 Hi, everyone. Welcome. My name is Lisa Timmel. I'm the director of Newark here on Boston University Theatre Company. I'm very pleased to have you all here and a woman here on the stage who are within an action panel. This is a conversation between four amazing writer, activist creators about women writers claiming agency in American theater. So that's sort of our topic today. Special thank you to Kate Snodgrass for hosting this year at the Boston Playwright Theatre. It's a real pleasure. I'm just going to introduce our panelists and then we'll get on with our conversation. So starting at the far end is Charlotte Ian, who is the artistic director of Sleeping Weasel, and the playwright residence at Mead College. And then we have Ruth McGrath through, look at my notes there, is a leader of the Newarker world and playwright in Houston, and a founder. Yes, Kathy, I'm from Chicago. And then I'm here on the recently won N.O.B. Award for Life and Achievement in 2012. She's the founder of No Passport Theatre Alliance. She's a playwright, songwriter, editor, and screen player, and just a real force in American theater. This is slushing her immediately to my left. She is not available from Columbia College in Chicago, and writer, artist, painter, artist. I would like you to please say a few words about Eda. We are here as part of this, so we could start. If you haven't heard, Eda is an organization. Eda is a women and literary artist. A couple of years ago, I was formed by Kate Warman, a poet from New York, and Erin Leue, a poet from Florida, to address inequity in publishing. They're both extraordinary poets, and they wanted to include playwriting as part of literary arts. Sometimes we're excited about it. That's sweet though, so it's hard to remember the other building. But we have found some of the organizations started. We are often without a conversation because we aren't feeling like publishing. Publishing is the least of the issues and challenges that we face. Kate was very aware of the inequities in American theater in terms of gender and race, ethnicity, and they primarily focus on gender. And she asked us in. And we think in conversation sits the four of us as playwriting committee, and they've been really extraordinary conversations that I'm thrilled to open to the public now. In the meantime, Eda has yearly done a count of the literary magazines around the country. You can look at this count up. They just put up 2012. You can look it up. They did pie charts on VitaWeb.org. They're in red and blue, and you won't be surprised. They get saddened by the way this pie charts still look. But their main mission is to start a conversation around the country, around these issues, and to activate change. Here we are. Charlotte, as our sort of fearless leader in this panel who put this together, I'd like you to talk a little bit about sort of the family slash reviving sleeping diesel and what some of your goals are for the organization. Yes, I, well, it goes back to 2010 when I decided to start to revive the company. I had a company with my husband, British filmmaker David Hawkins, who counted the company in England in 1998, and we did do some work together in New York via the company. But then, sadly, he passed away in cancer in 2004. And I had to keep going with my job as a professor and to keep writing. I decided for a few years that I'm just going to keep my head to the ground and keep writing. But, you know, I write idiosyncratic plays, I've been told. They're very hard to get people to read. They're very easy to get my friends and colleagues and people who are already directing my plays to read. But for strangers to read a play of mind was nice. So I realized that once again I have to do this myself. However, you know, I've never been a person of comfort with just promoting myself. I'm much happier in a group of people. And I decided we're going to, rather than do these one-off productions, which I did much more than 30 years ago, go that far into my life, we decided to really scaffold the company and collected about 30 affiliated artists in different genres, in different fields. Composition, design, writers, directors, a couple reformers, a filmmaker. And look at this group of people as a movement. And suddenly it becomes very interesting and powerful when you're not just trying to promote yourself. And I have a very strong curatorial mind as it is. I have a background in visual art. My first job was at the River Museum. I worked at Spursky Gallery in New York. So I see things that way. I see things in conversation with each other, whether it be painting, sculpture, or people and their work. So it's very natural to need to work that way. And so Sleeping Miso wants to kind of be a movement. People making what I like to call art theater. Art theater, for me, can be music. It can be a visual artist giving a slideshow. It can be cross-genre. It can be anything. But I consider it art theater. And I want to invite people into those moments, those high moments of being elevated. It's interesting. I didn't know you had a background in visual art. And of course, earlier we were speaking about the influence of the visual art world and how work is produced and promoted in that world. And how it's effective at figuring out how you produce your own work. So would you take a minute to talk about that relationship? Yes, I am at the Art Institute of Chicago and on the faculty there in the Writing Department. And before that, I had taught in a lot of theater departments and English departments and taught free writing specifically. But it's interesting being there because it's an art school and they just are more abstract. And I am abstract. And theater can be very concrete. And it makes me feel very at home around other abstract people. And also when you put writing into that with that background, you're allowed to be a little more abstract about the form of what you're doing and think of it as an art form. And not as like, this is how you're supposed to write a play and this is the system of how it's supposed to look on the page. And being around a lot of visual artists, that's one thing that really opened my mind. But also the way that they space is really fascinating and inspiring to me because we have a lot of black boxes in the theater. But they have white boxes. They have these gallery, very light films, spaces with windows. And the audience is allowed to wander in and out. And they call more performance-related work this time-based art. So it makes me look back at the theater and think about time and think about, okay, well, what can we do with time and how can we play on these time signatures that we traffic in in a way that can also be viewed as a work of art. So that's been really inspiring. And also just thinking of the artist having a studio or the way that I teach art is modeled in our department on the way that you have a studio artist and a mentor and an apprenticeship that you have time along with the art. Whereas in a lot of our playwriting workshops, we're in group think from the very beginning of the origin of the project. So how do you have time to sit along with your work? And so I find that also really inspiring to think about this kind of solitude or sanctuary of your own view of your work in your studio. It's even in the studio of your mind. And that comes a little bit, at least that's why you've done, you know, working on yourself, on yourself this moment of transition that you're in. Can you describe for us sort of how that being on a quiet space and a movie space works free of your arm? Yeah, I'm just listening to everyone speak today. I feel like the top of my list is the co-activity that I feel so strongly that being in you know, first I always want to hear what everyone else is doing. It's like an activator for all of us. And that really excites me. It generates the next project. And I work kind of vision by vision. I see something and then I go towards it and try to see how it will happen. So every project is completely learning from the ground up. And as Lisa said, I'm a sabbatical. I'm just like, okay, quiet, reading, collecting. I'm actually reading the dictionary, which I forgot how to do because I've been looking at the dictionary online. I'm not doing that anymore. And the words in the dictionary are really different than the words as they're given online. So I guess just to say, like, each project is different and it asks for a completely different process. And I think that that's terrifying at the beginning because you think, I don't know how to do this. And that's my most recent project is what I'm calling a slow theater project. It's a kind of local work theater. And I live with a musician, so I wrote this play that I call Black A Baton Forge News Play. And the idea was to perform it on the Baton Forge. Get his guitar out, get the text, bring some people in, start it, bring a couple of musicians, increase it and see how they improv, how their improvisational methods sort of affects the text and see where it goes. Like, if we would drop the scene, because the music went off in this great way, or if they would be quiet for a scene, or if they would decide they wanted to read a character. So I guess this is just an example of a meeting, the real meeting, I think, a tired pretending. So this is a theater, not pretending, and showing up and being real with the text, and being real with the music, and seeing where it takes us. Kind of, of all, you have a very prolific catalog of plays, and a special genius for sort of getting out there and making connections, and we were speaking about the way water is far earlier, and I thought I'd be interested in hearing you speak to all of that about your process on this. Jean, happy to. Well, you know, I should foreground this by saying that it, 10 years ago, in this kind of local war kind of way, except it was national. Yeah, other book 12 artists, musicians, actors, writers, practitioners, scholars, got together together around something called Love Passport, which is just an idea I have when I was actually here at RAC, at the Institute for Advanced Study as a fellow, and I felt like it would be nice to have a hub of some kind, where people could just brainstorm and think, and maybe like a rolling salon was sort of the idea I had. But all these 12 form artists that form Love Passport, we're all people who are interested in words of music, and we're all primarily playwrights, although not all of them, some were performers, who wanted to experiment with words of music and what that meant on the page, but also what that meant in terms of creating durational performance. And so we decided we could collectively write things, we wrote a manifesto called Dirty Thoughts About Money. And it was really cool, and so I still archived online, I'm going to hot-review down the board, and I'm going to look it up there, and there are archived since there are no passwords. We also wrote some things collectively, we'd reformed them at Brick in New York and at Tonning, just kind of really, really just experimenting and sometimes sharing characters we'd written without each other, and then kind of creating our own text based off on that. And then that same year, I was in residence on a TCGP residency at Intar, and towards the end of my residency, I thought I wanted to do something that's sort of like a meeting of minds, as it were, of Latino artists, playwrights primarily, to talk about, to talk in a national way, because often you're hard to talk to each other, L.A. artists talk to each other, the Chicago people talk to each other, barely does that convergence happen unless it's organized by somebody else, you know, and so I thought, why don't we just have a big symposium? And what would happen is that people would go in on their own dime, which is really gracious of them to have this big talk, which is a public lecture talking about the state of Latino theater making, that ended up being a three-hour jam session where we did a cruise with playing up poems from our backpack, and like mother and mayor was like, I just wrote this yesterday, you know, and then I, you know, I remember that the second we just said, it was okay right next to the season, I wish we had this all the time, and I was like, yeah, I know, and then we're all like walking home, right, separate ways of subway, playing, et cetera, and I was walking, and I was like, it's bitter cold, and I was like, oh my god, no, no password is this, it's this thing, you know, where we can all sort of be jamming together, and so I went to my core of 12, and I said, what do you think about opening this up? And they were like, are we included? And I said, of course you are, that's what I'm talking about. And so it's become this other thing, which is we used conferences, we just did one that was on Howround, if you go in the video library, we had it on Friday, we were talking about it was our keynote, so we have a press, where we now publish about 20 titles, Ruthies, Book, Rick Tarantino's plays, some of them others, that's how much people came from sustainers, so I'll just say that no password has been this kind of other creative life of mine, sort of entrepreneurial, somewhat curatorial and instinct, mostly just about kind of creating a place to throw ideas around, and through that, I'm a writer, I'm a playwright, so I make my great plays, and I wrote a play called The Way of Water, which is part of the part of the play about the working board in the United States, and this sort of part of the sort of after I wrote a play called Wafa, which is about a young woman who wants to play soccer, and instead was Texas, and a Latino family, and I thought, oh my next play, what will it be? And I was like Deep Water Horizon, and talk about that, and I've also been doing a lot of research and traveling in that region, sort of collecting stories on my own, but never really thinking it'd be a play, and then the play sort of overcame, you know, kind of took over me as a writer, and when that happens, I obviously get a bit of a sign, because it's like you're out of the way, and the play is sort of making itself in front of you, and so I wrote this play called The Way of Water, and then I do what most people do, and this is their playwrights, I guess, you know, they say, oh well, now I have a play, now I sit around them, and I was like, I don't want to do that. I mean, I do, but I don't. Like, I want to have a different phase of the process with this work, and I also, it's the second anniversary of Deep Water Horizon, disaster was about to occur, this was in April of 2012, and now we're in the third anniversary, and I felt I want to have the conversation now, and I feel like the health issues, especially, are still not talked about, and they're kind of buried in the news, and we sort of are pleading the logical aspect of what's the definition of the gulf, and so I just want to have a conversation with this play, with other people, and which is, I think, what theater does, because it's a public forum, look at us in a public forum today, and engaging one-on-one, and sometimes in groups, and so I thought, why don't you just call some friends and see if they can read you through the play. Silent tennis, it was the original idea, call some friends, and they're like, totally cool, why don't you report it, okay, sorry. Can we go to the month, and I was like, okay, let's do the month of April, I'll bracket that month, and then what happened is that it became sort of word of mouth thing, so like that friend, love of life, and the other friend, and suddenly, I was in the middle of 50 readings in one month of the world of this one play, that was also in process, so I had the ardent activist brain sort of working to engage in action and talk about these people's lives on the Gulf, they're our citizens, they're our neighbors, they're our brothers and sisters, and then the other part of me is like, playwright, we're all going, I'm still working on the play, and kind of seeing readings of the play happen over time, over a one-month period, where I was still rewriting and kind of curing it, and different, I heard it like in the Western Australian accent, I heard it in Germany, I heard it in South Africa, in Portuguese, and a translation by James Blade, I heard it in Rio, you know, in London, so it's interesting, and also laterally, in terms of universities, colleges, theaters, galleries, spaces, garage theaters here, you know, even at Emerson, a company called Exotic Age, which is where I support my students. So, yeah, I just thought it was really cool to have this kind of very animal-experiencing creative archive ask everybody to contribute if they wanted to, testimonials about how it sort of worked in their community, what kind of discussions they had after the piece, or as practitioners inside of the piece, what they felt, learning, learning, learning, learning, and having an engagement in the now, in the now of the writing process, in the now of the making of the work, and obviously, I still want to play, you know, I still, I might have my, whatever that means traditional, had on, I'm like, yes, and it's a theater, and blah, blah, but I've also had this other experience with the play with multiple audiences, I mean, in the space of a month, a thousand people were in my play, you know, and so I was like, that's really awesome, really cool, but also it's like I'm learning a lot about the process and I'm also learning in a weird way about, in terms of no password, thinking to go past, you know, our all-in-a-long play, but to think globally. And so then in November of 2012, got it into my hand yet again, I was working in the first play in Quartet, which is about three sisters in North Carolina, one of whom is returning warm up from Afghanistan, and wanting to, again, two weeks of lead time, which is really insane. I said, oh, let's do another scheme, that is crazy, you know, so I was like, okay, and I started calling people again, and then some people had been part of the way of water because the energy was really strong, but also people I didn't know, you know, so I put a call out on this year to ATHA, I'm in a theater, a legitimate theater, performance studies, I just went wide, I knew I was going to respond, you know, it could be blanks, you know what I mean, and then people started responding, and yeah, I want to do it in my, you know, I want to do it in, and it was sort of, and I started meeting new collaborators, which I thought was really cool, and very different experiences, people coming into it very directly, told them I was absolutely in the place of process, I'm going to be working on it while all this is happening. So in November of last year, we had 32 readings, within about, I say it's your read time, and again, sort of it went global, like there was a reading set in Florida, and you know, in Western Australia, so thankful to collaborators who wanted to jump on board, lying faith, a leap of faith, which is what art always demands, and a sharing, a desire to share something, and also to have, I think for me, the most fulfilling thing is to have like student voices, you know, like people who don't even call themselves aperture, not even a BFA program, so you know what I mean, we're just like, I'm coming upon this, and this is how I hear this, and to me, that kind of raw voice is very beautiful, because there's no preconception around what theater making is, but they're engaging with character story, which is something I'm still interested in, as a theater maker, and looking at it that way, so, and that's led to, actually, both of those actions, just in terms of the art making, because I kept telling people I was writing quartet, but I actually didn't have a quartet play, which means it made me write the quartet play, which is why I wrote in December, just on a dare, and it's about the Christian right, and I have less people coming back to the family, so, yeah, so, but yeah, this is like a, I think the two kind of schemes, and the sort of, the putting yourself out there, and I would say all of this was like for free, there's no funding, I don't know, infrastructure, it's like really like on faith, you know, truly on faith, of wanting to kind of experience something, but it also inspired me in turn as an artist to make another piece. You could also call that responsibility to all those collaborators, because I kept telling them there's a quartet play to happen, and they were like, yeah, sure, and I was like, oh my gosh, I better write it, you know what I mean? And so, I think that's, it's given me faith, but it's also made me think about different ways of art making and different models that one can perhaps engage with, but also making things in the now. Thank you very much. It's really inspiring to all of you. Because this was a panel on women in action and women artists taking ownership and taking action, I'm interested, there is range of actions, and I think we tend to think very narrowly about what actions count, and so I want, so maybe you could talk a little bit about that process of discovering I can take this action, even if it's as simple as I can pick up the phone and ask a number of people to do the screening, or I can, I was just speaking earlier about your collaboration with Fred Ho, and how that changed some of your thinking, or even Charlotte. What are those, you know, those aha moments of I can actually take this action? Yeah, I guess, I wanted to talk a little bit about seven, which is a project that I made with seven people at Playwrights, and it was initiated by Carol Matt, and she just got the idea that she'll get together and send her friends, and we would interview women leaders from all over the world, and we would transcribe those interviews, and then make monologues, and then weave the monologues into a play. And that project, I don't know, because there were seven of us involved, or because of the seven leaders that were also involved, but it seems like that project has gone further than any of my other plays, and they spoke of the audiences all over the world, and then performed in a kind of regenerals way where the actors playing the roles of the women can be played by men, they can be played by politicians, they can be played by actresses, and the model of that has really inspired me to work also with other playwrights and to deepen my relationships with other women, which is also, I would say that this conversation that we've had, and a lot of it's been by emails, sometimes by phone, this has been informal, it hasn't been funded or anything, but the conversations that we've had privately at this home today, and I guess we have one male person here. But I think it's great to have women just kind together and working together because the power of that is, that is so inspiring, and I think I have a friend, Elise Singer, who I've worked with for many years, and this is just something, it's maybe anecdotal, but it's not to me anecdotal because it's been, we started a buddy system and we were inspired by this book, Artists' Guide or something. And we check in with each other every couple weeks and we give each other our list of five tasks that are all supposed to be creative, not teaching, not, I mean teaching is creative, of course, but you know what I mean, it's about our creative work and the power of our, we did it all last year and I just feel that it has helped me focus my energies and see where I'm spending my time and also to have somebody that I'm accountable to creatively has just been this tremendous boost of inspiration and I just feel like we have the resources even in this group and in this room to do anything we want if we put our minds together, you know, so seven is an example of that where you went much further than any of us thought it would but I think we can also do it pair by pair and in collectives like this that are informal and criminal. I think everyone on this panel has worked on through the significant collective projects, you know, you have your project with Brian Poppett here ultimately and do you want to talk a little bit about that about the power of that collective and how it shaped your approach to that project? Yeah, you know, having come been educated in the United States and going to grad school I think we're educated as individualists and to do our own careers and I think this is like the perfect moment to move away from that paradigm and to see how we need other people and I think that's what we're all moving to is that it's actually it's when I feel most alive and excited so I did work with Brian Poppett but the primary activator for that project was Iman Alam from Pashtart Theater in Ramallah and as a Jewish American and a Palestinian we bonded in 2003 and the first project we did is I brought her over to the theater of the oppressed with some students at the University of Iowa that went really well was the first time many of the students had met a Palestinian person and then I went to Ramallah to work with Iman and Alshar and then we met and we said what can we do next and we wanted to do a play at the wall I tried to make it short it's nothing short Make sure you all know to bring to the wall those bills to separate the Palestinians and their territories from where the settlers were this wasn't even I'm going to get to the controversy but that makes sense it's called the security fence and the idea was to do a play on the wall and I thought how can we do this they can get how many is it 10 meters up into the air they're like the only theater company I could think of that would get that high but we realized very quickly that was too dangerous that we ended up modifying bringing two of Peter Schumann's right-hand man who were women over to Ramallah to do a peace parade and we did a peace parade in the center of Ramallah it took us two weeks to put it together so it was four women organizing and collaborating and as a playwright I didn't write a word that was my first experiment into not being a playwright although the genesis was for play and actually you might have commissioned me the right play but I didn't feel that my voice was the right voice in that situation so giving up my voice actually was a really interesting part of our action so it was a beautiful peace parade it ended with one of Peter Schumann's kind of story and it was depicted in the AP press as a demonstration which was really interesting but you can still find pictures of that out there so I would just say that the final piece of that is how beautiful it is to move from thinking me, me, me and for me it was like actually just saying I'm going to have no voice I'm just going to facilitate other people's visions and that's what we did it was all done by young people all Palestinian young people all the images that we presented were there so to become a facilitator was fantastic and definitely part of my process as a playwright you didn't take anything from me Charlotte the goal of what you're doing is to take a moment to point to the abundance of the actions government are taking in theatre and how widespread the field is so I just wanted you to take a little bit about what that says to you and what that means to you what I really wanted to focus on is presence and the positive photographic image rather than the negative photographic image that people are actually working and people are actually changing the landscape just by doing what they do we have some of them the future now here in the audience and Dara Myers was there playing Trials Obeyed Janice with her performance piece we have Cecilia Raker who's directing the play you know I'm amazed by what the new generation is doing and I wanted to come together and show the work that we're doing and kind of bust it in the new generation and to give them that really support and respect that you're continuing on in this art form and you're making changes within it and we need that we need to keep changing and shifting for a sacrilegious art we can't be obeying the old rules it has to be changing you know and so Vanessa Gilbert is here who directs my plays as well and so I want this dialogue to go across cultures I want it to go across generations and I want to invest in people you know I think also Lisa was talking about the writing and letting other voices come through I'm personally involved in a project like that now in college never did I think that I would be commissioned to do anything by the U.S. Department of Justice but here I am to tell you I have and the way that this happened you know because I'm mutinous soul let me just put that way I'm sure I have many blessings for other things I've done but this sociologist Kirsti Ulo who's an expert on violence against women and this anthropologist Caroline Torres who's watermelon and writes about violence against women in war both of them are my colleagues and asked me if I would get involved in a project about how sexual experiences play out on campus among students where like sometimes in those situations we're talking about people getting hurt in particular women and so I said to them immediately I can write that play I can make anything up we're all playwrights I can make it up but I'd rather get together with a group of students and use some techniques from sociodrama and theater and other areas I'm now in about my fifth week with them and they are just blowing my mind with what they're performing they are making up the scenes and performing in the long spot by the way I wanted no theater majors I wanted all people who are studying other things and have no experience in theater and we have one of the students in the class who's videoing them so we're developing this together and it's been an incredibly humbling experience because I'm learning again I knew how very deep young students are and how aware they are of what is going on in their lives and it's an example as you were saying about the seventh where I never expected to be doing this and here I am doing something and the plan is to have this play at freshman orientations as many colleges and universities in the country as we can work with and as we know from the presidential campaigns this is a deeply political idea it seems like a safety idea to everyone in this room but too many people in this country sadly it's a politically challenging thought and that's amazing you mentioned briefly your comments about crossing borders and I believe all of you have also the many the bent diagram it's amazing I want to just talk a little bit about your experiences developing your voice and your music for the world it's from what that notion of crossing borders and being in other cultures means for you just an individual artist and an American artist all members have been affiliated with the theater without borders as well it's a conversation that isn't an organization it's very different than we were talking about it earlier it doesn't have a board it doesn't have funding it doesn't have anything but it is a website and it's a conversation it's an idea and it's been very important to all of us as we travel and have conversations with each other but for me personally going to Bosnia in 2009 was a time when I think of my proscenium of the world just was blown apart and I wasn't seeing my mother she was a peacekeeper for five years in Bosnia and it opened my eyes to what was going on in the world in a way that you can't read in the newspaper you can read it in the newspaper but when you see you pick up shells off the ground and you see what's really happening and the turmoil that it takes on people's lives it's different and it impacts you in a way that a new paper just cannot do and when I was there I heard music and it took me several years to understand what music I had heard because it was in a market place and I'd gone there during the day and they invited us to come back at night and we came back at night and everything was closed down and the woman who had been selling the dresses during the day had two children who were, I guess playing music for orchestras and they came back with various instruments and then they put the oboe down and picked up the band over to the piano and they played music that I'd never heard before on the piano and then they sang and my heart was just broken and open and I found out later it was J.C. music and that they were originally from Bucharest and they found their way into San Diego and that music became really a call to my soul and I feel like I'll spend the rest of my life and being inspired by so that entered into my work in a way that I didn't really even intend but it just took, like you were saying, it took me forever and I think it's because I travel a lot that I respond so much to the sense of being transient and not always having a home having things in boxes and moving and shifting around so that was part of what I was struck by but I think then it also made me want to go and do everything I could save up my money to go wherever I could and once you open that invitation to the world and say I'm willing to go into places that are not safe into places that maybe you know, cautious, war-torn places places where there's violence once you're willing to do that then somehow roads appear there's a gypsy national anthem that we sing and one of the last verses translated means the roads are open and it's like come and so once you start to go you see things and you can't stop seeing them because I guess less than 5% of Americans have gotten passports the last time I went to the U.S. so the Americans are not going and that's why we had this problem I think maybe that's all the statistics but hopefully it's not so but that strikes me with your company, you know passport and like trying to cross those borders takes a lot of gumption and you've got to take some risk and put yourself out there and not to go to the vacation places and to not travel like a vacationer not travel like a tourist where everything is never viewed and owned and occupied but you're there to in a more pilgrimage type of way you're there to be enlightened you're there to leave everything as you found it if you can and so there's an art to traveling there's an art to crossing borders and I think it it's a constant process of learning that art and it's not something I've mastered but it's something that I want to keep putting myself into the road of and to follow that road wherever it takes I love that idea of the roads are open I wonder if I can comment on as they do have some memories in the road comments about how you find it in yourself to have the courage to follow that open road or to even acknowledge those there and walk us you have to listen I mean of course you have to be willing to listen to what that is and I think sometimes it's about listening without fear and sometimes it's about that simple thing of like truly just picking up the phone or you know or emailing somebody you don't know and saying you want to work together which is pretty scary thing to do especially if you have a very strong artistic vision to kind of be willing to say okay I don't know if we want let's make some work I think it's also about where you place your energies I mean I think that this year in particular I was exhausted from the quartet and everything else you know that we've been doing with no passport and just did my own work as an artist but then you know Molly Smith said I'm organizing a march in Washington for trumpet roll and I was like since I'm doing this as an artist I'm not doing it via RBS station and I was like that's awesome I'm there let's make some theater too so I was like determined to like create a theater action in Washington D.C. on that same day did an open call and received over 100 plays and suddenly we had to put this action together and like make it happen in theater J of course collision came on board and we're now staging another action in New York in April 29th so that all happens because you just listen you just go like oh there's a space here and there's a space where we can be in conversation with an idea that's bigger than us in a way and that the work can have many arms and that's something that I think just for me personally as an artist is has been eye-opening and it's also like as Ruthie says there's that place where you're making things and there's that place where you open things up and that changes you forever and I know that all work that I did prior to just sort of that first invitation which really I think being a radical just kind of what did radical give me time and space to dream you know what I mean for a year and make a lot of work because I felt that was one of the few free dance artists there so I was like making work all the time because the studio space is going to go away but it also made me think about other ways of dreaming and I think that in that process I was like wait step back why are you doing that and you start to look at your value system and also what people think of as being your currency which we treat our art sometimes in the market economy as currency and what is the need behind that when yourself don't view it that way but yet it's positioned that way and so I just I often have written about like you know what happened and no password is an amoeba you know what I mean it is this ever evolving thing so I feel like it's also like it exists on its own as a loose collective and it's the I and the we we're all we're all I and we and for me that's good but it's also a space of listening it's like once you come bubbling up and how do you respond to it we listen we put our ear to the ground and we respond and the world is doing this and we respond and we reflect and we want to engage and we want to create action and we want to make temporary art and we want to make music and art or you know however we describe it so yeah but that's it's about opening your heart that's so beautiful what I was just going to say that I think as artists also human beings you know just to look at where we're drawn and to go towards what we're drawn to but also to look at what we fear most and the places we can call stolen and to go there sometimes and see what's there for us and you know not maybe you know if we flip this room and we were all men talking about action you know the future you know just living going to the neighborhood that you wouldn't go to and seeing that there's every I don't know that seems like a beginning I'm wondering about there's a lot of things that you'll have done that could be categorized as entrepreneurial and I'm wondering about do you have any thoughts about how to be entrepreneurial about falling into the traps that operating within a capitalist slightly Darwinian system sets for us in order the ways we get heard and see and keep creating out of the way I have two little schemes right now that are entrepreneurial schemes one is to create an out of our light LITE family show with this group of lighting designers who created this company wherein they would make works once a year and I don't know that they're still doing it right now but I want to get them to do it with me they're called TET and I just by chance met the wife of one of them who is amazing and found out by accident in our conversation that she's married to one of them and I thought well we just have to make something together that's that and you know I have children so I want to take them to the theater and I want to take them to things that they're going to find fun and interesting and that's going to make them want to keep going to the theater so I have taken them to Blue Man Group and Stomp and through them I have loved those shows I actually think Stomp is very political very political about taking the garbage of the world and making something amazing it always makes me cry to make a show like that that goes everywhere and that is rich but is accessible to kids you know and then my other little scheme and I don't think I can say the part about wanting to escape my teaching or part of it but I'll just say it I'm sorry watch me watch me I love my students I love you I love you but I want to teach a little bit I love you I love you I love you I love you again you know really lucky to work in a college in Marriott where they're all these incredibly talented and smart people and all of us have a mischievous you know parts to us where we want to have another secret by your word an escape of our lives and this one is that we are making a cartoon yes New Yorker cartoonist and we started I do the dialogues and she's taking the illustrations these two women and that's all I'll say but you know like whether or not it becomes money we need our fantasies that we can keep sustaining ourselves and those are my two fantasies of the moment I think we have to be entrepreneurial if we live in America because we live in a capitalist system so by nature of where we're living it would continue to live in America we have to be entrepreneurial but I don't think we have to just reflect the dominant popular culture and so doing small things like shifting the center of the focus of our plays to the perspective is a huge shift in terms of the dominant culture so even within the entrepreneurial if we use the entrepreneurial skills that we have which I think Americans all have because it's built into us in our ideology that we don't even acknowledge but since we have that and we have to be good at it in some way we have to find a way to use it for a good purpose and I'm not saying artists are even a lot of good people I'm not always a good person and I think we get that idea too that the artist is good and in the morning of the salvia the artists were involved in the civil war so I think that we are not necessarily always good but we can try to do something that is productive and has some kind of common part of it and so we use the to control the meaning of our production we can steer that production in a direction that we hope is a little bit more abstract I think again, abstracting the dominant culture so that we're not just sitting here regurgitating what is put upon us without any kind of judgment but we're resisting that, shifting it even when I like to talk a lot about realism because it's a capitalist in my opinion, capitalist ideology that we see on our stages all the time this goes back to what we were talking about earlier with Fred Ho's work where instead of building an expensive set that looks like a living room and in my opinion just lets the audience feel comfortable that these actors are not doing something so seeing the character maybe it doesn't matter about their own character but the work I've made with Fred Ho doesn't mean scenery the behavior, the martial arts choreography is the scenic behavior and as all of us mean it some costumes that can withstand a lot of state to combat and lighting and live music and then you're not wasting all that money building furniture that is just going to be torn out and then can't go anywhere you can't haul that furniture without a huge expense so why not do what theater is good at and have that scenic behavior that is part of the spectacle that theater is really meant to be and also then be portable in different spaces and speak to different audiences that can then be in live and fight live experience with that I think that the couch the famous couch the theater that comforts the Israelism I think something that audiences are seeking in that kind of art is they want to know where they are they want to be situated in a place which of course as we've been talking about to cross borders and to act up you know it seems to me that should be the direction that art pushes us in but I do think there is that very strong impulse to be in a house literally and figuratively when you're in the theater it's a curiosity that I think it has to do with a lot of the instability in living in capitalist systems that we cling onto that in a really strong way I had a lot of time to study this couch but thank you we are just about out of time I want to thank again Kate and Boston University and Boston Theater for having us here and all of you for coming out any last thoughts you should tell us more about what's going on this week yes I welcome tomorrow night we have Ruth Margarov Lisa Schlesinger and Magdalene Gomez performing at the Factory Theater Saturday and then Friday and Saturday nights we have The Future Now Alexia Stamatu who is a visual artist who will be performing and Darren Myers play Dryouts directed by Cecilia Raker I also want to give a special shout out for doing the post-show discussion which I think is really important and very much ties in with our discussion today in that I'm trying to create a new model for cultural conversation after shows rather than what the artist needed to change thank you and so that we are all in dialogue together about what the intentions were what went on there and what's going on in our culture that has connected to that so that's very much what today is about that's what the rest of the week is about and I hope that many people come tomorrow night is free tomorrow night is free I should read thank you for that script we wanted to keep the cast as model I think thank you all very much thank you