 Hi, I wanted to just offer some words of heartfelt and extraordinary welcome to you. My name is Derek Goldman and I'm the artistic director of the day at the Performing Arts Center and a professor of theater and performance studies here at Georgetown. When a few months ago Cynthia Schneider and I received a campus reflective engagement in the public interest grant to host this convening, we never imagined the response we would get from such a distinguished group of artists, scholars, policymakers, activists, educators, community leaders, journalists, and students and we are humbled and honored to welcome you here at Georgetown. As we were making the final preparations, we got a call from Georgetown's president's office telling us that logistics might become even a bit more complicated today but the secretary of state Hillary Clinton would be on campus speaking this morning. And this felt oddly auspicious as I was reminded of her visit to campus two and a half years ago. It was December 14, 2009 and we had entered exam week here at Georgetown. I was scheduled to meet that morning with Miranda Rose Hall, an undergraduate theater and performance studies major who is an award winning playwright as well as a gifted performer, director, activist, journalist, and poet. I actually got an email from her this morning. She's currently working with the Jesuit volunteer corps in Alaska. The night before our meeting we had received a campus email blast from the president's office that secretary Clinton would be speaking that morning on campus to roll out President Obama's human rights agenda for the 21st century. These last minute emails and appearances of world leaders are a frequent and occupational hazard at Georgetown. At virtually the same moment Miranda and I emailed each other and we ended up agreeing to combine our session with walking over to see the speech together in Georgetown's Dately Gaston Hall which is in the next building over. We waited in the long line and talked about her senior thesis project and finally settled in the middle of a packed house of about 750 people. And when Secretary Clinton concluded she had time for three questions. Dozens of hands went up each time including Miranda's. And on the third and final question the School of Foreign Service dean here at Georgetown Carol Lancaster who is moderating the Q&A and who you'll meet tomorrow spotted Miranda's red jacket among the crowd called on her. And Miranda stood with great poise and addressed Secretary Clinton. I'm wondering what you see the role of artists doing in helping to promote human rights. I had the privilege earlier this summer to hear the playwright Lynn Nottage speak in one of the Senate buildings after she advocated for women's rights in the Congo. And I wonder how you see creative practice accompanying and amplifying policy. And as she heard and received the question the first mention of the arts and artists in the 75 minutes we had been gathered Secretary Clinton's whole body seemed to change quite conspicuously whereas the rest of her presentation had seemed polished and forceful slick and certain. Here the rhythm of her breath shifted and she spoke quietly and slowly in a lower register as if a window had been opened and the air quality in the room was being allowed to adjust. She began. That is a wonderful question because I think the arts and artists are one of our most effective tools in reaching beyond and through repressive regimes and giving hope to people. She went on. Artists can bring light in a gripping dramatic way to some of the challenges we face. You mentioned the play about women in the Congo. I remember some years ago seeing a play about women in Bosnia during the conflict there. It was so gripping. I still see the faces of those women who were pulled from their homes, separated from their husbands, often raped and left just as garbage on the side of the road. So I think that artists both individually and through their works can illustrate better than any speech I can give or any government policy we can promulgate that the spirit that lives within each of us, the right to think and dream and expand our boundaries is not confined no matter how hard they try by any regime anywhere in the world. There is no way that you can deprive people from feeling those stirrings inside their soul and artists can give voice to that. They can give shape and movement to it and it is so important in places where people feel forgotten and marginalized and depressed and hopeless to have that glimmer that there is a better future, that there is a better way that they have just to hold on to. So I'm going to do what I can to continue to increase and enhance our artistic outreach. But this is also a great area for private foundations, for NGOs, for artists themselves, for universities like Georgetown to be engaged in. And I think that the power of the arts is so enormous and we can't ever forget about the role that it must play in giving life to the aspirations of people around the world. And she ended there with an eloquent and passionate statement about the role of the arts which she had not planned to make but which the serendipitous question from one poised undergraduate drew from her. Within a day of the speech I have received several emails from fellow artists and organizational listservs quoting Hillary's remarks. Roberta Levitao, now a dear friend colleague who's been instrumental in helping us shape this convening that with the time I didn't know well personally, sent a large group email to an international group of artists quoting her comments on the arts without specific foreknowledge of the Georgetown context. Innumerable responses came such as this one from John O'Neill, influential theater activist and artistic director of Junebug Productions. Roberta, your note raises my sense of optimism about how we might be able to find support in the future. Best wishes to you and all of us as we struggle to make things better for the world. In the ensuing weeks I would see Hillary scripted in unrehearsed words about the arts quoted at length on numerous major websites and the video of this sequence with Miranda was even included in TCG Theater Communication Group's video, Stage Matters, broadcast at the Los Angeles TCG conference. To this day I'm still amazed at how much I see it cited as perhaps the single most sustained accessible articulate and forceful statement made about the impact of the arts in relation to foreign policy by a high-ranking U.S. official. This single serendipitous moment strikes me as a microcosm of the growing sense of possibility and momentum that has led us to this convening. On that December morning I did nothing special to engender that exchange except to show up with a bright student and bear witness to a conversation and we come to this convening not to wield any specific expertise but with a profound sense that the worlds of theater and foreign policy have a great deal to say to each other in this particular moment, in this particular space and with gratitude that you are here for the conversation. Before I came to Georgetown seven years ago I had like many of my peers in the American theater dabbled a bit in international work but as a practicing artist and founding artistic director of a professional theater company in Chicago my focus had been closer to home directing regionally creating and developing new work, community based projects in schools, prisons, housing projects. Initially international work seemed too remote and unwieldy to make central. There was simply too much to do right in our own community and it was hard to wrap one's head around how to begin. I don't have language skills, funding is difficult, logistics are daunting. So many of you in this room have engaged in this work for longer and in deeper ways than I have colleagues here at Georgetown. We have so much to learn from you. My own sensibilities as a practicing artist, an educator, and a citizen though have been profoundly transformed by the cross-cultural exchanges I have been part of. Whether traveling with the Center for International Theater Development to be part of world class theater work in Bulgaria, bringing a delegation of Georgetown students to perform at the UNESCO World Festival of Theater Schools in Peru or hosting groups like Belarus Free Theater, La Theater from Belgrade, or Ping Chong's Voices from the Congo, and of course the delegation we are currently hosting from Baghdad University. As a delegate to the International Theater Institute of World Congress in China I met colleagues from India, the Sudan, Israel, Poland, Cuba and Burkina Faso and found that the bonds we shared as theater people are far deeper than the cultural differences between us. In fact these cultural differences seem somehow to fuel our openness with each other and enable intimacy and trust in a way that I have found is often harder to forge among American colleagues. I see the world in a radically different way because of these experiences. Whether I'm reading about global affairs in the newspaper or going into a rehearsal or classroom the world feels bigger and more knowable, more humane and I feel smaller in it in a good way. In these various intimate spaces of exchange I have felt so palpably the power of the contact zone, the newness of relationships that can and will be lasting and will lead to collaborations, partnerships new cultural understandings, the sense that something important is happening. I've come to see the relationship between working locally and globally not as a paradox or a tension but as a mutually enforcing continuum. The local, immediate, intimately embodied nature of theater is the very thing that gives its singular potency in the context of doing global work. As I was talking with Professor Wali Shamil who you'll meet a great deal in the next couple of days who's in residence with us from Bagdad University and is the adapter director of the performance of Nine Parts of Desire that you'll see tonight. He looked at me and tapped his heart and said only through this work together do we have a window into the other's soul. So I thank you for being part of this conversation and it's now my pleasure to introduce my partner in this endeavor, distinguished professor in the practice of diplomacy in the School of Foreign Service here at Georgetown, Ambassador Cynthia Schneider. Who work in universities, you will recognize I think that it is some kind of a minor miracle that Derek and I found each other. We have actually been working together so much productively and I'm so grateful for that. I first got to know Derek through the incredible international work that he's brought to Georgetown and a component of my courses in diplomacy and culture here which are taught in the School of Foreign Service is to send the students out to experience cultural events and sometimes they can do that right here and I look around and so many of you have been instrumental in this and saw the voices of the Kanzo that Mingchang brought to us thanks to Carol from Syracuse University they saw Ode Wushid's film Quartina they saw the Belarus Free Theater and they would really just come back to the class even still almost with tears in their eyes and hardly able to speak about these experiences and they would say to me this is the first kind of real thing that we have. All of our courses have been theory and I am completely unburdened with any knowledge of political theory and no danger of that for me and I could just see them kind of transforming as not to be too corny as they started to feel you know we're not really into feeling any foreign policy but actually all of the neurological evidence and many books written on this somehow probably the best known as Drew Weston's The Political Brain indicates that it is indeed and we all know this right our emotions that drive our political decisions so as I like to say to my colleagues at the Brookings Institution if you really wanted to have an impact you would be a movie studio because how much impact does a policy paper have you know which I write and I know how much impact you have and I would be to this again and again I think for example Alicia Adams and I were together at a conference in Alexandria Egypt in June of 2010 an effort by the library to build concrete initiatives on President Obama's now long forgotten and somewhat lamented high row speech and there was quite an angry air in the room and there was an absolutely no follow up whatsoever on this speech and in fact the policy continued then as it does today continued support for a military dictatorship continued unchanged and there was a lot of anger and of course the American diplomats were completely oblivious to this but the one ray of light in the series of angry introductory speeches was the confusion of Alicia Adams's organized Arab Festival at the Kennedy Center and the Egyptian official literally said there is one good thing that the United States has done since this speech and it is that festival and this is a kind of confusion that we often have the United States didn't do that the Kennedy Center and Alicia did that but that doesn't matter you know it was credited so we don't realize I think how much impact our culture has in the world and what I really hope we can achieve talking together and I'm there and I'm both sorry that you're you know we're kind of here and you're kind of there this is really a conversation so what I really hope we can achieve together is bringing together these two worlds I'll even put a slightly critical note on the Secretary of State's beautiful words and that is the second paragraph after those beautiful words about the power of the arts then she says I'll do what I can but really you in universities NGOs you go out and do this and that about nuclear deterrence in Iran you know fighting extremism in Pakistan against them it's growing from Iraq you wouldn't say that and what I hope we'll be able to talk about which is really my interest now in the area of cultural diplomacy is the really vital intersection of culture with politics and the ways that cultural productions and figures in fact are right in the midst of these very key issues and making very significant impact and it would be so great if we could find a way to have that impact noticed more and to be able to work together more closely with policy colleagues that would be to the benefit of everyone just some deliberate plot not to do this it's just the way things are set up so you know hopefully we can change the way things are set up so I'd like to conclude with just three little quotations from different parts of the world testifying to this power of what theater can do in the context of politics Waleed Shamil who I hope you'll all meet as said was in one of our wonderful conversations over the past few days the problem in Iraq was not a problem of culture or civilization but a problem of the individual so theater became a way to reconstruct the individual citizen you know and this refers to something the secretary said the idea of envisioning a future had you envisioned a future and without that it's hard to build it another part of the world Susan Lohenberg said to me about the production in China of Top Secret which you'll hear about I played in a lot of theaters but to have 1400 people in China cheering for the little guy is subversive and finally Shahid Nazim from Pakistan we'll also hear from later today said through culture you can bypass prejudices reach the heart and change assumptions so I look forward to doing all of that with you over the next two and a half days thank you so much for coming as many of you know who's been the incredible coordinator of so much and it's really the reason you all made it here in this room Jojo Ruth I just have some logistical things as is my job so you all should have gotten a welcome packet which has loads of information in it if you have questions and you can't find them there please feel free to come and ask me and I will be around for all of it sort of popping in and out of sections most of you talk to the person when you checked in about nine parts of desire if you didn't and you wanted to get for a night please let us know we're close to being sold out although we're going to try to squeeze as many people in here as possible so just make sure that you talk to us if you would like a ticket and have not told us otherwise you'll see on the back of your name tag is the schedule for the next three days and you'll notice that tonight's dinner is about an hour and 45 minutes we're of course providing dinner but it is a long dinner break so you're welcome to leave the building and walk around but please know that there's no late seating for nine parts of desire so don't be late coming back finally two last things the first is tomorrow we're going to studio here to see the animals and children to the streets if you haven't booked a ticket yet all of that information is in your packet we'll be talking to you about the folks who are going to see it about shuttles and waves of getting over there studio here is on 14th and P Street so a little ways away and we'll have a reception there afterwards and then as you notice up on the screen we are live streaming this thanks to Vijay, Matthew and Arena Stage HowlRound and the brilliant people over there so we will be live streaming all of today's sessions and then Saturday's sessions and are using the hashtag Global so if you want to tweet throughout the weekend but one thing we do need from everybody is a photo and video release form which is also in your packets so I will be collecting those but please do fill those up because we legally need to get those from you so that's all I just said you may have seen various people helping you check in, Allie and Pat here come in we've had a lot of wonderful help from my sister since in Vegas we've been seeing them, thank Allie and Pat Heyon who came they helped me this summer and I didn't really know what I was going to have them doing and they've been they're now planning to move to Baghdad and various things so they've been working very hard and also Megan who's upstairs who worked on the subtitles for tonight so thank you all so much as well as the whole Davis Center staff Toby Clark and others who you'll see they've been an amazing group ever and you'll be seeing them a great deal over the next couple of days so thank you all our first session D.C. a laboratory for global performance and engagement we have an incredibly distinguished group of folks here and Michael Dove arriving and Shirley Sarasi arriving as if on cue to join us come as many of you know D.C. of course has a political town it's also a great town for the arts and it's become an incredible theater town an incredible performing arts town and so we thought an extraordinary way to begin as a kind of welcoming gesture but also as an opportunity for people doing extraordinary work around the city to share some of that work some of the mission some ideas about projects that they're engaged with and how those projects are intersecting with these to begin with our local community and the ways that it is engaging around the world so just to introduce folks across and then we'll each talk for a couple of minutes about their work and about their organization's work and then we'll quickly move into kind of cross conversation directly to my left is Alicia Adams Vice President for International Programming from the Kennedy Center then we have Shirley Sarasi director of literary and public programs for Theater J, Andy Chalal founding owner of Busboys and Poets and co-founder of the Peace Cafe, Chris Jennings who's managing director of Shakespeare Theater Company and president of I.T.I. David Snyder who's a newly director of artistic programming at arena stage incredibly excited about that here at Rouge Town and everywhere in D.C. Miriam Weisfeld director of artistic development at William Mammoth Theater Company Adrian Alice Hansel literary director at Studio Theater Peter Marks who will be our respondent today and is of course the theater critic from the Washington Post and Michael Dove to his left artistic director of the Forum Theater So it's a big group, this is our largest panel so we've asked folks to do a kind of brief introduction and teaser and then to talk amongst themselves and with you about the ways that these individual projects you know how they add up to an ecosystem and a scene for this work here in Washington. So we'll begin with you. Before 1971 there was not a national theater for the performing arts in Washington D.C. and actually the authorizing legislation was in 1958 instead of the full right was one of the senators that pushed this legislation forward and the reason is that they didn't have a place for the Bolshoi Ballet to perform when it was coming to Washington and they had to use the Warner Theater and they understood that Russia was certainly using the arts as part of their cultural diplomacy model and that really was what gave impetus to the creation of the Kennedy Center. Of course it wasn't called the Kennedy Center when it was first conceived but it was after the late president's death that they decided to do this as a name it after him and have it be the living memorial. That said the Kennedy Center is a quasi-federal agency meaning that we get some support from the government for the memorial aspect of the operation. Everything however that we put on our stages we have to raise money more privately so we function as a 501 C3 and I'm telling you all of this just to be able to say that we also have a congressional mandate but at the same time we have an autonomy. That congressional mandate says that we should put on our stages and in our education programs the best in terms of the performing arts and education and that we should have that reflect the artistic and cultural heritage of the people of the United States. When Jim Wolfenson came on board as chairman of the Kennedy Center he said to me well he brought me to Washington from New York and he said I take this very seriously and I really do want us to look around the world and see where we have not had artists in any significant numbers performed at the Kennedy Center and I want to bring them here. I do want to reach I felt that Washington was a microcosm of the United States and that we should be reaching all of the audiences in the city as well as the country. So that became certainly the impetus for me during the international festivals at the Kennedy Center and we came up with a tinder plan that actually has expired and we have gone on and it started with looking at the local community and how we could address that in terms of international programs. So we began with Africa and then went to Latin America then we went to Asia, we did China, Japan, the 22 countries of the Arab world, the Middle East and India. And that began over a ten year period gave us a core of work that focused on countries that we had never focused on before. And in doing that I discovered a lot of things about the arts and culture in those countries, about the people and about the kinds of things that would be important to bring to the Kennedy Center. And over the years we've been able to expand these programs so it's not just the performing arts but it also includes literature, film, cuisine, design, education programs. It's a huge gamut that we run and for me it was a way to give people opportunities to enter into the culture from where they might be more comfortable, maybe from the visual arts, maybe from cuisine. But actually we find that food sells very well. I mean if you say you've got a culinary program those tickets sell out at first and we get people into the building and that begins a conversation that we can have about the arts and culture. As a matter of fact for India we had some 350,000 people come through the building in three days so we know that there is huge interest. Should I stop? Yeah. But just for now. Thank you so much. Shirley tell us about Theater J as the director of the program. On the other end of the spectrum of a huge gamut is Theater J which is based here in D.C. where the professional theater company housed in the Washington, D.C., JCC about 10 staff members total. Our official mission statement is to produce thought-provoking, publicly engaged, personal, passionate and entertaining plays and musicals that celebrate the distinctive urban voice and social vision that are part of the Jewish cultural legacy. I think I'm here most relevantly to speak about our voices from a changing Middle East festival which I'm also very thrilled to see that there are two people in this room who are even more informed about it than I am and they show all next to me and Steven is one of our board members. So any questions that I can answer can answer probably much more completely. The festival started in 2000 less officially than it exists now. It was actually originally called the Voices from a Changing Israel and it was centered around a production of the David Harris play Via de la Rosa that we were producing and then reading surrounding that. In 2007, the title officially changed from Voices from a Changing Middle East and after several years of producing primarily Israeli writers this festival is now expanded to include Palestinian and Arab Israeli voices as well as plays by Egyptian, Afghani, Pakistani Iranian writers, also American writers of Middle Eastern descent. We've done numerous English language premieres. We've done dozens and dozens of readings. Each year the festival has a slightly different focus. One year we focused on voices from the voices of the women and they were all female playwrights. Last year we brought the Camarie Theater from Tel Aviv and they were with us in residence for production of Return to Haikop, a play based on the Nivella Bar-Rosson and adapted by the Israeli playwright Boaz Gaon and also the festival also included a number of readings and other events surrounding that. We've had a long history of doing a lot of programming, panel discussions, talk facts and the Peace Cafe also surrounding this programming. The conversation about how the political and the theatrical intersect is something that has been both a great benefit to us and sometimes a big headache. So we've had our fair share of political questions that have been involved in producing what we do at the JCC and I'll stop that there. In December 2011 several members of our staff and Stephen Stern, a member of our board went to Israel for their Israel Festival which brings together a delegation of artists from around the world to spend five days seeing plays in Israel and meeting with other artists from many different countries and visiting big and small theaters, edgy and traditional theaters that are primarily Jewish Israeli and also Arab Israeli. Stephen Stern actually then took a delegation to Ramallah where they met with several theaters there and I know those conversations were sometimes inspiring and sometimes usually depressing so that's a whole other conversation there as well. Next year we'll be producing with Georgetown University the English language premiere of Volged based on an enemy of the people by the Israeli playwright Boaz Gaon and Mir Erez based on the play of course by Gibson. That's the overview. Great. And so if the creative team for that production is among us Yes, yes. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having this wonderful gathering of artists and art makers, culture icons here. I wanted to say that I was one of the people that was involved in the founding of the Peace Cafe and I am the only Arab on the Theater J Council and when Shirley speaks about the headache, I'm the headache by the way. But it's a good headache because sometimes we need those headaches to get moving. But I also want to say just a couple things. I take real exception that the fact that Busboys and Poets is not listed on the choice of places to go to eat so I think there's a little gap here and the way this programming was done so I really would like to address that. I wanted to mention what Cynthia mentioned about the idea that in order for you to change the world you need to have a movie studio. You also need to have a restaurant. I do believe that food and bringing people together over food has a huge impact on how people interact with one another. And I think a lot of it has to do with the way it travels to the stomach when you're eating. You sort of like your brain kind of empties out a little bit. It allows you to open up in a different way using your heart rather than your mind. Sometimes that's what art can do to you. When I opened Busboys and Poets back in 2005 it was really with the intention to create a place and looks and feels like Washington. And when I started sort of doing that it's hard to just kind of articulate your mission and this is what you're doing. You have to kind of create a space that allows people to see that without having to be told. And I put a lot of art on the walls. And I remember one of the the first questions before we opened the door was is the owner black? That was like common. Everybody was asking because we opened this place named after an African American icon Langston Hughes and all of that. And so one day I was sitting waiting for a permit to come or something to open out before we opened. And there were two elderly black women that came by. They were looking through the paper that we had put on the walls. And I happened to be there. I like to talk to people. So I invited them in and they kind of like eyed me from a distance not figuring out what I am. So they're trying to see what's going on here and who is this new guy coming to gentrify our community. And so they walked in and they started looking around. They saw the art which was very representative I think of the area and the community there. And then sort of you can see that they got a little bit more relaxed. And I had put this huge mural on the back which is the piece of struggle mural which has lots of iconic figures of the civil rights movement. And there's the usual sort of suspects and there's others as well. And it's a beautiful tapestry of all the struggles that have taken place particularly as they connect to the U Street corridor. And they walked in and I'm kind of nervous thinking what are they going to think. And I opened the door for them and they stood there for a minute and they looked. And I didn't know what they were going to say but I turned around and saw a tear coming down one's eye. And I thought wow this is how art can speak to people in a whole different way. There was no way that I could have had any kind of a statement or a conversation with them that would have created that kind of an impact. So art is obviously huge in my life. As someone who has a kid came to this country and stuttered very severely as a kid and went to high school here. I remember an art teacher that I will never forget that was able to really provide for me the space that I was able to escape and feel welcomed and feel comfortable in my own art. And I have to say I went to a conference at Sundance which was put together by the Creative Opportunities Agenda through a funding from the Open Society Institute. And the purpose of that gathering was to try to figure out a way to get more funding for the arts and get the arts to be more central in many things that we do in government as well as other ways. And I was kind of disappointed because we walked away thinking well the most important thing that they wanted to do is get measurable outcomes. And so we were sitting there racking our brains, 80 people, very smart sitting together in a room trying to figure out how do you quantify the impact of art. And that's the main thing because when you go to write a grad you don't want to say well I moved people's hearts. For some reason that doesn't seem to fly. But they want you to measure what moving hearts means and how far did they move and how far did they move. And so it's really complicated and we after three days of a conference of very, very interesting people that are involved in this work we came out saying arts are hard to measure. You just can't measure the impact of one's soul. We don't put those kinds of requirements on people writing papers and putting together any kind of thing. We don't say give us specific measurements and usually the measurements are phony anyway. They really don't have that kind of impact. People can make up numbers and statistics anyway. So we have to get smarter figuring out a way and how we measure the movements of hearts and minds and souls. The one thing that I wanted to do when we did Bust Boys and Poets was really create what we call a tribal statement. And that is a kind of a mission statement I guess that kind of speaks to the values that we talk. And we said we are a community where racial and cultural connections are consciously uplifted. We wanted to have a place where people can really feel a sense of being outside of their space. We are also a place where art, culture and politics intentionally collide. For me you can't change hearts and minds with just power points or papers. You got to do it with art and culture. That's how change happens. And we are a place where we feed your mind, body and soul and so it's not just feeding you. And the list here we have just feeds the body by the way. We need to have the mind and the soul also fed. Places like the place that I have and others I think can do that much better. We feel that by creating such spaces we can in fact change our community, change society and change the world. And I think we've done a lot and just by having the presence of a space like that I didn't realize how valuable a space like that would be that it's really able to make people feel a sense of connection to a community that I think for the most part was getting changed very quickly and gentrified very quickly. And there's a sense of sort of belonging now I think that was all being erased and missing here in the city. So I'll stop here. Just a quick word about the format because I'm very conscious that we've highlighted the idea of this as a truly interactive conversation that I've gone ahead and started with a big long speech and we're sort of hearing from these extraordinary books on this first panel one by one. But I just want to say that it felt to us even format wise like this group of artists in DC and these institutions represent a kind of incredible web and ecosystem and often we don't get to talk with each other even about what that work is. So just as a sort of foundation to lay for a real dynamic conversation. I'm aware of the time that have also the sort of like format of getting some stuff out there from each and then getting into a kind of like. So Chris Jennings managing director of Shakespeare Theatre. Yeah I'm actually here with four hats on. You know it's really interesting because this is my passion topic and it's something where I think all of us in the arts here in the U.S. and theater community are actually struggling to kind of find ways to break open and move forward in many ways. At Shakespeare Theatre it's been an evolution and I'll talk about we started in 2007 starting to move toward international presenting but I'm part of regional theaters and working with the unions, working with my peer regional theaters about creating paths. So in my kind of managing director had at Shakespeare Theatre I kind of tackle the issues in that way. I'm also a trustee on TCG theater communications group and again I had the international task force where again we're trying to look at the full service field of theaters throughout the country and again recognizing that even at this table here in DC the amount of theaters that are interacting on an international basis has just changed and grown and it's going to change even more so in the next five years and how do we as a service organization actually respond support and help build paths that way. I'm also under TCG International Theatre Institute which is also trying to connect with the other theater institutes that exist globally and what that network can provide and then finally and Diane's in the front, Diane helped support a group of 20 producers and presenters from around the globe that convene annually once a year called the director's circle which again is trying to take the strengths and weaknesses of those different organizations and find ways that they support devised work and cross pollinate the strengths and weaknesses of those organizations. So all four of those are basically wrapped up in the conversation that's happening here in the next couple of days. Shakespeare Theater, we opened a new theater in 2007, the Harmon Center for the Arts we outside of the Shakespeare Theater work and I do think it's no mistake or surprise that Washington DC of all cities supports a classical theater of our size much more so than New York and actually supports a lot of competing classical work because there's a timelessness and the themes within classical work are very much mirror what we're talking about when we talk about international work, cultural diplomacy, etc. So I think it's no surprise that then the next step was that we had additional weeks that were originally with partner organizations here locally but as the economy turned down those organizations like many organizations around the country started to produce less and so we had additional weeks and that was combined with an opportunity to present the National Theater of Great Britain's production of Phaedra with Helen Miran they were looking to come to DC, had a two week window and we were lucky enough to host them and that opened the door for the first time for us to say we're not just going to have our presenting organization but actually we can present some international work and that was our first foray so the next year and it was combined and Nick Kent's here from the tricycle theater was looking for a home to bring Great Game Afghanistan a trilogy of 12 short plays that dealt with that followed the history of Afghanistan for 150 years and was looking to bring that to DC and that was combined where we were looking to actually pilot this concept of international presenting alongside our work and that allowed us to bring Great Game Afghanistan which he'll talk about later but again truly where the rubber meets the road is epitomizes I think what we're all talking about which is that the Pentagon sought, invited back, made front page of the Washington Post really had direct impact on policy through art and we coupled that along with Black Watch, National Theater of Scotland's Black Watch dealing with the Scottish Regiment in Iraq and what was interesting about that is again while the Kennedy Center had been presenting a lot of work and really these are all producing organizations so we had like a sole presenter and it can't do it all and there was a lot of presented work that was bypassing DC. There wasn't a home for Black Watch and because our space was adaptable we were actually able to provide a home for Black Watch even though it had been into the U.S. twice before it had never been to DC and so we were actually able to create a home for Black Watch in DC that season created a success and we're entering our fourth season of international presenting and I'll leave it at that. Hi so as Derek alluded to I'm about to be the director of artistic programming at Arena Stage but I'm not yet so I would say in terms of Arena Stage I don't have any answers right now I have a ton of questions. I think one of the questions at Arena Stage is now having been for about a year and a half Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater what does that mean to be a Center for American Theater? In this context what does it mean to be a Center for American Theater not only domestically for the field but internationally? How can Arena Stage be a hub for international connections and international artists and beyond festivals and readings and works how can we be as a producer and organization an active laboratory for the study of American Theater? As I become the director of the New Play Institute and we've birthed HowlRound and the Theater Commons and the New Play Map which has its own amazing life now at Emerson College it begs the question of what's next what's the next stage what's the next draft and so there's a huge realm of possibility as I step in in July into that role. Tomorrow is my last day as producing artistic director of Young Playwrights Theater here in DC and I've been doing grassroots work with DC students for the last 11 years and so in the last year some of the work we've done at YBT has been working with the State Department to connect our students our after-school Young Playwrights Workshop with delegations of artists from China from El Salvador from around the globe and having them come together and do devise work. One of the things that we did in November was collaborate with the Canadian Embassy and with the Stratford Festival from Ontario to bring together students from El Salvador from Sushito to El Salvador who created their own company called Esartes with nurturing from Stratford they came to DC they collaborated with our students many of whom are from El Salvador from around the world to spend a day creating devised work and coming together as a company and by the end of that day not only creating bilingual work together but also trading Facebook addresses and connecting and becoming friends and for students to go we're not that different we're actually quite the same and through the artistic work and the artistic creation we can find a new personality. So I've experienced again and again what's wonderfully subversive about bringing artists together and bringing students especially together across borders and seeing doing work together what does that build one of the groups that we had come this year to the Young Playwrights Workshop was a group of Russian artists and these Russian artistic directors that afternoon said we would love to produce your work the work that you're creating you DC students let us produce it. So one of the artistic directors got a grant sent me an email about a month ago and said I've got money send me the plays we've sent her about 30 plays written by DC students they're right now being translated into Russia into Russian and so this fall at the Khabarovsk Theater in Khabarovsk Russia there will be a festival of plays written by DC students I think one of the amazing things about Greater Washington is just that you know that the local population is in an international population so it's already hooked in to do this kind of work and not only to what Derek and I talked about recently is not only speak truth to power with power here in our backyard but also to continue to have those connections because a lot of students come to DC and feel like I'll never go back to El Salvador or I need to let go of those connections and they really don't and one of the things that I think I feel the importance of this work is from my own experience 21 years ago as an undergraduate getting a chance to go to the Soviet Union and spend a summer in the Soviet Union in 1991 the summer that the do happen in Gorbachev was put under house arrest and I witnessed the first Democratic election of Boris Yeltsin in the history of the country and I had families host me for dinner and work with artists and I did my first check off ever in Russian for a Russian audience with Russian artists directing me and barely understanding what she was saying but understanding an action is an action and through the artistic work coming together and learning about each other and having grown up in the Reagan 80s at 20 years old during that experience I felt a little bit like we haven't quite been told the truth about these people in this country I'm not experiencing the evil empire I'm experiencing a people in a culture that to this day I feel a deeper connection to because I went and did artistic work with that without population so Mary M. Weisfeld from William Yammer this is so cool guys I just want to thank you all again for giving us an excuse to exchange ideas among ourselves because I think you're absolutely right Derek we don't do this nearly enough so that said I think it's also really interesting that so far almost all of us have started our comments by talking about the missions of our organizations because it just reminds me that I think international exchange means something very different to all of our organizations depending on our mission statement is and also who the audience is that we're talking to or that we think that we're talking to and also what our goals are for that international exchange specifically so without reciting William Yammer's my organization's mission statement I'll just say that it's really about the meeting point between aesthetic innovation and socio-political relevance and so because of that we've started to look for successful models of that theater that hits that intersection around the world and so our particular interest has been in Eastern and Central Europe right now partly for personal reasons I did some of my graduate work in Moscow and we've got two close members of our artistic family Misha Kochman who's a set designer is a member of Woolies company and he's from St. Petersburg and is our director in residence and he's from Moscow so when we talk about international exchange at Woolie it's very much about models of socio-political relevance and a real deep organic exchange of methodology we're interested in getting international artists in the room with us helping to figure out how to make new pieces from the ground up that are actually going to accomplish our mission and so the only other thing that I'll say about that is I loved hearing the phrase change assumptions because something that we've started to talk about a lot at Woolie Manor is the notion of disrupting assumptions we're looking for aesthetic works that disrupt our habitual habits of perception the habits that we have of seeing the world that disrupt the way that we usually perceive the world it's going to disrupt the assumptions that we have about the choices that we make as citizens of DC, of the United States and of the world so that notion of aesthetic innovation that actually serves the purpose of changing the way that we think and the way that we behave is very close to our hearts I'll stop there I'm from Studio Theater It's more than two of us in the room together every so often I can tackle one of us but hearing us talk together is really exciting I came to the Studio Theater some 30 years just south of Busboys and Poets the one at 14th Street so if you're going to animals and children tomorrow you'll have to go to before or after have some time under the arch so we've been around for some 30 odd years and we just had the transition from our founding artistic director to our subsequent artistic director to David Meads who started about two years ago and then came in with a real excitement around expanding the work that we do which is contemporary work primarily from the United States and from the UK so that it includes and it's primarily been second, third fourth production so that it includes first productions and it includes work from beyond the English speaking world and the form that took this season and for a while we've had some this is not utterly transformatively new in our practice we had a season, a Russian season that included work from check up to sort of the contemporary Russian theater that was 04 and we've done, you know, we've partnered with the Folklife Festival and done readings of Welsh plays but we've never actually had a sustained interest in bringing work from again beyond the English speaking world so me, I am taking furious mentally and specifically because we are actually beginning this conversation, beginning these exchanges and one of the things you asked us to think about was partnership so I actually just wrote down people and this is essentially like people I've talked to in the last year who've been intensely and fantastically helpful so we did a production this season we actually, our first new work was actually International, this was a play by a British writer Duncan McMillan so he counts even though it was written in British English we helped translate into American English so you can discuss that amongst yourselves our ultimate hope is to develop sustained for writers, actually I should forefront that because studio has for so long been a text based, playwright based experience and our space you'll see tomorrow you'll be coming those of you who are coming to Animals and Children which is a British company 1927, that we consider that our big theater it's like the widest it's got like 214 seats so we also have been forefronting you experience the actors when you're at studio theater you're very close to them so we're looking for work that playwrights we can build relationships with companies also that we can build relationships with we do touring on a much smaller scale it's not the 200 seat experience of blackwasher like that, that would be remarkable so 1927 last season we brought in Druidge from Ireland and you know and start a conversation with those writers and eventually premiere a commission work from those writers that commission translations from American translators so that's our vision in the last year so we produced the US premiere of the Golden Dragon by this fantastic German writer Roland Schumlfenig and the good to institute helped us with that we actually did a whole symposium on translations so the Alliance Francaise helped us with that the British Council is helping us I've had a lot of exchange with the Japan society actually writing in Japan is fantastic as many of you I'm sure know firsthand and it's one of the amazing things about being in DC is right you walk over to an embassy and the Canadian cultural ambassador is fantastic and tells you all about what's going on in Toronto and our partners I'd say the developmental organizations who have a real interest in international work in the US have also been tremendously helpful and this is I would say so the producers the company in New York which does fantastic international work and developmental organizations the Lark Theatre and NPN also represents you know their artistic director went to Australia and found some really great plays and actually one of our play from New Zealand in our coming season came through there the Siegel Center has been incredible to us at the Playwrights Foundation and partner theaters and translators so I mean I think this idea of where how do we see our network with my network is not we are already connected I think by the nature of our passions and our curiosities and the fact that we travel around meet people and are curious about other people's experiences so I would say and again this is the next two and a half days I recognize that I think there is power in sort of naming them and saying them and who are you talking to and what are you finding but actually at all again having come from a place where my experience was very my interest was very explicitly a new American plays like the second the second we thought to open our eyes it's been really wonderful to see who's like three blocks north of us and you know ten blocks south of us and the international world actually that's you know that is ever so close so we do some work we're going to do more if you have great ideas I have questions I think great thank you I'm going to in a moment ask Peter because I think one of the big questions in the room is going to be you know so what is all of this and you're sort of getting at it what is all of this add up to DC as a scene as an ecosystem as a lab is work happening across what are the relationships between these organizations is there some sense that it's a defining characteristic of DC theater that's already being claimed something happening specific in the nation's capital are we not quite claiming something that actually is a huge energy there are lots of folks, Sinetic Theater, Gala Hispanic, others who aren't even at this large panel who are doing this work centrally so we'll go to Michael Dove from Forum Theater and then have Peter speak to that broader question about Washington so I guess going full spectrum from Kennedy Center down to Forum Theater which is the smallest sort of organization on this panel but we've been around for we're just going into our ninth season we're actually located in Silver Spring, Maryland so we also serve Montgomery County so a little bit a little bit more reach there Montgomery County which is an incredibly diverse internationally sort of community as well early on we recognized when just in our first couple of seasons that many people have alluded to this the idea that it's an international city but in a lot of respects not only just of the population coming from various different countries outside of the US but also it's a community that has its eyes on an international focus whether that be in government or the non-profits sector so we recognize that very early on I would just I had never really noticed this but even in our first just two seasons we produced Samuel Beckett, Hunter Mueller, Tristan Zara, Sartre, Carol Churchill and Ami Diane who most of those were established plays Ami's piece was a world premiere and we were really inspired by the playwright we were listening to an interview with Charles Me at one point and he was talking about sort of his connection to Greek theater and that being that you know the structure of the theater was such that the audience was in this amphitheater with the back wall of the set always being your town so that any play you saw whether it be about far off exotic locale was always through this sort of filter of also seeing your town as you watch that play and that was really inspiring to us to when we do produce international playwrights to make the producing focus about here's something that is either happening in another world or perspective from somewhere else in the world and how does that reflect on us a big part of our programming is essentially we're always producing plays that want to spark discussion that want to start a conversation and we do that through our open forum discussions which are essentially everyone grabs the chair comes on to the stage sort of speaking to what we're doing here but our rule is that there are no panels there are no experts you're an expert on your own perspective and we feel that by getting an audience together and hearing one another talk about sort of the meaning that they're putting on the story that they just heard that that's how we're building community that's how we're learning about our community because we're seeing the person that we may shop at the grocery store with but we don't really know anything about them and we think that art and storytelling can sort of bring those people together and an understanding of sort of where they sit in the world and sit in the community so yeah and we've continued to produce international playwrights throughout our history you know through this focus since we moved to Silver Spring doing plays like Scorched by Wajima Wad which we were surprised to find that there's a strong Lebanese population in Silver Spring and that was a really exciting part of our discussions to doing a play like Mad Forest this current season by Carol Churchill that our focus about that was looking at a revolution over 20 years ago and then using that as a way to talk about Arab Spring and using that to talk about Occupied Wall Street and so sort of triangulating sort of our conversations through the perspectives. Peter these are extraordinary pieces of a huge puzzle. No one has that perspective of the whole I think that you. Yeah, yeah I cover all this and I'm going to actually I'm going to shift it to a little more some of the practical issues I see that you guys are raising I went to a production a few months ago at the Kennedy Center of a Hungarian play called Gypsies and about 20 minutes into the show which was in Hungarian the gentleman behind me said to his wife when are they going to sing there's no business like show business and I heard her say that's gypsy there's a problem with international programming even in this incredibly sophisticated city in terms of communicating to your audience what the heck they're going to be seeing they're not a custom and as a professional audience member I hear them all the time they don't understand why you're presenting to them certain things without context the Kennedy Center God love them will bring each year productions from around the world to the Kennedy Center and to me international programming is not we're doing like out of history course a play that I love that you know 30 years ago from India and we're going to do it in our company I think international programming is bringing companies from around the world to speak to a Washington audience I think that's really the essence for me I want I love when companies here do a diversity of pieces but I want to hear them in their native language I want to understand them in the cultural language they're performed and so my first question is why aren't you doing a better job of educating your audience about what you're trying to do the second problem is they very often international companies come to places like the Kennedy Center and go to they come for two nights I go I can't review a show that's only here for two nights because by the I write the review on the second date appears in the paper on the third date it's gone so I'm basically speaking to an audience that's already seen the show and nobody else has an opportunity to see it's almost like just a one time concert it really doesn't have the potential to create a conversation thirdly half the time when it's an international company I can't understand what's going on because the translations are so bad often the ways in which and not just at the Kennedy Center this goes across the board even to companies that are Spanish language companies in town that they place the American trans the English translation so far above the stage or so far to the side you can't get the expressions of the actors and understand what they're saying at the same time at gypsies for example people would speak in Hungarian for about 11 minutes and on the screen above you look up and it said I'm leaving now I mean there's a disconnect and I don't think the theaters think enough about how their audiences are going to absorb and metabolize what they're seeing very often the theater grows are older theater goers they have a tradition they understand certain forms I mean younger audiences might be a little more flexible but there's a tremendous amount of people who are older and really are trying to engage with new companies that they've never seen before why are we in stock in a form that does talk backs after the show when people already have seen the production and are forced to go oh now I understand why are we doing why are we letting people in a half hour early or 45 minutes early with their directors there they're dying to talk to their audience to give them a sense of where they're from why don't we sit down and have them I mean if we're going to be educational if that's if it's a three night stand we're not really going to be you know establishing a real beach head why don't we have a conversation before the show give people a context and understanding of what they're about to see where it's from maybe they'll take away more from it I'm not so sure that's as important when it's tricycle or black watch you know clearly English language is we're all you know that's a hump we're not really we don't have to get over although I think in some cases it would be helpful for the people and often people who can't stay afterwards they just don't have time but they could make time at seven o'clock or quarter to seven to come in and hear about this wonderful because you know audiences are intensely inquisitive about the world it's absolutely true and I don't think that would be a bad way to make the transition into another world a little bit easier the last thing I want to say was there's also I feel there's a hesitancy to engage with the most controversial stuff from around the world what Andy and Shirley did not tell you was that when they brought Return to Haifa last year it caused a firestorm in the Jewish community in parts of the Jewish community the Israeli embassy was not happy that is still raging and almost derailed voices from the Middle East I mean changing Middle East it almost scuttled the entire wonderful engaging discussion that theater J has over the past ten years and another important aspect of that is it's ongoing it's suddenly we get a depth God love I say the Kennedy Center when they bring us India and China and Japan but there's no conversation among these theater companies to figure out how to make this seamless how to knit these things together so that their audiences will develop an understanding and a following for a company from Hungary or from China it needs to be for to really have value you guys all have to be sitting and talking to each other it's shocking to me to hear you guys say you don't sit and talk about these things so I ask you is this a starting point for that could you guys become much more engaged with each other and figure out what you're doing that makes sense to each other that's great so that idea of the conversation among which of course is part of the broader idea here but also first time there's a sort of investment in how noticing all of this extraordinary activity and the range of organizations engaging with it and thinking about the nexus, the meeting place, the way you mentioned the kind of audience experience are there ways to enrich that that one organization may not always have the capacity to do but that are part of claiming something as a wider DC community around this work or probably in the next twenty minutes not gonna get all of that but we may open up some things that continue to reverberate over the next day or two so I would invite the panelists to interact to begin that conversation with each other but also open it up so questions of each other from you guys or from the room in this next twenty minutes to just sort of begin to begin that important conversation among. Well I'll say that sort of one quick experience I had just speaking to what you were talking about with theater days experiences we actually also had a co-production we did with Theater J a few years ago we did a production of Carol Churchill's Seven Jewish Children which when I went to our erotic artistic director of Theater J he was like sure let's do it and I was like okay that's great not to know sort of what that calls sure let's do it and what was interesting about that partnership is that we did it at Theater J for two nights and then we did it at forum for two nights and it was so exciting to see the different conversations clearly totally different contexts of audiences but some audiences would even go to all the discussions and that dynamic was really exciting and that excited me in the sense of ways that we can partner and create a much broader conversation that it would have been if it was just at Theater J and it would have been if it was just at forum theater. I want to say that I believe with most of what you have said the hungry piece we can talk about later that's a whole lot of issues it got really short short having only two or three performances that's another issue but I will say that Chris Jennings and I see a lot of the same product I think we both are passionate about the same kind of work we had a long standing relationship with the National Theater so of course they came to us and they came to the Scottish Theater came to us for Black Watch we don't have the flexibility to do that kind of to act on the moment so we're not able to take those pieces it didn't fit into our scheduling so it is an issue but one of the things that we are working on with Shakespeare because there are plays that we're doing that plays that they're doing they can't do it all but we do think that they should be here in Washington so our marketing people are working together to do a sort of international package that will feature both works from the Kennedy Center for the next season as well as from the Shakespeare Festival and I think that it's very exciting I think that we are generally collaborative I think when it comes to marketing the marketing people say to me this is very very very difficult and I say yes and what we do is very very difficult too so let's try to make it happen but there are lots others of our colleagues involved that we are to make the kind of collaboration that makes sense happen one of the things and people from the British Council are Sharon is here from the British Council that we did do was on the French Eye on Edinburgh and we work with the Festival here in Washington but it was very important for me all of the programs, all of the theater programs that we generally do at the Kennedy Center that are outside of the festivals or something special that I might draw and it tends to be the Broadway shows or the big musical theater productions and what I wanted to show was that it doesn't start there you know it starts in an incubator somewhere and there is work that's going on outside of the mainstream outside of the media that is developing that is really really really important I was really very proud of to have all of the companies from the Edinburgh Fringe that had happened over a period of years that I had seen come to the Kennedy Center and that we were working with the BC French Festival at times but I think a rise in tide raises all those and again I agree with all your comments that the things that I think we are starting to learn is some of the collaborations in what Miriam talked about because we all have very niche audiences and I think there have been some while it wasn't in the international context we recently did a Basil Twist Festival and it's something that I wanted to bring to the body of Basil Twist, the puppeteers work here to DC but I recognized that I didn't necessarily have the audience for something like Arius with the Twist or some of the other pieces and so actually went to the various theaters and actually four different theaters presented four different works because the pieces were so diverse that they fit within the context of the different theaters and I think in the same way this international work I think it's home in the right niches and how we work together and how we bridge and those bridges are going to go I think to help solve some of the main issues that I struggle with that you brought up which is the short runs even though Black Box was very recognized and had two sold out runs in New York it wasn't fully known here in the market and we had to limit our exposure and our risk you know we had to first underwrite it and then second of all even with that underwriting limit that exposure and do a short run and it's only through building awareness the first run that we're bringing it back in September for two and a half week run but you have to kind of we're all taking these baby steps to do it the right way we're bringing Les Liaisons from France directed by John Malkovich in December and we're only doing a half week run because again and I think you I mean this is our first foray but this is something Kennedy Center does regularly anytime you're bringing work that's not in English language it even further limits the audience and so how do you you're struggling with how to build an audience and yet you cut yourself off because you don't get the press to actually help you build the audience so it's kind of this catch 22 that I think we all struggle with which is how do we get enough press to build the audience but yet at the same time we don't know that we can do that. Yeah and how do we brand this kind of kind of work that falls somewhat outside of the but you're talking about bringing work that's more controversial and what we find is that's really it can be difficult for us to sell one of the things that we did do was a piece from Palestine during the Arab festival called Alive from Palestine Stories Under Occupation where we got you know press calls immediately and they were calling R.A. at the U.J. they were calling me to ask me how could we consider doing such a piece. I said this is a very humanitarian piece. This is a piece talking about the lives of people that are living in a country or a place where they feel very threatened and this is their daily life this is what they are doing in order to survive and I must say that to R.A.'s credit they called him to ask him what he felt about it and he said I think it's a good thing I think that the more conversations that we can have about this kind of about the conflict the better it is for everyone and so that sort of stopped it and it said that we are working together. Ari and I had talked about it and Ari told them that he was going to bring a constituency from his organization to a performance and participate in the talk back which should be a talk before I understand. I wonder by the way if there's a disconnect between global audiences and American audiences in terms of their understanding of what theater is supposed to be doing and the motivation behind bringing something from another country I think very often people ascribe different motives to the visit of a show from somewhere else specifically geographic wherever they're from then they would if you're presenting even a foreign playwright in this country in your own company and I don't know again it speaks to an issue of educating your audience about what theater is supposed to do because theater of provocation is to provoke you for God's sakes but people take it and I feel as if there's a shyness at some level and some theater companies to want to take on the most provocative work that's being done around the world and it's usually the most beautiful work. Well can I respond I'm happy to talk about any of the politics involved and that's as I'm speaking as Shirley Sturronski local theater artist some of the works at theater jam not speaking on behalf of the whole organization and definitely not speaking on behalf of the greater Washington DC JCC that's part of where all of this controversy stands is that we are an arts organization in a large organization and yes our relationships with the Israeli embassy have been sometimes good, sometimes okay and sometimes very bad and that's tricky but it's never stopped us from producing and finding other ways to produce and I'll say the idea that Ari would ever have said anything but given great to know theater J and to know Ari Roth there would be no question that there would be anything but a huge sign of support to produce this Palestinian company we know what we do best and it's tricky because we find ourselves obviously getting it from both sides it's not all for an Israeli artist, it's just as devastating to when we are quieted or encouraged not to do certain plays or produce certain voices and this is where actually I'll argue with your point Peter about only doing work in the original language the relationships that we've formed with Israeli artists in doing Israeli plays translated into English and the relationships that American actors have formed with Israeli directors, Israeli designers and Israeli playwrights has been so valuable in terms of teaching our American artists so much about that part of the world and I've watched actors who knew nothing about the conflict have these light bulbs go on over their head from working with an Israeli director on a play based on a story by an Arab Israeli or a Palestinian writer and the conversations that happened just couldn't happen in only bringing over companies so it's very tricky and having worked on an English translation in Israeli play getting it translated into English in the super clunky, awkward version that we usually get and that's just unfortunate that it's a different way of speaking than Americans speak so the amount of finessing and some people in this room have also worked on these and will continue to work on these that it takes it's a lot of work but I think there's actually other payback that happens we had our own experience with this with the Iraqi delegation now in Nine Parts of Desire and one of the translation of course is a literal challenge in those moments but it becomes also part of the embodied kind of cultural experience the translation of the entire event here it is in its language in this body and the continuum even with our Iraqi delegation of how good the English is but how expression and meaning happens in those relationships really complicates the good translation bad translation of the script I think to the point about what we're this whole about is culture diplomacy the productions of live the Palestine play and of return to Haifa were news events they were cultural turning points and they were not given enough they weren't measured to the true level of their impact and importance in an environment where Palestinians and Israelis or Palestinians and a Jewish community were speaking to each other in Washington DC beyond theater that goes way beyond theater Peter in terms of talking to our audiences we all have our traditional audiences that are used to coming to see what they're used to coming to see but when we do things that are more progressive more outside of the box I think it comes down to identifying that audience will be and then being able to sustain it and I think that's where we run into trouble we don't know, our marketing people don't know exactly where that audience is or how we brand this and what we call it but I fight for it because I just think it's very important work and I think that the whole thing with language I think it's really important for Americans to hear other languages I think we're a little lazy to not hear things in English but I think it gives you more input to hear it in the original language and it's also more comfortable for the artist I wanted to say that I think much of the controversy that happened especially at theater J had to do with the talkbacks probably more than the play itself if I recall correctly and I think one of the things about the talkbacks I think added it brought some voices from the region to speak about the production that was just seen I think sometimes and maybe that's the beauty of art is that it's ability to sort of transcend all of those sayings that people can walk away feeling whatever they feel and it's their own personal feeling as opposed to have it be kind of explained to them at the end of the show or before the show or whatever so I have to say having been through the controversy with theater J and the talkbacks and the backlash and all that I'm less interested in talkbacks now I think I think let the tips fall where they may you know I think one of the things that happened when we started the Peace Cafe one of the reasons why the Peace Cafe was actually even founded was that Ari wanted to bring the Belarosa which is a well known play by Dave Hare by David Hare that talked about the Middle East and had this sort of balanced way about it you know and so Ari was concerned that people would walk away feeling that it's not so balanced and they're going to have this sort of backlash that's going to take place in the parking lot or something and a revolt is going to take place so people would be upset so he said well let's kind of control their kind of whatever comes out of them and let's do it in a control setting so we created this environment where people after the show were able to come out and sit down at the ground tables and have conversations that were sort of like facilitated and of course you know we have to have food because that makes it you know much much more sort of relaxed and so as people really sort of had lots of conversations were a lot more were a lot better received because people were allowed to have conversations with instead of this kind of arrangement it was more people came together and talked with other audience members as opposed to sitting there and being kind of talked to so I think maybe the talk back should be differently where people can actually have conversations maybe facilitated somewhat maybe just initiated a conversation in fact we were so specific about how we did it we were so nervous that at the beginning some of you would see with others recall this that we created menus on the table where it was like prompted conversations but they were like appreciative inquiry in the best way you know it was like wonderful little moments and nuggets of conversation that were not hitting you over the head with issues but really kind of and I remember going back and forth over every word and sitting with I've got emails and emails that you won't believe it but every word was like poured over and really paid off I mean I have to say in the long run it became a very very powerful conversation that took place so you know no talk backs and you just give me this like sort of important uncomfortable segue because of where we are time wise which is using the food metaphor there's this kind of like truly and I think the convening is full of this like bountiful feast of people, ideas, stories and the way even the room is set up which is by necessity in a way because of the nine parts of desire but is misleading in terms of exactly that notion of the talk back but we're at a point of breaking and coming back for the second panel but I do want to say that the second panel is not a restart exactly the feast of this, the conversations and the cumulative nature of this is really important so while I'm super conscious that we've said welcome to the