 It's like two something, so it's afternoon, right? All right, good afternoon. Good afternoon. Thank you all for being here. My name is Brian Moore. I am an Associate Professor at Concordia University and I am the outgoing Vice President for University Relations here for LMDA. We are excited to present our annual hot topic session for this Thursday afternoon. We have a great selection of combination of various topics of all kinds that to present to you this afternoon and we're excited to see how they compare and contrast and combine in terms of what people are thinking and sharing and doing and this is one of the missions of the University Caucus is to encourage the dialogue and the peer share that is vital to our work as dramaturgs as a whole. So thank you all for being here. I hope you hear some topics that may inspire you and excite you to look into potentially talking further with these individuals and even amongst your own colleagues or strangers that you meet over the weekend. So Jeff Pearl and I will be co-moderating this. We will introduce each of these panelists one at a time. They will come up and give their five minute presentation. We're really strict on this five minute time frame and the goal of this speech is mostly kind of the starting point to the opening of the dialogue to hopefully a conversation that's even greater than today than this moment. And so please keep that in mind. If it feels like it's really quick and early into the point that's because it is. So this is great but understand that for many of these individuals this is the work that they're doing. This is culmination or maybe just the beginning of something even greater and that's exciting to be a part of that process and this is part of that process. The ability to share this in a public setting. The University of caucus does a number of different projects that are listed. If you have your program we list a number of the different projects that we have been doing and that we still do and as we head into the rest of this conference you'll likely hear about at least one or two more projects that will be on our radar that we're working on beginning or continuing from this point forward but we're always excited about this hot topic session. So without further ado we have 11 great speeches ahead of you and we will get started. Jeff. Mark Lord, Bryn Mawr. So the full title of what it is I'm going to read to you is Against Devised. But I want to begin by rescuing againstness from the image of it that my Puritan ancestors projected which is still today perhaps the way in which we understand what it means to be against. It begins perhaps by wanting to subscribe enthusiastically to a series of commandments that tend to begin all in caps thou shalt not. In the case of my relatives this quickly became a lusty impulse towards silencing, punishing, rejecting, shunning, judging, and denying. They created communities of denial and their againstness was an authoritarian weapon that they wielded with a dry pleasure. We see this kind of againstness at work even today as we seek to exert our moral authority in realms from smoking and soda drinking to political campaigns and referendums. Our discourse of againstness is perhaps because of my family, shrill, denying, closed minded, and shaming. I'm interested in considering another image of againstness and in order to conjure it I'd like you to imagine the againstness of prom dates in the backseat of a large American car testing their passion and discovering themselves by holding their bodies against one another. Consider the friction of againstness in this image in light of its intense engagement. The againstness of these bodies is entangled in a curious, purposeful, playful, and searching. And it is in this light shining gently from the dashboard that I want to take up my argument against the use of the term devised in our field. So remember, not silencing denying againstness, but an againstness that is an opening grappling continuing engaging opposition. I'm not trying to legislate anything here but I do want to make a conversation. As the dramaturg for I've spent ten years working on making original pieces that are often referred to as devised. We start without a script we use bodies and imagery and experiments and dance and found spaces to make our work. We improvise and often include open improvisational structures in our work. The dramaturgy, the materials and the performance techniques for each piece are developed specifically for that piece. Our work is decidedly not theater. And while our work is often called dance, that's not quite right either. Surely we ought to be categorized with the growing army of folks who are referred to as devisors and yet every fiber of my prom boy being bristles at that appellation. I'm against devised and I hope that you will be too. Here's why. First, this broad brush term flattens terrain that is only exciting when considered as deeply varied. As Martin Esslin's theater of the absurd unintentionally encouraged folks to see the writing of a wildly divergent set of important 20th century writers as all writing the same boring play in which God is dead and everything is random and pointless. The term devised makes it seem as if there is a way to make a performance from scratch and the whole reason to do that work is because there isn't one way. Despite the sense I get from looking at syllabi for devising classes online, there is no recipe for this work. The point of it is to move away from pre-known structures for making, to be inventing our making as we invent what is made. Further, the word devised makes it sound as if there's not only one way to do it but that it's an uncommonly clever way. It smacks of what I take to be the UK origins of the term and there's a sense of aren't we smart about the term that's totally alien to every creation process of a so called devised work that I've ever been a part of. In fact, one advantage of this work which is sometimes created in front of the audience out of the simplicity and complexity of quotidian movements words and spaces is that we're actually freed from the oppressive theatrical cleverness that dialogue needs to have in it for it to successfully fight its way through the development process. Diversity always matters and one of the signal values of work that is tarred with the devised brush is that creative processes are unique reflecting the uniqueness of their questions, their personnel, their dramaturgy and its materials. To encourage recipe thinking in relationship to this work is to render invisible one of its great offerings. Next, devised is anti-historical, maybe even anti-historical. Calling work that has been produced in the last 15 or so years devised renders invisible the 100 year tradition of performance projects that self-consciously reject the tradition of scripted drama and of course the history of events and entertainment that share formal characteristics, ideals and ideas with our work is old. Circus, Commedia, Jugglers, Debates, Chautauqua, Vaudeville, Variety Theatre, Sport and Contest are all a part of our lineage. Part of the noble and mature tradition of creating performance before the eyes of the audience in their time of making public play out of materials that are ready to hand. More recently as I mentioned there's a 100 plus year tradition of self-awarely rejecting the structures and certainties of scripted drama from the Italian Futurists of 1909 to the performance artists pranksters, ritualists and performance makers of the present. Those of us who use presence, situation and the materials and personnel of our studios to research our pressing artistic questions are linked to one another and we ought to be encouraged to consider our affinities and our own generative againstnesses in relationship to our fellow travelers. The word devised seems to be used actually in an old school againstness fashion to shut down curiosity. What about this project? Oh, it was devised. Oh, well then. Do you have a draft of the new show you're working on? No, it's devised. Oh, okay. To advance that devising is simply another method of making plays renders what is important in this tradition invisible. And it defines devised work as a kind of bastard step sibling of the actual theatre. I'll call it by saying that my secret crackpot conspiracy theory is actually that devised is a term that the conventional theatre wants us to use in order to artificially lengthen the life of the scripted drama to make it seem as if it's more vital than it actually is. So I'm against devised and I hope you will be too. Thank you. Please welcome Gavin. Is it Rube, R-E-U-B? Reeb. Reeb, sorry. Gavin Reeb and Sarah Keats umbrella project. We're working out the logistics of how to tell people when they've reached time and it's hard to see you. So you signal me when they have one minute left and I'll touch them on the shoulder and when they're out of time I'll grab them by the shoulder. Okay, thank you. This group has ten minutes however it's two. That's the trick guys to you're so much taller than me. I can stand back here. Hi, I'm Sarah Keats. This is my colleague Gavin Reeb. We and we're from umbrella project. We're not a traditional theatre company but we consider ourselves a new play accelerator. We're here from Seattle which is increasingly a city where startups are flourishing and growing and we were curious about how the models that we see in startups could be applied to new play development. So when we're looking at startups we start by looking at the initial setup and design of a startup when I'm starting a startup I think okay, what is the question? And then we decide what's an answer to that question that we can start to build something on top of and then we decide how can we make a profit based on the answer to that question and based on how we can fill that gap that currently exists in the world. So certain examples would be how do we make sharing and showcasing photos more accessible? Instagram. How do we make it easier to find and buy a house? Redfin. How do we sign documents in increasingly digital world? DocuSign. So the question that we started with with umbrella project was how can we make the mechanics of new play development by which I mean workshops, submissions and producing not so much the nitty gritty of working on a script more efficient and effective for playwrights and their champions. The answer we arrived at was that we could actually look at the best practices from other successful development models particularly in the tech and startup world and reimagine a path for new plays. One that starts with one-on-one meetings, goes through workshops, goes through presentation readings, first productions and then beyond. We hope that through umbrella project we can make this process more efficient, more effective and ultimately more equitable. Umbrella project is a new play development and co-producing organization that is making Seattle a destination for new plays. We are building a local and national network of arts organizations and other innovative partners. Umbrella project will be connecting untapped audiences to the most ambitious and vital art in our theater communities our new plays. So what exactly do we mean when we say start-up methodology? Other than that basic frame that Gavin started with are other best practices we can borrow from the startup world to apply to new play development. One thing that we started with was working with a really small cross-train team that's supported by a network of project-based contractors. Unlike a super large theater that has a ton of resources and a ton of time, we know that those models are sometimes really slow and not totally efficient. By being small we're able to be agile, work on a bunch of different things at once, be changing the hats that we're wearing all the time. And then having that network of project-based contributors means that we know the directors and other dramaturgs and designers and especially writers that we want to pull into the conversation at any given time. So this creates something that is a very often word used in the startup community which is agility. It allows us to be an agile company that can function in a variety of ways. So the second thing that we do that is often considered a startup kind of method is that we are constantly prototyping and revising custom methodology. Because we are all dramaturgs and producers as well as marketers, et cetera, et cetera, I mean I can make a list that can go on forever basically. We are able to kind of flex and go in between these different departments and build custom processes that are built in conversation with a playwright that we can test against one another and see what functions in a certain way. This also goes into further conversations around subscription entities and marketing entities and other new models that are really important and need to be built from the ground up and customized in order to meet new demands in a digital era. The third thing we do is we are cultivating and capitalizing on, this is another more commercial phrase, but the investor-developer relationship. I'll start by clarifying that our investors are not necessarily people who are giving us money, in fact they usually aren't. Our investors are potentially everyone in this room. Our investors are the people who support new work. Our investors are the people who buy into our network and decide that they want to join us and herald the development of new work. The developers are the playwrights, the dramaturgs, the co-producers who are involved on that specific project. So we develop this relationship, we create a very close necessary relationship between the two of them, and we find ways to build on that and use it so we can all be on the same page and heralding forward. Another idea that we've borrowed from the startup community is the idea of planning for the full life of a product, as weird and icky as it feels to think of a new play as a product. This means that we're thinking not only about a development stage that it comes to us in, whether it's a first draft or it's at a workshop before, we're thinking about, okay, what is this going to look like for a first production? How is that going to connect us to a second production? Part of that also means thinking about marketing really early on and having dramaturgically informed marketing, rather than having a marketing department and an artistic department that are totally independent. We, because there are only four of us doing everything, are all thinking about all those things at the same time. This means that our marketing efforts for shows can be more informed by the conversations that are going on in rehearsal rooms and can ultimately, we hope, be more effective. So I outlined those three initial phases and the first thing, the question, the answer, and the profit. So we're starting to talk about product to a degree and once again I know these words get icky but we're talking about them so everyone buck up. But in startups, the way that you make a profit is through scalability. Scalability is, I go to someone and I'm like, okay, here's my idea and they're like, okay, but how can it grow? And how far can it grow? Most of the major startups in this day and age started, went through processes of like 100 times scalability. That's how they sold it. We can grow 100 times in two years. We can grow, some of them have grown well beyond that obviously. Now that's not so much what we're interested in. I mean we're interested in scaling. We're interested in how that increases the distribution of our product but our scaling is very different. Our scaling is about sustainability of new plays, new work and the companies that want to support them. We're not an old company. We're nine months old. In that time we've grown a network of 19 local liaisons to our network in Seattle and we are starting to grow a national network that includes some prominent houses throughout the country as well. And our scalability is about continuing to develop that network but not just the network about new plays, about playwrights, and about making sure that plays have other lives through this network. So I'm talking about life of a play now. Excuse me. You can just have my notes actually. The second part that's about scalability and profit is the life of a play. So 90% of new plays don't leave Seattle. I'm sure that's actually true in most countries as well. Seattle is its own little odd country, Portland is just an annex. But 90% of new plays don't leave Seattle. There are obvious outliers to this Yusuf Al-Gundi and Threesome, Elizabeth Hefron, Bonita, Mithi Zabortion, Steven Deets, Robert Schenken, etc. But 90% don't have a life outside of our city. We are looking to change that. That is how we increase sustainability, flexibility, growth of new plays and play rights. The last thing of this Threesome is our product is excellent new plays. We do that through a custom process that we talked about earlier and I'm happy to talk about in further detail. We currently have three plays that are in pipeline that are all in process, various portions of process from with all Northwest Playwrights that we're all very excited about and we had our first full production a few months ago that was Knockingbird which was by Elizabeth Murray and we're happy to share that with you as well. The last thing I want to talk about briefly before I walk away is talking about profit one more time. We're mostly a non-profit. Our company is a non-profit. So when we talk about profit, we're using metaphors here. We can all roll dramaturgs. We can do a little bit of this. But art is our product and our profit. Our community, the impact on our community is our profit. That is our product affecting our community and giving us profit. It is about the impact on not just Seattle but our potential impact across the nation and everywhere else as well. We have opportunities to take plays often around the world as well as just in Seattle or elsewhere and we want to continue to increase that impact, that profit, that scalability and that sustainability for our community and our playwrights. So we're doing a lot of things and moving in a lot of different directions as you can probably hear from this presentation and we'd love to talk to you all more about it. We're hosting one of the happy hours on Friday. It's at Swank and Swine. It starts at seven. Maybe it starts at five. Well, check your books. And we'd love to see you there to talk in more detail about what we're up to. And then we're also doing a panel on Saturday morning making local thinking national with a bunch of other Pacific Northwest and one group from Texas about how we can start working really locally and then thinking broadly and more nationally. And we're also tweeting like crazy so you can join that fun. And if you were talking really fast we're running over a billion ideas and there are a lot of things that are about new and customized models that we're not going into depth about. So please come talk to us. We want to talk. We want to continue to exchange ideas and we look forward to meeting you all. Thank you. Thank you. Didi Kugler, Simon Frazier University. Thanks, Jeff. Catherine Perfettas, dramaturgy in motion at work on dance and movement performance. Now on sale in the lobby. One. An artist changes direction. In 1995 black choreographer Ralph Lem disbanded his decade long largely white dance company and made two radical choices. He decided to make dance with a group of dancers a collaborative model rather than on the dancer's hierarchical model. He also traveled to Africa, Asia and the American South seeking quote international collaboration that would explicitly acknowledge race, culture and religion in an effort to confront preconceptions of self. Two. A collaboration begins. Ralph received a resident artist commission to create an evening length work for Yale Repertory Theater and during the 1997 LMDA conference held at Yale we were invited to watch Ralph's rehearsal. On stage warming up with the dancers was one of two MFA dramaturgy students assigned to the project. Catherine Perfetta a founding member of elevator repair service which previously trained in both dance and theater. Catherine recalls quote Ralph was a nice person who had no idea what to do with me. So her dramaturgical strategy was to record the rehearsal room quote. I wrote down steps discussions, arguments, brainstorming, everything filtered through my own perception of what was interesting, relevant surprising or useful. What produced intriguing results, what fell flat and in my notes I wondered about why end quote. A month after that first workshop Catherine met Ralph in New York and dropped 169 page transcription. Thonk lost my place now. Thonk on the table in front of him. She marks that moment as the actual beginning of their collaborative relationship. Three. Collaboration sustained quote. In emails and meetings we grew a conversation with a promising level of give and take. I wanted to catalyze the process, create productive tension, touch off conversation. We found and shared a faith in the idea that a certain kind of disagreement would be a crucible for the work. Perfetta remained a dramaturg on Lemon's journey with successive collaborators through countless residencies and workshops that led to four seminal works. Perfetta acknowledges that dramaturgy in motion is the fruit of her 18 years and counting of collaboration and conversation with Ralph Lemon. Four. Dramaturgy as oscillation. Perfetta asserts that the role of the dramaturg, if it can be defined at all, can only be as a quality of motion which oscillates, claiming to determine its own between theory and practice, inside and outside, word and movement, question and answer end quote. Dramaturgy in motion is divided into five chapters what Perfetta calls quote, five potential registers of the dramaturg's engagement in the working process end quote. The chapters are text and language, research, audience, movement, interculturalism. Each chapter provides a rigorous theoretical grounding locates nuanced artistic choices within specific rehearsal moments then offers analysis of the implication of those choices. Perfetta's writing mirrors the dramaturg's frequent travels from theory to practice and back again until in motion oscillating. The distinction between theory and practice blurs. These articulate discussions of hands-on dramaturgical activity written by a freelance project-based dramaturg reflecting on a sequence of collaborative intercultural projects from a valuable practical resource clearly aimed at dance dramaturgs and choreographers. But everything in Dramaturgy in motion will prove equally valuable for theater dramaturgs and theater makers. I use it in my Dramaturgy seminar and the students loved it. Five, a bonus. This book is a rare window into the intimate relationship between choreographer Ralph Lemon and the dramaturg of whom he says quote, Catherine Perfetta whose job it is to ask me questions about what it is I think I'm thinking and what it is I'm not. Haley Fluke and sorry, Company One Theater. Good afternoon everyone. I'm Haley Fluke. I'm the literary associate at Company One Theater in Boston and also a proud alum of Lincoln Hall. I disagree with that comment about Portland, umbrella folks. I'm here today to start a really practical discussion about the difficulty behind creating script submission policies that are both efficient and sustainable but also mission driven. Company One Theater has struggled this year over whether to close our open submission policy which has been in place for the bulk of our history and which up until this season was run through literarymanager.org. Like many theaters of our size our script reading needs started out relatively small but as our organization has grown the number of script submissions we receive annually has expanded potentially and we found ourselves getting further and further behind on our reading. So this year we decided to reevaluate our system both the human element and the software element. So while we were having this very logistical nuts and bolts conversation about whether we wanted to use literarymanager.org still or whether we wanted to switch to a Google based platform that we could customize to suit our needs we were also having a parallel discussion about the philosophy behind our open submission policy. On the one hand we were so behind in getting back to people about their scripts and so few scripts that were submitted through our open portal ever made it anywhere close to the programming table that we felt it was unfair to genuinely call this an efficient portal to working with us. Yet on the other hand as more and more theaters are closing their open submission policies to do so for us felt distinctly counter mission. A huge part of Company One Theater's mission is to unite citizens diverse communities through socially provocative theater that often features underrepresented voices. And many of these underrepresented voices were certainly present in the pool of people who were submitting through our open portal. These are writers who are often working without agent representation who perhaps do not have access to the same educational or development opportunities as more established playwrights. So to create another barrier of entry to them to us felt for lack of a better word really icky. So we were torn and are still torn about what to do but after many many hours of meetings we came to a solution at least for the time being and that solution is two fold. Firstly we are encouraging new playwrights who are working in the Boston area who might have submitted their scripts through the open portal to apply to the Company One Play Lab program which is our new works initiative. This year we've expanded the program to include three distinct tiers. The first tier is the writer's unit. It's a writing group dedicated to more emerging playwrights about 8 to 10 of them. We also have the Company One Play Lab fellows. This is an opportunity for three more experienced playwrights that includes one-on-one work with a dramaturg and also a reading series showcasing their work. And finally this year we've added a third tier to commissioned master playwrights. It is our hope that by providing these different levels of involvement we'll be making production and development opportunities for Boston area playwrights of all skill levels. It is also our hope that over the course of several seasons a playwright could in theory go through every single tier of this involvement and then we will have cultivated a relationship with a playwright that lasts through various stages of their career. The second big change that we made this year is that we have switched away from using literarymanager.org and now use a purely Google based system. We have kept our open submission policy in a sense but have moved it from a one phase process to a two phase process. Now any playwright who wants to submit a script to us must first submit an application. This application is geared toward assessing whether the playwright has a good working knowledge of who we are as a company and also assessing whether the play that they are submitting to us is something that is in line with our mission, something we'd actually be interested in producing. It is our hope that by making the number of plays that our readers have to read or smaller we can give those plays that are really in line with Company One's mission a more effective, efficient and thorough consideration. So that's the solution that we came up with but it's very young, like a month or two young. So it's too early on to know whether the solution we came up with really works. But we wanted to use this as an opportunity to ask you, our colleagues, what you think of the solution that we came up with and also whether your organizations are going through similar debates and whether you've found any solutions that you really like either from the human element or the software element. So I'll be around after this discussion. Myself, Jesse Baxter and Ramona Ostrowski, my colleagues at Company One Theater are also going to be around. So if you don't get a chance to ask a question during the session, please come and find us. If you have thoughts on this topic, we would be really happy to hear them. Thank you. Veronica Thomas, University of Maryland. Hi everyone. If you know me, you know that I think about cities quite a bit. Even when I was a kid, I was fascinated by cities. I got a thrill when my parents would drive us into, thank you. Can you hear me now? I got a thrill when my parents would drive us into and through a city, seeing a skyline come up on the horizon, getting closer and closer until we were finally amongst the tall buildings. And when as an adult I started my career as a dramaturg in Chicago, not only was I excited to be living amongst those skyscrapers, but I also thought about how my movement and my work throughout the city as a dramaturg shaped my experience of Chicago, how it created my Chicago, how those experiences created then me, Veronica, the Chicagoan. And I started to ask what exactly is this city that I experience? What is a civic identity to a dramaturg, to an artist? As I worked with a variety of theaters and organizations in Chicago and witnessed firsthand the complicated negotiations between city systems, residents, tourists, art makers, theater companies, etc., the entertainment machine at work, I could see that as a manual shipper and others have put it, the city is performance. In fact, it's a never-ending palimpsest of performances. I was so intrigued by this idea that eventually I decided to go back to school for my Ph.D. and study performance in cities and write a dissertation on the topic, and that's what I've been doing for the last five years. At the beginning of my research on cities, I wasn't thinking about dramaturgy very much, which is a funny thing for a dramaturg to say. Performance studies theory, critical spatial theories, gentrification, the intersection of race and class and space, cultural production and labor, yes, all of those things. And while I always lead toward the dramaturgical, it didn't have an active place in my early studies. But as I was writing my dissertation proposal, I came across a sentence in Jeff Pearl's Toward a Dramaturgical Sensibility, where he writes, doing dramaturgy involves more than intellectual analysis and more than an easy voyeurism. It requires a relentless cycle of stepping forward and then back, both metaphorically and literally. This seemed to me not only a useful way of thinking about dramaturgy, but also about scholarly research. And it made sense for my work in particular as I try to connect the ways in which the labor of the individual artist performs the city, to the ways in which city governments and urban planners use that artist's labor to perform the city, a lens that focuses in and then back out again and in again. As all of us in this room know, dramaturgy is not simply textual analysis. And as previous dramaturg scholars like Shelley Orr and DJ Hopkins have noted, the city is not read like a script, it's experienced, it's produced, it's performed. And dramaturgy is as much about enacting context as it is about interpretation. A civic dramaturgy is not only a way of looking at the performance of city or analyzing it after the fact, but also a way to participate and to anticipate and to take action. When I introduced my theater students to the concept of dramaturgy, I used Eleanor Fuchs' Visit to a Small Planet as a jumping off point. And then in the course of our discussion, I showed them a picture of Curiosity, the Mars rover, and I asked them to consider how a dramaturge is like a Mars rover. For me, it's key that Curiosity is communicating its findings back to NASA, creating NASA's view of Mars up close, and therefore helping to formulate future actions and explorations. This is the social aspect of dramaturgy, and it is a useful way to think about dramaturgy's place in the city. This civic dramaturgy not only tells us about cities, but it also tells us something about the social aspect of our work as dramaturges. Civic dramaturgy is a term that other dramaturges have used to describe an analysis of city council meetings and local politics, or to discuss the complicated relationship between the theater, its audience, and its larger community in public. I think we can, and I want to, build on these ideas and think about civic dramaturgy as a way to understand these complicated overlapping systems, these contested spaces of the city. Sorry, I just lost my place in actionable terms. Dramaturgy to me is the unending merging of theory and practice, and in this way its social bent matches the social performance of the city. So I'm taking this notion of a civic dramaturgy, and I'm questioning it, and I'm revising it, I'm stepping forward and backwards. My dissertation project is an analysis of the relationship between artist labor and their labor movements, the creation and use of cultural space, and the way that urban planning is performed in Chicago. Cultural planning meetings and documents, tourist sites like Navy Pier, the work of Southside Artist and Urban Planner Theaster Gates, self-identification with Chicago and its neighborhoods, performance in the city gives us a way to analyze all of these, and civic dramaturgy lets us take these performances and put them into conversation with one another, focusing in on the active agency and the variety of participants in the creation of the space, the place and the idea of Chicago. So this is what I'm excited about. As our conference continues, I'd love to talk with anyone who is excited and interested in dramaturgy in cities, your city, my city, any city. Please find me and we'll grab coffee or beer. I hear both of those are pretty good here in Portland. And we'll talk more about my two favorite things, dramaturgy in cities. Thank you very much. Kathleen Jeffs, Gonzaga University So mine is the colorful handout with the kind of Venn diagram on it if you have that in front of you. Thank you. So I'm going to talk you through that Venn diagram a little bit through four different productions and kind of a process down the center of research, adaptation, casting, and collaboration. And then on the back there's some notes about play that I recently dramaturged that'll kind of tie things up together. So dramaturgy in process for Troilus and Cressida. It starts with research, the Aeneid, the Iliad, the mythical origins. It moves on to adaptation, Shakespeare's interpretation of the myth, his choice is to adapt, and then casting. There's four women in the play and a million men. What do you do about that in a university context? And people always ask me, are you trying to make a statement when you cast a woman in the male role? And I ask them, what statement do you think I'd be making in 2016 casting a female in the male role? And I want to know the answer to that. It's a deep collaboration this time with Sarah Romersberger, a movement specialist from Southern Methodist University, who's a director in her own right. So for that process of working as a dramaturg. Jesus Christ Superstar happened last year. This one, research, adaptation, and casting, you can imagine what you need to look into. It's a Catholic university that I come from, so the perspective there that people take, the post-show discussions, the reactions that you get are very 1976 and very 2016. So you get kind of two sides of a response coin there in dramaturgy, and you have to anticipate and then ping pong that around campus, which is fun. That was a kind of deep collaboration with a choreographer who works in musical theater. So there again got to work as a dramaturg. For the force of habit, this is the kind of situation where the dramaturg gets to change hats. And here I translated the play from Spanish and then did it twice, once at my home university, and then again at the University of Puget Sound with Sarah Freeman directing. And that play was interesting because we had a lot of students in the cast who self-identified with gender neutral pronouns and whose life was very gender invested in gender infused and doing it on my campus and Spokane, it wasn't that way to those people the gender themes and something like the force of habit, which is a play about inverting genders and what happens when you swap genders was really a different experience, so I can talk a little bit more about that. I kind of want to synthesize that with talking through half good. So just as all those processes and any dramaturgical processes you know will contain all of these different steps, working with half good allowed me to kind of get more conceptual with that and think about facts in space. So the actor Dave Rideout made the character of Kerner in half good a very physical experience and he made the math in that play very meaningful. He played about physics, it's a play about science and he was able to take that and humanize it which was very instructive for the dramaturg to play back and forth between facts and space. So on the back of your handout you have some pieces of our process some text from the play at the bottom and some thoughts above and some audience material that we generated at the top. So Suburd writes a Russian character, Joseph Kerner, who provides a hard science of the Strategic Defense Initiative and the Antiparticle Trap and he also provides a lot of the comic that's very brief. So you wouldn't think those two things would go together but it takes a skillful actor to kind of physicalize that and make it funny. The play contains metaphors about personal and professional loyalty, about trust and suspicion but it relies on knowledge of this double slit experiment which is when you shoot light through two holes and see it behave as both waves and particles at the same time whether you observe the experiment or not. So if you as a dramaturg are interrogating for facts then you need to look into those facts. That's used in Suburd in dramatic terms for when the two twin spies are doubled as Russian agents and the British agents are experiencing that kind of today you decided to look. You changed the experiment by observing it and Elizabeth Hapgood leaves the secret service returning to civilian life and that kind of made me pause a little bit and say the act of observing changes your results. What does that mean for dramaturgs? The act of observing changes what you see. So I then had to kind of provoke myself and say is a dramaturg then this kind of double agent who gets what you interrogate for is a double agent like a trick of the light. There's a line in the play a double agent is like a trick of the light. It depends on the which way you look and I think yeah I think you do. In the collaborative context you do you get what you interrogate for. You get what you look for and you change the experiment and you change the process deciding to look that day. You decide what you see. So conclude I'd say if you interrogate the text for facts you'll get the facts. The upper kind of left hand column on the handout which is a great place to start. Go down the mine bring the canary see who survives. If you interrogate the text for space you'll get movement and aesthetics and it might be beautiful but lack the conceptual content of why or when the play needs to exist. For me the same went for Jesus Christ Superstar and Trellis and Cressida. It was exactly the same. If you try and restage the pageant you'll miss what's now, what your writers adapted, what your community needs from and adapt the project and that was true for us. So a dramaturg is like a trick of the light. No longer the circles the curves of a Venn diagram trying to see how they intersect with each other but the hard edges of rectangular pages, the individual particles of light, the cold isolation of waves. We're all doubles even you. And at the end of the day both then and now in the text and in the liveness you have to be in two places at once. But the end of the day of that play tells us that it's quantum. Not double but endlessly multiple with a dramaturg. Thank you. We're halfway there. Diane Brewer University of Evansville. So the title of my presentation is Kilroy's in the classroom, Bigger and Better. Question mark? I'll come back to that. If you go to the Kilroy's.org website and you look at the opening statement on their homepage, you'll see four phrases that I think are pretty resonant. The first is they're done talking. They're taking action. They're mobilizing others and leveraging our power. Yes. And I wonder as a teacher what role I should play in that effort. And what role other teachers might play in that effort. I know we can talk. And I preach action. And I spend the majority of my professional time mobilizing students. But there's nothing quite like working at a university to cultivate skepticism about leveraging power. So that's why I have a title with a question. Because I see in this organization, in this room, a group of diverse people with multiple ideas. But I wonder if we are effectively leveraging our own power. And at the end of this presentation, I'm going to ask for your help. So content of my presentation has four basic steps. First I'm going to talk about a class that I taught last semester based on plays from the Kilroy's list. Then I'm going to tell you about an assignment that I gave to students where I imagined that or I asked them to imagine taking action. And then I'm going to share some stories about some of my students who actually mobilized and took actual action. And then I'm going to ask for your help. These pages are sticking together. Okay, there we go. Okay, so the class that I taught, this is what we did. We read plays from the Kilroy's list. And then I asked the students to research parity in the theater and do presentations on them. And then their final project required them to choose one of the issues that we had talked about and that they cared the most about. And imagine how they would address that problem in the field. They had to devise a plan of action. Now the plans of action that they came up with were extraordinary as most students who came up with plans of action. They imagined things that I could never imagine. But I'm going to tell you about two people in particular, two projects that emerged out of this class in particular. The first one is Maddie Easley and she developed the monologue parity project. And you can find the monologue parity project by going to monologueparityproject.wordpress.org. You can also look for, she has a blog article that she's written that's going to be published on HowlRound soon, so you look for her article. But basically, because she was a freshman in college at the time, she had a very visceral memory of her experience as a young woman in high school looking for monologues that spoke to her and finding monologues that didn't traffic in stereotypical tropes. And she thought, what if I set up a site where anyone can go in and tell a story. And then anyone can go in and read that story and write a monologue. And then anyone can take that monologue and perform it at an audition. She set it up, it's happening, you should check it out. It's pretty cool. The other story I'm going to tell you is about a history major named Chelsea Walker and her project, first when she came up to present her project, she started with an apology. She was a little worried that her idea wasn't as impactful as some of the other people in the class, and I just wow, okay. This is what she came up with. So she was talking to some of her friends about what they had, what we had been talking about in the class, and they said what? What? There's no gender parity in the theater, what can we do? Okay, this is a student from rural Illinois whose only experience of theater before coming to college was the male Spanish teacher who wrote all of the plays for their high school. Well, this is what they decided to do. She and her friends formed a mother-daughter playgoing group, and they have committed to seeing five plays a year that are either female authored or are dominated by female production teams known in the class. I thought that was the least impactful idea. Okay, alright, so what are our options? We can spread the word, we can support people, we can go to the sites, we can acknowledge that the Kilroy's gave us a gift. They gave me a list of plays that I had never read, that I could share with my students, and they also responded to the impulse to act, knowing that they weren't going to have a five-year plan, that they were going to be unexpected consequences, and that they would negotiate those unexpected consequences. And they remind me that we all have stories as teachers about students, like the ones I've just told you. So here's my question. What if we, we in this room, could create an open source platform where we share resources with each other and students in classrooms who have the ability to imagine things that we are too jaded to imagine ourselves? What can you contribute? Do you have an idea? Do you have a point of contact? Can you submit a video that answers a specific question? I ask this question as a teacher, and also as the incoming VP for university relations. I want to make this project happen, and I need your help. What can you do? Thank you. Good afternoon. The topic of my talk is after the show closes, preserving the theatrical legacy of campus productions. So there's this New Yorker cartoon that appeared in 2001, in which a theater goer speaking to his companion turns and says, I love the ephemeral nature of live theater. Once a specific performance is over, you can never be subjected to it again. For better or worse, many performing artists create work without foresight or expectation that will ever be seen again. After all, performance is the art of the present, according to theater director Eugenio Barba. It ceases to be at the same moment as it becomes. After the show closes and the performance has disappeared, what is left? Overstuffed boxes, dusty filing cabinets, and scattered electronic documents containing the script or text of course, production notes from the director and stage manager, scenic and costume designers designs, lighting plots, photos, press files, and other documentation. Admittedly, these artifacts are a meager representation of a three-dimensional living and breathing work existing in real time, but they have enduring value and are worth preserving for they provide a window into the creation and production process of theater professionals. Since 2009, the American Society for Theater Research has led the effort to preserve the legacy of living theater companies through the American Theater Archives project by providing resources and support for setting up a company's current and archival records. But what about college and university productions? Some institutions have well-established physical archives or digital repositories while others post production photo links on their website. Still others have collections that remain in departmental silos and are largely undiscoverable. At the University of Puget Sound, a mix of disparate systems is used to capture our campus productions. While it serves our purpose, we were looking for a more unified approach, a digitization initiative sponsored by the Council of Independent Colleges and underwritten by the Mellon Foundation was exactly what we needed. Last fall, we were among 42 institutions awarded a three-year grant. For our project, we chose to construct a visual history of faculty-directed productions using photographs, set designs, posters, programs, costumes, and other materials to showcase the creative work at Puget Sound. Using a product called Shared Shelf, a cloud-based asset management service, we have digitized and cataloged almost 300 items from four productions, Angels in America Part 1, a streetcar named Desire, In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play, and 1620 Bank Street, an original commissioned work by a local playwright. We plan to add many more productions over time and include student-directed productions as well. In addition to archiving and preservation, Shared Shelf has allowed us to achieve other goals. For one, our theater image collection will be exposed to a broader audience thereby raising the profile of the theater department and preserving its legacy. Additionally, we hope the project will have an impact on teaching and learning by allowing instructors to easily integrate these primary sources into their coursework. For example, a student in the first-year seminar might research the political climate of the 1980s by investigating a staging of Angels in America. In another seminar, a history of science faculty might use material from In the Next Room to discuss the origin of the electric era in the 1880s. The possibilities are endless for assignments and projects that cross disciplinary boundaries. So while we will always celebrate the ephemeral nature of theater, it is important that we preserve its artifacts for future artists, scholars, students, and audiences. If your response to the questions about your theater's history is, I think it's somewhere in that closet over there, please contact the American Theater Archive Project whose co-founder is here at this conference, or if you work in academia, please talk to an archivist or librarian. Thank you. Jessica Rizzo, Yale School of Drama. Today I'm going to be talking about dramaturgies of waste, which might initially sound like just the thing that we as dramaturgs are supposed to concern ourselves with eradicating from the theater. We often praise and preside over the execution of efficient or economical storytelling, and we've all probably disparaged pieces of theater that are too long, too sprawling, or too unfocused as being self-indulgent or lacking a payoff. While this language can be useful under certain circumstances, it also echoes the language of the marketplace in ways that I find limiting at best and sort of sinister at worst. Pache, my friends from Seattle. I got interested in thinking about waste in theater on a thematic level a couple of years ago when I was looking at ways that artists were attempting to engage with what I see as two of the biggest, scariest, and most intractable issues confronting the world today. Environmental waste, of course, and the human waste of globalization in the form of refugees, asylum seekers, the unemployed, or the unemployed, and thinking about the ways in which we might be able to learn more about ourselves as a culture by looking at the things we don't value, the things we don't take care of properly, discard, or push to the margins. I started wondering about how different dramaturgies might help us to unlearn certain habits of mind that it's difficult to avoid consciously or unconsciously cultivating when we live in a consumer society. We're constantly being told that we live in an increasingly competitive world where it's essential for us to always be escalating and finding ways to quantify our productivity, to promote our work, to sell ourselves. Having a distinctive personal brand is now considered all but essential by the how to be a successful 21st century entrepreneur literature. All of this noise engenders a kind of scarcity mentality when in fact we live in a time of tremendous, if severely, unequally distributed abundance. So, non-productive expenditure or waste of resources, time, energy to look immoral, irresponsible, even self-destructive, when in fact much of what I think most people would agree makes life worth living is not productive in any conventional or measurable way. Play, contemplation, forgiveness, eroticism, religion, sport, art, to measure the success or failure of these pursuits according to their efficiency or productivity would be, I think, to miss the point entirely. But we still have this language of production and productions baked into the way we talk about theater. So I got interested in sort of rehabilitating the notion of waste as it pertains to our field. So a few disparate contemporary examples. The plot of Ibsen's Enemy of the People revolves around questions of ecological crisis and environmental waste brought about by a municipal government more focused on immediate economic rewards rather than on the long-term health of the population. But the Shabuna artistic director Tomas Ostermayer's production introduced a novel feature into the famous town hall scene where the protagonist gathers the townspeople to warn them of the dangers of thinking in the short-sighted terms of profit margins. Ostermayer interpolates text from contemporary writers opposing globalization and neoliberalism and then opens the town hall meeting up into a frame-breaking debate on the state of contemporary capitalism with spectators encouraged to square off against the performers and each other inviting the audience to respond to this provocation. Dramaturgically it could be considered a wasteful moment if no one in the audience chooses to speak up or if what they have to say is banal, irrelevant or badly expressed. Ostermayer runs the risk of seeing his taught drama go slack and this was at least partially the case when I saw the production went toward the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2013. But in creating a space to enact the messy, inefficient and at times boring political process we need to preserve in order to have a democratic society. Ostermayer eloquently demonstrates that time wasted in the theater and elsewhere what I'll call good waste is the price that should and must be paid to control what I'll call bad waste. Another way of encouraging different spectatorial habits is through durational extremes. A Robert Wilson spectacle that lasts for an entire uninterrupted week for example resists the acquisitive impulse we might bring even to our experience of an ineffable performance event. It's impossible to have the full experience of such a piece. To have the full experience of a piece like that you can't possess it, it can only possess you. The parts of the performance where your attention wanders or even where you fall asleep aren't wasted on you. They're an essential component of creating an experience in which you feel incidental which is a feeling we could stand to get reacquainted with as human beings. We tend to put ourselves at the center and to think of the earth and the other creatures that live on it as separate from us as resources to be tapped for our benefit. In a piece of theater that emphatically stands in scale, we're forced to see ourselves as just one tiny element of a landscape. The Austrian playwright Alfreda Jaliniak takes an opposite approach with her dense jagged collage-like plays using textual access to create language scapes that are suffocated with man-made garbage. That's actual trash, junk ideologies and mythologies. The growing slag heap as one of her plays is titled, victims of wars fought for the sake of economic expansion. There's too much of a human in her plays, but very little discernible humanity. So these are some dramaturgical approaches that use waste as a kind of structural or aesthetic strategy for reassessing the place and function of the human being in the world fighting bad waste with good waste as it were. And I hope this way of thinking about our practice can maybe allow us to reassess why time wisely wasted in the theater is perhaps preferable to time well spent. Thank you. Two to go here. Patrick Denney, University of Santa Cruz. University of California. I knew I was going to get that wrong. University of California, Santa Cruz. Welcome him, please. Hi. I'm going to be giving a talk today entitled, Dramaturg to Pharmaturg, Pharmacos and Dionysian Dramaturgie. I can't point to anything specifically, but if you took a knife to this play, it would bleed me. With this quote, Mark Bly illuminates what can be one of the most frustrating caveats to the dramaturg's practice, that our work is incredibly hard to quantify. What does the dramaturg have to show for their Tyler's efforts weeks, even months of rehearsal? If we examine the definition of dramaturgies that Bly presents as the lifeblood of a production, I believe we can find the record of our contribution. Inspired by Jamie Kozens, the dramaturg and the irrational, I've been engaging with her borrowed binary of the Apollonian and the Dionysian Dramaturg. Building on her work, I have come to view the Apollonian Dramaturg as a figure with an almost surgical economy in their actions. They make knowing incisions into the dramaturgical body that is a play, removing all small sections of infected tissue, or if necessary, amputating entire limbs. However, dramaturgie cannot be practiced with only one perspective. Instead, we must give equate, and in my opinion, greater emphasis to what Kozens defines as Dionysian Dramaturgie. For Kozens to be a Dionysian Dramaturg is to relinquish control, to hurl oneself heart long into strangeness. In this embrace of strangeness, the Dionysian recognizes an inevitable part of any rehearsal process, that it will at some point fall apart. They are willing to accept injury and revel in the search for knowledge that comes from both failure and success, relishing in the physicality of the journey. While this embrace of a more holistic dramaturgical practice might fly in the face of the Apollonian Dramaturg as doctor, there's a wonderful liminality between these two polarizing identities, a blurred border where dramaturgical best practices could be observed and adopted. The tools that allow us to explore this overlap are the ancient Greek ideas of pharmacon and pharmacos, words that can be translated as either poison or medicine. Jacques Derrida seized upon this term in his own work, Dissemination, Derrida makes the case that writing, particularly performative writing, can be perceived as a drug. While discussing the work of artist phantasm, a copy of a copy, Derrida points to the politics of memetic reproduction and the tensions that are dredged up in the process of translating oral speech into the written word. He who writes with the alphabet no longer even imitates, no doubt because he's also in a sense imitating perfectly. He has a better chance at reproducing the voice because phonetic writing decomposes it better and transforms it into the abstract spatial elements. This decomposition of the voice has here both what best conserves it and what best corrupts it. To Derrida, once it hits the page, the voice is dead, decomposing before our very eyes. Perhaps then text-based theater is the reversal of that system, the reanimation of the voice as it passes from words on the page to voice on the stage. But because these words have been captured on the page first, they have, for Derrida, been corrupted. Theater is built around this corruption though. It brings phenomenon and spectacle to writing, adding the third dimension needed for true understanding and appreciation. Through a knowledge of production history and a navigation of research, the dramaturg can create yet another phantasm, a way of examining a performance that acknowledges the corruption and through close study and observation is able to mask it, if only for a little while. The corruption still exists though. What does this mean for performance then? If we can view writing in this manner as a corruptive drug, how can we interpret an artistic medium like theater where a script is infected from the moment the playwright sets it down on the page? The answer is pharmacos. In times of hardship like plague and famine, a single representative often marked by otherness in some way was selected and then they were through a highly stylized ritual purged from the city and in some instances killed. This purge supposedly cleansed the city of its maladies, allowing it to recover and thrive. The performance of the text, the translation of the static entity into a dynamic organic creature, serves as pharmacos removing the infection. The dramaturg as a key advocate for the script within the rehearsal process can be seen as a facilitator for this process, guiding the patient, the collective being that is a piece of theater through the process of purging and ultimately into a healthy, vibrant life. If you took a knife to this play, it would bleed me. The dramaturg at its current evolutionary point exists as both pharmacon and pharmacos within the theater. For some we are a lingering poison that cannot be purged from the theatrical body. Still others see us as some sort of healing to solve, our application helping to heal wounds and cure existing maladies. However, salve is not the right word. It's far too visible. No, perhaps we are a powerful pill that is absorbed into the body. Perhaps the best practice for dramaturgy lies in a sort of dramaturgical transubstantiation, the symbolic transformation of the physical body and body of work, the archive of the dramaturg's contribution into the dramaturgical body of the play itself. Perhaps this is the source of Bly's blood. Thank you. Hope you have some questions ready in just a minute. Robin Quick, Towson University. I still vividly recall the constant challenges and discoveries of my earliest career teaching. And each time I navigated a tricky moment to my satisfaction or believed that I had taught something more successfully the second time that I had the first, I hoped that meant I was finding my groove as a professor. And it was fun, so I kept doing it. I've been thinking lately about the longer game. What are the shifts in one's groove as a professor? As the semesters turn into years well, you get the idea. And what can those new perceptions and experiences tell us about how we might continue to develop as teachers in the future and throughout our careers? I share some personal reflections to generate conversations about the ongoing process of discovery that we make in teaching and what is joyful about it at every stage. If you are early career, I hope to give you some food for thought about your journey now and into the future. If you have also been at it for more than a little while, I wonder what has shifted for you. And if you are a senior to me and in this room, then you have inspired or mentored me at some point. I thank you and I welcome your further wisdom. Here in no particular order are five thoughts in five minutes on the joys of teaching at mid-career. One, the familiarity and confidence that comes with having taught a course multiple times allows me to place even greater emphasis on the student's encounter with what we are learning. The more the goals for the particular lesson and the material I plan to cover are in my bones, the more I can set aside the notes and then be even more intensely attuned to what is percolating in their minds, nurture their developing thoughts, urge deeper analysis, fuel a potentially productive debate, and seize every teachable moment. In fact, I've discovered sometimes less is more. When I look back to certain comprehensive command of the material, I now feel freer to set aside the notes if it means deeper engagement with something that has resonance for them and find other ways to cover the material that was summarized briefly. Number two, trying something new now has different resonance. Once upon a time everything was new by definition, right? But I've discovered that when an established professor whose department chair walks into the room and says, we're going to try something I've never done before, there's a level of engagement and interest in the room that's fun for all of us. I hope that means that I'm modeling adventure and risk taking in a way that I'd love for them to continue. Certainly lifelong learning is what I hope to encourage. Number three, these students bring fresh ways of understanding the world that inspire me. As just one example, my student's sense of the variety and fluidity of gender and sexuality has expanded exponentially from what was when I first started teaching. Of course this topic is far more complex than a brief observation can convey, but the broadened range of possibilities in the conversation makes me hopeful that they're more accepting and inclusive world and certainly impacts the perspective they bring to our consideration of why this play at this time for this audience. Number four, today's students bring new experiences of the world that challenge me. My students learned how to learn with rubrics and schedules of standardized teaching that were not present in the culture in the same way when I started teaching. I am reminded of the notion espoused by Paulo Freire and others however that we must meet the students at their starting point. And so I work to create a dialogue with them that speaks to their educational frame of reference with the structures that they believe they need to be successful. At the same time that I hope to inspire them to the independence and creative innovative thinking that will serve them in our society in the future. And number five what's different now? My cast of collaborators has expanded. I've always been attracted to the notion of students as junior colleagues as so many of us do in how we do what we do. Together previous students and I have engaged in collaborative learning using the dramaturgical process to explore new works and learn about the cultures in which they were created. Now my cast of junior colleagues has expanded to include alumni with whom I collaborate as artists and scholars. I've hired some form professional partnerships with others. Hope some will hire me soon. And others come back to teach or guest lecture and enrich the education of current students. As I look at the journey ahead for all of us I'm certain will continue to be inspired and challenged by new developments in our students in ourselves in our world. And I look forward to continuing to gain insights from the work of colleagues at LMDA in this wonderful event and elsewhere in the field. And we'll take particular delight in what the students all of us have today will bring to the conversation in the future. Thank you. So we have about ten minutes I think for conversation or dialogue amongst folks on the big panel here but also this is a chance for you to ask questions. So I think we have some mics in the house and can we get a couple hand mics up on stage too? So all your questions have been answered clearly. Yes. This one is kind of a shared question for Jessica and I'd like to hear Patrick chime in as well. I'm really interested in I'm hearing Jessica talking about a structure this is what I hear and what bounces off my head. A structure of plays that break from a kind of clean or agreed upon structure of development which is something that I'm also extremely interested in and I'm curious if you had any thoughts on how waste affects process or how we develop process that embraces waste. You're on. I think that the fantasy of this growth is something that is a larger problem in our culture as well as being a problem in new play development which isn't in my world but in art making and making in general. I don't think more is always better. I don't think expansion is always better and I don't think more is always possible so I guess I would be against growth in that. So waste, as someone who has been what you might consider waste. Waste is an interesting word for dramaturg. I invite you all to come and talk to me about it. Same as plug. I encouraged or I talked about my experience working as a dance dramaturg for a piece called Splinter's Inner Ankle by a great choreographer named Joe Cassell and I felt redundant. I felt like waste on this process because I didn't have too much of a dance background and I came to the process a bit late. So there was this wonderful redundancy in it that I didn't really appreciate until I started reflecting for my thesis and I was very nervous working on it because I had thought that ah this experiment was a complete failure. It was a waste of time. What am I going to conk and cock to make it into a thesis? But then Gerald came up to me and said you're vital to the process. Waste can change its identity in fun interesting ways. Hopefully it got some work. Is that Mona out there? You have to really be right on top of these hand-makes. Good for you. The only thing that occurs to me as I listen is Barbara's phrase. The important thing is to think the thought and I think that can occur as we revisit things and that can occur in relation to new things and generally it's hard to say ahead of time or even during what will what thought or value will be generated by something. So I'm just always in my practice very philosophical I guess or increasingly philosophical and try not to focus on outcomes. There's somebody's hand up right across the hall there. Go ahead and then we'll go back here. I feel like I'm hearing we're talking about two different kinds of growth and maybe you can help clarify this for me. I hear we're talking about growth and waste in terms of maybe the plays as a production and maybe growth and waste and play just the play. Like the growth of the life of the play versus the production of the play. I don't think that's a question. I'm just hearing two different conversations. My intent was not to actually come from my position as an umbrella project or to talk about lifespan of new plays or how we think about them commercially. My other company is actually one called The Seagull Project and we spent 18 months working on the works of Anton Chekhov and we have specifically tailored that model to utilize our time and not waste it to go into a rehearsal process at Act Theatre in Seattle and so I'm actually I write both of these rails and I don't see them as antithetical but I'm actually just curious about forms of practice and that's really where my question was coming from. Thank you very much. I think we're going to go back here now. Go ahead. You touched on yet and is it actually a question to anyone? It's mostly a question to everyone here but I'm just noticing how white the room is and there's no offense in that but I'm just wondering how do we diversify as LMDA and as theatre artists and I'm noticing that there's 8 out of 12 women on stage which is amazing and I feel really proud of that and so I'm just kind of closing a question and looking around the room I'm like oh how do we actually bring that into light? So that was just sort of a thought that I had. Does anybody on stage want to respond? Questions? Response question? I'm looking for hands. Yes. I could respond a little briefly to that. I think that you're absolutely right that this is a profession that is coming late to the diversity party and we need to get on it. However it's also a profession that in the last 30 years has gone from being exclusively male to being dominated by women so that's something. But I can tell you I think that there has been a...as dramaturgy programs have begun to grow in academia that has been the exact same time that the cost of public education in this country has been rising and this is because of decreased funding from state and so as we in the university system are doing our damnedest to try and be more inclusive about the kinds of students that we are able to reach and you can see just recently we wanted a very important Supreme Court case about who we can admit into our classrooms and who we can't that process has worked against our ability to recruit people of diverse backgrounds and diverse approaches into our student body. So I'm from UC Santa Cruz and we just became a Hispanic serving institution and so one of the things that I've been doing is looking and talking with my colleagues who are focusing specifically on Latinx dramaturgy and theater practice to try and be more inclusive about the way that we teach dramaturgy and the way that we invite people in. So I think that one of the ways that we can begin to address this issue that you raise is in the university classroom and so I can tell you that we're working very hard where I come from on that but we got a long way to go. I also would love to speak other people have said this before but just to speak to it in this room. This is a field that's very apprenticeship and internship driven which creates a huge socioeconomic barrier and I'm super privileged and I've done like four internships which is great and I learned a ton in all of them but I think that though I don't want to conflate socioeconomic diversity and racial diversity those are definitely linked and that's something that we could look to address. I know there's a whole Rachel's doing an early career dramaturgy session where we'll talk all about that later on. Yeah I'll also say like and I think there are multiple factors at work here. I think conference going has a lot of barriers to entry and it's an expensive thing to do it involves a lot of travel. We're in Portland Oregon right now which is a city that I love very dearly and it is the widest city that I have ever lived in so I do think that it's a complicated not of a problem but I think you know identifying for ourselves as leaders in our field like who should be at this conference who am I going to work extra hard to get there and try and equalize that out a little bit more. I'll also just go ahead thank you. Yeah go ahead. Thank you. I'm going to go ahead and also just put this into actionable terms because we are a group of dramaturgs. We are a group of people who work on scripts and I think that one of the primary issues is actually structure of story and the types of stories that we tell around the world. We are very fortunate to be part of a large scale conversation right now that is happening about gender binary racial diversity and it's a lot of the ways that we bring people into this field is by opening up the conversation the structures of stories and I know that's not just on the dramaturg but it is certainly our job to support stories that are not the norm excuse me speaking as a white male and to continue to open that up and challenge traditional story structures once again Thank you. Go ahead. Move us through this into the next thing a little bit which is I was hit by the same thing walking into this room and I was like it was a white conference and I've been thinking about I was really struck in this hot topics session by the different perspectives of working changing how we think about dramaturgy in practice and thinking about your presentation a little bit in terms of thinking about dramaturg as city planner or diversifying how we the place where dramaturg lives I think we often think about like the rehearsal room the writing room maybe if we're allowed and academia and I was struck to think about who you are engaging with and I guess my question to you is how are you engaging with the city and the place as a way to invite other people into the practice of dramaturgy because the reality is that city planners are dramaturgs and they are practicing dramaturgy all the time the person at town hall is practicing dramaturgy all the time the graffiti artist is like enacting dramaturgy so how do we explode the definition of dramaturgy in a way that invites more people into the field rather than limiting it to engagement in academia only or in a production that you have to get the internship for in order to engage with it so I'm curious who you engage with and how those you identified yourself as a dramaturgy to a new audience we'll take this will be your last answer so Laranica you're at pressure is on that's very loud so I'm still writing my dissertation so I'm still asking some of those questions that you're asking and as I said bringing back bringing dramaturgy back around into my project has come at a later time I think some of the questions that you posed are the questions that I'm posing if the city is performance who's doing the performing who's receiving the performance who's the performance for who's being erased from those performances one of my chapters is focusing on the work of Theaster Gates who I mentioned in my five minutes he explicitly identifies as an artist and an urban planner he's working on the south side of Chicago and he has a very well regarded studio practice that he's a visual artist a sculptor and his work has a lot of performative elements in it so there's that where he's going into gallery spaces he's really questioning who's being allowed in that space who those spaces are traditionally for and how he can explode that also he's a major at this point millions of dollars major developer on the south side of Chicago to highlight a neighborhood on the south side of Chicago that we think of the south side of Chicago and violence and disinvestment and all those things that he's very concerned about because he grew up in Chicago and so he's now creating networks there concerned with the local population but giving them a lot more or highlighting the space that they're in in a way that now a lot of the rest of Chicago is coming to visit certain spaces that he has created so I'm looking at the interactions of those folks who are coming in who has lived there for a long time the effect that he's having both in his studio work and as an urban planner and the interaction between the two I'm really interested in the work that individuals do and how that work talks to larger systems and how those systems talk back or don't talk back so I'm not going to end this conversation I'm going to invite it to continue and I hope you'll join me in thanking our panelists for great topics today thank you so much everybody I'm going to steal the mic for two seconds so you all have about 27 minutes just