 Currently, we are currently streaming on the website, so action. Welcome. Hello everyone. Thanks for joining this evening at roots week 2020 reimagined our theme the fierce urgency of now. I am Amy, Amy McCoy, I will be one of your co host this evening. My pronouns are she, her and hers. And I am hailing from the land okay, also known as Atlanta, Georgia. And I'm going to toss it to my fellow co host to introduce herself. Hi everyone, I'm page part of the operations team with Amy at alternate roots. I am the caretaker peacemaker and implementer on the operations team and I'm here in Atlanta, the land of the muskogee. Welcome. This evening, we will be blessed by Sam well and his panel. And I would like to toss it to Sam. For his, I'm sorry, let me describe the panel tonight. The theater too many times characters in with disabilities are played by non disabled actors, leaving the professional disabled actor behind and without work. And this conversation, the deep dive will focus on discussing this problem as as a way of finding solutions on how to promote the work and artistry of the professional theater artists. And I hope that the technology can be employed by theaters across the country. And again, this will be hosted by someone about this. And I'm going to now just go over a few things. And I hope our language justice partners here are present. Let's check. Mary Louisa, maybe having some tech challenges. I have a few other things that would be great. We're waiting for our language justice partners. Another accessibility feature that we have is close captioning. And you can access that from the close captioning feature at the bottom bar of your zoom screen. And so that's going to be labeled it's a little box labeled with CC. Our gender equity work group reminds us that we should all change our profile names to include our pronouns. As you can see, right below me in this fashion and just include your name and your pronouns and any other information you'd like for us to know. And that can be done by pressing the little box to the side on the right up in the right hand corner with the three dots and just go to rename and you can rename yourself from there. Are we ready with buncha. I think we may have had a mix up with scheduling. Okay. And so unfortunately, I don't think we will have interpretation this evening. We're going to be in our in our growing phase. So we appreciate you all and apologies for that. But we will make sure that we have our interpretation set for tomorrow. Thank you very much. Thank you, Wendy. And you, as you watch you will see a few slides happen across of your screen. One that just went by was alternate routes mission. All of these items are also present on our website. So we and in in respect of time we won't go through all of them. So you could go to the next slide for me Lauren. Thank you. And we as to honor our native and indigenous cultures, and also to acknowledge that this is stolen land that we currently occupy. We do land acknowledgments. And we encourage you to support and encourage you to go to the information that you see on the screen. And then also, as you are here and able, if you would please introduce yourself in the chat with your name, your pronouns, and where you're And if you do know the original name or the people who originally inhabited your place. Please add that as well. Thank you so much. And we do have community agreements. Those are also posted on our website. Just a few I'll go over. We take care and responsibility for ourselves and our own physical emotional mental and spiritual needs. Some of these are definitely pertaining to being in the space together. Thank you to each other grace, knowing that the work of undoing oppressions is hard, and we'll all mess up at some point. You can just keep going with those. I do encourage if someone would please drop the link for the community agreements in the chat, people you can click on that. And read them at full length. We appreciate your patience as we move through this. And without further ado, we will be moving into a video presentation. And as soon after that, you will be hearing and seeing them well about that and take care. I do apologize. I did not give you this piece of information. The video will be on the website streaming just for connectivity reasons. So if you do have the ability to go to the website. We will put a link in the chat for that. But please just keep your volume from the website down so you don't hear an echo when you come back into the zoom space. Thank you. The video will be presented a little later in the session. Oh, so the, does that mean we can go. We will be starting. Right now Sam. Hello, my name is Samuel. My pronouns are he can make his. I'm in Tijuana, Mexico, borderland to San Diego, California. I sit in the Koma land. And I am here today to talk about a very important subject, which is disabled and professional field of artists in the industry. We have a great group of panelists who are willing to talk about what's going on in the world in the country right now with disability and theater. I hope you already enjoy what we have for you. So why don't we go first with. Hello. Hi everyone, this is tally, thank you Sam well. My name is tally McCray I use she her pronouns. I am wearing a purple sweatshirt I'm a cisgendered white woman I've got kind of brown tussled hair, and I am out of doors. So behind me on my screen you can see kind of the white brick of my apartment building. I live in Louisville, Kentucky, my particular neighborhood is the land of the Osage the Shawnee and the East Cherokee nations, and I have a disability I have cerebral palsy. I'm going to pass it to and I also work with national disability theater and I was the co director on the performance and production that we're going to be talking about today. And I will pass it to Sean. My name is Sean fanning and I'm a scenic designer, my pronouns are he him heads. I'm a white cisgender man with short brown hair and a beard, wearing a great national disability theater t-shirts. Behind me is my design studio which has blue walls, a green drafting table and a window with lots of natural light. I live in San Diego, California, which was once part of Mexico and prior to being colonized that was originally the land of the community people. I'm disabled. My status is deaf, hard of hearing. Thank you. And I'll pass it to Nicole. Hi everybody. My name is Nicole kitchen I use she her hers pronouns. I am a cisgender light skinned black woman wearing purple glasses with hair pulled back. I'm wearing a gray over shirt with a little pink and white dress peeking out from underneath. I am in San Diego, California, which is land as has been acknowledged here that was stolen from the Kumai people. So happy to join you. Now we will go back to tell her to talk a little bit about. What is she doing, you know what. It's important to know the work that we are doing with a national disability theater. Thank you, Samuel. This is tally re national disability theater was founded in 2018, and our very first organizational artistic project was with the Ohio Playhouse in San Diego. And today we're going to be spending time talking a little bit about the 2020 pop tour the performance outreach. And I'm going to do a little bit of a P tour. That Nicole is laughing at me that was produced by the Ohio Playhouse in partnership with national disability theater and so this, this particular performance space is typically for a new work that is developed with an audience of young people in mind. The new work had an entirely disabled artistic team design team, and we worked with several different artists and performers with disabilities as well. And it was a great starting point for a national disability theater like I said we're a very young organization and we're kind of moving through our own growth but we wanted to take this opportunity to pause and just tell you a little bit more about the pieces that put that project together. Samuel, am I heading into accessibility specifics or just doing the introduction at this moment. Okay. So, this is Talari again. When I am not a, when I'm not a director at the Ohio Playhouse which is most of the time, I'm not. I am also a teaching artist and so I really believe in kind of what are some of the concrete takeaways that we can take from me, making a space that's accessible right or making a space that's access centered. Kind of three things that were a little bit of a guidepost as National Disability Theater was forging this new partnership, this new project with the Ohio Playhouse when we thought about how to make this space accessible for so many artists in really a compact amount of time. And so the three things that I find really helpful is, and I'll start with C because I'm a teacher and I'm cheesy that way. So the first one is communication, right? How are we communicating early? How are we communicating often? How are we communicating in different modalities so that everyone is getting the information and able to process information and respond in a way that works for them. When you think about, I love that we, that this panel started with an intention of language justice, right? And so National Disability Theater tried to be as mindful as possible of not privileging one mode of communication over another one. So that was the first C. The second C that we really tried to think about a lot is how do we make this accessible, inclusive, professional space was we really thought about choices, right? How do we create an equitable space where everyone that's involved has the ability to make an equitable choice for how they can engage? And so that had to do with just being really flexible, right? Looking at a professional rehearsal calendar, looking at a professional design process. How could we give people choices to engage in ways that really worked for them? And I have to say that La Jolla Playhouse was really game for this kind of approach. Sometimes it was as simple as working with a designer and saying, like, let's think about the best way to process your paycheck on this project. What's going to be the choice that works best for you in your life? That's just one small example that was actually really easy to implement as soon as we all were in the habit of checking in about people's choices. And then the third piece that we'll talk about throughout the session is really the creativity that comes along with creating that kind of accessible, inclusive space. We needed a lot of creativity. I think sometimes when you talk about accessibility on kind of a superficial level, it can be really easy to think like, oh, I'm going to get this one checklist, right? Or I'm going to make this space universally accessible, which always makes me nervous, because if you're having a space that's really access-centered, then sometimes your access needs are going to compete, they're going to overlap, they're going to kind of get in each other's way. So that's where we found we really needed as much creativity to kind of get through that, to navigate that space together and say, does everyone feel that they have the support they need moving forward? How can we make that happen? Yeah. So you're seeing on the screen in front of you just a slide. There is a young person with white skin and light skin and kind of brown hair. She has two crutches with armbands towards the top of her elbow and then handles down below. She's wearing a red sweatshirt and jeans and a sign next to her kind of in a picket style sign says Emily Drivers Great Race Through Time and Space by A. A. Brenner and Greg Mazzgala. So A. A. Brenner and Greg Mazzgala were the writers on the production. And they wrote a great 45-minute time-traveling adventure in which the main character Emily, who was disabled, had to navigate in her real life and in a dream world the forces of ableism and how to address them in 2020. And then that's my elevator pitch on what the show is about and it really, Emily was able to travel back and forth in time to learn more about disability history and disability rights. So I'm going to pause there. That'll give you just a tad of what the actual content of the show was and check with Samuel to see if we're on schedule. Yes, can we go to the next slide, please? And next slide, thank you. This, thank you, Samuel. This is a slide. It's black and white at the top. It says disabled ensembles, a sampling. This is just a reminder to everyone in this session that National Disability Theatre is not the only performance group in the country that does this work. In fact, its founding in 2018 was very much informed by and inspired in the good way by a lot of the other work that's been going on around the country, so we encourage you to look at that. And there's also, if we go to the next slide, which has a slightly different heading, it's called inclusive ensembles, a sampling, again just a sampling, knowing that there are also some professional theater companies throughout the country that are really dedicated to having disabled and disabled performers work together. So what National Disability Theatre aims to do in its mission is to really think about how these different pockets of really excellent disabled work, whether it's an inclusive theater work or it's a primarily disabled ensemble. How does that, how do those companies have a space to talk to each other? How do those companies have a space to come together? And how can a company like NDT be a resource for different theaters around the country, not just have its own home space and its own home theater and home season, but do partnerships just like with La Jolla. So we'll go to the next slide there. Can I pass this one to Sean Fanning to talk a little bit about our workshop and then what that meant going into production? Yeah, this workshop really was the first time that we were all kind of in the same room together. And I immediately was inspired just by the adaptations that were made to do this reading. If you can see in this image, these two wheelchairs being pushed together with clip lights being added to them, and this is supposed to represent a car. And so I saw this during this workshop and I said it's done, you know, we've already, I mean, I'll talk about this a little bit later when I go into like my actual panel discussion. But I think that this was the sort of thing that really set up what we grew to learn during the production, which is really like building off of the adaptations that we normally make. Yeah. Thank you, Tyler. Did you want me to expand and do my whole discussion at this point, or are we going to do that? Yes, Sean. Go on. So yes, Sean, keep going. This is Tyler. Okay, great. Well, so I'm actually, I'm here to talk about the concept of disability gain and also to discuss what it means to collaborate with disabled artists. So disability gain or originally we called it wheelchair gain was a term that we coined early on in our process on this show. The idea was inspired by the concept of death gain within the deaf and hard of hearing community. So what does that gain mean? Especially for those of us who are deaf from birth, we have never felt like we have anything to lose. So why do you call it a hearing loss? We don't have places value on something that we potentially don't need. We're not broken people. So why do we need to be fixed? The word that I think that's the most is adaptation. Our disability gives us a unique perspective and an important voice. We also require that we code switch constantly whether we're functioning more of that as a deaf individual who uses their cell and relies upon interpreters or whether we're mainstream and whether we are oral. As I was throughout my life and gain our information from speech reading and putting together clues from context and detective work. I mean, I believe that because of these adaptations, having my disabilities made me more attuned to situations more included into body language, more sensitive to tones or emotions in the room. It's also made me a very visual communicator. And so I often feel that being deaf is the reason I'm an artist. So having a disability isn't just a challenge. It's also an opportunity. And the creative team for Emily drivers great way may have been probably one of the first disabled creative teams. The first meeting for the show was like the first time in my own life that I found myself sitting at a table looking around it and feeling that shared understanding and experience with others. I didn't feel alone anymore. And I didn't feel like I was trying to pass for hearing or trying to battle my way through a meeting where people were talking over each other. So being able to bring my own experience about what it means to adapt and innovate to the table with other wonderful artists I worked with, allowed us to sort of come up with this concept disability game. And what that means is that when you have an artist in a wheelchair, that wheelchair is not a nuisance to design around. It's an opportunity to create something. So just between us as a designer, putting a vehicle on stage in traditional situations is a real pain. It's always the problem. And when we look to the adaptations, if somebody already brings to the table, we discovered that there's already a vehicle and it really works. So instead of having a wheelchair embrace it, play it up, make it a part of what you're doing. I think that there's something to be said for identity and perception and something that we all discovered with the common thread running beneath the creative team. Like the characters that we represented in Emily Driver, being disabled is a part of one's personality makeup. And it doesn't form how we live our lives, but it doesn't define us as people or as artists. We're not shallow two-dimensional figures that are only represented by disabilities. Those make up a fraction of who we are. We all share the power to choose our identity and decide our function and determine how we most accurately wish to be portrayed. So while disability informs our ideas as collaborators, ultimately, we also must have full agency over the narrative of the disabled character on stage and how they interact with the world. So, I mean, I'm glad to be here because I think that this plays into a much larger discussion on representation when it comes to selecting a creative team that sort of representation matters, not only for the sake of equity, but because diversity also means that we're able to bring unique voices and perspectives to the creative process and elevate all of our work. And that's what I got to say, so thank you. This is Talari. Sean, can we advance to the next slide? And I'm going to have you talk just a little bit more about your set design. So, yes, so talk more because you're great. I'm done. They're following a few pictures about your set design. So you can talk about the pictures. Yes, speaking about the design elements here, we were really looking for a way to create an open space where we can imagine going on a journey. We have this idea of this wonderful sort of Rand McNally map that we use to sort of describe the process of the main character during the show. And as you can see, we really borrowed that original image that we saw in the reading and said, hey, we can make two wheelchairs with them together and it becomes a car. If you want to advance to the next slide, I think we had like a picture of the designs. So this is what we actually came up with. And what I love about this is that we, it's a hybrid of both a set piece and wheelchair. And we've really featured and highlighted the wheelchair as a part of the form follows function idea of this car. You can have two pieces of sort of hinged open and then enclosed in front of the wheelchair but still allow the users full range of movement. If you can move to the next slide. So here with some drawings that I did to sort of put these ideas together. And there was another vehicle in the show that was supposed to be about. And so I really wanted to find a way to embrace the wheelchair, let us see the wheelchair, but also have something that suggests about so it's not like we're trying to hide any of this framework. I think that there's another wonderful picture of calories. Oh, well, here's another side view of the car. I really see that this was just connected to the wheelchair. And I really had to thank the production staff of La Jolla Playhouse for being very clever and innovative and working with this challenge. Look at this thing, I mean this thing folded up flat and then attached to a wheelchair and you immediately get the sense that the bus, which is a very simple, simple idea. And so effective. And so that that was sort of the guiding principle this whole production was how do we, how do we have fun with it? Because that's really one of the things that you miss when you're trying to get your head around designing a space for accessibility is you feel like you have all these rules and all these restrictions. So working with the actors and discussing what works for you. And how do we have fun with this? How do we create a performance space that allows you to bring out the most in your performances. And a lot about its collaboration, and it's not something that I could always decide coming into a room, we have to have those conversations. We learn a lot about this type of process when we're thinking about implementing things and other theatrical productions. So it's very proud of this whole production. Thank you. And now we would like to hear from Jacob, who is representative of La Jolla Playhouse. Hi everybody. Nicole Kitchen from La Jolla Playhouse. I just love looking back at those pictures. We had so much fun creating it. I actually just want to hear Sean talk about more about the car. I look at the pictures and I'm like, ooh, tell them how it opened because it was so cool the way it just ends together and then the panels went off so the people could get in and out of the car. So I'm going to say a little bit, but I want to hear more about the car. And even the way the wheelchairs just clip together so they move together as one. It was so much innovation and it was so fun getting to go down to the design studio every day and see the different progress that was being made on this. It was just so fun. This project was such a joy to be in and to be a part of and to be a part of the creation of. And Sean and Talley have heard me say a number of times that it was so wonderful being at the table and because I as a black woman, I often am the only one of said group at the table as was spoken that, you know, a lot of the artists with disabilities often when they're there at the table they feel like they're the only one. And it brought me so much joy to push back from the table and just watch this group of people commune and speak a shared language and and not getting jokes and going that's okay I don't need to laugh at that joke they're laughing it's fun. This is good. This is good. It was just it was so wonderful just to be in that room and to be part of the creation. But one of the things that they brought me on this panel to speak about is really just creating opportunities and this production, it had a number of opportunities but it also came as especially as a casting director and as a producer. It came with a number of challenges as well at one point. I literally looked at the team and I said okay so you are telling me we need a trans disabled woman of color to play this role. And they're like yeah that's true that's what we're telling you and I'm just like. Okay. And we you know we dove in we dove in hard I would say we did not meet all of the criteria for that particular character but the representation of what was necessary for the character that for the person that that character was based on we were 100% true to that. And that is what was important. We had a cast that was made up primarily of people of color and as well as people with disabilities and so the the cross section and the intersectionality as we call it that took place on this production was just astounding. But again it's about creating opportunities and the one thing that I learned and that continues to stay implemented into our work and at the La Jolla Playhouse is the way you communicate going back to what tally was saying in the very beginning is how you're communicating what language you're using, especially again as as artists of color we would always see something that says all open to all ethnicities and we're like okay but do you mean it and you know the language we all have that language that when we see and it's like, Oh, oh you mean it and working with national disability theater helped us to open up language on our breakdowns that really showed no we are open to seeing actors with disabilities actors of all disabilities in our productions not just for the productions that are specifically have these care disabled character you know we are open and so having open language within our breakdowns and and including just also thinking more about space and being able and it goes with language but it goes also with intentionality of thinking about the spaces that we are auditioning in and the spaces that we are rehearsing in and taking a good look and making sure that those spaces are fully accessible and then putting that on the breakdown as well and saying rehearsals auditions and performances will take place in accessible spaces that is language that makes you go oh, oh they mean it okay you know and it's such a simple thing to put on there because it's also the truth our spaces you know and we if it's not the truth, then we need to take a step back and go why isn't that the truth, how can we adjust what space can we utilize that would make that the truth versus going oh no that's not true let's take it off the breakdown. So it's it's really a deepening of the intentionality of the work to make sure that whatever communities we are making sure no need to know they are embraced within our work know that now I want to hear more about the car. This is Talarie Jacoll I have one more quick question for you can you give just a couple examples like concrete examples of how some things have shifted at the playhouse you mentioned like you mentioned like your breakdown and some other things but I know since our project together you sometimes I'll get a text from Jacoll she's like new thing and then it's just really exciting to see the actual organizational processes shift. Oh gosh see and in all honesty these things are being so much becoming such commonplace or I'm like ooh what are we talking about what did we do what was good what did we do. I will say one example and this I don't I feel like it's a good example but it also makes me go but is it. Sean Fanning is somebody that La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego in the city of San Diego and has worked at all of the theaters here in town in some capacity and has designed a number of pop tours before our partnership with national disability theater and there was a moment where of course when Talarie and Mickey came to us and said well this is what we want to do we're like we've got a scenic designer. All right what else we got you know it was just like done we Sean is somebody that we already know and love so then we did get to put together this full creative team that was all artists with disabilities. And then as we were putting the design team together for the 2021 tour we're looking at this list of people and going all right this this feels good this feels good I think we're ready to put. I think we're ready to put offers out and I looked at the list and spoke with my colleagues at the Playhouse and I said. We just went from doing a production with a full design team of artists with disabilities and this list has none. And we re-evaluated we looked back at our list we were like you are absolutely right that is not how we are going to do business moving forward. And we Evan Easton who was the sound designer on Emily Drivers Great Race will be the sound designer for the 2021 production of Pick Me Last by Idris Goodwin. And that's it's such a small step that's why I'm like it shouldn't. It almost shouldn't feel like a point in the right direction because it took a stop in a step to get there you know but we are stopping and we're acknowledging and we are. We're checking ourselves in every place that we need to be checked and we're holding ourselves accountable and we are looking to our partners to hold us accountable as well. What else did I do tell me what else did we do. Okay. Sam well you muted. I'm sorry my computer is crazy. One one thing I would like to for you to go to talk about is what changes that happened while you were touring the show at sports. I know that there was a change. And no wonder the support that was really a ground breaker for the project. Thank you. Yes please thank you and tell her by all means feel free please to jump in because you were very much a part of this process as it was initially happening. So the pop tour one of the things and this is another major change that we have implemented into our just process of creating the pop tour is. We have added an extra step into our screening process of the schools that we're going to go into our stage managers and production team would always go in we had a checklist to make sure you know this is good this is good we got what we need. But accessibility has become paramount and gone to the top of the list in that. And we for this production we did we double triple checked everything all of the schools that we were going to be touring to. But our very first school where we previewed this is a school that we've had a long standing relationship with Sequoia Elementary in San Diego we have started every pop tour probably for the last eight years at Sequoia Elementary. They allow us to to tech and and do our previews in their space. And so Sequoia did not get the screening that the rest of the schools did because we went oh we know Sequoia Sequoia school now we're there every year we know them cool cool cool cool. And we went in and we got there and it was not cool. The the stage was not accessible and we as as the pop tour the touring production because we were forming cafeterias and whatever space happens to be available we're very. We're quick to adjust okay we can't use a stage here let's go down here usually the it's because we can't get the. The stage pieces on and so we just go okay cool we'll just do it in front of the stage we still have enough room for an audience okay no worries perfect. This was different. The reason that we could not perform on the stage was because it wasn't accessible to our actors. Our actor couldn't get on the stage and so we were but we so we kind of we but it wasn't as full of a click as it should have been at that moment we were still like adjust okay yeah we're down here. It was the principal again because we have this long going relationship with the principal comes in and he goes hey why you guys on the floor what do you what are you doing here. And we let him know the situation and he said no there there is a there is a ramp but nobody had the key to or no this one didn't have one that's right this school didn't have one. Am I right Valerie this one didn't have one this yeah this school didn't have one and so the principal was just he went into action. And because and the worst that's right I do love telling the story. The thing that makes it like that broke all of our hearts about this is so the principal went into action he was like okay great no problem at all. I'm going to get on the phone the the the janitorial staff the head janitor at Sequoia Elementary I wish I knew his name and I wish somebody on our education staff was on here right now because this man is he championed everything that we did and it was the principal and the head of the janitorial staff that were relentless and put in orders that they said we're going to take months to months to take and they said no months isn't good enough and within two weeks Sequoia Elementary had a temporary. ramp that was put in and then they had orders for the lift that would be put in so yeah we're like okay when for us the thing that made it sad that it took us to come in and make that change. There was a student Sequoia Elementary school who had been going there for a number of years and was a wheelchair user full time wheelchair user and was in the choir. And her wheel could not get up to that stage to perform with her with her classmates in her wheelchair and there would be there was somebody they offered to oh well we can carry you and she wouldn't she wasn't going to have somebody carry her. This child every day for choir practice. Got her way up those stairs to be able to be up there with her classmates and perform but it took La Jolla Playhouse and National Disability Theater coming into that school and not being able to perform for real action to be taken so yes the action was taken. And it was taken throughout San Diego County this wasn't the only school that this ended up being a situation for and real change has been made in the cafeteria. Of San Diego County benefiting so many students the pop tour reaches more than 2520,000 students a year. How many of those students are students with disabilities for the very first time not only saw themselves represented on stage so directly but also had got changed implemented in their school that would better benefit them moving forward it's just it's beautiful and astounding but it's also heartbreaking that that's what it takes. This is tally and I know Sam Wells going to get mad at me because we have to do some Q&A but I also just want to say that part of the play of Emily driver was our main character who was 12 going back through time and space to look at the mainstream disability rights movement right and so the final scene in our play was actually the character of Emily. Encountering and reenacting the capital crawl that happened in 1990 right before the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. So to go into Sequoia Elementary and hear that there had been a student that had to crawl up the steps to get to her choir practice when that was part of our play. Our play was really many of us had a very visceral response to that and we were really happy that it ended with that happy ending where the you know where change happened. But it just really hit home for us that it was a really important piece to be literally bringing into the schools because I got to tell you when La Jolla Playhouse came to National Disability Theater and said, we'd love to do a project with you it's going to tour to a bunch of elementary schools we were like, that's going to be hard. It was but also super meaningful. And I'm done. That's it Sam well. Thank you. It's a car for all of that. That's a wonderful and this is an example of. Other work that's being done right now and to open up doors for disabled actors. In the country. I am working very, very closely with Hillary being a part of National Disability Theater. I'm actually a board member of the organization and we are changing. We are trying to change these ideas and the example of what happened at the beginning of the year with La Jolla Playhouse and National Disability Theater is huge. It's a huge in November of last year I was called by J.C.O. because J.C.O. knows me. You know doing theater around San Diego and J.C.O. called me and said Sam, I want you to come and audition. I was like, what? You want me to audition for La Jolla Playhouse? What the hell? But it really impacted the way I saw theater and the way I saw my work. It's like, you know, if La Jolla Playhouse is giving me a chance, a little chance to audition, then that means something. And from that audition, I wasn't casting, but I started a relationship with Hillary and other folks about what we are doing. And to follow this, we would like to present two videos. One is from La Jolla Playhouse and the other video is about my work with my show as a disabled professional artist. So where do we go to see the videos? And the link is in the chat. So let's go to the link. And just a reminder that you'll want to mute one of yours so you're not getting that echo. And when we come back into the room, make sure you either close out or mute the live stream. For those of you not in the chat in the streaming feature, if you want to see the chat, please go to the top right corner. And there will be a bubble. You can click on that and that will open up the chat. Please remember to use your name and add your pronouns in that streaming chat. Also, this is a good time while we're queuing up the videos to take a stretch or refresh your water or just close your eyes from the screen until we hear the video. In 1967, a child who was born to a farm working family there, my parents, came to Los, migrated in to Los at the end of the 1930s, leaving behind their well-loved, light Santa, a small village in the state of Zacatecas, Mexico. The children of the father, my great-grandfather, had a farm worker, but since I'm bringing in the children of the family into the fields, I had age three and started attending the stupendous circle for the same bunch of girls in Riverside. Life was normal. Okay, I'll wear the coat to get you out of my ass. Good. You don't want to be on your ass. Where's your feels like it? Tomah-way. Tomah-booth. The next day, I had to go out at the club. And of course, the answer is no. This is our deal no problem. I do like safe women. But we were talking about you. I have to worry about you. You're my father and I love you. The whole family loves you. To see myself in this situation and I don't know why. I am not loved the way I want to be loved. I also get frustrated to see the other man who abused their wives. When I would like only one single opportunity to care for someone. All right, back everyone. Samuel, is there another video? Samuel, you are muted. La Jolla Playhouse creates the opportunity for artists to tell stories the world needs to hear. From sharing the human kindness and hope that emerged from tragedy and come from away. To illuminating the forgotten stories of a generation lost in Cambodian rock band. We nurture the next generation of award-winning writers. I've just been really thankful and grateful for the artistic home I've gotten to find at La Jolla Playhouse. When I was a grad student there, I was just continually inspired and really delighted by the breadth and depth of what the Playhouse was doing. By partnering with companies like National Disability Theatre, we are creating change. Our 2020 pop tour for students was written, directed, designed and performed by artists with disabilities. A lot of theaters work really hard to talk about making an effort towards diversity and inclusion and accessibility. And often the way you see that play out at professional theaters of this size is they will put on a play that was directed by a non-disabled director and designed by non-disabled designers and written by non-disabled people. But there will be one actor with a disability cast in the show. La Jolla Playhouse has been so incredible that they have joined National Disability Theatre in saying that is amazing, but it's not it. Okay, so the two videos are two examples of people with disabilities doing professional shows. And we wanted to share this with all of you to show you all the work that I have been doing for the past several years and for my play for the past several years. Now, what I would like to do is I would like to open it up a few minutes for some questions from the viewers. We are a little late, but I think we can take a couple of questions. Actually, we're not late at all. We've got plenty of time for questions. Thank you, Wendy. You can drop them in the chat or you can raise your hand physically or with the blue hand razor thingy, whatever you call it, button in the Zoom. We have a question already. Yes, I can read them. Question from Lisa Mouth. What brought you the greatest joy in collaborating with other disabled artists? Okay, and I'd say the stories that we could tell each other that other people who were not in the room or on the fringes of the room didn't completely understand it. It's like having a little secret society or a secret club where we're all like, I remember back in elementary school that thing happened or something and we could all sort of relate to each other and talk about this sort of shared story of what it's like to sort of feel like you're pretending all the time, walking through your life, going through your education and all of that. So it's like this full circle feeling of meeting people with the same kind of story. That's what I loved about it. This is Tallari. Two things. One, Samuel mentioned like getting a call to come in for an audition at La Jolla Playhouse and just sitting through the audition process and watching everyone in the room get like viscerally excited when a performer with a disability came in. It was so different from my lived experience of walking in and being like, do I explain? Do I make a joke about it? Do we talk about it? Do I just keep going? How do we do this? So like just having that space where not just me but La Jolla Playhouse was excited. We were like that one has a disability. Yay. That was awesome. And then the second thing that will stay with me for a really long time was when we were doing the workshop production about a year ago, we spent one rehearsal doing just like a physical warm-up, you know, moving around the space. And it was the first time in my entire life that I could remember where I wasn't self-conscious about doing a physical warm-up in theater. I was like, oh, I'm not the only one limping around. So people aren't watching me. There's like nine other people to watch. Okay. And I know that that happens in other affinity spaces, that there are a lot of theaters that provide that opportunity. But it was really my first time having that where I was in the room and totally comfortable and it was really life-changing. Next question. Do you have cast or crew members who use facilitated communication or adaptive communication devices? This is Valerie. Again, this project was National Disability Theater's first production. So we did not have anybody using adaptive communication for this particular show. But one of my favorite pastimes is to think about awesome characters that would be really neat if they used alternative communication, right? So the ghost of Jacob Marley in the Christmas Carol, right? Really any spooky, like ghost thing. Like that's one of where my head goes dramaturgically is like how does that become disability gain? And how does that help you tell the story? And then when you think about it like that, then there's really the options are limitless. Alright, next question. What process do you all utilize to identify artists with disabilities to collaborate with? This is Valerie. Any way possible, right? We were so lucky to put together such a great artistic team for this show and then use the local artists that we had. I think even just partnering with La Jolla and other community partners to get the word out there that we were actively looking for and excited about people with disabilities was great. But one of the things that I think we have to do across communities within the disability community outside of the disability community within the intersectionality within the disability community is I think we have to really start thinking about what it means to come out as disabled, what it means to say professionally that you're disabled, and how that is complicated and not always possible. How sometimes even the identity of disabled is privileged in a way that doesn't always make space for people's lived experience. So moving forward, National Disability Theater really believes in the power of authenticity and also the complicated nature of what that means, right? That while many of us experience disability, it can be a really positive thing that in the world today that can't always be true for everyone's experience of their own life. And you know, and I want to say that it's a challenge to find disabled artists out there with disabilities. And part of the problem is like I already said, they need to hide the disabilities. You know, me talking to the designers at the show, they, for years, they had to hide that they were disabled to work in the professional theater. And you know, those are things that you go like, wow, how can that be possible? I'd like to add to that. This is Nicole. As, as Tyler said, we got to get to a place of a great result, but that was by so much collaboration. It started with the list of folks that National Disability brought to us that folks that they had worked with. But also we had the constraints of wanting to keep as much as much local as we possibly could. The pop tour is a very San Diego local production. But it took so much reaching out. It took collaborating with agents who we know work with performers with disabilities. It took collaborating with the other theaters that we knew. The list, the family theater, the list that Talary put up earlier, we were reaching out to all of those people asking everyone to reach out to their networks to then help us. Also, again, because they're one of the characters was a trans character reaching out to our LGBT community and also saying what kind of what folks do you have that may have some intersectionality with this but then also making sure that we are collaborating and speak in a constant conversation with trans family services to make sure that everything is happening authentically on each side of things. So it was, it was a community, it was communities coming together to make it happen. But the first thing was making sure that they knew we were very, very serious about wanting to hire performers with disabilities, artists with disabilities. And one of the things that I talked to you about feeling like you have to hide, one of the actors actually the actor who ended up playing Hugh in both our workshop production and the touring production. I've known this actor for a number of years. And I've known him through the community. I've known him through work that he's done with Samuel. I've known Paul for quite a while in this industry. It wasn't until he submitted for this role in Emily driver that I knew he was disabled performer. I had no idea he's a he uses a prosthetic leg or what did he said a removable leg that's what he put on his resume. He had a removable leg and and I had no idea and it was just I was amazed in an awe, but I was also kind of sad that I never knew that before. But anyway, so it's all the things coming together, but it definitely takes communication and community in order to make that happen. I told you I want to tell you that Paul was at two roots the week last year. He wasn't with the group that I took. So he was a part of the cast of the show. Do we have any other questions or comments? I'll read a comment here. We've gotten all of the questions. Thank you some well. How could this be possible. This really is underscoring the necessity of disability justice in all avenues of human experience. I am honored to sit with this necessity and the accountability that it requires. Thank you so much, the period for your comment. And I know that bringing this panel to root. It's a lot because we need to inform everybody about disability, accessibility, accountability for who we are as artists. I would like if we have any other comments. Yes, I have a tally has a comment and this is for everyone viewing. If you know talented disabled artists, or if you are one, seriously send me their your info. Seriously, that's how it happens. There's no magic sauce. Email address is tally dot a dot McCray at national disability theater.org. And they've put their information in the chat. Also, Doris, I am so grateful for this workshop have learned so much so glad to see you all, especially some well that that's it. I would like to thank the panelists. I admire and look out to and seen a fan in tally my great and you call kids for being part of this. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And show some, you know, audible appreciation. Thank you so much. It was such a great panel. I learned so much. Thanks. Amazing. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you again. Appreciate you all. Samuel you're such a great late night emcee several years ago who knew you had all the talent. But you know, he wants to show it out. Thank you. I think we're also very privileged to have Camille Schaefer here from Azul in North Carolina. So for our new friends associated with national disability theater Camille has been really instrumental and has been doing a lot of work around inclusion for folks with disabilities for a number of years. So Camille, she's, she has Azul as her name. So that's who she is, but I just wanted to uplift her. Yes, Camille. Thank you. I'm, I'm particularly excited about what I, what Sean presented about you, how you are working with the technology in design work, because I have experience in both the performance aspects but also in scenic work. And so I was just really thrilled to see the work that you're doing and scenic design and how. Thank you. Yeah, great. This is our moment, you know, this is our moment where the technology is there for us to really think through, how do we innovate with disability theater so it just feels like the time is right. Thank you for that. Very exciting. Camille. Yes. Would you like to say something, Camille? Yes, if you, if you want to, yeah. What do I do? You can say whatever you like, or you can say nothing if that's what you like. I'm very, very, very, I'm very happy to see what's happening right now. This is really, you know, I've been working at Truth for many years and to see this today is absolutely wonderful. I am really, and thank you, Samuel. Samuel, I really thank you from the bottom of my heart. And thank you, Ruth. Yo, this is Talary. I just want to say we didn't even scratch the surface in terms of some of the cool things in that design. Our costume designer was Mallory Kay Nelson, and her costumes were incredible. And she basically was able to make magic with mostly like jeans and t-shirts, and she was great. And the other thing I wanted to just lift up is I really appreciate that this is a space where we're talking about disability justice, right, which really looks at those intersections of how when you really look at accessibility and access centered work, then you're actually, it's actually a liberatory process for several different groups. Right, and several different lived experiences that have those intersections. So that's one thing that I know National Disability Theater is continuing to work on and with and through. Because it's tricky, I think, and sometimes even the name National Disability Theater can, it gets a little complicated and it gets a little messy and so I think as an organization and as a new organization, we're kind of trying to embrace that mess as much as possible. Well, I just want to thank you so much for writing with us in this panel. Again, I would like to thank the panel for being a part of our Roots Week. It's just grateful to be here with all of you. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much. We dropped in the chat, if you want to hear more from Camille, Camille will be giving our pollination keynote next Saturday. So we're excited for that. Yes, it's in the chat Saturday at 930 am Central, 1030 Eastern, which is my real time. And that will be keynote pollination with Camille. So please, please, please join. And I want to thank everyone, everyone for coming to this evening's presentation. It was amazing. I learned so much. I'm inspired and also convicted as in wanting to be more intentional with the work that I do and how I move forward as well. Next up this evening, we'll have studio visit and freedom map report back with cherry and Ron. And we appreciate you all. We want to see you at 730 Central for that for 830 Eastern. In the same zoom link. The same zoom link here. Thank y'all. Thank you, Lauren and Wendy and self for everything that you have done. Thank you so much. Thank you, Samuel. This was so awesome. And I don't know if we could have gotten all these people at Luther Ridge. It would have been awesome if we could and maybe we can in the future, but how, how wonderful it was to be able to take advantage of the technology and have your crew here. So thank you for doing all the behind the scenes work to make sure that happened. Amazing. Great work. Sad. I can't bring you a beer right now though. I know you do. I know you do. I was just going to bring you another. You know, we know each other. We go way back, Samuel. Oh yeah. Thank you to the tech team for working through these glitches. Thank you so much for everybody who worked on this. And I really appreciate it. Thanks. Thanks y'all. All right. See y'all at 730 central 830 Eastern on the same zoom. I have a show. I cannot be on that. Okay, well we'll see you tomorrow. Yes. Bye. Bye y'all. I always like to see who's who really stays. All right, Amy, I'm going to close it out. Yep. Thank you. Thank you for your hosting. And we'll see you a little bit later. All righty.