 Because I knew that I would be seeing the very chic Amelia Cascipero. Every time I attend a conference, I'm like, what would Amelia wear? This morning, I ran into Chey U. And started over, Chey. For the formatively intelligent and tenacious Roberta Runeau. And then late last night, I was like, there is no way black Jesus That I can cover all the things I want to say And what Bill Rausch would want me to say in the span of three minutes In what world was Bill Rausch going to welcome people in only three minutes? He did not be with us this morning because he is attending the funeral of a family friend So let us hold the Rausch more family in our hearts That I was asked to welcome you in his stead is truly an honor I am welcoming the movers and shakers of the API theater community in our field When I saw the list of attendees, I sent Sharifah an email and I said, I think you miss the Obamas Surely the first family would not want to miss this event And then it looked over the conference schedule and I realized that you all did not come to play You all came to slay Have you read some of the breakout titles? May I? Asian Everything Conversation about race Yellow face Break 2014 as Randy was talking about When folks were walking around blowing whistles and you could hear whistles down in every single hallway And then y'all just started blowing whistles just because, you know, bullshit It was like, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, whistle Overwhelmed with excitement and anticipation Excitement to see some familiar faces And to get to see some new ones And anticipation because the theme of this year's conference Subject to or caused by earthquake Having a strong widespread impact Earth-shaking I can't think of a more fitting theme and call to action We are being called to shake the ground of the American theater The foundations of which are problematic to say the least Actually, the least will not do Not at this conference, so let me be more specific We are being called to dismantle the foundations of racism and white supremacy in our field Challenge to smash the intersection of racism, sexism, homophobia And all forms of bias with the seismic force of our collective wisdom Organized action and resistance We are being asked to have courageous conversations about representations of the Pan-Asian and Pacific Islander community on our stages We have also been invited to celebrate the excellence of Asian American theater Celebrate the power of Asian stories by Asian writers with Asian actors and directors Celebrate the importance of the API community defining its own narrative What an extraordinary honor it is to host this historic event Thank you Katsu Board and staff for inviting us to be in partnership with you And for holding us accountable Accountability brings us ever closer to our value of inclusion And our mission to reveal our collective humanity OSF has made a commitment A commitment to creating a safe space where API stories can be told with integrity and authenticity We do not have all the answers We are far from perfect But we are prepared to model this commitment with humility and courage And we hope that the rest of the field will join us Friends, let us take a deep breath Lean in And brace ourselves for seismic shifts Thank you Only a few minutes I really don't because all the conversations, all the things that you find out here She's been doing for the last 40 years So, my name is Nina And I'm from Pangeo Earth Theater And it is a deep, deep honor and privilege For me to introduce my dear friend, Roberta Uno, as Aki knows today I've known Roberta in so many incarnations of over the past 20 years As artistic director of New World Theater, which she founded in the 70s by the way Program director at the Ford Foundation And the current director of arts in a changing America And also as an important artist and director in the field And as a dear friend So I speak about Roberta Uno as a dear friend right now When I met Roberta, she invited me into our house the second day I was an host And was one of the warmest hosts I could have ever imagined I met her mother who was an amazing human being And when I met Roberta, I also understood that she was one of the most visionary artists of our time Now in Indian dramaturgy, we have this metaphor of the script really being the boat And the unspoken being the ocean And below that is the seabed or bedrock Roberta has laid the foundation on which so many boats float One of them being this Asian American theater movement Self and a bunch of other people, 15 other people have been in a pre-conference For Arab American, Middle Eastern, West Asian artists from the last few days And as we were in a circle, one of the participants, the amazing, amazing artist, Sohair Hamad Said she invoked the name of Roberta Uno She said that how can we speak about this movement, this movement of Arab Americans, this movement of Middle Eastern Artists without invoking the name of Roberta Uno So Roberta has really carved space for indigenous people Arab American, South Asian, immigrant, queer, GLBTQ, youth In fact, many, many, many generations of young people With her visionary work at New World Theater So she was practicing and modeling intersectionality Before intersectionality became a buzzword And then the other ocean bedrock she laid was in the world of publishing Editing and publishing seminal words like the color of theater Unbroken threads, contemporary plays by women of color And I had a young woman come to me in Penjia the other day and said she saved my life That book saved my life And in the foundation world she also Really she laid red rocks as program director of the Ford Foundation Forging new pathways, being fearless In holding organizations and networks accountable And be truly reflective of the demographics of this country In all her past work and in her current work as director of arts in the changing America That is reframing how we look at demographic shift Roberta is selfless, building sustainable bridges And continuing to create an ecosystem in which we're all made stronger Through all of this she's had an amazing active career as a director and artist And she's one of the few women who's been a member of the stage directors and choreographers union So Roberta has been creating a world in which she's intentionally breaking apart productive silos She's changing structures and systems Which is leading to lasting change and advancing in an understanding of equity that is authentic and real In so doing she's had a real impact in American theater She's changed the map of American theater She's crystal clear about her work Her refusal to bow down to dominating cultural standards And create spaces for stories that have been invisibilized is inspirational Whatever Roberta does she does with passion, integrity, commitment, intelligence, joy and deep, deep love I have been an unqualified admiral friend And I'm grateful and pleased that she's become a close and trusted friend in the past few years We are so lucky to have her here So I invite you to welcome an amazing person who's made her mother proud A person who has had the strength to counter cynicism and create movements And counter injustice with her own art and with a commitment to the arts in general I invite you to stand up and welcome Roberta for now A few chairs Here's Cypher And the emcee said The chairs are reserved for the elders in the room So if your name's not Roberta then you'll get your butt out of the seat And that was the 19th so It's really wonderful and deeply deeply grateful to be here I want to thank Katta and Leslie and Randy Nina, Tim, all of my wonderful friends, Mia who are here And also to thank OSF, Mita and my dear friend Bill Roush And not to be shamelessly self-promoting but there is a book coming out next month Called Theater and Politics of the New World About the legacy of my theater, New World Theater And I'm very grateful to Bill for writing the afterward to that book So thank you I'm very grateful to all of you for creating this space for us to find each other And for us to build a community together Some of you I've known for many many years and some of you I've just recently met and hope to meet And last night in the shuttle band somebody was asking me and said I actually don't know your theater work And so you know that's how we learn each other is through our work and through working together And so I thought I would introduce myself by showing you what I'm working on now What I'm currently directing This is really a devastating time in America I think you know we're all grappling with the rage and frustration Not only of the new cycle but of the overwhelming damage that's being done to our national character And discourse by the presidential race The last keynote I gave was in July at the Raven Voices Festival in D.C. And fresh in our minds we were just coming from the killings by police in Minneapolis and in Baton Rouge And so the names of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were in our minds And especially in the minds and the words of the young people, 2,000 poets from across America That were channeling their rage and their pain I've always been deeply grateful that as a theater maker my work can speak to my deepest feelings in my heart As well as to what is going on in our world So I've been directing an adaptation of Donald Brathway's solo show, Spirit Trials It's a piece which deals with the criminalization of black men The incarceration system and an individual spiritual and literal trial, legal trial So we started this work at the Center for New Performance at Cal Arts Which is an amazing place for professional artists to do their work And in two weeks, two more people were killed Terrence Crutcher in Tulsa and Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, North Carolina These were the latest killings caught on videotape Forcing us as James Baldwin urged us to bear witness And as Ivy Wells fought her entire life to document the story So I'm just going to show you a little clip from that Conjure the gods, and I think that's what we do through our texts and minds This is the second time I've actually addressed Kata In 2006, Tim Dan invited Phillip Baton and I to talk about the Big Bang relationship to the American theater So I talked about two interrelated Big Bangs One, the demographic shifts in Asian America And two, the expanded aesthetics of performance in Asian American theater And I shared at that time a New York Times article Actually it was the front page of the business section That quantified our cultural presence in America So, you know, I'm not a demographer, but if you ever want to use this fact It's very, very helpful Right now, or actually at that time, there were 36,000 Chinese restaurants in America That was more than the number of McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's combined That fact still exists, only the number has increased So that kind of tells you, you know, we're permeating every small town Between the coasts, between the borders So as we've all heard, and we're just going to run some headlines here By 2042 it is projected that people of color, Asian Americans, Latinos, Blacks, Indigenous people, Middle Eastern people, et cetera In aggregate will eclipse the historic Asian population And this change is rolling up from the next generation Since 2011, minority babies are the majority being born Maria de Leon from the National Association of Latino Cultures Arts and culture says every 42nd young Latino turns 18 And APAs are poised to overtake Latinos This shift to what I call a new American plurality Has already occurred in major metropolitan areas like California, Texas And the changing sea in America is going way beyond the borders And historic gateway cities to the heartland Of course the shift alone is not a victory You know, it's not just like, there's more of us, we want more I mean, I get pretty excited when I saw this And I have to say it tastes pretty good When I was in college and the first Asian American appeared on Weedy's Box I got it, somehow I put that image in the show I was directing You know, I don't even know if it makes sense I'm a tractor, I can justify anything But you know, what is this really the extent of our success? Is it about bringing flavor to the mainstream or being a marketing demographic? You know, aren't we just the 4s of 90s multiculturalism Food, fashion, festivals and free tickets Or do we stand on the shoulders of last century's visionaries Of the larger As James Cass has said, this is a whisper to a roar moment We have an opportunity to change some basic power paradigms And basic cultural frameworks that really are antiquated I mean, even just look at the language, majority minority What does that mean? You know, it's like, you're the majority but we're still going to keep you a minority You know, it's this oxymoronic language Like, of the beautiful or soft rock, you know So we're going to look at the spaces of our power slide I believe and I hope we are looking at much more fundamental change The Oscars were just symbolic of the institutional shifts that haven't yet happened This is a New York Times photo collage It recently looked at 500 of the most powerful people in American culture In business, education and government They found only 40 more people of color So we're going to take a quick look in a second The people of color are in yellow boxes And it starts with the CEOs of the largest companies This is going to go by very quickly I don't think we can dim the lights a little bit These are government leaders This is corporate America President of this cabinet, presidents of Iowa University U.S. Senators Hollywood executives who choose what they want to be People who decide what music gets produced Mayors of largest cities People who determine what books we read People who read like television shows People who decide what news gets covered The Supreme Court, American governors America's top military advisors And then owners of probe teams Sports teams, which are dominated by people of color So you can see we have a long way to go GAP translates to funding And right now the majority of arts funding Goes to large organizations with budgets Greater than five million dollars Which represent only 2% of the entire sector And these organizations primarily focus on Western European art forms And their programs or audiences That are predominantly white in upper income As well as their institutional structures Are not diverse Mary Jo actually asked me to speak from A person point of view And to tell a little bit of my own APA story So I'm going to share some family photos in a second That speak to these issues I was born in Hawaii When it was a territory, yes, I'm that old I was raised in Los Angeles And I have deep roots in both places I read Wikipedia recently That Hawaii is actually the only state That has never had a Caucasian majority Good reason I mean I think there's a reason why Hawaii is as progressive as it is It was the first state And the only state to have a dual language policy Oleda Hawaii and English It was the first state to legislate gay marriage And it was also the native state Of the first woman presidential candidate Patsy Mink For those of you who watch the Olympics All those women are part of her legacy She was a champion of Title IX So, yes, she was before Shirley Chisholm And before Hillary And Hawaii is a place that some extremists Have even failed to recognize as a state But it's perhaps one of the best examples Of the global future And global connectedness of America And it's also a place where native Hawaiian leadership Has connected us with the past And the possibility of a sustainable future So, here's my photo When I was a little girl I don't know what you see in the photo But I would ask you Which one is the local Which one is the tourist Which one is the newcomer If there are any Hawaii people Or anybody actually Where is this photo Does anybody recognize where this photo might be Big Island Big Island Okay Well Actually, in this photo I am the tourist And the little girl in shorts Is the native born person This is taken in Colorado Where my bare feet first touch main land soil My parents Entered our family In a Boulder, Colorado parade We stayed hood We had to carry a big banner That said Aloha from your 50th state We lived a very short time in Colorado I think until my parents Realized how cold it was going to be Better get ourselves back to LA Here's another photo This is my uncle Edison Bruno Who was a redress, activist And co-founder of Ethnic Studies At San Francisco State He's with my paternal grandfather Who some would have known As a Japanese gardener But he was an artist Who immigrated to California in the 1920s He came to the U.S. For religious freedom as a Christian His mother was converted By Christian missionaries And as a Filipino-American journalist Jose Antonio Vargas says He has a great expression About immigration We are here because you were there My granddad changed his name To George after George Washington And he began his American dream But the laws of America Meant that he was ineligible To own land He was ineligible as an agent To intermarry with a Caucasian He was ineligible to become a citizen And therefore ineligible To vote to change any of these laws Just like so many immigrants today He married, he had 10 children He gave all of them American names That were pretty unpronounceable In Japanese He learned impeccable English And shortly after Pearl Harbor December 7th, 1941 The FBI knocked at the door of the house They took him away They were really thrilled to have evidence He had boxes Of his sketches Journals, letters To American friends That he kept copies of And printed for years from his family Most of my family Were sent to Department of Interior Concentration camps In Grenada, Hart Mountain Jerome Arkansas He was moved around the country secretly They would not know where he was For months at a time He was put in Department of Justice Detention Centers In North Dakota, Montana New Mexico and Texas Meanwhile, three of my uncles Volunteered for the U.S. Army Battalions in the 442 And the MIS My grandfather was not released Till fully one year after the day The official end of the war And I have been told that he was Possibly the longest held Japanese-American detainee There was no trial or charges Why do I share this story? One, I share this story Because we are in a parallel era Where racial profiling Is targeting black, brown, Arab-American Muslims and immigrants in general And during World War II That hysteria Targeting the so-called enemy within Allowed everyone else to look the other way While an entire people Was sent to concentration camps And this is not unlike what is happening now In immigration centers Where women, men and children Are living in violation of human rights And facing mass deportation We are living in a time of demographic hysteria Of who gets to be an American Or who gets to be perceived as an American The second reason I am sharing this story with you Is for us to understand this 2042 changing demographic moment It is not a fluke We did not just suddenly decide Let's have a few more kids Or my cousin is coming to stay with us No, you know The United States was constructed Legally as a white country Through slavery Through distance franchisement Through genocide and broken treaties And the discriminatory immigration laws And the shift that we are experiencing now Is directly a result of the activism of the 1960s Both the civil rights error legislation And particularly the 1965 Immigration and naturalization act Which has made the possibility Of a pluralistic America possible So you, we, our presence Is connected to those marches Those sacrifices Those courageous activists Of the 60s Who held our country accountable As a project of democracy I am going to show another slide Has anyone seen this slide? It is a pretty shocking image It is from 1854 I thought that since we are engaging the topic Of yellow face We need to look at how we intersect With black face minstrel scene You know, what are the roots Of this masking tradition This is by an anonymous Japanese artist In 1854 From when Commodore Perry Opened Japan through to To trade After 200 years of sovereignty Was opened up by gunboat diplomacy And this painting documents A minstrel show Put on by the U.S. naval officers For the Japanese Shogunate You remember Shogun Right, that movie But starring Commodore Perry Just saying This also documents how African Americans were introduced Into Japan Visually both the military And black face And to remember That this was These happy black minstrel faces Were performing at a time When slavery still existed in the U.S. The civil war would not Occur to the next decade So I really want us to think about How culture controls the narrative And how deep and long lasting These kinds of images are As we have our conversations today As you can see I'm deeply interested in intersectionality As Nina said Actually I started something called A long, long time ago Which was a gathering where I met Many, many artists Some of them who are here today I'm going to show one other family photo So this is a photo Of my maternal grandmother She came to Los Angeles As a picture ride And married my grandfather On my maternal side On the day they met She would never, ever, ever Say that she was an artist She wrote a photo She wrote poetry She did calligraphy And she was a clothing designer She had a custom millinery Of dressmaking shop In my grandfather's hardware store In Little Tokyo, downtown in LA And there are plaques now The Japanese American National Museum Has put on the sidewalk That commemorates these businesses So my grandfather's business Is commemorating But there are no plaques Of businesses They are still invisible And I think that this is Part of the work I've been doing A large part of my motivation Is to find these hidden voices Which is why I did that first book A broken thread Because as a college student I never read plays That reflected me And my work has really been About defying invisibility It's catalyzed my writing My directing and my producing When I was working there Lucy Burns The amazing Filipino American Scholar and dramaturg And I started interviewing Asian American theater makers Including my mentor Mako At the East West Players And Lucy said something That was pretty profound She talked about visiting Asian American theaters To do these interviews And they were largely producing To find a trove Of Asian American women writers When she asked If they kept rejected plays That were not produced And that was the file Where women's Writing voices would appear That search led me to Start looking for some of the earliest Asian American women playwrights And I found A few that are still alive Two in particular I found Lee Ling Ai Who was, who wrote in the 1920s Who was still alive And living in New York In this crowded apartment Where you had to walk through This narrow canyon of books And I found Wai Chi Chun At the end of her life In Hawaii Wai Chi Chun told me About her mother having bound feet And how her mother was carrying From the family's home She was at the back of their store To the cash register every day To cash out people And that was her entire world With her bound feet This domestic space Ling Ai Lee on the other hand Her world was enormous She told me about going to China During the rape of Nam King And making a film She told me about being In play writers' salons In New York City And her ideas were stolen To make the world of Suzy Wong And I really actually thought That she might be exaggerating Or old and just kind of losing it And then a couple of years ago The filmmaker Robin Lung Contacted me about a documentary She's making, Finding Kukan And about how Lee Ling Ai Was embraced as the co-director Of one of the first Academy Award Winning documentaries, Kukan On the rape of Nam King Basically, that's what I've been doing For 40 years. I believe that's what we do as artists We find that in human voice We challenge boundaries And reveal the unexpected And as a theater director And an Asian Pacific American woman I've been inspired By mentors of all ages But some are now ancestors And so I'd like to mention them James Baldwin Yuri Kochiama Mako Seepernard Jackson And I'm going to show another slide So I started a project This is Grace Lee Boggs When I came to the Ford Foundation In 2002 The first national convening I worked on was in Flint, Michigan And I introduced Grace Lee Boggs To a national arts audience We did not know her at that time I started a project called National Arts in a Changing America At Cal Arts So I'm unfortunately going to be Having to leave tomorrow morning Because we're convening Art Chain U.S. Detroit Which is largely inspired By Grace and her legacy And featuring so many of the artists That she mentored So because I ran a theater For so many decades I never missed a chance to Promote a good show in our season I was actually guilty Of the fact So I urge you to watch The live stream on HowlRound If you can This Thursday Friday I started today talking About the devastating times We're living in And when things seem really Unbearable for me I often think WWJT I think you've heard that term For me it means What would James Baldwin do Or WWJT What would Grace do Baldwin told us That in order to be free We need to listen And Grace put it very simply She said We are the ones we are looking for I would only add to that In this changing demographic Moment We are no longer counter-narrative We are the narrative So let's go on stage 2042 I should try to be shorter To do the things Naturally inscrutable Naturally Commande Yes There's another thing I don't know if I can articulate it completely But let's give it a shot Okay It's like Well They kind of just don't value human life At least not in the way The regular people do And Americans do Because their emotions Their emotions Aren't as important to them We're cerebral people More intelligent Than normal people At least in terms of things Like math and science But they lack Instinct and intuition Or robots Than people And when they die It's no big deal Because they're really just small cars And a big oriental robot machine That explains things Like kind of guys And how they're curious And suicides They just don't care About beauty Or love And breathe And breathe And that's more important Than you can totally live in squalor And like pups Or whatever Cramped overpopulated cities Filled with smog And their backs are hunched over Because they're always carrying heavy bags of rice And sticks on their backs Until they're like 80 And they can die Because they just don't Because The same The metoral kind of weak and asexual And the women are all Side by side Until they reach a certain age Which wouldn't be a holy dumpy visit I don't think they're all the same But They kind of all Are the same And I don't mean that to bad people I know But actually quite impactful Like Maybe you're more involved We're all apes And then we became African people And then at a certain point People started to migrate all over the rest of the world And some of them became civilized And then we became white people Filled cities And became normal And stuff And other people The orientals Well, they're even further away They're smaller They have the aforementioned less body care They're less primal And instinctual In general I don't mean generalize Illusion of apes To become mystic And more and more Less emotional And you don't care much about human life But it's more efficient Overpopulating the earth And building machines And importing wealth Because you don't care so much About actual human emotion I mean I'm not making this up You know what I'm saying Right? It was NACCO based in New York We just saw it from Lloyd's As Charles Francis Chan Jr.'s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery That NACCO commissioned in which we produced That's it The actor in the yellow face Name Charlie Chan is being asked Some basic actor lay questions By his Asian American director I should give you some context There was a purpose behind this casting Which is the use of a white actor In the yellow face To expose white racism By using stereotypes Because they are In the words of the protagonist They are so real They are real white racist fictions That fuel a real white racist reality And quote Dave The actor playing Charlie Chan Is being asked to speak about his character With whom if we're going to be Stanislavski And he's supposed to identify with And so do he He exposes rather easily Because he thinks it's just common sense His racism As my good friend Jorge Cortegna The playwrights could say The yellow face in the play Is actually the exposure of the white face The white point of view The white actor thinks he is selling us About his artistic process But he is actually confessing His whiteness And quote It is ever thus And because it is ever thus We are here In an effort to Achieve the seismic shift Of neutralizing the yellow face In her keynote address on Saturday Zeba Raffin spoke of artists As witnesses Zeba also spoke of artists Being able to take us to the essence Of a problem In order to encourage response In this instance The use of yellow faces Deployed by Lloyd In response to the continuing assaults On our cultures and our identities Lloyd will speak more About this this morning Also here today Joining us in the panel Is Karen Shimokawa Who is the chair of the performance studies And what I'm hoping is that We can ask you guys to respond And hopefully respond to each other as well So in there Ask your Karen to kick us off So I want to Thank Mia and Kata For inviting me to respond to this I also want to thank Roberta Because it's not only theater artists Whose careers she made possible I feel like I'm here because of her as well So thank you I'm an academic And not a theater artist or producer So I'm also not a critic exactly But I do sit usually On that side of the footlight So I'm very disoriented up here And so I think my job Is to try to figure out What you people do Does So that means number one A quick apologies That is in my world That academic role we tend not to Memorize our lines A little bit And to I think maybe what I'm going to say Towards the end might not go over all that well So you might want to keep those whistles ready Okay So I think my job is to sort of like Do some kind of academic positioning So I hope you'll bear with me with that So on one hand it seems ridiculous That we're still asking this question But on the other hand If we are Trying to offer some answers to it The question being What is the injury of yellow face Or rather how does it work How does it work I think everybody in the room knows after all What yellow face is kind of And many of us know where it comes from And what's wrong And what's inaccurate about it We also all know the nature of the injury We can speak to the shame Or the rage that we feel When we're confronted by it But how exactly does it injure So the racist performance of yellow face Is a way of being called Or in my job Whatever we call it Inhaled by a hateful identity or term In a way it's a form of naming Right We're describing For whatever the performers might claim About it being either a quaint historical relic Thanks to the Mikado Or playful imaginative fiction Big I don't know It obviously references And thereby implicitly describes Asian bodies in the real contemporary world Moreover And here's the kicker Is that in answering that hail That is for Asian American Is to speak back to that hail And many times the only way we can Is to become visible as that racist persona I think for the actors in the room You can think about What kind of roles are you able to Audition for Which things you get asked to play And that's the sort of You're answering in a certain kind of hail Right So Truth about Or who's a feminist philosopher of language Asks Okay so we understand that that's what happens There are certain kinds of ways That you can become visible in the mainstream And often times those ways are racist But she says So what else happens In that oppressive force That's expressed in the hail That is can you answer that call But maybe answer it in a way That's a little bit fucked up Right so that you are just legible enough That you get your foot in the door But maybe kind of mess with the perception A little bit So I think I'm sure you guys Are all super familiar with that strategy And if you permit me And thank you Thank you for doing that And so I just We're short for time But I want to take a slight detour Because I can't resist through a legal case That I suspect many of you May know something about I'm also interested in the law So you might know about it Either because you're an Oregonian Or you read the newspaper Or you are a fan Of high energy dance rock That is so popular with young people today I hear So I'm talking of course About the slants And the U.S. Supreme Court case So the U.S. Supreme Court Just announced that they're going to hear This case this fall So it's super exciting I'm going to just talk about it super briefly For those of you who don't know And then I promise I won't move on So the slants are a Portland based band Starting in 2006 With four Asian American musicians Simon Tam, who's the bassist Described their choice of the name And their sort of iconography That people have about us Like the slanted eyes And own them So 2010, Tam tried to Filed an application to register The slants as a trademark And the examining attorney Found a mark disparaging To people of Asian descent And therefore refused to register it That's one of the criteria For the trademark act So he and his lawyers Appealed this a couple of times They lost a couple of times They had a positive ruling Where the Supreme Court Appeals found The part of the trademark act That disqualified him As unconstitutional And so now That's why it's going up To the Supreme Court Okay, so there's a lot of Variety legal stuff To be said about this But I will spare you But the reason I think of this Is because Presumably the slants can Still call themselves a slant Even without the trademark But there's a value to that name And there's a value to prohibiting Other people from using that name That is from shutting other people down From using the word And I'm sort of interested In that play between Being able to sort of Appropriate the term But also censoring somebody else From using it In a way you don't like An injurious speech When she's talking about hate speech And she says Okay, so hate speech is bad It injures people But she's very suspicious About possibly out Prohibiting it That is making it against the law Precisely the reason That once you lock down An injurious value Sort of association with the word It stays injurious And you can't So that people can start messing With that word And kind of appropriating in different ways So rather than to say This word is injurious This image, this kind, this mode Of performance is injurious That's why we need to shut it down She argues that we actually just need more More speech, more proliferation Of the possibilities So in thinking about this In terms of the slant's case Which I've been doing If the slant's case shows us anything The words depend on context Who's speaking matters How it's being used matters The political context matters So if we want Simon Tam And the slants to be able to use that We have to think about We have to be willing to admit A variety of contexts For this kind of hateful representation And the possibility that could do Maybe some good So let me skip ahead So going to So Butler actually makes a point Sorry for too much time Yeah, sorry So the reason I've been thinking about this Is that last week I tried another essay In my class Another essay by Butler One that doesn't get a lot of play But I think it should And especially in conjunction With the kind of stuff we're talking about today That essay was written in the aftermath Of the trial of four police officers In the beating of a black man And despite what looked too many With the victim in a coma And resulted in permanent disfigurement The jury watched that same video And saw the black man with hands raised Palm out in self-defense They saw him as a violent aggressor And they acquitted the four policemen So does this ring a bell Or sound familiar to anyone Sadly my students had never heard Of Rodney King Which kind of broke my heart a little bit So Butler argued that the jury In the Rodney King case Seemingly saw, descriptively But that what they were interpreting But what they were actually doing Was interpretively reading They didn't just see something That was objectively there, right They were reading based on What's what Franz Fanon calls An epidermal schema So her point about this Is that it's a political act To, so she sees something else In the video But she acknowledges that her Own scene, that is of a victim Defending himself But she says this political act Sort of counter over read the other way So my point here is just that Her aggressive counter reading Or our aggressive counter reading Of all the videos that we're seeing Like every day now Is only possible if we keep that Interpretive latitude in play Locking things down by saying You can't show this Or you can't do that Or even I can say that word But you are legally barred from saying it Only serve to do power to that word Or that image And to cement the injurious power To the word So for that reason I'm not sure to go back to the slants I'm not sure the trademark registration Is really the way to go Although I want him to win Because you know we want him to win But more cynically Because I worry that if the term Stays profitable Even in an ironic relation to Its hateful connotation Still carries with it And if you want proof of this Just go read all of the Legal briefs that are online With this case Because they just dredge up Every other case Of like hateful trademarks That people have either tried to Or successfully done And so I didn't even know These trademarks existed Until I read this case And they're like oh my god Somebody tried to trademark that thing What does this mean Should we be trying to shut down Bad yellow face productions Well out non-legal way Sure I don't want to buy tickets to those things Right But shutting them down Before they're able to be produced I do have questions about And they're genuine questions Because I worry that it gives Another kind of cultural power We can't erase or censor the past So I wonder How we circulate those images To better tap that hateful energy In ways that start to undermine The power of that image To name us in the present I think that Lloyd's play as a whole Is an excellent example of this And I love this monologue It's so subtly and well done And performed So yellow face is a hateful Adurious naming Of Asianness is red Or performed in some ways And the author reads The Rodney King video What I really like about it Is that it's more than a simple negation That is it's not just That you know that that yellow face Mask is not true I mean certainly that's part of it But the mask as a racist mask Is sort of performed But also we get to see the ways And here I'm actually thinking About the play more generally The ways in which Asians Can and do deploy that mask as well As a play Both for better and for worse There are all kinds of ways In which this can go awry In super interesting ways And so I won't give you that How it comes out But all of this is to say No spoilers but the mask Is interesting to look at Because sometimes a mask can come back And bite you on the ass And these are only available If we are able to look at it And let that thing actually show up On stage So I guess this is just a call For more yellow face In a weird way No that's not what I mean But something like the possibility Of proliferation Of those sorts of images I think can only Give them less power So no no no I mean I think This might sound like I mean honestly I really hate Talking about yellow face I really really hate it It's It might be kind of a weird thing To say this is like the third panel That I've done This year where the title Has the word yellow face in it And I've been asked to do At least ten more You know I just Can't And I know that Yeah totally I've spent a certain amount of time Personally and professionally In the energy around yellow face And it's You know some of it intentional Most of it not intentional The intentional part Is definitely a part Where it's about me trying to Encounter And grapple with And find some sort of personal catharsis Around those issues Because a lot of those issues You know are things that have visited me In ways that were not necessarily welcome And it's a very Dehumanizing, demeaning, discouraging energy To live in The You know what I do in my life Is I'm a playwright And I'm an arts administrator Who works at an organization And is dedicated to Trying to support, nurture and advance The work of playwrights To eliminate the most important issues Of our time I recognize that In the current Moment that we're living In the yellow face conversations are important You know it's why I have agreed To Have conversations around this topic In In a few instances And I am very appreciative Of this particular space I'm very appreciative of Kata And his conference Fortunate enough to be on the founding Stream committee that created The National Asian American Theatre Conference And I know that the mission there Is to advance and celebrate And build the community around The work of Asian American theaters And artists It's not necessarily to Spend our time Or our energy Dealing and reacting to other people's shit When I feel like that's what I'm spending You know that causes something It really does cause something It's costing something personally And I'm like you know Whatever It causes something To spend our energy there And it's also just a real drag And the reason it's a drag is because There's also this recognition When we're encountered with these situations That That there's hostility Right, that there's hostility in the world There's hostility to us To our own ownership of our identity There's hostility to us Not fitting into a box There's hostility to Like everything that we're Like all the changing demographic stuff And the disabling of those power structures That actually wields that power For the people who have the power They like the way things are going Because it's going pretty well for them Right, and so any disruption To that power structure And you know The ability for Asian Americans For us to define our own identity In this political climate Is a disruption And so I mean We know where this hostility is coming from Right, these changing demographics Are a big part of it The louder and more empowered we become The more and more we're going to get a backlash It's the same place that Donald Trump comes from It's the same place that We're up against So when I think about The topic in hand Which is how do we neutralize the yellow face I think that neutralizing the yellow face Obviously that meets Multiple strategies And I'm looking at this schedule This conference and I'm like It's very exciting to see The many ways in which There are multiple strategies being addressed But I think that them You know Then These questions about You know this energy about Reacting to the other people's shit I think that the thing that That I believe Is the hill that I want to die on That I think is the most effective Strategy for neutralizing the yellow face Is the advancement of The extraordinary community Of Asian American playwrights They're generating and developing We're growing now I think that the Playwrights You know, I'm not going to name Because I know Like it's going to take a long time And also I'm going to leave people out But you know who they are You know who they are And if you don't Then ask each other Everybody know You know who they are And if you don't know who they are Ask around talk about it with anybody who will listen, because even though there is extraordinary work being done by Asian-American playwrights right now that are excavating our history, examining our present, and imagining our future in a way that nobody else is and nobody else has, the fact of the matter is there are still, like the numbers of representation are still appalling, the opportunities that these writers have to actually be produced, to be widely disseminated, to be understood, to be taught in schools, to be spoken of, is not nearly where it should be. And so I think it's our job to to spend our energy trying to make those representations as visible and as loud and as present as possible and enduring as possible. And I think that, you know, like I would say Asian-American playwrights, yes, you're doing good, but I also think, you know what, we can still do better. Like we can always, and I challenge myself every day, and I challenge all of you every day, to always, always, always do better. And you know, like, you know, I don't know how you guys grew up, you know, with a lot of Asian-Americans here, but the way I grew up is my parents told me that, you know, I had to be twice as good as the other kids in order to get half as much credit. And that's a drag too, to have to do that. But you know, I think we can do it. I think we can, you know, I think we're up for it. So, and I think that we should be spending the correct, like there's a proportional amount of time we should be spending on, on celebrating and advancing and promoting that work versus reacting to stuff, talking about the Mikado. And I don't know what the proportion is, but it's a huge, it's a, it should be an enormous proportion. And so that's, that, yeah, I guess that's a good question. I'm so sorry. This is such a rich conversation, I think, and we're very, very constrained by time. But we have kind of designed additional opportunities to continue this kind of conversation. Because what Lloyd has said in terms of strategies, I think the more strategies we have, the better we are and maybe change the balance of that. So that the positive energies are, are, that, that proportion goes up. And I also see value in what Karen is saying. And it's very complicated conversation, I believe. There are at least, that I know of, two other sessions that will follow this, that will continue to kind of explicate and unpack this and hopefully be, step up to Lloyd's challenge in terms of putting the positive energy and creative and collaborative and brainstorming that thing. In, in the half an hour there's another panel that will talk more historically. And I know that tomorrow there's also another one that's, I think, that you mentioned in case of yellow face, a great blast. I'd like to thank these wonderful folks for being here. And I'm so sorry. I would love to, you could maybe have time for a verdict. No, I was just thinking about how when I was in high school, my brother dragged me to a protest for lovely ladies and kind gentlemen, which the center theater group was producing in Los Angeles. And then when I was on these coasts, then it was Miss Saigon, of course. And, but when I was in college, I wrote my first play and the department chose to produce it. And we worked on the production team and then like we wanted to give you so and so as a lighting designer and so and so for costume and so and so. And, but we're going to have to bring in a guest artist to do the, the mask work. And I said, well, why? I don't have any masks in the script. And they said, well, you wrote the play has like all Asian American Asian leads or Oriental leads. It has, you know, 10 people and then they're all Asian. And I was like feeling militant. I was just like, well, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to cast that show and we're going to, you know, I'm going to do that show and I don't need masks and I don't need people. I'm totally projecting yellow face. And then of course I held auditions and there were no Asian American actors showing up. And so then I started accosting people. Like, you look like a dad. Do an actor training workshop with me for. And so that's when I just said, okay, what I'm going to have to do is approach this like, you know, I had been a community organizer for you know, farm workers. I'm going to have approaches like community organizing and start organizing the workshops and recruiting people. And, you know, I was working in a boutique. So I met lots of Asian American women that were really pretty cool looking and so I think from me anyway, I've always questioned, you know, it's just like blood donorship. Why is it that there's kind of this universal donor universal recipient and why should Caucasian actors get to play everything? I think we should get to play everything as well. And so when I started it and why I started it was because I did not want to spend my energy just for testing. I feel like there are, I could just actually have a nervous breakdown every day if I just react to all the shit out there. And I also feel like for us to train ourselves to put our own narratives out there. And the last thing I will say is just as an artistic director, I never believed in matching people. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's an Asian place. So I mean, oh, you look like you could direct that. So when we produce Nefertiti Burton's play, New Butters to a Student Revolutionary by Elizabeth Wong, I asked Nefertiti Burton to direct it because she had to have years of going to China, being in China, even though I lived more like that play. Do you know what I mean? So I've always cast, I mean, like working with Fort May Quartinius, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean you were producing him. It doesn't mean that you have to match the person. And I think that's really important. Yes, we tend to get reduced and categorized and centralized. Well, I think at least there's an illiterate progress. You have that cast in call right now. You have a room for the Asian America. Absolutely. This is a college in the five colleges in Amherst, Massachusetts. Oh, yeah, which sometimes that isolation, like people who are working, not on the coast, it's actually in some ways more empowering for you, because you're the ones who are making everything that is important happen where you are. Thank you so much. This working? Yes. Hi. Thank you all. Thank you. Amazing panelists. Mia. And we have the one thing our sponsors. That's very important money and our partners. Oh, my God. Also, the library system, the library system around that thing them conference sessions will be at the Hey Patton across the bricks, walk to the left of the Thomas Theater. And if you don't know where that is, that's hard. And also join us tonight at our kickoff event at Grizzly Peak winery sponsored by Grizzly Peak winery and the Southern Oregon Chinese Cultural Association. That's a natural partnership there. And all the information is in your program guide. There'll be a bus to transport you to and from Grizzly Peak winery. And they'll have you back here in time for hot Asian everything. Right here in this space at 8pm tonight. Thank you all. Welcome and enjoy the conference.