is a Northwestern university and School of the Art Institute Chicago alum. A Sundance Theater finalist, Chicago Quarterly Review 33 and Anthology of Black American Literature published her short story Off the Wall. Ibar is one of 80 poets selected internationally to celebrate Kwendolyn Brook's 80th birthday. She was playwright in residence at Chicago State University and artist in residence at Valparaiso and Evanston Public Schools. The citizen playwright founder Cook Jail County Women Writers Workshop. She was lead instructor with After School Matters and Young Chicago Authors. Ibar is a member of the Dramatist Guild, Black Theater Network and a past president of the African American Arts Alliance. Ibar is active in artistizing, accessibility, inclusion and arts engagement initiatives, and member of disability's future sacred spaces performance initiative. I have been fascinated with Sahay's work ever since I first read about it and I really pursued her to bring her to the presentations festival this year. I'm so glad I did because in just the one Zoom call we had I realized that she was one of the most brilliant people I had ever met. I spoke about multicultural theater in Northwestern, about Evanston winters, and about the intersections between realist disability and access. And I left the call feeling like I had learned so much in just 45 minutes. Now we are led to. Please welcome Sahay, Jero and Ibar. Thank you, Asha. There's a job for you and my company. First of all, thank you all for being here this morning. When I was here on a Saturday morning, the last place you would find me is Norris. Because we have a colleague we were here similarly and there was nothing around Norris. It was on, there was no person's land. It wasn't paved so you had to walk up and join, I mean just to get into the building. So coming from the apartments to Norris was like walking 18 city blocks, New York city blocks. And you'll hear a little bit about my mom. I am a light-skinned African-American woman. I'm from the Mama Lique tribe, West Africa. And also I am part of the Tensea tribe in Louisiana. My heritage brings together France, Africa, and America, and an incredible amalgam. And my job is to honor all of those traditions. So I honor my ancestors because without them I would not be here in front of this mic, but for the sacrifices that they made and continue to make. I am wearing my old glasses because I broke my other ones this morning. These are black and white tortoiseshell. I generally wear a bald head. I am growing out my hair for lots of love so I have this huge head of hair which I can't wait to say. I'm dressed in a leperty print that is a taupe top. I have on black slacks and I'm standing in front of a white wall. When I was at Northwestern I was told that there was no such thing as black theater. I had just left National Black Theater for two years and I couldn't figure out what the heck my professor was talking about or actually it was the graduate assistant. So like a good Catholic girl, I just said, I bit my lip and called home and announced to my mother that I was dropping out of school. She said, why? I said, well, I went to Louisiana State for a year and that didn't work out. As the first black person on stage I had to wear Egyptian number nine makeup which was like eight shades darker than me. I looked like a corpse on stage. People did not know what to do with me. I was too light-skinned to be a black person and too black to be the other roles. Nonetheless, I was a child actor. I acted in everything in my grammar school and partly because my mom was a teacher there and rather than get a baby sitter, she just put me in productions and somehow it stuck. My mom was a concert pianist, a Rosie the Riveter woman who worked in DC. She's a woman of the world and she didn't suffer fools. So when I told her that I was dropping up because there were no roles for somebody who looked like me, she was a smoker. She dragged her marble and walked out. Write your own damn roles and walked out. Thanks, Moss. So I honored that and began to write my own roles. And the symbol that I use is Sankofa, which is a Ghanaian symbol from Ghana and it's a Dinkra symbol. And what it means is, as you can read, move forward into the future with lessons learned from the past. So I don't believe we ever lose a lesson. If you're smart enough, you can always mine the gold in anything that you do. I would like to honor the previous speaker who hit so many high notes. The emotional labor community. I'm sure you did too. There's so much that comes into play when we talk about what is inclusive, what is inclusive practice and where and how do we begin? And I would say that one of the first things that is important is that we are asking the question. And I identify as a black woman, an artist with a disability. These slides will continue to carousel so I don't have to. I hope it's not a distraction. Okay. And the most important thing is to have that question in front of us all the time. Making theater in the greater Chicagoland area means there is the opportunity to enrich the lives of all Chicagolans, right? But what about the 520,000 Chicagolans who identify who are people with disabilities? All the 40.5 million people in the United States who live with disabilities. What about us? And as a previous speaker of kind, it's not about simply us being on stage, right? It's about the whole canon, all of the jobs. A little bit about my disability journey. Excuse me. I became disabled as an adult in graduate school. One day I woke up and my body was doing things it had never done before. At the end of that journey, I had been in the hospital for a year. I had been paralyzed for a year. I had a tracheotomy. I could not talk. I could not move. And I had been abused in the hospital and ended up with bad sores down the length of my body. That I'm standing here in front of you is a miracle. And I honor the doctors and the nurses and the personnel who listened, who were able to help me survive. Many of them did not. That, I think, was one of the plot points in my disability journey, right? But in truth, I had been a disability advocate for many, many years. But how could I do that? I'm laying flat in a hospital bed. I have a tracheotomy. I can't move my fingers. So what's a playwright to do? You better believe I wrote some plays. And I thought, okay, where does this go? What does this actor do? And that is how I chose to spend my time, the year that I spent in paralysis. Now, recently, the Sometimes published an article about the dire straits of American theater, specifically Chicago theater, right? And one of the suggestions was that in order for Chicago ones to save the arts, that each one of us should go to one event a week. When I thought, okay, white wealth in this country is $1 to 8 cents wealth in Latinx communities to one cent in black community. So we are going to go to theater four times a month. Then there's the whole notion about disability. How can I get on stage if there's stairs? How can I get into the theater get into the theater and have that experience if it isn't signed, if it isn't audio described, right? We have shown up so many times to places where we can't get inside the door. We're asked to go to the back door, the side door, the door through the kitchen. I don't have a problem with that. But my goodness, that's a bit much. I went to an event with a friend of mine who uses a motorized wheelchair and they sent us to the back door through the kitchen. And let me tell you, how do we make space for my friends to come to the theater or the performance space where I'm working? Well, I have a clause. If it's not accessible, don't ask me to come. It's pretty ironclad. And when I found myself someplace where it wasn't accessible, I made the best use of my Northwestern theater voice. I let everybody know about it. She ever asked me to come someplace that my friends cannot get into. That's just the first level, right? The barrier free access. But as Claudia said, we're talking about on stage. We're talking about backstage. We're talking about tech folks. We're talking about front of house. We're talking about audiences. And I'm going to go you on. You're talking about the entire communities that surround your theater space. If you're not paying attention to those, then you're not doing your work. Playwrights, actors, directors. The word community has been used so many times today. We cannot make theater without a community. Heck, you need people to do a one woman show, right? So the notion that we're here doing this by ourselves is a false notion. Now, let's go back to that 520,000 people, 40.1 million. Lack of inclusion, lack of accessibility is valued at $3.2 trillion. Let that not be a mercantile expression or decision that's rooted in making theater more commercial. But what does that say? That says that there's a market that says that there's innovation. But please, I don't want to see 800 able-bodied people go out and create product and apps because a lot of that has to come, the solutions have to come from inside the disability community, quite frankly. Now, talked about Sankofa and how nothing is actually lost, right? What do you do when, for me, as an elder, and I'm going to tell my age, but I actually entered graduate school over 60 years old and that was 10 years ago. So when you talk about doing your work and who's privileged to be on stage, who is on stage? Is it an elder like myself with gray hair? Is it a black woman like myself? We have had increases in numbers according to the dramatist skill, which tracks race, gender. It does not track disability. That's my push for the dramatist skill. I've been a member for 25 years. I want them to track disability. Now, if you're a member of the dramatist skill, which I am, and I love the organization, you will note that there is a dramatist skill disability bill of rights. So when I go into a situation in quote, unquote, legitimate theater, I have certain rights and I can say I want, I want, I don't want. So I use that as a leverage. I'm expecting that all of the scholars and the supporters in the room will appreciate the fact that it's not until often, it's not until you become disabled that things kind of fall into place. That was not my story. My story is really interesting story in that I grew up in a disability rich environment. And I would, I want to say, how could I have willed myself when I talked about disability? How could I have willed myself not to see my elderly relative with Down syndrome, not to see another relative with muscular dystrophy, not to see another relative with mental health issues? Or is there maybe another way to deconstruct that? On the surface, it sounds like I erased those people, right? How could I not acknowledge that folks were there? So when I became a part of a group called disability lead, used to be AD advancing leadership, and also cultural accessibility school or consortium, which is not cultural accessibility co lab. One of the things that I did was to do an inventory of everything disabled. And I was flabbergasted I had like 10 pages. And I started to deconstruct that. And then I realized, wait a minute, I had to go to my Kurosawa moment on this and I had to keep turning this thing around to figure it out. And then it occurred to me, oh my goodness, I grew up across the street for the Louisiana School of the Blind. But it was the White School of the Blind because I grew up in the era of apartheid, American apartheid. My aunt lived a block away from another sprawling campus, acres and acres, the Louisiana School for the Deaf. But it was the White Deaf, right? But I was in between these two schools. So I always saw people who were blind in low vision. I always saw people doing sign. I just thought that was the world. And that occurred to me that disability had been such a part of my life that when somebody asked me to deconstruct it and pull it apart, I was like, I'm not sure if I know anybody who's disabled. And it was, you know, and you talked about the mistakes somebody asked you, that was such a clue for me to how my world was constructed. And it was a brilliant clue for me because it really allowed me to see, to apprehend in some ways, especially as a person with adult onset disabilities, what the richness of disability gave to my life. With my elderly relative, I never heard anybody disparage my relative. She died at about 90, 95 years old. And I had been querying all of my huge family, a Louisiana Creole family, 26 first cousins. And not one of us can remember one time that our great aunt was disparaged. That is the biggest gift you can give a child, a family, to think about the whole person and to not simply visit on the disability. I began to use my body as a text. We'll come back to that slide. And as a way of, since I couldn't use my hands at the time, I started sketching again. And I realized that I loved to sketch. So I started sketching the parts of my body that were not cooperating with me. Okay. As I came back into school, I began to craft an idea that I was a citizen playwright. And I started to think about it as well as recalling the disability moments. I had done like five or six plays with characters who were disabled. I did an ASL version of African folk tales. And I'm like, geez, I come along with the program, right? And I began to embrace that aspect of my personality, of my being. Now, I said to somebody, I had eight brothers. I had eight brothers. I knew how to handle gender issues. It's fighting with the boys. If they can't, if they're not allowed to wash dishes, then never mind. I knew how to be an African-American woman. I grew up in the deep South during apartheid. My family's home was bombed. We were attacked as children crosses a burden. I know racism. But I'll be God-dorned if I did not know how to be disabled. And that stymied me. I was like, well, why is that? But I had learned sign language because my brother was in love with a girl who was deaf and challenged me to learn sign language. And we started trading back and forth when I learned how to finger spell. He sent me back to the table and said, now go learn some sentences. How about some phrases? Duh. Are you doing a finger spelling? And I'm like, oh, is that bad? And he was like, well, you're looking at sign language as if it's this happy, flowery, beautiful dance thing because I had the dance background. He said, this is a legitimate language with a syntax and with, you know, a lexicon. You just can't come in here. I'm flying and dancing. He said, you need to put some academic research behind that else. I can't talk to you. PhD at Columbia University in Linguistics, of course. Thank you, Myron. So I began to figure, try to figure out what were ways that I was able, that I'm able to embed change in my scripts and in writing those scripts. It was substantially harder 10 years ago because I was trying to do Claudia's job. I was trying to do Ashna's job when I want to write. The advocacy that I do now is amped up because I do have a platform. I do have a voice. I am able to talk with other people about some of the challenges that come to pass when we try to create work that is inclusive. I was appointed playwright and resident at Chicago State and I was deeply moved that we had a multi-racial cast. We had a multi-able cast and that was a surprise. And as it turned out, the woman who is in the front row who is holding her cane had also been in a theater production at a theater that I would soon have a production at. I would not have known that had I not begun to speak with her and ask her how can we make the production better? We did not have a disability consultant. I think I relate to what Claudia was saying because we're actually building the plane as we're flying it. That's not a comforting thought. But the comforting thought is that you built the plane. You know where all the nuts and bolts are. So, build a good Dagon plane. And part of building that is that I decided that not only am I having to be a playwright, the profession and the vocation that I love, but if I want substance to change, I need to be this artist, creator, a producer. I need to be a co-producer. I need to be a director. Not to the extent that it blemishes the writing, but I can't sit in my beautiful studio on the outside and write my little plays without trying to figure out how you get to be in the seat, how you get to come, and how to make that a really rich experience, right? In graduate school, I'm just running through some of the work that I did. I set out to write four plays, which I have time to make up, I would say. So after my kids were grown and left school, I started thinking, okay, what am I going to do when I go to grad school? I'm going to do something really out the box. So I started dreaming of these things, these plots, these whatever. And one of my desires was to adapt to pick million. So rather than just adapt it, I deconstructed pick million. And my professors kept asking me, what's the title of the play? What's the title? But I'm like, what? I don't know what the title of the play is. It's an adaptation. And I was like, no, it's not an adaptation. Is it a reference? Is it based on? And I want you to see that thing. So that is also part of the process that, hey, I'm still thinking about it. I don't know. However, in that piece that I started to become ill in the middle of that piece. So that allowed me to kind of think about language and the loss of language in a way. And what would it mean for somebody to acquire language that brings them into a different arena, different class? Gosh, I would have given anything to have a message board when I was in the hospital. Nobody signed. Nobody brought me a message board, but my family. And the only person who could read my lips was my daughter. My husband could not read my lips. My son could not read my lips. My daughter. Oh no, she said no. She does not want that. That's what she would go on a whole diatribe about what mommy wants, right? Language is profoundly important. Now, that same brother with the sign language actually made me an alphabet board. And I was able to blink. Yes. Once, no, twice. When people hit the alphabet board and my smart brother said, what is with this grammar stuff? When you were in the hospital, you were like, yes, I would like to have a dot dot. He was just like, just get the noun. Water, pain. Yes, yes, I am in a lot. He was like going up. So where is the way that we can communicate with people? I could not talk. And since I could not move, I was in a hospital bed with a flat paddle on the back of my head that I had to hit to bring the nurse in. And I started to look at all of that as this incredible laboratory of how do you change the experience? I was put in a room and thought that I was just this old black lady who, you know, couldn't talk and, you know, you're on morphine. I was on, I was close to death. I coded twice. So sometimes I couldn't figure out where I was. Things that are touchstones, right? Like people wouldn't change the calendar. So I was like, okay, is this Groundhog Day? It's February 8th for the last. Has been a week, you know, when you're in a hospital, you can't tell whether it's light or dark sometimes, but based on the situation you're in. So how do you craft all of that? And bring that back into the real world, you know, as a part of your work. So I decided to lean into it and not avoid it. So in the hospital, these four plays, right? One play a semester. So I wanted to write about the experience that I had as one of the inaugural dancers in Muntou Dance Theater. I was an inaugural member. And some of the issues that came up for us were around identity, right? So coming out of the hospital, I decided to use a different process. So when talking about my actors, I went to the art institute to start pulling paintings out and asking people to think about painting. So when the dramaturg asked me for my packet, I gave them that packet. I'll go through some of these slides again in a second. They're rolling rather quickly. But know that your work matters and you begin where you are. You are building theater community. No one's going to do this for any of you. This is for you, honey. This is for you. Vermont Studio Center, where I went to finish a new play on Ida B. Wells, The Anarchist Lucy Parsons, and Jane Adams. I walked with my cane. And sometimes I did walk with my cane. Sometimes I don't, right? I call it the four Ss. How much sleep have I had? What kind of surface I'm walking on? And what pair of shoes do I have on? I'm liable to hit the floor at any time. So a committee of women came up to me to inquire about my disability. And I was like, gosh, Dawn, who? What is that? So out of that came the essay. And I perform my essays now instead of reading them. So I performed an essay recently when I lectured to Morehouse College. And the essay is Look Disabled. Because people come up to me and say, oh, you don't look disabled. And I'm going, if you were in that hospital with me when I had eight tubes in me and I had a hole in my neck, would you ask me that question? But what is it about disability politics that my body is open to anybody's inquiry? So the essay talks about things people told me. You wouldn't say, you wouldn't go up to an unable-bodied person. How'd you get like that? How do your hands work? Do your feet always move like this? So the smart SS that I am, I started doing comedy with people because it was so upsetting to me. But in the past 10 years, let me get back to reality here for a minute. This is reality, but let me get to the other side of it. Within the last 10 years, I have heard the R word spoken so many times I literally had a blowout in a meeting. I had corrected the executive director, who happened to be a colleague of mine. And it just didn't connect. And if you think that it's ruled to correct somebody, it is not. Please do it. I wish I had it corrected harder, because that person used the R word in an academic setting and a highly charged setting. And I think that cost badly for that person. I've heard people talk about childlike people. And I'm like, I had to stop. What do you mean childlike? I had two kids. Do you talk about a toddler? I'm unclear. Oh no, they had a brain injury. And I'm like, why don't we say brain injured? A lot of my time is spent fixing some of that so I can get to the real work that I'm trying to do. Entezaki Shange was here. This is in the past 10 years. At an A-T-H-E, my Southern accent was saying it's an Athe conference. Entezaki Shange had to be carried up the stairs in a motorized wheelchair and rolled onto the stage. I almost fainted. Fast forward. And I'm going back and forth a little bit. So getting back to this production, coming out of the ICU for a month, being in a coma for a month, just colored this entire story because my main character is approaching a significant life change. So how do we talk about that? How do we talk about illness? I'm sorry, this is a little distracting, but I just want to go back. So how did we talk about that, right? So I think you want to get past ethnobiography, but you want to open up the circle a little wider. So one circle that I did was going back to my body and how did my body respond? And I was able to craft some of the scenes. My main character is facing a life-threatening illness. I was facing that life-threatening illness. Next time I'm going to just dream and imagine winning the Lotto or something instead of dreaming about this play because I literally mirrored this person's, the main character, the protagonist's illness. That was not by design at all. But life has a funny way of playing with you, right? And there's always the humor in a situation. So we got into, I won the Candida, which was this huge prize, playwriting prize, national prize. And I wanted to write about the Black Dance Company that I had been a part of. And as you'll see, we've got some characters here. And I want to go back to this young lady here. She just toured in Frankie and Johnny and a bunch of other stuff. And this woman came into the audition signing. She signed her entire sides. She got the role, you know that. This is the incredible Danielle Deadwiler, who just played Emmett Till's mother in the movie, Till. This is my cast, Francesca, the woman on the far right left is the head of the Alvin Ailey School. Jewel on the left, a dancer, his choreograph for Houston Ballet. The director, the incredible Kent Gash, took all of the ideas about illness and disability and crafted a production that was amazing. Here to the right, you'll see Michelle Banks, as you know, from Deaf West, and her daughter, who is Dakota, the child of Deaf adults. And there are subplots straight through, completely throughout the play that not until after I'd written it that I realized all of the disability tropes that were in there. And the other actors figured it out. James Brown, who was in Rocky and who was in Frozen, who is the main character here, he already knew how to sign. It was like, what? So when the interpreters were not there, James helped to sign and Tiffany helped to sign. Now, I want you to know that the play was also at the Kennedy Center. We got a team of ASL interpreters for the entire week that we were there. And then we had them for the entire two months of rehearsal and production. It made all the difference in the world, not only for the character, but it changed everybody on that stage. I will tell you, it changed me. And at one point, I wasn't pleased, and I could tell Michelle wasn't pleased. So I said, Michelle, through the interpreter, what are we doing wrong? What are you doing wrong? And I said, here, I tore up her pages. I said, they're gone. You write the scene. It's your scene. She rewrote that scene because she wrote it as a person who was deaf. I'm not a person who's deaf. I can try to write that scene. I can do my research. But why not have the actor take a go at it? So I began to apply for fellowships to do my work. As I mentioned, the Vermont Studio Fellowship was one of them. And you go into a situation where you're able to write seven days a week, 24 hours a day. And it was like I was in a candy factory. And you're surrounded by people who want you to do better and be better, and you're reading your work. And it's a very charged experience. Only I didn't write the play I came to write. The other play pushed through. So as I playwright, as a creative, as an artist, you have to really honor the impulse, right? And I was raised a good Catholic girl, try to follow the rules that I was raised like that. And this other play came through. And I actually hit send on the Sundance winning application at three minutes to the deadline. And a picture came up on my phone of my dear friend who had passed away, who lived in Evanston and done community work with me forever. At post-college, I lived in Evanston and worked here. And when her face came up on the phone, I said, that's it. And I hit send. Had I not hit send, I would not be a Sundance finalist. I tell you, sometimes it's just dumb luck. You just put your work out there, you continue to ask, you strive, you look for people who are aligned with you, build your community. No one else is going to build that community for you. Is it going to be easy? No, it is not. Is it going to be worthwhile? Yes, it is. But it can be easy or smart. We're smart in here. We can always do it better, is my opinion, right? So where are we now? We hope to remount our production here. I want to go back here with the light, for example. This is a full mirror, as you can tell. So the lighting director and the designer worked for hours and hours to highlight this. And the sign language, this scene here, we were doing it back and forth, back and forth. So we did that whole scene. I wish I could stop this, Asha. Can you? Yeah, I want to get to this scene with the two actors. Yeah, that. So in rehearsal, we did this scene like 18 times. We just couldn't get it. So finally, Kent said, wait, let's look at the vertical plane. So Michelle is standing, who's playing the role of Gracious Dunning. And Becklehem, her daughter, is reading a letter that Gracious has written to her. So while Beth is responding to the letter, Michelle is signing the letter. Not one word is spoken. Don't you know? During the talk back. Why would you put a scene in ASL? Because no one else understands what is going on. And I just felt completely lost. And then all of a sudden, the woman just started sobbing. Oh my gosh, she said, I get it. And she just hugged me and just cried for me. She said, I can't believe I came and asked you that. Is this what people who are deaf and have hearing challenge issues deal with all the time? I said all the time, honey. She was changed by that endeavor. Now, I don't know what it was about that day and that production. Right. So another member of the audience came up. There were 40 some odd people who are deaf, who came in from six different states to see this play. Six different states. They're fans of Michelle's. This play was in Atlanta. People came from DC, Florida, Tennessee. I was blown away. Now, we're not just doing this for the field goods. Anybody can do a add a girl. Right. But when you open that circle and you're building that community, that's the significance. So one of the women came up to me and she waited. Just talking to other people. The interpreter said, she's asking you to look around. And she said, what do you see? I said, I see people. I see, she goes, look again. She said, what do you see? So she's frustrated with me. She finally through the interpreter said, you see 40 people. I see 80 hands talking at one time. She said, look at all of this. She said, I can't even interpret it. They people waving across the room and I said, oh my God, is this what the magic is? And again, it's not my feel good magic. It is having the experience of letting the script do what you wanted to do in the first place. Right. So in the contract negotiation, we're still struggling with this contract that I'll tell you about that in a minute. I know it's being recorded. No, no, leave it on. I demanded that this role is always played by a person who is deaf. And that's in the contract. If that can't happen, we don't sign this contract. Another issue that I raised, respectfully speaking, because we're coming to a great resolution, is that if I can't, I asked to have the play translated in, I want to make sure the time translated in ASL. Oh, I can't do that. I said, well, why would you put a play about South Side Black people and translated them to Korean, Japanese, Italian, French, Finnish, and you won't do this? I said, we'll find, we'll figure it out when the time comes, it'll happen. So now the consideration is that I get to keep the ASL rights and I can give them to anybody that I want. That's my prerogative as a playwright. Use your power. So I'm going to kind of bring it in now. Asha, we're still moving here. Okay. So after that, when I came back to Chicago, I became really involved in with the disability community. I was actually lost when I came back because I did not know where to go with this energy, right? I can't make theater any differently now. There's like before and after. Now I had done theater a lot of things in theater, right? I started off by doing productions at my kids preschools and I taught my kids sign language. So like, oh, let's do this in sign language. So I went out of my own pocket and hired sign language interpreters. I mean, oh, with the top mom, right? But, oh, I can do that for my kids school. And that is how I literally started. I started going to dance classes at Columbia College that had sign and dance. And then I went and took classes at the Chicago Hearing Society. And one of these slides that kept coming up at the room. Asha, if I just push, okay, there we go. Let me cycle through here if I can. And there I am. Northwestern, your contacts. The woman who told me about the free class at Mahalia Jackson School was a classmate at Northwestern. She always wanted to learn sign come over here. So I showed up and here is the Lake Renee Townsend, an artist at the School of Yard Institute who came and painted all of our faces. Many African animals completely changed the tenor of that school because somebody from the outside came in and said, hey, let's do this. We became friends with Officer Friendly, right? Who was the person assigned to learn sign language so he could better help people in the community. I was blown away. There were grandparents who were in that class. There was a detective, a Chicago police detective. Everybody was there because they wanted to sign. Parents, aunties, everybody. Why can't we all live in that environment where we're all helping each other? We're all moving forward. When I went to teach, I talked the novels of Toni Morrison at Cook County Jail for five years. Incredible experience. And if you know anything about the jail system, 80% of the people who are incarcerated have disabilities, learning disabilities, physical disabilities. We are housing, we're housing people who need to have a different set of services. This was one of the most formative experiences I've ever had. The late Leon Forrest who was the head of the African American Studies Department here and the celebrated novelist suggested that I do that workshop. I was terrified to go to jail in many ways. It terrified to go and teach. I was like, teach anybody? How do I do this? And with his blessing, I went into that jail for five years. My life has not been the same since. Women who could not read, who were learning disabled, would read the books out loud to other women. They talked about disability in the bluest eye. Where Pauline's whole trajectory is based upon a nail that's punctured her foot, which has left her with a bad leg for the rest of her life, which Toni Morrison ascribes to the beginning of her journey of pain and dissolution as a black woman in circa World War II. Here's another Northwestern connection. One of my students, I'm just blanking on her neck, will come to me. Nina Boulogne got her PhD writing about the work that I did at Cook County Jail. She was also an honor student here and she wrote her honor thesis on the work that I did at Cook County Jail. Nina came aboard. I was a board member at Piven Theatre Workshop. My kids went to Piven Theatre Workshop, both my son and my daughter. Nina was an instructor. She was so smitten with the work that we would go and say, come along. So here is Nina Boulogne, Italian girl from far west sub-Earth. We're at Cook County Jail teaching people zip, zap, zap. We're teaching people. And at one point I tell the women, do you want to get out of here? Let me show you, get out of here. And of course, the guards are leaning in. It's like it's all here. We're going to use our imaginations. We don't have to be here. And that was a profound experience for Nina and myself. As I said, she has written about the experience and I have written about it, but not to the extent where I'm done with that. You use the experiences in your life to create your work. I'm going to wrap it up here as I scroll through. So when I came back from Atlanta, from some other productions, I applied for, I was nominated for a three arts award and I became a three arts body of work, um, fellow at University of Illinois. And again, how do I make, what is this work I want to make? What are these challenges? Now, let me go back to the four plays. I adapted pick million, I wrote the C.A. Lions project. I wrote a piece that's set here at Northwestern on, um, interracial casting on how do you place bodies on stage? It involves Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Ida B. Wells, Jane Adams, and an incredible baby of women in Chicago who have made history, right? So when it came to this fellowship, I thought I'm going to do something really way out. I'm a funketeer from way back. So my first piece interrogates the sound O. And in that piece, I documented how many times in black culture the word O comes up and it comes up. It's ubiquitous in spirituals and music. Oh, rock of my soul in the bosom of Abraham. Oh, when the saints come marching in. Oh, my Lord, what a morning. So I've crafted this whole performance piece about that circle and it uses wheelchairs primarily circles and it interrogates what circle means. And here is Illinois Laureate sculptor Preston Jackson. And as you can see, he's about what six? He's kind of a short guy. He's about short staffed. He's about five, six. So I called him up one day and I said, how could I see that on the top of there? How does that work? I'm in a wheelchair dude. How can I work with this? So he became my mentor and we spent the whole semester trying to figure out how to bring that into a performance space. We've got some really provocative ideas that includes very high tech stuff and scaling and how things collapse and move. So those are some of the things that excite me about sound. I'm primarily located mostly trying to deal with deaf theater, because you can't do everything, right? So find the one thing that really resonates for you. Writing resonates for me. I'm up at four o'clock in the morning, you know, I'm up like, oh, my God, this is an idea. What makes you scared move towards it? What makes you laugh move towards it? What makes you passionate? Please do that. So we're in the middle of that one, but he was also a professor at SAIC. So for him to give me the gift of his work, I have extended interviews. I have schematics about that piece that are, you know, you need that in order to do it. Now, this is the VSC and part of my therapy was putting every piece I've done on the wall, and it was not until then that I realized how much work I had done. You're so busy writing it, you're not thinking about the catalog of your work or where it goes. So in conclusion, I want to come back to this notion of how to do this, because I asked at the beginning, how do we do inclusive theater? As part of my movement, I've created my own LLC community of the arts, and we are becoming a producing entity. And I can take a breath now because I have this brilliant one who's going to take care of some of the disability so I can go over here and produce and then somebody can go over here and act, right? We've come up with a couple of issues around inclusive theater. And the two that are, the three that are predominant are nothing about us without us. If we're not at the table, we're not on the menu. I have a hidden disability. I have dysphagia. There are times when I can't talk, and I start talking, having a seizure, and it's just, that's different than somebody using a wheelchair. All disabilities are not equal. I have an adult acquired disability. I was not born with a disability, right? It's a whole different trajectory. And I can't presume that the short span that I've dealt with disability is equivocal to somebody like Judy Newman, human, or anybody, you know, Alice Wong, who have been dealing with some of these issues their whole lives. I wanted to thank my mother again for kicking me up the stairs and making me go and do my theater. You always loved it. She said, why don't you do that? You're always on stage. And, you know, I said, because you told me to get a real job and to go and teach. That's what they tell you, artists, right? How are you going to pay for it? Take a deep breath and say we will find a way to not be dissuaded from your dreams. The world needs you. The world needs your stories. The world needs our stories. All it takes is a moment to consider what's happening not only across the waters, but right here in our own cities and towns. And part of it is that we don't have a full narrative. We have these incomplete narratives. And those narratives are full of half-truths and misinformation. And if we can't bring that forward, what does our work for so we can get dressed up and go to theater and smile at each other in the dark and go at a girl? So in conclusion, let me say thanks, mom, Barbara Antier, the incredible Barbara Antier who founded National Black Theater. I dropped out of school first time and ran off to New York and went to study theater. Everybody thought I had lost my mind. It's the best thing I ever did. And there I was, sitting at the table with people whose names Maya Angelo would show up on a Sunday. Gailan Kane, the last poets, people, James Baldwin would show up. Can you believe that? I mean, the likes of James Baldwin. They would just show up at these Sunday soirees and I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I want to thank John Gray, my friend and colleague who is the formerly the Executive Director of Muntou Dance Theater, who was my colleague and my roommate and who is in many ways responsible for the CA Alliance project because it's written about the three dancers based loosely upon myself and my two roommates who couldn't be any further apart, a classically trained ballerina, a wild around the way runaway girl, and a little mousy child who's trying to figure out where she fits in the world. Thank you, Joan. Esther Grimm and Carrie Sandahl, three arts is Esther Grimm, Carrie Sandahl bodies of work. Esther Grimm asked Carrie Sandahl, what does she want? And she said, how about a fellowship for artists with disabilities? So when somebody asks you what you want, you better have your list ready and tell them. The same thing happened with Susan Booth, who also went to school here with myself and two other people listed here. The family asks Susan Booth, what does she want? The Candida Foundation, she said, I want a fellowship for new work. I want the Candida. If she hadn't said I want a fellowship for new work, it wouldn't have happened. Ask for what you want. With disability, we are always bringing it down. We're doing the least amount in celebrating ourselves for it. When the ADA is the beginning, it is a benchmark, it is not a final stop for anything. So it's not about our parking space only, about that ramp only, but it's about the relationship building that happens along the way. Linda Jenkins, a professor here, Dr. Linda Jenkins, Ph.D., I see a nod there, brought together the next person, Cindy Ludenbock and myself. So you're talking about three Northwestern graduates here? Boom, boom, boom. Andy White's name should be on here, looking glass. Big supporter was able to do some readings there. Work your network. Let me repeat that. Work your network. If you go online and look at your you have what, 100 friends, exponentially you have a thousand friends because if you ask each one of those friends to send a message out about what you're doing, you've got a thousand hits. Don't misuse that. Finally, well, almost. Avada John Brown is an African American woman, also an ancestor now, who was a social worker and created a Black theater company on the south side of Chicago that did not have a mortgage. Let me repeat. No, mortgage. Forget my name. No mortgage. How the heck does she do that in 1960 something, 1970? You can do it if you want to do it. I see myself as being a cheerleader because the first thing that we hear is we can't do it. We don't have the money. We don't have to know how. My attitude is you don't have the imagination and you don't have the political will. I'm taking no prisons now. At 73 years old, how much time do I have left on planet Earth? I don't know. I have more time looking through the rear view than I have through the dashboard. So I am going to use every minute that I have to create an American theater that reflects America. Avada John Brown did that. She put scores of people on stage who would have never been on stage and went on to train children. Finally, I'd like to thank my daughter Shani. My daughter Shani is a survivor. She survived cancer and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis while I was in the hospital in a coma. So I came out of that and I was just flabbergasted. I was like, well, dear God, take me. Don't take my child now. Let's do some wage ring here. And Shani has taught me more about disability than any program, any organization, any book, because it's up close and personal. It's my child. And my daughter has characteristic humor. She said to me one day, she said, Mom, let's get over it. It's like I had a curfew and I came home with my left side state at the party. It was like, how could you have humor? She goes, it's not all sad. Why are you just in this doom and gloom? You know, bring some levity into this thing. And so she gives her cane a name. I give my cane a name because of that. And also, Cindy Luttenbacher adopted two children, my college friend. One of her children is a child with Down syndrome. So the two of us have had incredible conversations about our children, how we make art, and our own safety, and our own well-being as caretakers, caregivers, how do we bring in a level of care so that we are continuing to make inclusive theater? Thank you. And I will be around afterwards. Thank you so much. Hi, there was such a joyful presentation. Thank you everyone for being here. We are going to break for lunch. Lunch will go around to 1.45. So that's one hour and 15 minutes. And we will return to this space for our networking events that's happening here. I really hope to see as many of you as possible there. And then we have two more presentations remaining for the day. But again, feel free to help yourself to anything in the room. I just want to quickly speak about some of the posters that we have over here that you can explore during this time. So we'll have some posters from Calling Up Justice and One Free Community about why we should mask in public spaces. And One Free Community is a community discord server where we can all access community spaces for social justice, for mutual aid. It's run by queer neurodivergent BIPOC people and it's an amazing space. So I encourage you to look at that. We also have a padlet for the inclusive theater festival this year. If you have any reflections, any pads, anything you want to add, you just want to network with people, add your contact information. Feel free to do that over there. We have our links to our access pack and our welcome program over there. Over there and over here we have some questions that we would like you to answer whenever you feel like it. They will also be asked again during the networking space. But those are some questions that our presenter Claudia will actually be using your answers for tomorrow during her presentation. So I encourage you to like think about them and just add your answers over there if you want to. Thank you so much everyone again for all your patience and for being such amazing audience members and I'll see you in an hour.