 And welcome to the No Summary, Golden Threads online conversations with artists who don't fit in a box. For those of you who don't know, Golden Thread is the first American theater company devoted to the Middle East and is founded by a playwright and esteemed director, Taranj Yehazarian in 1996. I'm Sarah Farmy, I use she, her pronouns. I'm a scholar, a divisor, a community-based researcher and I'm currently an assistant professor of theater at Florida State University. I am wearing a light green blazer with a striped v-neck shirt, colorful earrings and I have medium length, dark black hair with blue highlights in it. Hi, I'm Marina Johnson, I use she, their pronouns. I'm a director, dramaturg and scholar, currently a PhD candidate at Stanford University. I am a pale woman with dark wavy hair wearing a navy blue shirt in front of a blurred window background. I would like to take a moment here to acknowledge the people on the land on which we live and work today, the multiple Alone tribes. Despite the atrocities of colonization and genocide, native communities persist today and are active in efforts to preserve and revive their culture. At Golden Thread, we are driven by a desire to expand this land acknowledgement statement to recognize our community's experience of occupation in the Middle East, the refugee crisis and the displaced population. Whether we are immigrants displaced by political economic events or U.S. born for one or more generation, we all appreciate the human connection to the land. No summary program is in its fourth season this year and in this new season, the program embarks on a virtual tour to universities across the nation, bringing Golden Threads conversations with artists who don't fit into a box into theater and art classes. We'll start by introducing our guests. Yasmin Zakaria Mikhail, she's a dramaturg, theater journalist and oral historian with roots in and around Chicago. As a queer, fat, brown femme, they endeavor to amplify and archive stories that go lost, stolen and forgotten. Their writing and research explores the possibility models for a more inclusive and sustainable theater culture and industry. Next, we have Aishana Akimete, who uses her pronouns. Aishana received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin comparative literature program. Her research focuses on contemporary theater criticism in England and the reception of the art color theater productions that deal with Turkey's political history. The latest works are forthcoming in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and a collection of theaters of resilience in Turkey. And we have Tara Kamami, who is a New York based playwright, best known for his plays, Smale. Everything will be alright, the town of no one, spite, white picket fences, the one Percy Ent and co-writer on the musical The Life of Mary Rogers. He is currently working on a commission from Golden Thread Productions where he is a resident artist. Please look for the intersectionality of faith and culture, calling on his multi-faith and multicultural upbringing. I am personally exceptionally stoked about this no summary session, because it is a collaboration with the Middle Eastern Theater Focus Group at the ATHA conference. ATHA stands for the Association of Theater in Higher Education. And this session builds on numerous fruitful discussions and conversations that we've had both at ATHA and with Golden Thread. This conversation seeks to analyze the status of post-pandemic theater criticism and the desired pathways forward, both in academia and in praxis from Swannar artists. One of the Middle Eastern Theater Focus Group's primary goals, and I'm the Focus Group representative, so I'm the chair of the group this year. One of our primary goals is to serve as a hub for theater and performance scholarship and artistry in the United States, home regions and other diasporas. And this session is one of the intentional collaborations that we've really been working very hard on in the past few years to help bridge the academy and scholars in the academy with industry. So today we have the great honor of building off of conversations that our group has had at the conference for several years and since its inception in 2019. And a no summary panel that I was so lucky that I got to moderate as part of the, in collaboration with Minatma last year. So Minatma stands for the Middle Eastern North African Theater Makers Alliance at the convention that we had at the Our American National Museum where we looked at topics of cultural competency in the multiple forms of criticism and the ways that Swannar artists and academics seek to change the game. That conversation was very important and necessary and we realized that there are multiple conversations that have to come out of it and it's a continued effort. Today Yasmin, Aijan and I are actually zooming in live from the conference. We are in Austin, Texas and this is the indigenous lands of the Tanakawa, Kamachi and the Apache and we are here joining from Austin. So we're very excited to be in collaboration with Golden Thread this year. And I am zooming in from Palestine where you can potentially hear call to prayer behind me. So I hope that we also enjoy that coming into the space. Before we dive into our conversation, I just wanna take a moment to welcome the folks who are joining us here on the Zoom room but also those tuning into the live stream on HowlRounds. Those here with us, please feel free to utilize the chat function to post your comments and questions throughout the conversation. So I wanna start off our conversation with a quote from Yasmin that they said in a Kenefa and Shea podcast about theater criticism. Quotes, the problem with arts criticism is also the problem with this country and figuring out how white supremacy culture is the thing that actually undergirds a lot of the ways that we're moving through the world. And even when we're thinking about a culture, it's not just about race and ethnicity. It's about how we speak, how we love, what our lived experiences are. So then if we look at the microcosm of how theater criticism is replicating those issues, a lot of it is because of the distance we're trying to have this mythical objectivity between who we're writing on the page and who we're witnessing on the stage. And quote, I love those very powerful words said by Yasmin and I think that can serve as a really good jumping off point. In previous conversations, we've covered topics like how and when is theater criticism useful and problems with existing forms of theater criticism. But our hope today is to extend this conversation into how we can change the game. So to start, I'll ask each of you to share one priority for the future of Vanessa theater criticism. Yasmin, since it was your quote, would you mind starting? I appreciate that. Thank you so much for gathering us today. It's been really exciting, not only to be a part of Ather right now, but finally in like a little home base with golden threads. And it was really fun being on that podcast almost a year ago or so. And it's really fascinating to me that we continue to have a lot of these questions and there's still so much depth that can come from them. I think moving forward, I really just wanna see more investment in younger critics that are writing from our particular cultural location. A lot of the times in Chicago, I feel like I'm the only one of Middle Eastern descent writing on Middle Eastern theater. And I would love to just have more colleagues around me on the ground too. And I wanna be thinking about it in an abundance mindset because a lot of the times I'm straddling both dramaturgy and criticism. So if I don't write on it because I'm dramaturging, I'm not sure that it's gonna get the same amount of depth that it needs. So I'm definitely looking forward to more investments in the next generation of critics, specifically of similar heritage, but also who are the folks out here that could also skill up even if they're coming from a different kind of career too. That's an amazing way to start this conversation, Yasmin. Thank you. And I think abundance mindset really is like such an important thing. And so not really feeling like more people is a bad thing. We actually want more voices in this conversation. Aijan, since you're next to Yasmin, we won't do this always, but maybe we can add to you. Yeah, I'm also really excited to be here. Thank you so much for holding that space for us. I wanna bring up something that I feel like is overlooked when we interact with criticism, which is like, these are just texts that emerge from certain contexts and they are shaped by many layers of context that also bring so much bias with them. I just feel like, yes, everything, that Yasmin said, but I also feel like we need to change the way that we think about criticism and just see these as products of their political context, social, cultural, and of course, personal. And when I say this, of course, it is important to challenge the authority of the critic as this arbiter of taste, as someone whose word is like taken to be either 100% true or as like betrayers of a production, but they are just texts that surround these performances and these productions and they do come with their bias. I think that's like really important when we think about criticism. Definitely, let's bounce it over to you now and then we can actually use pieces. Yeah, I think for me, I mean, a priority goes back to something that has been asked for in many different facets and that goes down to representation within a room and that we need more people from our community either reviewing our work or at least in the offices of people who are reviewing our work. Because I think of an experience I had working in a literary office one time for a theater company and one day randomly the artistic director comes in and specifically hands something to me and says, could you read this and tell me what you think? And I was like, why is this person talking to me? And when I read it, it was obvious it dealt with the Middle East, it dealt with Islam. And I realized I'm the only person in this building that can give you any insight into this. And it was very clear it was written by somebody who was either it was not Muslim and not Arab or Middle Eastern or anything. So at least having somebody within the room either reviewing our work personally or if somebody from outside our community is gonna review our work, they have somebody in their office that they can talk to and be like, what was this about? So I think that would be a big priority for me. Definitely. From looking around at the faces onto them that I can see it seems like that experience might have unfortunately replicated itself in different places as well. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah, it's so funny because Marina and I are switching off questions like, what's the cutoff point? Bounten off of that, it's definitely, something that is coming up is like that issue of representation and that issue of like, well, who gets to talk or advocate about the work that you're doing and who gets to review that? And I get the pleasure of asking this very complicated question that sometimes we get the same answer to, sometimes it's all over. And so given what you just said, what do you think culturally competent theater criticism looks like and why is it important that as Swanna folks, we actually push for cultural competence? Maybe we'll go to Todick first since it was, we left off with you. Yeah, I mean, cultural competence in criticism, I think goes into a larger point I, or grape I have about criticism is that, the whole point to me of criticism is looking at, like why this piece, what is the value of this piece? It's something I talk about with my students when I'm trying to get them to write, papers critiquing art that it doesn't matter what you're seeing, if you're seeing, like another production of King Lear from the Royal Shakespeare Company or like Fast and the Furious 37 or whatever they're up to at this point, like you can have the same level of conversation because the question is, why did they feel the need to make this and why did they feel the need to ask you to come see it? And so I think that that, a lot of criticism needs to get back to that. And if you could get back to that, I think a lot of cultural competency would come into it because you would ask yourself as somebody not part of this culture, what did I get out of it? Or what do I think I was meant to get out of it? And then you can have a conversation on that level, which I think would be much more competent than the alternatives. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, thank you for that. Aishan. I was like, there's a concept that I really like about criticism. It was an essay by Jill Dolan. It's a critical generosity. It was misunderstood I think at some point as being always nice and always writing about positive things. But how I understand that and what I think that essay means is that speaking from a place of knowledge and that critics also evaluating and the artist thinking about their relationship in terms of like, how much do I know? How much do we know about each other's work? And always justifying to your readers, what is it that works? How does this work communicate to the audience? And what is it that it does well and justifying and informing your audiences on why it may not be doing that well? So most traditionally, we understand criticism to be like evaluating something. But even if you're evaluating, you need to be evaluating it from that standpoint, thinking like, what is it that these people are doing on stage? And how do I speak from a place of knowledge? And if that requires research, like digging deep more into a context and certain concepts that you see on stage and that maybe you don't know much about, then it is your duty as a critic or reviewer or journalist to dig more deep into those and look into how, okay, how can I inform my audience about this and how can I justify my own evaluation of this and speak from a place of like more knowledge? Yeah, and one thing I love to keep in mind too is that cultural competency is not a box that you check. It's not something that like, I did it, it's over and I don't have to keep reevaluating everything. And something in the quote that y'all shared of mine earlier is that culture goes beyond race and ethnicity. It's also about social locations. What other identities am I holding as I'm going into a space or writing on something? Something that I've really enjoyed researching so much is what happens after the criticism is written on a piece of paper because I think cultural competency doesn't end where you're writing. It's also about what conversations emerge from what you've written and then how you handle them. What does it mean for a critic to be just as reflexive, like really investigating what my writing is doing and then reflect on what you're doing? So you're gonna be changing how you're writing and how you're approaching different cultures based on what you learned in this experience because writing and publishing is one part of it but if you've done something that is potentially harmful or you miss something and community is calling you in, I think you have a duty to be accountable to your community and address it somehow. What I have questions about is like, what is the productive way to be doing that? So many critics don't even wanna touch social media. They don't wanna be getting in the Facebook comments with the folks that are really upset with their pieces but I'm always curious about what happens after it because I see cultural competency is ongoing and we're all coming from different contexts and there's always gonna be a rigor that we can approach and see and then there's gonna be things that we miss or mistakes that we make and I think a part of that competency is handling it in a way that is, what does the artist deserve? I wanna say something. I felt like what you say is really significant but that's what I meant like in the previous question when we challenge the critic or read reviews as just any other text. I think this is also placed into that like your critic or your review is not the ultimate word on a theater piece. It's just one of the many texts that's around it and that has equal value and it's just an ongoing conversation in the public sphere that is like extended beyond the performance space but then other people are going to react to it and are going to engage in a conversation with it. And if there was something that is missing that you missed a point for example, then a people's responses on social media become a part that complement your or maybe correct or refine your understanding of this piece. So these all, I think these all together all these should be considered as a part of a larger event but they're all equal value and they all surround the same text, the production that are in conversation with each other. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a great point too because every like work of writing you have a conversation with the people that see it or like as a playwright, like you do a talk back after reading or like as a novelist you go and read your work at a bookstore and have conversations with people but like as a critic you write something it goes out there and then like you said like that you could go through like the Facebook comment feed but you don't want to touch that and so as something that was intended to start a conversation, the person who created it does not end up engaging in that conversation, you know. But some do and I think that yeah, possibility problems like what it means to be a really engaged critic within your community and we're definitely in a turning point where people want to know who their critics are where they're coming from and have dialogues but there's some critics that are just so reticent to that and having a separation between the critic and the artist is actually more ethical for our business and that's also up for debate. I think something that keeps coming up from like just what's been circling so far is that we, you know, you're all advocating for or we're making assumptions that like the reviewers are knowledgeable and like they're going into this with like an open heart and an open mind and like they're willing to engage further and I think one of the issues that we keep coming up against is that the reviewers that keep coming in to see a lot of Swana performances especially in the US are not coming at it from that level of cultural competence and they're coming at it from a very Islamophobic rhetoric they're coming at it from a very specific perception of this is what we think this type of theater should be and this is who it's written for and obviously we're pushing against that but I'm curious how you feel like the who we're writing for how that has an impact on the types of reviews that are coming out and then the issue of like well are there enough reviewers that are currently out there that are culturally competent or is that something that we are still aspiring to achieve? So I guess it's a two part follow up question. I mean I think in terms of like are there enough reviewers out there who are culturally competent? I think that that's just like with all aspects of society right now it's an ongoing thing and sometimes you are and sometimes you aren't it depends on the person it depends on the culture that you're trying to be competent about I think for me what at a bare minimum there needs to be is an acknowledgement of what you are knowledgeable on and what you're not. I think I would totally be okay with a reviewer writing in something like I don't know a lot about the background of this but as a theater piece here's what I thought about it in terms of stagecraft. I think that would be totally fair but that's not something I think at least I've never read or encountered. It's fascinating though because in Chicago there's actually a model for that what does it mean to have disclaimers about your own background? It's rescripted magazine that was definitely bootstrapped in Chicago by a black queer femme person and there's a questionnaire kind of that all of the different critics fill out and so you can go and look and learn more about them and even sometimes within the pieces it's very much prioritizing what locations are you coming from? What I'm curious about too is how we have editors that can really challenge some of the dog whistles and really horrible metaphors or racist puns that a lot of the time happened not just in Middle Eastern reviews but a lot of people of colors work where we see so much language that is meant as a joke is actually super harmful and hurtful. Just a couple sentences of throwing there. Yeah, I was like studying a play it's a play about the Kurdish experience in Turkey and it was staged in the UK and most of the reviews they were like oh, this is only a play that Turkish people can understand and it was so problematic on so many levels it's like coming from a place of like assigning these audiences to plays based only on the subject matter or the playwright or the theater company that is quite problematic it's also there might be people reading it and being discouraged from attending it and it is so unfair to a theater company who relies only on the box office income who has no other funding so those kinds of statements and like Tarik said, at least like Asman said like a disclaimer on okay there are things I don't know about this play but then we assigned historically such a status to the critic that it's so hard for the critic to admit that I don't understand this there's so much anxiety around the critical responses that they give as audiences because after all, they're also audiences but then they make such harmful statements and those are ultimately harming the theater ecology because who can survive without the funding as a marginalized or like a French theater or an off-off Broadway theater in the US and this might be jumping ahead but I think some of the solutions are the people in this room what does it mean to be writing on our colleagues on our collaborators to make sure that they get the criticism that they deserve and it's stamping it into an archive that doesn't hurt as much it also becomes powerful marketing materials because we know we're living in disaster capitalism right now and so what does it mean to actually be co-struggling together noticing in our cities like oh, if there is wanna work going up what can we do to write on it or empower other folks? I think where it also gets tricky is just like the labor that most of us have to do to even be writing for the papers of record if we get the opportunity or building the table making it even bigger so more folks can be learning how to write criticism and doing it for each other as well. Yeah, it's hard to think of like a solution I was thinking about it like in the lead up to this like, oh, what could we do? We could create like something online where we review our own things and then people could comment on it and then I was like, wait, that's Facebook like I just created Facebook, you know? Like so the idea of like how do you solve this it really comes down to having more of us around writing for the papers of note like you said and I guess hearing this out loud I don't wanna be too nihilistic there's nothing more we can do but I mean, I think that is a major aspect of it is who from our community is at these places? Yeah, and I think that can speak to the collaboration that happens across disciplines too especially for scholarship there are so many different Swana Middle Eastern scholars that are writing but they don't necessarily have competencies in theater themselves but they're stellar writers so I'm just so curious of what it would mean for some of those folks to be inspired to like try to take up what it means to write in the arts but something that I've been dealing with a lot is just do I have the same kind of prestige for writing for magazines and newspapers as I would as an academic journal because even if I'm sitting here with like 60 plus publications I've still had institutions tell me that my own writing is not strong enough or doesn't have the weight of the different journals that I'm supposed to have as an academic when I'm sitting here so comfortable in being all act and teaching on to Paul like that feels good for me I'm doing the work that I need to but it's fascinating when I can sit here with so many publications for so many different audiences and it's still not seen as of value in a way if it doesn't live in a journal that is unpaid like one of them absolutely like they don't want that in 10 series I'm not there yet maybe in 20 years but if I get back into academia that is but yeah the weight of the materials how they're even in our dossier or whatever like there's other problems too Yeah I was also when you said like I had the opposite experience whereas like I've been academically published but one time it was twice I wrote to like a mainstream publication that I want to like I used to work as a reviewer in Turkey but my only experience is in Turkish language so they asked me like do you have any sample writing of like review and I said no okay let me try translating this and then it doesn't translate because completely different audience completely different everything is different and it's hard to translate the context of the context that I wrote that in and then I tried my best but I was also dismissed for not having a background here and then not having the language skills to write and which is I it's debatable but that even like inclusion of me as someone who lives here as an immigrant but has theater experience and a scholarship etc I was not like accepted into those institutions as a writer of reviews yeah so those are the but then of course like why do I go to the then the question of like it's something that we will discuss maybe later on but like what kind of platforms can we write on what is it what is it that people value as criticism again or as like a legitimate publications and what is it that is gets dismissed where can we make our voices be heard and that's just an issue of cultural competence competency right there as well not from the critic but from the institution because why are they not valuing those experiences and those you know things that you've done in the same way and that I think is another form of cultural competency yeah and very much goes back to Yasmin's I think earlier points from the quotes of how theater criticism replicates this white supremacist undergriding of our culture and society when you were mentioning Yasmin that the academic review that like is unpaid but then also probably behind a paywall for most people as well and so like we do have all of these layers of the institution thing this is how you get tenure or how you look like a scholar whatever that means that it usually puts work away from the people and public scholarship then is of course not treated as seriously because everyone can read it which is yeah problematic on so many levels but I want to take I think this point and then go into where Sonic sort of reinvented Facebook because I think that it's what you were pointing to was so great and exciting which is like yeah we could do these other methods but they haven't been taken seriously before so I think all of those things tie into a question that Sarah and I had prepared before which was the theater criticism in the past has really taken a form just the one and we've seen some other forms emerge Yasmin I think you're the one who had alerted me to a podcast that was like dueling critics maybe yes okay great and so I think we've seen this as a form also you mentioned rescripted but what other forms do we think could be useful and then what are the strengths and weaknesses to these multiple forms I think also I want to tack on to that question just because Yasmin you mentioned like it seemed as though you had experience with critics not participating in conversations feeling like they could have the final word and then not responding and I'm curious if you have seen any responses on social media or other platforms be a useful tool so two part question I will say that even though Twitter is dying in a different way every single day there's still much value to it just because of the communities of connection that you have not only just across the nation but across the world and I've seen it's funny to see more useful productive conversation happening in Twitter threads than in a Facebook comment sphere but I think it's because folks are really more attuned to different kinds of politics on Twitter and there's just like a nuance that maybe exists there since we do have the niche of like academic Twitter and then there's like a theater academic Twitter that you can stumble upon and I it's it's my social media that really gets me more jobs than anything I put on my CV so I think that's also pointing to the power of people's own voices and being themselves what does it mean to have equal measure measures personal and professional kind of swirl together folks are comfortable with it and definitely some of the models that I'm fascinated by are the ones that put theater back into our bodies as critics what does it mean to talk about what we saw that is in like a talking mode or a witnessing mode rather than distilling into the perfect words on the page so a lot of the times I look I still look to token theater friends as one of those first models of what does it mean to have some critics sitting around really discussing the work earlier iterations of that podcast sometimes I think did a like scale method of more of like a thumbs up down middle situation but then it more so involved into long form podcasting conversation and I enjoy that too and I've also worked as an editorial producer on different news shows and so I know what research and kind of dramaturgy goes behind the scenes and really crafting an audio piece for somebody and those are usually made more in collaboration rather than your singular critic working with one editor you're really on a team of folks and challenging each other because you both witnessed the same kind of material there's a there's another podcast made by younger theater makers I'm totally blanking on it but definitely fronting theater makers of color and another podcast so I see so many different kinds of offshoots but I locate token theater friends as generally one of the first there thank you for sharing those and if the other name comes to mind we would love to hear it at some points in the conversation but from those which I think are all really exciting and ways that like you've experienced with productive conversations and I keep going back to the word conversation because I feel like it's so important in our theater world but actually in the conversations we've been having about critics it's really been a conversation with other people and the critic is just a person who who sends in a word or a missive of sorts but yeah so as far as social media goes for others Ajan and Tarek are there things that you've seen either working there or other forms that you've experienced either in the States or internationally I have a colleague who okay her name is Elam Ejdar she's in Turkey she's a practicing critic and scholar and her last name is EJDER if anybody wants to look up she has a brilliant article I don't think it's behind paywall they have a they practice collective criticism and they have a group called feminist endeavor and she writes in detail about how they do collective criticism so she told me about I had the I was lucky enough to talk to her and then she told me that there's like a they exchange emails over like a group email about a play and everyone like you know they have a dialogue a conversation among themselves and then they publish that so I found this idea fascinating and I think it does a lot to challenge that idea of the critic or like being one text serving as that like arbiter of taste or like as the ultimate judge on a play and production and also invites us like to think about these as like what I like to call paratex or like like I said different texts of equal value surrounding it and it does a lot in terms of like to challenge that all these like in the feminist endeavor coming together in a plurality of voices and expressing that I find that I find that really valuable yeah if you look that up her I think it's called critical endeavors about like theater criticism and it is also I think they're significant that they came up with that in the face of political polarization in Turkey as a response to that so I also find that very valuable she has like a really detailed background about that so if you want to look at that thank you for that yeah in terms of like what like how can we I don't know like like tactless I kind of go back to the same point as well with with social media I mean social media does seem to be the best way to to get a hold of your own narrative in a way but it's so daunting because this the idea of social media has become so toxic within society and the idea of well let's go harder on social media is like a thing that makes me want to go into my shell and go away right but but honestly I mean you think about in other facets of life where do you get your your recommendations for things and I think about like like my wife is really into booktube you know so there's just like a whole section of YouTube of people reviewing books and everybody is watching each other's videos and getting recommendations and and so and there's all there's a whole bunch of different like examples of that and so the idea comes down to how do you organize all of this social content and I think maybe that is is an avenue to explore instead of creating the content itself people are more than willing to create the content how do you bring it all together in a constructive way for people to kind of come and find it at this hub Hashtags the power of Hashtag honestly it's been really fruitful some of my students and some of their more creative projects will be I asked them sometimes it can be more creative with the final papers that they don't want to write a paper what are other works of merit across media that they can be producing and so many TikTok pieces on criticism or essays via TikTok are very emergent and whenever I and I my day job is a non-profit marketing for a newspaper a newsroom and so even just the organizing of Hashtags it's like there's still power there even as the infrastructure for socials falls apart there's a practice on a there's like a theater website in Turkey and people publish reviews online and there's a function on the website where you can rate the the review and you can comment underneath I think I really like that a lot and then there's like facial expressions for each rating so when you read a review you see those expressions on the on the like and it's at the top of the page it's like that's the first thing that you see when you really read a review I really like that practice it's so fun because then it's not directly on the critics Facebook page which also has the emoji buttons courtesy of Facebook I appreciate the comments about like the question around organization because I feel like sometimes I'm inundated with things and I don't understand Hashtags very well so I don't feel like I've ever understood how they organize but this is really exciting to I guess come up to speed on social media embarrassingly but it's also here of other ways that that can work for us as you were all talking I also thought of what I don't think is a new thing but I was in Chicago directing a piece right after Leilina had opened and I knew that Leilina had a swan at night and then the show I was directing also had a swan at night and it was so lovely to have all of these swana folks like in a space talking and it's making me think of like oh these are also ways that we can have those kind of call in or not even if there needs to be a call in but also just these dialogues between community that can then potentially lead to criticism from this group that's all there at once because it seems like a lovely thing I wasn't at the Leilina one but it seemed wonderful in Chicago I love her I'll throw down for her in so many ways and how we organize is across so many different channels so like we have lists serves we have a Facebook group there's a WhatsApp of 100 Middle Eastern theater people that are and Facebook groups and different collectives and so folks across all of them are just so interconnected so it's not as much of a challenge to mobilize each other and really be inspirational in the ways we show up but it's also about taking up space in these predominantly white institutions I served as one of the dramaturgs on Leilina and I was really fortunate to be a part of a lot of that public programming especially like coffee and calligraphy night and making sure that talkbacks are actually led by folks that have been in the process because I think there's a nuance there that we lose when it's a general literary person or intern doing those conversations but yes I'm obsessed with what Chicago has really shown up for Middle Eastern work in the last year or so feels like a renaissance in a certain way definitely and that community engagement is so important in these conversations I'll take a quick pause here just to remind those who are tuning in just now off the conversation that this is no summary Golden Threads online conversation with artists who don't fit into a box and we're here in conversation with Yasmin, Aijan, Tarek and my co-moderator Sarah talking about theater criticism and new paths forward for those of you here in the Zoom room please feel free to participate in the conversation by utilizing the chat function or raise your hand to address a question directly and I actually noticed that we have some chats one from Sheila about substrate arts if that was what someone was mentioning and then also Yimaira thank you for commiserating with me on that hashtags yes I think I think Yasmin can teach us a thing or two here appreciate that Excellent Social media is its own thing you either love it or you hate it and it is very interesting to see what the future criticism is going to be and just like the future of theater in this ever-evolving digital realm so that's a whole other thing which takes us straight into this next question here in this room today just on this panel like we're a group of scholars and artists and scholar artists and we do a lot of everything and I'm curious how can academia and theater professionals create a more mutually beneficial relationship around theater criticism and this can either be something that you've seen in the past or something that you've personally benefited from or maybe just acknowledging things that need to just be improved a little bit well something I always tackle with with my students since I mainly teach intro to theater classes so I get students who are 18, 19 just starting college and and I they are supposed to write reviews themselves of the shows that they see and things like that and I always tell them that the point of the class is not to make you all theater artists to go change your majors and everything but it's to make you like a better theater audience member to be more knowledgeable on it and I think in terms of how can academia help this idea of criticism I think it's giving it's helping people have the tools to recognize what a bad review is and what a good review is you know like this is what theater this is what criticism is supposed to be and then you're going to try doing it to get a hand at knowing what it's like to create it and so when you do read those reviews that that like Yasmin you had mentioned like use like really like problematic jokes and things like that in them that as a reader you'll be able to read that and go oh this so this is a flag for me that this review is probably not the most shouldn't be the most trusted one for me on this work of art right here and so I think that's one way academia can help combat this I definitely go for it no go for it Yasmin I agree too and I wonder what are the ways that we can be amplifying our colleagues across the field as well who are the people that we know are doing this right how are we each others our own case studies how can we be using the work of playwrights we really enjoy bringing them into the classroom since a lot of our curriculum we have to be fighting to get people of color onto our syllabi or just like totally reinventing the wheels sometime like theater did not start in Greece why are we starting in Greece for my one oh one intro to theater history and so I think it's just a real like amplification across colleagues and our scholarship of like who do I want to bring into this room what lineage of writing do I want to plug into and just getting into the brain of our students I think that's where we can get really intergenerational with the folks that have been working on this before and hopefully inspiring the next round of theater critics I work at a conservatory program so so all of the students that I'm dealing with are across all of different majors and it's one of the few classes that they're all swirl together actors designers dramaturgs playwrights and so just teaching them first like what is criticism and figuring out the ways that they can be inspired to write on it or be working across their own cohorts and figuring out what does it mean to write on a colleague's play in a sense too so this building camaraderie and collaboration early on yeah and I think it's like what you said at the beginning is what I had in mind for this is like teaching younger people or other groups of people have to write criticism but not ideally in conjunction with theater theater companies so something that I have seen personally is a public theater they have a BIPOC critics lab I think they've been having it for the past three years is that they are trying to train critics of color and help them give voice to their work as critics as well and another thing I've seen is that a colleague of mine in Canada was also teaching younger people at the they were writing about the Toronto French Festival like she's a scholar but like she was teaching all these young people how do we write about these performances and they also have work on also like BIPOC theater criticism and the cultural competency so I feel like all these initiatives they could be broadened also to be more specific to maybe Swana theater makers and Swana like scholars who work on this field and people who who have the cultural competency to write about these plays so I think these initiatives training education that also happen with the artists themselves which is like like you said that distance between the theater makers and the critics that we think should exist may may not exist like it does not have to exist because we are all you know in this together all occupying the same spaces so I think that these are really significant yeah I think that so one thing that I've been working on trying to be a bit more diligent about is making sure that there are no disposable assignments in the classes that I teach and I feel like something like write a write a review on like a place something that we could potentially start thinking of is like this is something that we could be doing and it's like they're actually doing assignments where they're actually going out and they're writing pieces and then we as their instructors are then going over and viewing does this measure up to cultural competency is actually reliable but I think one issue that I've run into and I don't know if any of you have also experienced this so I'd love your input on it there isn't there isn't a lot of Swana theater going on in places where I have worked or currently work and it's just and I think that is one of the fundamental issues is that even if we look at okay what's the university producing and the university is not producing Swana material because they run into the issue of casting and they run into the issue of recruitment and we don't have enough Swana students in theater and and it's like this you know a chaat a constant like catch 22 type of thing and so I'm curious what you think of can be a very tangible immediate action that we can be doing in our classes for those of us who are starting to teach again in the fall in about two weeks what is something that we can be doing at predominantly white institutions to further this conversation but to make sure that we're not just having the exact same conversation over and over again and seeing the same results well what we potentially are going to have access to is a full database of plays that folks can be pulling from spoiler alert for another asset panel that is coming up and you open access material that's going to be hitting these Deeter streets across the country yeah major plug but I think there's a lot that we can do in assigning plays and then we're imaginative people so what does it mean to be actually writing on plays even if we're not writing on performances of plays because half of theater criticism is not just what's happening up on that stage but it's how is the script functioning what are the questions I still have why this why now kind of dramaturgy scope so there's at least half of a review potentially that can be written at least from plays that are read and it's one way to get voices into these stories in a very low stakes way even for schools that are majority whites and it's a very definitely controversial figuring out how casting works like would we rather not have this play produced versus let's just keep it in the classroom but classroom space is definitely the way we can play through these stories and also exercise our writing skills in a way that feels safer and one that is of peer mentorship in a sense to sometimes on first drafts I invite my students to bring in their writing and I'm not the one that has the first eyes on it the person next to them does what does it mean to actually have eyes and co mentorship within our own classrooms and our students and so they're sometimes going to get into conversations that I'm not going to understand even if I still consider myself a young person but the level of knowing this across generations too and that's again the low stakes the practicing the speaking and draft that's why we have our classroom spaces hopefully being as open as possible so folks feel comfortable this could include maybe assigning also the digital recordings of performances if they exist just like of course remembering that is a different medium but like Yasmin said even writing about the text itself is part of reviewing something because that's a part of the performance as well and geometry like you said or like a script analysis goes hand in hand with writing a review which is like one of the components of that that could be another solution there are like some companies from Turkey that have for example their recordings with English subtitles that English speakers can also watch and I'm sure like that's only one example and others exist as well and I know HowlRound has such a vast digital library of recordings of plays I personally don't know how many of them are Svanasa but that's something that we can also advocate for in our future productions so what would it have meant I know this is like big fancy schmancy but if Leylina had been broadcast on The HowlRound it's like what would a addition to the field it would be if a play like that was able to actually be seen by more folks than those that are sitting in that Goodman space and it also connects to a lot of conversations that we had at the peak of the pandemic of what does it mean to have digital access always on all shows kind of thing even though we are contending with rights and paying folks for their time and their labor there but there's there's so much more that we can dream and we've seen pieces of the infrastructure be built but potentially not actually executed fully because we're back to business as usual in a lot of context across our field I think too it also I mean this is kind of piggybacking off of some ideas you guys have touched on already but just in terms of like what plays we're assigning to have to for them to read and and making sure that it's plays from you know from from our artists I had this experience at a school I taught at where they decided to send out this mass email to be like here are like the the lists of plays that you can choose from to make sure that we're you know all choosing the right things and I I just always remember they had the one section where they said you know okay this is the international section so pick a play from this list and the international section was Anton Chekhov and and like the guy who wrote Equus and it was a British playwright and I'm like I mean sure they're not American but that's not really the international perspective that you're getting and so you know not in terms of that module but I just kind of sort of choosing my own plays not on there hoping I would fly under the radar and so I purposely chose for a period of time a writer that's also contemporary so I had them reading one of Mona Mansour's plays mainly so they're introduced to writers contemporary writers that they might see other work from and while they're out in the world to walk around and say oh a production by this playwright I remember from my intro to theater class maybe I'll I'll be more open to go see that because that's part of the problem is you know our work is not being promoted in the same way that that it is with other artists and so people aren't as willing to take a risk on a play by a playwright they've never heard of before or starring an actor they've never heard of before so getting that into up and coming audience members ears you know is a thing not that I'm looking at my my classes as a selling point for future art but but I think it does get the idea out there to people that you know this work is out there and also it's relevant to you it's like a lot of my I get a lot of Mina students but a lot of them aren't and you know we read that play and it's all about your identity being from two different worlds and so the the class discussion turns into everybody talking about you know their background and a lot of them are immigrants themselves or the children of them again immigrants and a whole conversations about sprouts up from that and they realize oh this play that was written by a Lebanese American playwright isn't just for Lebanese Americans like I'm Dominican or Dominican American and this totally was relevant to me and so I think it's also that idea that you can find value in plays written for you know cultures that aren't your own yeah and I want to totally push back against we should not like you're not using classes to also you know tell the idea of modern living playwrights because I think we totally should be because if we're not doing it in classes then who is like nobody is so I I will contest that one and say that we I am all pro you know and tell enough this is who's doing the work at the moment and and totally having them read it and engage of it and and practice doing it so thank you for that yes just sitting here flabbergasted and tongue check of being on the international playwrights list but I guess we shouldn't be surprised I want to just read Catherine Corey from the chat with there is a step between reading a play by Nina swanna writers and mounting production which does call for actors of Nina and swanna backgrounds that is reading plays allowed in class with no external audience which gives students an opportunity to put themselves in the shoes of a character from another background and hopefully gain new perspectives which is such a rich thing to do in the classroom so thank you Catherine for bringing that up and I love I mean the focus to sort of shift into the classroom for a bit here for us which makes sense as a room full of people who educate in addition to doing arts and all of these forms and I'm hoping that the critics who are not necessarily in school but maybe can start to see themselves as lifelong learners and take a few lessons from what is being said here because these are all amazingly helpful ways to get people's brains to start thinking in criticism in new ways and I actually feel like maybe the Barbie movie has been an interesting thing to see like the very conservative criticism has become memes because the conservative criticism is perhaps a selling point in some ways for others which I've really enjoyed seeing how that's been turned on its head a little bit I Yasmin before we move on to a different question I wonder if you could say a little bit more for those who aren't at ATHA you gave a little bit of the drop about the open access setup so do you mind saying a little bit more there I honestly want to pass the mic to Sarah because I think he can really he's on the panel I will just be sitting pretty in the audience so yeah a quick plug for that and we can mention this and chat about this more bit at the end as well I'm myself Aijan and Susie Almagar who's not on this call at the moment we have been working tirelessly for about a year and a half now compiling a digital database that draws on a lot of other existing resources that are out there with the intention of creating a handbook that is specific to the teaching and the scholarship and the production of Swana Theatre it is divided up into different sections we have a section that is completely on plays casting breakdowns this is not just the play and where to access it including a section on notable reviews that have come and a noble critiques that have been published on it we also have a section on anthologies of play anthologies and where to access those we have another section that is dedicated to the scholarship that's been published whether that is books book chapters academic journals and then we have another section that is on scholars where to find them who they are what institutions we're at because we often run into this issue of people are working in silos and they can't connect and what their specialty is and so how you can reach out to them if you want them to come guess lecture or any point on any of the specific plays that were on there or anything else in the expertise we also have a section on theaters so golden thread is on there but it's all of the different theater companies that are dedicated to doing this work both in the U.S. and elsewhere and specifically focusing on where people can access these productions so this is an ongoing live platform we are happy to continue talking about it please come to our session if you're actually at Ather if not then we'll share our email contacts and and either we welcome you to contribute to it we welcome you to or invite you to further this conversation with us but yeah it's something that we're working on that we're realizing is gonna and we're hoping to visualize it into a fully visualize like website itself so that's something that has been taking up a lot of our time realizing that it's not a single effort but rather collective collaboration so I'm I'm really really excited about that it's been a long time coming so Yasmin thank you for the shout out yes and also Marjan was here and so just a shout out to Marjan who also has a database that has inspired this I think in a lot of ways so for her work we're always building and growing and changing these things with each other which is yeah that's all we can ask for we have about 13 minutes left together I have a question I think that we've sort of been bouncing back and forth around but I want to invite anyone who's in the audience to put a question into the chat or raise your hands we can have you unmute and talk with us as well and make it a really really a conversation but so we were going to end this with like our set questions with what is an ideal path forward for theater criticism and we're all very different people so I think we're coming at this also in different ways as we've noticed but there are a lot of common threads that have continued to come up both as far as education goes as far as actual printed theater reviews go printed depending on digital and then also what we also might like to see for ourselves as dramaturgs as scholars as playwrights so I just want to invite this conversation to sort of swell again with things that we are looking forward to or things that we really hope continue to happen and if there's anything that we really don't want to happen again if there are things that we want to just flag as hey we've actually thrown that in the bin for now this is a great time to contribute that too who wants to start I know it's a broad ask I feel like sorry Tarif no go ahead go ahead I'm still actually forming my idea in my head so I see reviews or criticism as implicitly prejudiced utterances and I read them I read into the bias into them in my own like research and I feel like checking your own bias when you're writing something is the first thing that you need to do and besides a disclaimer I think it's like first of all just reflect on what is it that you're biased against what is the culture the political social all these like contexts that surround you because which you and your writing emerge from and when you're watching a play all these become a part of like this very complex critical response but if you don't realize if you yourself don't reflect on that then it becomes harmful even like it doesn't have to be explicit but there's so much implicit bias that is if you read between the lines in these reviews in the reception of Swana artists and another thing that I really really care about is the changing the ways that we think about criticism and we talk about criticism our concepts around it like I said to me these are just texts that emerge from these contexts and I think it's important that to have that plurality of voices it's important that we do first challenge the existing misconceptions about around what a critic does what criticism is what counts as criticism what doesn't count what do we value yeah I think those are the first things that come to my mind I think in terms of what to see going forward with criticism it's kind of like going back to the basics of like so what is what is the purpose of it like why do we even have it and there is still that aspect that theater is you know fairly pricey you know like I have two small kids if I'm going to go see a show it's the ticket price and the babysitter and all that stuff so I am going to look up a little bit something about a show before I go because I'm only going to get to go to one show every like a couple of months or so in a practical way so the reviews help in that sense they let you figure out what do I want to go see but a lot and so a lot of it I think comes down to audience as well like what are you valuing whose word are you taking because I know like at least in New York the New York Times is just like the iron fist of what survives and what doesn't here in New York and so do and the reason why it is that way is because of the value we as as readers and audience members basically put on their say and it's a cyclical system because they're strong because we read it but we read it because they're the the main one and so it has to break somewhere and so I think what would be nice going forward is seeing more and this is maybe more of a utopian idea but that the people out there reading it and consuming critiques are going to pick and choose which ones they actually value not based on the size of the institution maybe I feel like I'm always cheating on this question because my thesis is exactly about what is possible what are possibility models and so for me I'm always like I have four solutions that are proposed but even if I ingest and walking through them I think a lot of them are the notes of what we've talked about here for today especially when we're considering what is the most inclusive and what is the most sustainable for the future of criticism in general and so we did touch upon what does mentorship in expanding the form actually look like talking a little bit about digital reviews being in conversation what we're hearing now again is a kind of cohort model of what does it mean to be writing in community across disciplines across institutions we've also touched on that culturally competent approach what does it mean to actually acknowledge that we have our own gaps in the ways that we are writing about things that are different from us and then I think what's most crucial and I spend the most time writing about is having a reflexive practice which is putting reflection in practice it's a little Englishly there but that means that we're taking our own reviews and we're critiquing ourselves as fiercely as we're critiquing other artists what does it mean to have a reflexive practice about the work that I'm producing that happens to be writing and so those four things are the main things that I'm always preaching about when I get on topics like this because we have all of the tools we've seen these models it's about putting them into practice and then figuring out what to do about the labor compensation difficulty around resources in a sense and so I think that can even be addressed again in that abundance mindset and figuring out where the money is and reallocating it to these four possibility models for criticism I love that I think I mean also having four possibility models feels to me like yes okay I have a number like we can go and do this but I love that and I love that there have been different models put forth here Yasmin in your list but also in what it looks like in the classroom and what these different I guess that there are so many possibilities yeah I've been really struck by earlier we talked today about research came up as a word in a bunch of different answers and I know that in dramaturgy of course that there is research but I'm just I'm really thinking about how like writing is a cohort and sharing research that you have with someone else who's seeing a show like that feels to me as like a great scholar artist connection in academia that has really sought to be so gilded and working separately and breaking those really purposeful silos see what that possibility looks like so that's I think what's sticking with me the most right now and I'm really excited about and also about the community engagement that we talked about earlier and how that can lead to different ways that community conversations happen and how that leads to a great critical conversation I think too I wanted something I really loved actually Yasmin that you said earlier too I think that near the very beginning questioning this idea of the separation of the artist and the critic and I think that honestly would be a very big thing as well because if you are experiencing art of a different culture and there are things you're not really getting why not reach out with one or two questions to the writer or the director or one of the actors and and as the critic you could make of it as you will but you know there shouldn't be a problem with asking the person who created it well what was the point of this or what were you trying to say and then writing a critique of that as well but yeah I think set Crete eliminating that separation is also probably really helpful yeah thank you all so much for that like this is just such a conversation that I think we can keep going at it for many many hours and I guess this is why this is turning into a series of conversations about Theocricism so thank you I see that we've got one question from our audience here and we've got about five minutes left of our session so Amira I'm going to turn it over to you your question thank you all this has been an amazing conversation hi Marina one of the things that I've observed in my work as a cultural consultant is that the audiences are predominantly non-swana in a lot of the theater that I've worked on so I feel like to be realistic I think the critics are speaking to the theater audiences rather than the people who wrote the work and that is an issue that I feel is really prevalent that if we want more works representing our part of the world then our community needs to come out and support it they need to come and see the shows and I think that I'm seeing a trend that a lot of the stories that keep getting published over and over sort of supports a white narrative and it's written from the lens of the west and that is no coincidence either that resonates with the theater going audiences so that's an observation but I personally feel and I don't know how you all experience this that relying on my community which is back in community for criticism or seeing their criticism as a beneficial theater hasn't really been that effective partially because a lot of us bring our own political experiences and likes and dislikes of this regime and that ethnic group and such so a lot of what makes good theater gets diluted in these agenda-driven conversations and I was just curious from other countries and other parts of the world if you've seen that of course if they're theater makers it's a different issue because they are actually understanding storytelling and theater making but if it's the audience engaging with a critic it's not always the most beneficial or effective way of receiving critique so I guess the question is have you all experienced that as well Yeah so Humair I'm just going to jump in here real quick that is definitely a very huge thing it's something that we've all seen I've personally been at a performance that was Yusuf Elgendi in play it was incredible and then the talk back that like didn't include Yusuf was not there just went in a completely different direction because again responding to that issue that you were speaking about of having that predominantly white like audience in the space and just seeing how it was completely skewed we are unfortunately at time so maybe because we need to wrap up here so maybe if we just want to have one of you give a final statement in response to that Yeah I mean I think it's it's a matter of include if the artist can't be there including what their ideas behind it and their intention is again going to that idea of separating the wall between the artist and the critique so that when the critique comes out it includes something from the artist about the work itself so at least that maybe can become part of the conversation within a room like an entirely white room at least the artist's voice is there somewhere in the room to be to be touched on so that could be one way to combat that maybe and one thing I know we're at time but the willingness of a critic to actually engage in the dramaturgy materials that are a part of the production because there have been situations where you have a gorgeous play right now and it seems like a critic has not even read it and that can be a choice or that can be holding on for spoilers but there's a lot of context that our artists already do about telling you who they are putting their bodies in their work and even around the theater company so if you want to know the information is usually in front of you in some regards and it's just about a willingness to engage with materials that are also beyond the stage Yeah, people have no problem reading Tom Stoppard's little novella for every work that he does I don't see why they don't read our dramaturgy materials Yeah, definitely to all yes and to everything more cultural competence is needed among our theater critics among our audience members among our dramaturgs and we need more people to be engaging with that and to really realize how that is how a playwright is being honored in the process how the artists are being honored and how our Swana communities are also feeling welcome in these spaces Mayra, thank you very much for that question I want to thank thank all of you for coming to this wonderful session we have unfortunately come to the end of our conversation many thanks to our speakers so Tarik and Aijan and Yasmin thank you so much thank you to all of you joining us live at the moment and those of you who will be watching later on thank you to those at the at ATHA the ATHA conference as well I'd like to remind you to check the rest of the Middle Eastern theater focus group panels at the ATHA conference we still have a few more days over here so please come check them out and I'd also like to thank Hal Round for being the hosting for hosting this program as a reminder all of the No Summary episodes live on Golden Threads website and on Hal Round as well I also want to give a special thank you to Wendy Race for a live stream technician and to the rest of Golden Threads incredible team Sahar, Michelle, Shaila, Linda, Sulana and Heather thank you all so much for working behind the scenes and a big thank you to our audiences coming up next at Golden Thread we have the new Threads reading series with two plays in commission at the company one by Adam Ashraf Osayek inspired by the story of the high-profile political prisoner Allah Abdul Fattah and one by Arun Tarak here Tarak Hamimi inspired by the experience of the Black Panthers in Algiers and the Reorient Festival of Short Plays is happening in the fall so stay tuned for that for more info you can visit the website goldenthread.org and there are some links in the chat for you as well you can also join the email list to stay on top of programs and events thank you all so much for tuning in and for your work today we'll talk soon thank you thank you