 Hey, welcome. Come on down. Let me get these good people down here. All right, sorry to get started so late. We'll all just try to speak faster. Welcome to the Under the Radar Symposium, edition 10. That was Jay Duckworth, the man who piped us in, who is his day job, is our prop master. If you're at PS122... It's Jay, it's the Public Theater. I think I've learned after like 10 years, but no, no. Anyway, this is our 10th edition. It feels like only yesterday we were all gathered in the then new St. Anne's warehouse space. But here we are now. I can't believe it. And we're making a big celebration of that. I hate celebrations and birthdays, but we're going to make a big deal out of this one. Who is... I want to see hands or stand up if you're an under the radar virgin. You've only been here this year. That's good, that's good, good, good. People have been here two years. Stand, oh, okay. Two years you don't have to stand. Three years, three years. Okay, four, five years at six, seven. No one came the seventh year. Eight and nine and ten. Who's been here? That's a lot of suffering. Thank you very much. This year I have a code record of the best. Yes, the amazing Mayan Wang. The first year that we've allowed her to see the full symposium. He's welcome to Mayan. And I'll be back in two years. Thank you. 280 of you. Radar to the January season. And welcome to the 10th edition of the festival. I'm eight years. Under the radar is supported by major gifts from the Lewester T. Mertz Charitable Trust, the Ford Foundation, the Leon Lohenstein Foundation, Select Equity, and the W Trust. And we also really want to acknowledge the supporters who have really been there for us the last 10 years. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Trust, Altria, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, Niska, Jim Henson Foundation, and all of our individual donors and supporters. And of course we want to especially thank our wonderful staff at the Public Theater. And Susan Feldman and St. Ag's Warehouse for hosting the very first Under the Radar. And of course our small and mighty Under the Radar team which includes our associate producer, our pleasure and our program assistant, Lily Lamakinsen. And finally, we could not have done this without the deep support of the institution that has been our home for nine of the 10 years, the Public Theater. And I would like to introduce you to the executive director of the Public Theater, Mr. Patrick Willingham. Patrick's first show in his tenure was last year's Under the Radar which is kind of a big hello. And he comes to the public from our neighbors across the street, the Boo-Man group where he was the president and chief operating officer for the 16 years. And he has really transformed the public in his short time and it has been a true, true pleasure working with him. And so please welcome Patrick Willingham. Hey everybody. Welcome, welcome, welcome. I just want to echo both Mayan and Mark's sentiments. It's fantastic to have everyone here. For the 10th edition, I coked my head out. I saw those of you who have been here for 10 years. It's a large group of folks, right? Up until this morning, I only had one Under the Radar story that I was going to share with you, but I'm delighted to tell you that I have two. Very, very brief stories. The first was as the staff and I were wending our way through a very noisy crowd gathered in our lobby. I ended up riding up in the elevator with Heidi Griffiths, who's our casting director here. And she's been with us for over 20 years. And she has turned to me and said, I just have to tell you, Patrick, I have seen some of the most extraordinary theater in my entire life at this festival. Right? Absolutely right. And I think that that's the thing that's made some of you come back time and time and time and time and time and time and time again. And what has drawn some of you here the first time. And my other story is from the opposite end of the spectrum. It's from my husband, who is not really a theater guy. I dragged him along. Just this week, I took him to 12th night of Bud with Mark Rylandson. He said to me, could we only see Shakespeare at the Public Bay? He said, all right, all right. But the first year that I was the executive director, I brought him to some of the Under the Radar shows. And he turned to me after the first couple of shows and he just had this huge grin on his face and he said to me, these are my people. Which I totally, totally loved. And I think for all of us sitting in this room now, there's a real sense that the work that gets presented at Under the Radar, the work that gets presented at festivals similar to this, in this country, in New York right now, all around the world, is something that speaks to all of us in a way that helps us understand these are my people. And that sense is something that the public has, I think, really taken to the forefront of our overall mission. It's pretty extraordinary that almost a decade ago, Oscar Youses decided to take poor old Mark Russell in from the cold. And bring him from St. Anne's to the hallowed island of Manhattan. But I think it was a really extraordinary move for each of them. And I think it was a real risk, but also, I think, rather extraordinary that we would house this festival of devised theater works from all around the world and from the United States here at the Public Theater. And to make an ongoing statement that this place is a home for not just specific playwright driven work, isn't just a home for musicals, isn't just a home for Shakespeare, but is a home for all sorts of theater. Everything that falls underneath the umbrella of theater belongs here at the Public. So from that moment, eight years ago, you fast-forward to now we now have Mayen Wong, the extraordinary Mayen Wong, who is now the co-director with Mark of this festival while he sort of starts our European outpost. Not really, but kind of. And the thing that we've decided to do is the Public Theater, which I'm really excited to just talk to you very briefly about, is to really put an institution's muscle behind supporting the creation of devised theater works. So as Mark said, Mayen's not only the co-director of the festival, but she's also the director of our devised theater initiative. And over the past six months, she's been working on a three-year plan that will put the public's muscle firmly behind creating resources, tools, and space for devised theater artists to develop their work. I think we're all really aware, particularly those of us in the United States, that there's a great deal of support, or I should probably say has been historically a great deal of support in the rest of the world for the creation of this sort of work. But there hasn't necessarily been a lot of support here in the U.S. And it's something that we at the public are very excited about creating. So as I said, our intent is to create a space. Our intent is to give devised theater artists the support and resource that they need in order to develop the work, so that beyond the walls of the public, beyond the walls of just these festivals that celebrate and encourage this sort of work, that this work is actually better accepted, better taken into the whole of the American theater. And that's just something we're extraordinarily excited about. I think I've said enough, but I'm really happy to have you all here. I am looking forward to a great many shows over the next week and a half. And I hope you have a terrific day here at the Symposium, and so tomorrow. So enjoy, it's been a pleasure. Thank you. Hi, thank you, Patrick. Now I would like to introduce Mario Garcia-Durham, the CEO of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. Under the radar was a product of APAP for many years. I have known Mario for many years at the Yorva-Wena Center for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and now a leading APAP. He has always been a strong supporter of new theater. And it is a pleasure to welcome to the stage to say a few words. Thank you. Mario. Thank you very much, Mark. Mark started out this session doing something that's completely unacceptable to presenters and that's by throwing candy to the audience to win their affection. I'm going to throw dollars out. No, but don't worry, that's not APAP money. That's my leftover money from my time at the NEA. I wanted to sincerely thank Mark and Mayen and Patrick and Oscar and all of the folks here who make this possible. I also want to give a round of applause. You know, I'm in conference mode, so our volunteers and staff that meet us at the door really help out. So I'd love to give a round of applause for all of you. As Mark said, APAP is very happy to be in partnership with this project and organization. And we're very happy to announce this event as part of our pre-conference event lineup. But I did want to mention as well, can I have another round of applause for the 10th year anniversary of this fantastic festival? Just a couple of things. I wanted to thank Mark. He's such a great leader and colleague. He contacted me about a year ago. One of the issues that I faced at APAP and would always come up with a board is like, oh, my God, you have APAP and then you have all these other festivals and events that are blossoming around APAP and is going to pull audience, all of that stuff, which you're all aware of. I come from the school, as many of you do, that it's like working together we're much stronger. So when Mark called me about let's all work together with all of the festivals, it landed on open ears. And I'm very happy to give him credit that this year we're working as a pilot project with seven other festivals and events that are going on under the radar, Global Fest, Coil, Focus, Winter Jazz Fest, Prototype and a number of others because we firmly believe that working together we will all rise here. So I'm really, really happy that we're doing that. We're cross-promoting because we think this month in January is an amazing time of performing arts professionals coming here to see and experience work. So I want to give Mark credit for the initiative of all of us working together and it's just going to grow. So I wanted to thank Mark for that. And then finally I wanted to acknowledge a dear friend who actually made this all possible as well. And that is Olga Garay English. And as you all know she's an amazing individual an amazing colleague and without her foresight and wisdom and support this would not have happened. So I want to remind you all that tomorrow we have the APAP under the radar speed dating from 9 until noon and I wish you all a fantastic symposium. Thank you. Thank you, Mario. We're going to skip housekeeping. You all know what to do anyway. But I want to go right into from where I stand. Now last year we asked four of our artists in the festival to give a mini manifesto based on their perspective on the world. You can find Taylor Mac's text on one of the walls in our upstairs club. This year we have asked four arts and activists, administrators, curators to do the same. A simple and difficult little assignment. What is their view of what is going on in the world? What is their experience? What concerns them? What gives them joy? And how do they view the future of theater? So from where I stand. There's been a small change in the program. Anna Mae Van Acker, the artistic director and managing director of the How Have Along Ufa in Berlin sends a regret she was not able to make it. She had one of those board meeting things. It's terrible. Anyway, our first speaker is Olga Gray, English. Let's see. Here we go. Olga has made such an impact on American culture from wherever she has found herself. At Miami-Dade, as presenter and an NPN mentor, where I first met her, to her time at the Doris Duke Foundation, where she was my main co-conspirator and starting under the radar. To her last job as ED of the city of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, she helped bring our particular formula of festival to create radar LA. I'm proudly honored to bring to the stage Olga Gray, English. Still the sexiest arts practitioner I know. Olga! Thank you so much for being here. I'm going to show some slides, I think. I want to talk about how she brought me to this kind of work. Egon Schiele was an Australian expressionist artist of the early 20th century. He was an odd with critics and society for much of his life and briefly was incarcerated for obscenity. John Kelly is a contemporary artist from New York City who fluidly uses the tools of performance to draw a haunting portrait of Schiele at 28 during an influenza epidemic that crippled Europe. I first encountered this work at Dance Theater Workshop in 1986. It was the evocative portrayal of Egon Schiele's life and artistry called Pass the Butthorse Beta. Coming from Miami before Art Basel before even the ubiquitous Art Deco movement was really brought back to life I had never really seen theater such as this. I had seen standard theater and musicals and, you know, secondary kind of Shakespeare stuff. And I'd never seen anything like this. And I was sitting next to David White who has been such a pioneer in terms of bringing this kind of work to audiences that I was just mesmerized. John was able to bring a simple, concise and gripping tale barely using any language. He did it through imagery, through music and dance. Artists who tell tales that I can embody and that taste just permeates my soul really seduce me into doing the kind of work that I do and that is playing a role in helping work get developed and then sharing it with audiences like you. I respond to artist-centric work, work that reveals hidden truths sometimes shining a light on a lone individual sometimes mirroring the strength and path of entire peoples. Strong work that can be found in your own community but that is in dialogue with national and international community. I'm interested in artists who represent the diversity of those communities geographic diversity, gender diversity, sexual preference, cultural ethnicity. All of those kinds of artists really are in the moment and are really the harbingers of truths. People like Carl Hancock Rocks, Pat Graney, Ping Chong, Randy Eckerd, Luisa Fado and Culture Quest from Los Angeles where I now live, Urban Bush Women. These are all artists that have played a major role in keeping me engaged with this kind of work and I hope that I have been able to nurture some of their work as well. I'm also driven by my commitment to breaking the xenophobic practices of this country and internationalizing the fields of presenting in theater. And the combination of all of those factors really evidenced initially in how I responded to John Kelly's portrayal of a gongshila are what brought me to under the radar. We're here celebrating the 10th anniversary of this fantastic and path-breaking festival. I'm proud to say that we were able to launch Radar LA Festival two years ago and has brought similar questions and truths to our own community. Both have been laborers of love that have brought countless artists and audience members together in communion. And I also want to just give a shout out to the many of us who work year after year to make these encounters possible. From where I stand, it is necessary to recommit to this work and to continue bringing these stories to life through difficult periods and through periods of prosperity. I celebrate under the radar and hope to meet you here again in 10 years. Thank you. Thank you very much. And now, I'd like to welcome to the stage Joe Hodge. Joe is an actor, a director, an artistic leader and currently the producing artistic director of Playmakers Repertory in North Carolina. One of our agendas at under the radar and we have many agendas was to invite to the table leaders for the American Regional Producing Theaters. And Joe's honesty, curiosity and deep integrity are one of the pleasures of this journey for me. He is one of the people showing us how to remake the American Theater for the future. Please welcome Joe Hodge. So great, I'm going to keep us in the dark out there. I have a huge thanks to Mark and to Mayen who are two of my favorite people in the American Theater, extraordinary thinkers, extraordinary practitioners and I'm honored to be speaking to all of you and I'm flattered to be invited to your party. My father and I fought tooth and nail about my desire to go to graduate school to become an actor. Partly because my parents were immigrants from Palestine and there were only three jobs for the children of immigrants from Palestine, doctor, lawyer or engineer, but mostly because my father was given to understand by talking with some folks that the theater was dying. I was reminded of those conversations from so many years ago when I read an article last week about the theater as a dying art form due to the threat of our on-demand world. I also read this recently from an important person of the theater lamenting the demise of the field. I quote, I question the utility of turning out every year some thousands of young people who are qualified to teach drama, the overwhelming majority of whom are hoping to get on the staff of a college where they hope to teach succeeding ever-multiplying thousands to teach drama. That quote is from Tyrone Guthrie's a new theater written in 1964. I have never seen anything take so long to die. We keep it up with new reasons why the theater is dying. Our business has been around for at least 2,000 years and it's doing beautifully in a typically shaggy way. We're told that we need to innovate and adapt in order to survive. We could teach a clinic on the subject. You know what the business world learned 20 years ago that was innovative? They learned that it doesn't make sense to hire people and make them do the exact same job for 35 years. They learned that they were far nimbler and smarter if they worked on a project-specific basis, put a small team together for a particular project, each team member bringing skills very specific to the demands of said project, then disbanding the team once that project was finished. In other words, innovatively discovering a way of working that we've been doing since antiquity. For 2,000 years we've adapted to change. We do it better than anyone. If I had to bet on who might be here 2,000 years from now, the theater or television, radio, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, the GOP, Christianity or Miley Cyrus fans, I'd bet on the theater. And we have to be careful that our desire to be innovative and entrepreneurial, 2 words that I'd be happy to see banished from the lexicon, doesn't encourage us to compromise the thing that is unique and extraordinary about what we do. A couple of years ago playmakers allowed tweeting from a section of the audience and it felt silly to me and we stopped because in our world where it seems that every single person has a blog, further evidence that the unlived life is not worth examining, and selfies and selfies that must be taken and shared with everybody we've ever known. I think one of the single most radical acts a community can perform is for 500 people in agreement with one another to turn off their cell phones and sit in a dark room together to listen to someone else's story. I don't know that we have to innovate in order to save a theater which is not dying. I do think we need to be braver. I think we have to invite bigger artists to join us. I think we need to make room for one another. I think we should work with a generosity and joy that comes from working in a discipline which is indeed so durable and indestructible. The art form is about the closest thing we've got to a sure thing. It has survived everything. It will surely survive whatever damage you or I do to it. Capital T theater I have no worries about. That said each of our individual theaters or presenting organizations are extraordinarily fragile and vulnerable entities and dependent on the continued support of the communities which they serve. I just wonder and of course I don't know but I wonder if that fragility while anathema to our corporate culture is exactly right for us. Be relevant all the time or go away every year, every day to question whether we are relevant enough whether we are important enough for our community to engage with us and care for us. That fragility somehow seems right to me and though it leaves us feeling anxious and stabilized we have to stop acting like that fragility is somehow evidence of the failure of the art form or of the sector. And I think it is this chicken little mentality this sky is falling mentality that creates such a sense of scarcity that contributes to this sense that anything that is good for you is somehow something that is being taken away from me and this contributes to our main failing as a field which is how we take one another. If we can leave aside all of our orthodoxies all of our insistence that the kind of work we make is the only kind of work that ought to be made if we can think of the theater as a single ecosystem which it surely is then to say companies that make devised work are struggling is a lot like saying there is a leak in your side of the boat for a field that celebrates itself as it is an inclusion we sure love our little fiefdoms and we operate from such a place of fear and conservatism for all of us in this room who run an arts organization we are going to be fired from our job or we will retire at some point to the great relief of our organization in our community those are the only two ways out besides quitting or dying at our desk people will come to despise us or at least grow tired of us because that's what people do our leadership career has a life span and it may turn out to be it maybe should be shorter than we'd like and so faced with such career mortality what are we doing you know Peter Sellers once said to me the trick is to do as much as you can as fast as you can before they figure out what you're up to and throw you out of the building and I think there's something to that make as much art as you can now invite as many artists into your building now as you can make the work that you have to make before they throw you out I'm truly bored with all of our orthodoxies and competition about who is making more meaningful work and I don't want to argue about any of that but the question I will pose to all of us is are we making the work that we most want and need to make or are we making some other kind of work while waiting for the economy to recover the audience to come the board to step up the foundation to embrace us the NEA to recognize us what are we waiting for better times these are better times this might be as good as it ever gets right now and a fear based scarcity mindset that invites us to hunker down think small share nothing with anybody have no courage until some imagine better day in fact pushes us towards the very demise which we are trying to avoid my job is not to ensure that playmakers uses its resources to build a bomb shelter in its backyard in preparation to get some imagined apocalypse my job is to make as much art as I can right now as well as I know how and connect that work meaningfully to the community which I am charged to serve and interestingly that's turned out to be a pretty sound business model for us last night we opened Mike Daisy's The Story of the Gun at Playmakers we commissioned the piece from Mike because we thought that a nation of 300 million people and 300 million guns is a domestic question of some urgency and relevance and that our cultural addiction to guns is worthy of interrogation we just closed a rotating rep that I co-directed with Dominique Sarand of the Tempest and Metamorphoses I chose to work on those plays with Dominique not because we think in the same way the same things but because we don't which grew our company and our community meaningfully outside of our producing season at Playmakers we've got Taylor Mack, Rachel Chafkin and the team and residents this summer continuing work on a future project we also have the Rude Mechs coming into work on a new piece with help from the Mellon Foundation we give room and time and salary and administrative support and leverage the intellectual capital of the university all in support of devising companies it isn't the work we make at Playmakers we don't want the premier we don't want subsidiary rights we just want to be helpful because we are in the same boat and having those artists in our building makes us bigger and makes our entire community stronger I'll leave you with this final thought I was in the first city company production over 20 years ago and Bogart directed Chuck Meese or Estes we built it in Togomura, Japan using a system called Viewpoints talking to other artists at the time about the approach they thought we were all from Mars nobody knew what it was now Viewpoints is on actors resume the way that jazz or tap used to be our edges roll in towards the center and we make a terrific mistake if we are not nurturing those artists and companies who make work in ways that we don't immediately understand or at first blush even know how to fully appreciate and so I encourage you to make the work that you just need to make choose people who are unlike you choose people who work in paradigms other than your own choose generosity, choose love make room there is truly such abundance thank you very much so when Anna Veven Acker had to drop out earlier this week I told her as punishment that I was going to ask Mark Yeoman to impersonate her right now I'm sure Mark could kill in a wig but he brings to us today a different perspective we do not get enough of in this country that is one from across the pond Mark is the artistic director of the Nordison Festival in Groningen, Holland a little college town two hours by train up from Amsterdam I recommend that you put the Nordison Festival on your list of festivals to experience it is a wonderful combination of state fair there is meat on a stick battle of the bands and experimental dance in theater and performance art and installation he has done wonders for American artists and exposed me to many artists from around the world with this amazing eye please welcome Mark Yeoman considering the journeys that some of you would be making to be here today it might be good afternoon or even good evening obviously sorry not to be handy I was looking forward to hearing her speak also myself Mark thought they should choose someone who looked a bit like her I haven't had time since yesterday to prepare a speech such which is probably good news but I do promise that there will be in what I have to say at least one secret because I think that all good speeches should contain at least one secret really so I I grew up in Britain and I grew up in Britain and didn't stay there I left when I was 25 and since there I've been working living in continental Europe or Europe as the British call it a number of countries and it's been quite interesting doing a sort of 25 year extended interrail around Europe different countries Germany France, Spain now Netherlands growing up in Britain I used to like making theatre but I was always having fun with it because theatre was such a serious thing theatre was theatre was intellectualising theatre was Shakespeare theatre was beautiful voices theatre was mainly white middle class kids going to a London school Lambda Rada, one of them and learning how to do working class accents that we have on BBC and I'm quite happy that since then much has changed in the world theatre is no longer this narrow band theatre has grown to be this much bigger thing than just that narrow band and I'm delighted as an adult to discover that and now to work within this broader vision of theatre and celebrate that with everything that I'm able to do I am the artistic director of a festival called the Nordison in Groningen in the north of Netherlands it's a small city like Mark was saying people 300,000 bicycles and what we did there it really wasn't much of a it wasn't an ambitious kind of a place when I arrived in 2001 it was a very self-contented place a beautiful summery feel and so on and since then we've done an unlikely thing we've added in a lot of heavy heavier content on the programme whilst keeping the basic form of a festival and do you know what? no one has a problem because people changed also I joke sometimes I say folks ain't so stupid they they don't have a problem following what people might say oh that's difficult no it's not it's difficult if it's not well made it's not difficult because really the underlying secret of our festival I would say is that my only theatre book of reference is actually Desmond Morris man watching I don't know if you know Desmond Morris who wrote The Naked Ape as zoologists who study study us as if we're animals The Naked Ape the less intellectual version of his work is called man watching it's about us as an animal descended from ape become a thing called homo sapiens we are a 200,000 year old observer survivor species and that's what you're doing now you're observing me observing someone's phone observing everything the movement of my hands seeing everything hearing what else is happening in the room that's what we do we do it 24 hours a day 7 days a week because that's what we are inside we are fabulously good observers and I've attempted to put on stage at our festival work which is as intelligent as the audience will be sitting in front of it and actually the audience really likes that because the audience doesn't really like being insulted the audience doesn't like the idea that somebody thought they might not be able to cope with something Mark asked me to say something about the theatre today and in the future about the theatre today I would say I see three real tendencies society with the internet becomes quite rapidly less vertical and much more horizontal please let's not confuse wealth which is as vertical as it ever was with thinking which is becoming extremely horizontal we as people become much more complex than the idea of us until recently there were people like theatre there were people like dance there were people like music we all know that that's not us we like theatre and dance and music we also like Game Boys and watching Bruce Willis films when it's too much stress to go out to the theatre because it's really who we are these days we become much more broad much more open the influences on our lives the things which we're interested in you are arts or science that's no longer us we are arts or sports that's no longer us rapidly we become much more broad we are more multiple so I think this will affect the work that's interesting on a stage as well and that's what I see in a lot of the work that's being made by artists these days much more horizontal I'd like to it's a bit of a crime to post in front of anything I know but I'm going to do it I'd like to talk about post international I'm aware I'm a European I work in a small cluster of countries in Europe but there's sort of an obsession with the idea of international as if it has some special quality to it it's almost sort of a category it's not a category or a genre it doesn't really mean much anymore because people these days are not so interested in where your shirt was made the music you listen to on Spotify where it's from which country it's from what was the nationality of the company that made the seats that you're sitting on you're not thinking like this we really are moving on quite quickly the idea that national identities can be encapsulated within the things which politicians wish sometimes or funding structures wish for sometimes to reflect national quality or identity I don't think that's what people are thinking at the moment I don't think we're thinking like that I think that we don't really care so much I think we care about whether this feels relevant to us so my feeling at the moment is that there's slowly less interested we tend to produce nationally and present internationally but who cares I don't know how it works for you here in the States but the idea this is American your own country is a nation of nations many different influences which bit of America are we talking about so we are influenced by culture not nationhood and culture is an ancient thing that we carry within us from many different places so post internationalism that's my experience for a European kind of a plea and also post contemporary I've avoided using the word either international or contemporary around my festival because the word contemporary scared me away from it for a long long time the idea you got to be able to talk about it afterwards that's scary and contemporary actually doesn't mean modern contemporary is a movement contemporary is specific it's a term borrowed out of visual arts and music and stage work contemporary doesn't mean from now contemporary is specific in style and I'm personally at the moment very very interested in breaking away from the dogmas of contemporary idiom into what might come after that that might include words that's not adhering to those dogmas coming from different places different ways of thinking maybe it doesn't have to be deconstructed we don't have to maybe it doesn't need to start at the end and go to the beginning it's okay to drive around it people don't think really care what matters is that it's well made it's respectful and it's aware of the fact that the people who would be told to are members of a 200,000 year old survival observer species and it needs to feel relevant in this day to wrap up about something about the future I'd like to just echo one or two things that Joe Hange was just saying there and I was in Athens a couple of months ago and I went to visit the Parthenon I don't know how many of you have been there it's an ancient city and still upon the big hill in the middle is the temple and a lot of stones that fell down we put them back up again the ones that the British didn't take away to Britain so I was wandering around and it was beautiful it's sort of ancient and old and so on and until I came to the theatre of Dionysus and to explain the theatre Dionysus was built a couple of thousand years ago and it's it's basically a Guthrie thrust stage 2000 years before Tyrone Guthrie and it's got a little wall it goes around and people sit around it and this is my secret I promised you a secret my secret is I almost cried because it was the only thing in that place that still felt familiar to me because it's just was very immediate it's a theatre people stand and tell and so for the future I imagine that in 2000 years from now much much will have changed in society how we live we will have become as unrecognisable to us now as we would be now to the Greeks that sat in that theatre I do believe that the theatre they will be making in 2000 years will be extremely recognisable to us because we don't evolve that fast the audience is still going to be homo sapiens it's still going to be homo sapiens watching other homo sapiens telling stories in a homo sapiens kind of way and so for me the theatre performing arts I think that it would be one of the very few things that we will still recognise in 2000 years from now thank you very much thanks so much our final presenter today is Mark Bermuthi Joseph Mark was the first artist to perform it under the radar I believe I think we made him do a version of his classic piece word becomes flesh at 10 in the morning that January two years ago we did the group work of word becomes flesh many of you saw that it was amazing he recently came to the dark side and joined the world of presenters and he is the artistic director of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts he is bringing to that role the same genre breaking honesty and passion that we know so well in his performances please welcome Mark Bermuthi Joseph yeah so the first performer at the first under the radar I didn't totally blow the shit up it's still here so from where I stand fun's topic I wish I could tell you where I'm standing but I'm dancing I'm an immediate product of an immediate past two years ago I premiered a dance theater piece at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts the show went up on a Thursday and the following Monday I had my first interview for the job of director performing arts at the same institution I like to joke that there was a poster of myself in the room that I was interviewing in this may or may not have been an asset to the interview room because who trusts artists at arts centers the piece itself was a performed documentary of three years spent working on sustainability issues across African America we developed intentional communities who collaborated on a festival meant to illuminate sustainable survival practices in under-resourced neighborhoods in Chicago in Houston, Harlem and Oakland the Astragates designed a set for us that functioned like an up-purposed sleeve for the narrative skin of the piece on tour we talked about keeping new resources in the community of moving up but not moving out we talked about the politics of staying three months into my gig at Yerba Buena I received an inaugural door stoop performing artist award at our orientation session Duke President Ed Henry looked us square in the eye reminded us all that we were so honored for our work as artists us jazz musicians, dancers, designers and actors us weird people, us culture actors don't stop making work he implored which was an admonition and a little bit of a warning and so my next three works are a hybrid opera for the Philadelphia Opera Company, a play in verse for South Coast Rep and a dance theater piece about global economies through the lens of soccer's world cup the ghosts still keep waking me up in the middle of the night and moving my pen and so here I stand mostly on a fault line in a blue state three blocks from the ghetto six blocks to Twitter's office eight blocks from the bridge to Oakland one week in October Apple will launch a new product into the world from my theater and the next week Sankai Juku or Bill T. Jones will launch a new stage I imagine each person in this room is a little bit of everywhere at once to be of art and commerce and politics we have to be my specific everywhere is everything stated above I'm an artist with a particular civic duty I love performing because of the agency it affords me hi oh that's all good at this point it's just me right it's there was some fresh shit I had naked people but you know I love performing because of the agency it affords me to self transform and also to impel movement among others I love curating because of those same principles transformation and social movement and so I stand of the belief that contemporary art centers exist on an axis somewhere between the academic and the entrepreneurial my boss talks the way Octavia Butler does sometimes talks about all that you touch you change all that you change changes you she says let's think about something other than getting people to our space let's think about how we are changed through the multivalent members in our community so from where I stand and in reconciliation of a moment of social practice performance passion and field of inquiry I'm engaged with a curatorial activism that centers on the art of making environments for relationship I developed an audience development mechanism based on the cultivation of creative ecosystems that we call the future soul think tank just as universities provide the perimeters for small discipline based colleges so too I believe that contemporary art centers can hold intentional pedagogical space to uphold programmatic values the core philosophy behind the future soul think tank is the cultivation of cross sections of the Bay Area's creative class intentionally using our institutional space as thought lab harnessing a quorum of generative energy and nurturing the group began fairly small about 30 people that came from Stanford Harvard Berkeley their Apple software developers civil rights lawyers playwrights authors rockstar chefs rockstars we gave the memberships to our institution free tickets to certain events quarterly academic meetings but most importantly we gave these folks our building and we asked them to generate reflections on a big idea in our institutional space we also asked that each subsequent meeting they individually invited one person who had yet to attend a gathering but definitely should have been integrated into the cohort so the group has both social and productive import we're not developing an audience we're cultivating a future and selecting a key group to make it with us we project that the way to develop an audience is to seed it with offstage thinkers will then pull in their constituencies to our organization around big questions and not just beautiful content the big question that we asked this first group is what is soul going to look like in the year 2038 we then gave them physical space and an online platform to manifest to that question over the next several years we'll concurrently convene other ecosystems around other big questions so that when we presented the work of young Jean Lee she and her company aren't the only ones that are actively present in codifying an inquiry around the body gender post feminist definitions of post feminist inclinations we have a creative ecosystem that's been convening for a year reflecting on two questions what is on the other side of your body's joy what is on the other side of your body's shame the body politics cohort will build and present immersive participatory interventions around the YBCA campus in response to these questions creating a contextual gallery of installations an immersive foyer to prime the audience experience for untitled feminist show activating our belief that YBCA is a place for the public to provoke thought not just to witness art it is an institutional practice that mirrors the prologue of the piece I happen to premiere there and it also mirrors the cadre of artists who are designing work that begins beyond the lip of the stage that are resolutely attempting to reconcile the pedestrian space with the performed space and developing work for everywhere but the theater itself this is a dance with theater itself resourcing public intellectuals having shared process within the frame of art space citizen art as ecosystem and introduction the transposition of cultural through careful and curated systems of invitation it's a reframing of the plaguing question considering civic development rather than audience development the location of urban growth inside of the architecture of theater and likewise my institution has integrated artist flow within the not so zen of its administrative skeleton so I guess where I'm standing is at a place of social design theory and multimodal employment a culture hacker a culture center inscribing circles within the institution dancing a little bit of everywhere twirling in the midst of a stand still sandstorm of social polemic and economic quaking a breach among the people intent on being changed by community like how my poems try yes thank you okay now we're going to have a talk and it's going to be moderated by Eric Ting and Eric Ting is the associate artistic director of the Longworth theater in New Haven, Connecticut and recently received an OBE award for his direction of we are proud to present a presentation at Soho Rep a play by Jackie Sibley's Jury you guys get on to mine I'll just keep talking is other credits include Miriam at the BAM next wave and he also directed at the Goodman the Alliance ART Longworth theater Singapore Rep theater and also Eric did every post-show discussion at Longworth and they do one almost every night of their shows for seven years he is a rising star director I'm really proud to have him here and he's also my professional son-in-law welcome I'm going to be very conscious of time because I know we're going to break for coffee at 1130 and some of us need to be away thank you so much everyone for such inspiring words I think what I want to talk about today a little bit was courage and in part I've been drawn to this question of the last 10 years that we've been this festival has been around for 10 years and just thinking sort of meditating on what that means what the last 10 years means that this festival is like there's not been a time when this country hasn't been at war during the lifetime of this festival that there is this sense of the kind of the scarcity that Joe mentions about like the creating that the festival started in I guess 2005 but that the recession hit us in 2008 and to be able to sort of support artists in a space of scarcity is a very interesting thing to me as well and in particular I'm drawn to this idea of how in times of scarcity we often find ourselves in a state of fear and many of you are presenters I suppose and I think many of us here in this room drank the Kool-Aid of under the radar years and years ago the idea of being willing to present work that surprises us right that changes the way that we see things and what does it mean for you in that context to be brave in a time of scarcity to be sort of courageous in that does that lead us to anything maybe not no please and feel free to completely disagree with that I'm going to start so I think that scarcity is something that can be mind-numbing and can be totally paralyzing and that part of the reason that I wanted to really do this kind of work from the very first time that I was exposed to it is because it spoke to me at a level that more traditional work just hadn't and I think that what I've been very adept at doing is at any position that I'm going to whether it's as a presenter or as a funder or as a agency leader in the local arts agency movement it's about being present and being part of the solution and being part of creating the resources that will make this work really come to life and so it is a personal commitment that I've made and I think many people in this room find themselves at that same crossroads that you make personal sacrifices you really rattle cages and it's all worth it when the lights go down and you see extraordinary work and sometimes it really sucks the work you know and then you have to just kind of muddle through and keep thinking about funding but it's really important to be able to give artists that wide berth that not everything that you see on stage is going to be hit not everything is going to speak to you you really need to give people the opportunity to make mistakes or to explore areas that might not speak to you but they deserve that audience and they deserve that communion so for me it's really about facing scarcity and just saying I will not succumb to it you know it's interesting I'm going to force it to you so it's interesting because I think in this conversation about scarcity one of the things that keeps coming up is that in that state of fear it's harder and harder to see far we're caught up in the moment we get caught up in the moment and I was struck by what you were saying Joe about this idea of actually focusing on the moment as much as we talk about the last 10 years as much as we may talk about the next 10 years or the next 10 hundred years what you were talking about was this idea of focusing on the moment being sort of where we are now and what is our responsibility now to the people and not getting sort of overwhelmed by the sense of what we need to be doing yeah I can't do this yeah I don't know it's hard to know anything right now we know in this country that corporations are sitting on more cash than they've ever said we're in this economic recovery we haven't quite recovered they're sitting on record amounts of cash they're a scarcity mindset they're keeping their arms around it because they don't know what's going to come next and if we can extend that analogy to what some of our creative organizations are doing you know we're doing this with our resources a little bit we're doing it with our creative we're doing it with our imaginations we're thinking smaller than we might otherwise and I guess in thinking about what we need to do right now you know I don't know and you feel like maybe giving any kind of you wrestle with it the way you need to wrestle with it I just encourage us that on some level in our imaginations and our creativity we are sitting on record amounts of cash you know and what we do with those resources and how we apply it daily as opposed to saving that for some other better time I guess is what seems important to me I think maybe I want to jump in by saying one that my parents are from Haiti I'm a first generation American and I'm a child of hip hop and so you know I'm not alone in this something from nothing background I was struck at a recent staff retreat among senior leadership at YBCA there was a common current of striving among us all no one came from a place of privilege all of us were our misfits this this is a field of thinking left of center and moving from a place of productivity as survival and so you know to the points of where we've been over the course of the last 2000 years to the point of the saliency and the resilience of the field the field is dominated by salient resilient people we don't enter we are all of an intellect where we probably could be stupid rich if we chose but we choose not and so the field persists because we do because of the collective character that we have that the art that we make that we gravitate towards comes from a same place from a place of lack and of question and of inquiry and I think that might be the secret sauce it's not so much about the hoarding it's genetic and socially it's part of the social DNA that makes up the field that we're talking about so is that kind of that idea of scarcity and sacrifice there's all these interesting words that are for me very charged the kind of fringe this idea of the fringe festival and the work that's being created with nothing and that idea that it's coming out of a place of scarcity and what you were talking about which was about living in that space of fragility do you know where do those voices come from and how do those voices speak to us as a different perspective perhaps from who our audiences are and what do you mean when you say audience development and community development where does that take us and I think one of the things your festival does is in this whole conversation about locality and creating community and not underestimating your audiences which is also maybe not underestimating your community well it's not about underestimating audience it's about underestimating us as people it's sort of fashionable or maybe just biochemical I'm not quite sure we're always a bit hard on ourselves we're pretty sort of critical generally as part of our success I think as a species and as people and I I don't know I have to think that the Buddhists often talk about how violence begets violence and yet if you consider the massive war making that we've indulged in for thousands of years on that rule then we would live in an awful war making bloody place we wouldn't sit here in relative safety okay violence does beget violence but there is also something in us which must cut across it somehow mysteriously individually collectively otherwise we wouldn't be sitting here in relative peace all through time and history something in us has not just fought back we've also absorbed and made violence go away but we don't talk about that much we always beat ourselves up about how rotten we are how awful how we are a mean species we don't care about this we don't care about that and I don't know I was having a conversation last night with some friends about how I lost my wallet in a taxi in New York a couple of years ago and how after seven hours of being helped by very many people who I didn't know that was changed to me with everything still in it passed from hand to hand and how for every dishonest person there are very many honest people and I think that's something also that I like about our environment that we are free to reflect on the full breadth of us so I don't feel okay it's an economic crisis and everyone's got a really tough moment but we are phenomenally wealthy collectively and mostly individually I'm a millionaire not in my cash but in how I feel I was born in a lucky place I'm European I fought no wars I don't fear for my children's safety I don't have to do all those things look at the history books it's all in there we are amongst the not one percent of the most privileged creatures ever to have walked the face of the earth and we're still beating ourselves up about the things that we're not and I think we need to balance that out with things that we are as well can I ask you on the last few minutes that we have three minutes we're probably not set up for questions but I'm going to just ask you really quickly which is about these artists and the supporting these artists right and I think there's not a person in this room that would disagree that real courage begins there the individuals that are sort of fearless and that are making the world and that are existing in that space of fragility are the artists and I think that's why Olga you started what you started where do we, ten years past where do we look next where do we look next which we well that's also good that's a good answer, what else to farmers ok so alright so chirpy thing this this piece where it becomes flesh is pretty close to the bone for me biographically it's about the pregnancy from a father's perspective and it's by my son Makai who is now 12 and wears the same shoe size that I do you know he just celebrated his 12th birthday and you know and I look at him and don't know where the time went the arc of that particular piece in a lot of ways frames the arc of our relationship and in a very real way has kind of formed some of the economic frame in which my family exists so I think that you always look to your close personal history that in terms of artists opening up or creating some beach by which some you know magical tunnel by which we can navigate the future of the field I think that that's a misstep I think that the closer that we cut to the marrow of our being rather than looking externally the more likely it is that we'll continue to work in such a way that it's human and part of what I got from Joe's remarks in particular is that the field is not so much in distress or is only in as much distress as we are again to quote most death hip hop isn't some giant in the hills it's who we are it's what we do we need to look externally I think that we just need to fortify ourselves I really appreciate those words Mark I think that's on the personal level on the artistic level that seems so right to just think about the organizational perspective over the next 10 years and what maybe needs to be thought about I've become interested in this idea of the inverted U curve where the very same thing allows us to be successful can be the thing which enforces our demise so if we think of money in this relative to our organizations I run a producing organization I look at the big producing organizations in the country so without any resources it's very hard to do good work it's hard to make enough time it's hard enough to get to collect the fantastic artists you want to work with so no money is a tough place then you get some money to be able to get something money improves the work and that goes up and up and you can do more, you can impact a community and you can spend that money in ways that continue to grow and then there's some point and some of our largest producing organizations in this country I think are on the far side of this inverted U curve where the money is so great it has become so much that they can no longer afford to do the work that very small companies can afford to do so when you have we do a lot of classical work where we are and when I hear of a 30 million dollar producing organization that can't afford to do a Shakespeare unless it's something that's on the high school curriculum because they can't afford to because they need all those thousands of kids to come through their doors so they can't make the play and in the theater at the scale of hours we can do whatever those are places that our largest organizations cannot do so in this inverted U curve I think we're a lot of so much of the theatrical capital in this country is held is in some of these very large organizations who, that money has to feed the machine so much and not enough of that is getting out to artists, it's not enough of that is getting back out to meaningfully impact the community and anyway, I think that's something we need to look at going forward all right, oh we are at the end of our time so thank you for very very much for just your wisdom all right