 Everyone, before we get started with the panel, the early careers dramaturge's lunch will be in Osher A. We were gonna meet in the circle area and go to Berkeley Bowl, then go to Osher A. So after this session, thank you. Hi, everybody, how are ya? Last day of the conference, still going strong. Good job, everybody, you're all doing great. Welcome. My name's Ilana Brownstein, I'm the director of New Work at Company One Theater, and I'm on the faculty at the Boston University School of Theater. And here's what we're doing here today. No need to consult your packets, I will tell you what this is. This round table, or linear panel, will explore how and why responsive theater gets made. Examples of this genre include things like, but are not limited to the Every 28 Hours Project, the Orlando Project, Ghostlight Project, et cetera. What challenges are posed by the emergence of this form of immediate social emergency style work? What do best practices look like? How do we amplify and innovate to the great work being done in this field? Surely we are more in need of effective, immediate responsive theater actions now than ever before. And I have this amazing group of panelists up here with me, and I'm gonna remind us as we're up here that we'll want to speak directly into the mic so that we can be really well heard. Access for everybody. And I wanna say hello to our friends at HowlRound and all the folks who are watching us from afar. So I'm gonna go through and introduce our panelists really quickly. I have tried to distill their intense accomplishments into just a hundred words each, so we'll see how that goes. I'll start here with Diane. This is Diane Brewer. She's a professor of theater history and criticism at the University of Evansville. She serves as the department's resident dramaturg and directs text-based and ensemble-generated productions. She has actively developed new work in venues such as primary stages, the Toftee Lake Center, and Mark Taper Forum, among others. She's a founding ensemble member and performer within The Mix, an Evansville-based company dedicated to the collaborative development of new work. She has received the Dean's Teaching Award from the University of Evansville and a certificate of merit for dramaturgy from the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. Welcome, Diane. Next to Diane. Pardon me. We have Rebecca Stretch. Did I pronounce that correctly? Struck, my apologies. Rebecca is a theater artist, cultural field worker, and educator with a commitment to participatory practice in arts, education, research, and civic engagement. She currently works at the Stanford Arts Institute. In 2014, she launched Stagecoach, a two-year community-based participatory theater program at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. As their first community producer, she worked to integrate the ethics and practices of theater and pedagogy of the oppressed into many parts of the organization. While there, she co-developed and co-taught the first citizen artist training program for the MFA acting students and led the development of three community-devised productions with local partners. Welcome. Next up, we have Phaedra Scott, who I hope you guys heard this morning talking about the Black Theater Commons, which is freaking amazing, so I'm so excited about that. Phaedra Scott is a Boston-based director, dramaturg, and writer. Phaedra has been a part of the artistic departments at Cleveland Playhouse, Huntington Theater Company, and Company One Theater. She's recently directed She, a choreoplay, in New York. She has produced and directed every 28 hours in collaboration with Company One Theater and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her recent dramaturgy credits include Salt Lake Acting Company's Playwriting Workshop, Huntington Summer Workshops, The New Harmony Project, and The Boston Project with Speak Easy Stage. She's the recipient of the Bly Creative Capacity Grant and the, oh gosh, I can't pronounce this, Comigas? Okay, Comigas Byte Fellowship. Thank you for that. And the Frederick Douglas Fellowship for her work on August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle. Next to Phaedra, we have, hold on, this is a late addition to the panel, so I need to pull this up on my email, great. We have Joan Hurwitt, hi, Joan, who you might recognize from being a volunteer at the conference, doing great work. Joan is a creative professional in the arts, education, and community engagement. She works as a director and dramaturg in LA. Her interest in responsive theater was peaked in 2007, when San Diego battled nine raging wildfires and thousands of people were evacuated to Qualcomm Stadium. She organized a responsive theater effort to perform for evacuees in an effort to relieve any amount of anxiety and distress. With a background in emergency relief, she continues to be fascinated with natural disasters and wonders how national response organizations like the Red Cross might support or collaborate with future arts relief efforts. Thank you for joining us, Joan. And then finally, at the end of our linear roundtable, we have Allison Carey. Allison is the director of Oregon Shakespeare Festival's American Revolutions, the United States History Cycle, a multi-decade program of commissioning and developing 37 new plays about moments of change in the United States history, including All the Way by Robert Schenkin and Sweat by Lynn Nottage. She is the co-founder of Cornerstone Theater Company, which collaborates with communities across the US to tell their stories. Her work has been produced in venues such as Arena Stage and a dirt floor cattle sale barn, right on. She lectures frequently on the importance of the arts in shaping healthy societies, especially focused on how theater can most effectively respond to climate change. So I wanna tell you why I asked this illustrious panel of folks to join us and why I wanted to have this conversation with you. But I wanna first clearly state that none of us will have the answers to any of the questions that have been posed. I'm really interested in a conversation with people who are approaching this topic from different entry points, different levels of power and decision-making and different levels of expertise and interest. As a moderator, I'll expressly be looking to identify and highlight threads of connection between what the panelists are saying and then try and turn these provocations out towards you, the audience, for your response and your input and ideas for revision. My inspiration for proposing this topic was that we are wrestling with how to include responsive programming in our seasoned structure at Company One. We've tried a bunch of different approaches. We've produced every 28 hours and some other things and each of those approaches has had its pros and cons. For us at Company One, the way we think about responsive programming is its use is how we demonstrate our commitment to social justice and advocacy through our art and how we demonstrate our ability to serve our community in ways most beneficial to our community. So we're deeply committed to this process, but even so, I still feel unsure about exactly how to do it successfully, responsibly, ethically and with artistic merit. So I wanted to know how other people are approaching it and in this dramaturgical spirit, I wanna create space for a conversation that meets the audience where we all are. So there'll be a wide range of familiarity with this topic in this room and online. Some are experts, some might be totally new to this idea of responsive programming and I don't think it's our job up here or your job to convince anybody that you need to do responsive programming, but perhaps we can begin to come to some jointly understood definitions of the form, identify its unique challenges and opportunities and share some strategies for success. So that's why we're all here. Thank you for being part of it with us. We had some conversations before meeting up today and some themes arose from the conversations about what these panelists were concerned about in terms of this question of responsive programming and they kind of like coalesced into a couple of different categories. One category has to do with the flexibility or inflexibility of an institution's and its desire to do responsive programming. So how do you make something happen in a structure that might not be set up for that? Another category has to do with who makes it. Not just the theater companies or the organizations and their dominant identities, but also its openness and availability as a grassroots model that allows for students or unaffiliated artists or members of fringe scenes or people who are not artists at all to become part of this work. We actually were also talking about the notion of audience and ethics. So whose stories are centered in these actions? Are they actually part of the creation process? How do we encounter and handle issues of tokenism and can the audience even be the generative body for this work? And then we had some questions about action steps, takeaways and impact. How do you measure that? What happens next in a community? What happens next in an organization? And is it just a one-off? So those are like the big areas that we are gonna try and touch upon in this moment. So I wanted to invite the panelists first to spend a couple minutes describing some of these responsive theater actions because I don't wanna assume that everybody knows what these things are by their acronyms. So first, I think, Phaedra, you were gonna take on Every 28 Hours. Can you talk about that? Yes, so Allison, please jump in as well. So Every 28 Hours started at Oregon Shakespeare Festival in tandem with the One Minute Play Festival. And so what it is is a series of 81 minute plays of... It's a series, oh yeah. So Every 28 Hours is a series of 81 minute plays around the theme about the contested statistic that Every 28 Hours, a person of color is killed by police or a security force of some sort. It was rolled out into three different phases and I believe it's in phase three right now. And the first phase was reaching out to the national playwriting community of like, hey, can you write this one minute play? And so there's a lot of wonderful playwrights that are involved in this from many walks of life and different perspectives. And then phase two, I believe, was the national outreach, yeah. So which is what we were, company one was a part of. And I was the artistic producer from the Boston one. And so in that phase two, different regions were put the play on. And so it was a part of a national conversation about talking about police brutality, but using it in a way of art and community engagement. Alison, do you wanna take a minute to talk about the climate change theater action? Sure, it was earlier than Every 28 Hours, but not at all this similar. Hi, Leslie. Apparently, you were involved with it. It was a series of plays, Chantal Billidou and Karadad Svitch put it together. Short plays looking at the climate crisis from an international lens, so international playwrights from all over the world. And theaters could participate or non-theaters could participate in reading and producing one or more of these short plays. And at OSF, we performed one of them, Universes actually performed it, at gathering of all the local climate organizations as sort of a way of bringing art into a conversation that is often not seen through an artistic lens, but rather a scientific and political lens. Great, thank you. Diane, you were gonna talk about the Ghostlight project, right, do you wanna talk about it? Thank you. The Ghostlight project was a project where a bunch of different theaters from across the country could engage in a ritual. It was a flexible ritual. There was a structure that was offered that each institution could adapt, whereby you establish your theater as a sanctuary and read a statement or have music. That was part of what we did. And then you leave the Ghostlight on. You just come together as a community to announce yourself as a sanctuary. Great, thank you. And I also think that was, I think it's important to note that that was on Inauguration Eve, I think, is that right? It was on Inauguration Eve, and the idea was that participating groups were in some way trying to pledge their commitment to protecting some core values. And then we have something like the After Orlando project, which was produced by Missing Bolts Productions and No Passport Theater Alliance. It was a response to the Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting in 2016 and comprised 70 plays and over 40 organizations that produced that theater action nationwide. So hopefully that gets us all situated in what we mean when we say responsive theater. But certainly these examples are not all inclusive. There are lots of different ways to conceive of this definition. And I think one of the things that will be great is as we open this up to a bigger conversation in the room, if you have a strong idea or a question about a different way we could define this term, I think it would be great to hear it. But I wanna start because all of you have had various interactions with this form. And I'd love to start with each of you talking about a success that you've had, something that you can identify as something replicable, maybe, maybe not, but something that you feel like the form allowed you to do something that you felt was important. And I don't mind who starts, maybe you could popcorn around. I would love to start. So specifically with every 28 hours, what was really wonderful about the project was the flexibility. Specifically for the Boston version of this, we engaged with four different other institutions, including Harvard University, a performing arts high school, Boston Arts Academy, as well as the theater offensive, which is a LGBTQ community-organized theater, like community-based theater, as well as Company One. And what we had discovered during it when we were distributing the plays, it was brought up by the theater offensive. They were like, by the way, there are 81 minute plays and only one LGBTQ voice. And so I talked to Claudia. I was like, would it be okay if we developed our own section of queer voices for this one minute play, this one minute play festival? And the answer was an overwhelming yes. And so for, it was a huge success to have this very Boston-based but queer community one minute play section of every 28 hours. That's great, thank you. Anybody else wanna take this question? Yeah, I'll add to that just because it's also related to every 28 hours. So I produced the every 28 hours plays at the American Conservatory Theater two days after coming back from phase one in Ferguson and St. Louis. And a success that I don't know is replicable, but I think is worth putting out there because I think it's what allowed us to do it within two days was being able to build on preexisting programs that already exist at your institutions. So I had the privilege of running the Citizen Artist Program at ACT and having this community-based program, which I know not every theater has, but being able to tap into those preexisting networks and say, okay, we're gonna do this within two days because we have to respond right now. Who do we already know who's doing this work around the community? And so similarly to Phaedra, we built a bunch of quick partnerships. Well, we didn't build them, but we re-engaged them and connected them because we already have them, with activists all over the Bay Area, Oakland, and San Francisco predominantly, those two cities, and had a huge resource fair that was the pre-show of the show where all these organizations could come and talk about the work that they were already doing. We had Youth Voices present. We had community members who had participated in previous projects, who came out, and then we did a very rapid reading of the show with the MFA students from ACT. So being able to just plug into what already existed and use it as a springboard to bring people together, I thought was really successful and the flexibility of the project allowed us to do that and just get disparate voices who are operating in different corners, but doing similar work, get them all together in the same room. And so that was one success. So this is similar to using platforms and structures that are already out there, but I recently came off a year-long nationwide research project loosely based on my graduate work from years ago on art as therapy or art as healing and finding different ways that different communities use the arts with a capital A to address trauma or to serve communities in distress. And that scope of trauma ranged from gun violence or social justice issues or natural disasters. And so I worked closely with a lot of arts organizations who were using their art to talk to the community about current events and relevant issues, but I also got to shadow and observe aid-based organizations who were using their arts programming to help their clients process trauma. So a lot of homeless centers and domestic violence women shelters, among many. So it was really interesting to see how different types of organizations were what was working, what was not working, and then returning to Los Angeles after having gone on that whole adventure to create a program based on some of my favorite parts of those different programs and then also addressing where we could kind of fill in the blanks and make sure that all those voices are being heard and uplift the stories that had not yet been shared. So right now we're, so I created a program called Trust. It stands for the therapeutic relief of unearthing stories together. It's definitely community devised work, so we're teaming up with a women's shelter to start very early stages of starting production on those works. Thank you. Yeah, I guess what I would, I echo what everybody else is saying. The best way to do responsive theater is to have social justice part of all the work that you do, right? Because then there's nothing new. It's all just a continuation of your mission. And what I would say is we've done, been involved in all these projects to a certain extent. The thing that I think is sick at the heart of OSF's belief in this work is that we hire activists to run our programs. And if you don't, so that the people who are suddenly called to do this work already have the skills and the life tradition of engaging that way. And if you do not consider yourself an activist at this time in your life, it's time you learn because none of us has the sort of moral right to step back at this point. And so the more that we are all in the habit of doing this every day, the more it will happen and with ease and with honor and with respect and with grace. Great. Diane, I know. Yes. Diane, I know that you are in the process of sort of developing some ideas. Do you want to talk about sort of what that's looking like for you right now? Are you kind of? Great. Okay, you do you. Okay. It's hard not to. I guess I want to respond a little bit to what I'm hearing in terms of the relationship between the institution and what the institution does on a daily basis and what kind of position that puts you in when, you know, maybe social justice is a part of the value statements of the university. But it isn't necessarily at visibly at the center of everything that we do on a daily basis. So I think that the circumstances that I find myself in at the institution is how do we, I like what you said about, you know, what structures are there that exist. So I often find that my role at the institution is when students come to me with ideas that I have a responsibility to help them figure out how to activate those ideas. So for example, our participation in the Ghost Life project was entirely student driven and ultimately faculty and institutions supported. But it meant that a student had to come to me and say, I really want to do this. Can you help me make it happen? And then it was just a matter of, you know, finding out who can help us ask the right questions within the context of this institution and then activate it. Another example would be students who came to me and said, this was right before the election and said, you know, we're really starting to feel like Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson would be an interesting way of starting dialogue. So, and they wanted to do a reading, sing through of it at a fraternity house. And so they did. And, but that wasn't, it wasn't as easy as just saying, we want to do this because there's a lot to navigate. And when you're 18, you don't necessarily know how to navigate those things at an institution that's been around for almost 200 years. So, so there's that. There are other things that we're addressing as well, but that's maybe the beginning. Thank you. I want to spin off from Allison, what you were saying about, you know, the time is now and social justice and activism can help us make these responsive theater actions more quickly. But I am also aware that responsive theater is oftentimes a way in for theaters or for groups who may not have any familiarity yet with activism and with social justice. And it might be a first step. And so this may not totally relate to what I'm about to ask you, but I want to sort of plant that in our minds as we continue our conversation, because I think one of the things I hope that we're going to do is both make demands on how we move forward and also acknowledge the places where people are new to this work. But I want to ask you each to maybe also talk about a challenge that responsive programming has that you've encountered in that realm. And with you figured out how to deal with that challenge, great, if it's still a challenge, great, you can say that too. I'd love for you guys to popcorn around and talk about that. I would say that one of the challenges that we have faced is not so much now at all, but a tendency to separate one's work life from one's outside life, right? If you have an artistic staff meeting, do you talk about the news? Do you talk about climate change? Do you bring it up, right? And there's a, I'm speaking as a white person, a tendency to make polite our workplaces, which disallows honest conversation about the most important work. And I think that is a challenge in everywhere. So it's not surprising that it's also a challenge in theater realms. And the other thing I would talk about a little bit is, and this is a completely separate topic, is that equity, as an equity theater, equity can be very, can require actors to sort of get special permission if they are engaged in something like a theater action, like the climate change play that we did. They had to get a letter from equity. It's as if actors were not allowed to be citizens outside of their equity contracts if it was associated with a theater that's employing them. And I understand why equity does that. They don't want theaters to take advantage of their actors, but it's a thing, right? And how, it's a thing I encourage actors to talk to their union about, to help them participate in this sort of activity. Thank you. Just quickly, a challenge. I'm gonna talk a lot about institutions, but a challenge is that while institutions themselves may be diverse, brands are not. That's a challenge. There is a consciousness about the public presentation of a statement that an institution makes with its every action. And not, it's very difficult when individuals feel like they aren't, A, aren't represented by the institution's brand, or when they feel like the institution is saying, you are not representative of us, or we have, usually it comes out in, we have to be careful. That's the language around it. And that's a challenge. And it's not like we're not aware of it and not trying to be honest in our daily work as we address that. It's just, it's there. And it's sometimes hard to deal with. I'd love to add to that, because I think that this type of work in my experience can be very unsettling within institutions because it's largely driven by some kind of political narrative, which I think all of our work is always inherently political, but maybe not always progressive. And so then when you engage a certain radical or progressive politics in a space that maybe isn't foregrounding that right away, it's unsettling to the internal structure. And I think it's a challenge and a huge opportunity. And I, in the work that I did with every 28 hours in a couple different places, I found that to be consistently true. But I really believe that nothing is gonna change in our society if we don't talk about the way that power operates within the spaces that we occupy. So it's not just power out there or it's not just the police out there, but it's also our relationships, our working relationships, our family relationships, are all of the ways in which we interact with each other on a daily basis. So I kind of welcome the way that it's unsettling to an institution that I find myself a part of. You do have to navigate it with some level of complexity and sort of be able to have a bird's eye view as much as you can in sort of pulling in the different sides and how people perceive a particular issue. But I found that those conversations gave me a lot of hope, even when they were frustrating and challenging and even if I like ran home crying at the end of it or something, which happens. I think that that internal work that we do in our institutions when we produce this kind of rapid response work is part of the work. So as my offering would be to not shy away from those complexities or to not be too scared of them but to acknowledge that that's sort of part of why we do it, I think. It's part of why I do it. Great, thanks, Peter. Do you want to take it? A challenge I think with every 20 hours, specifically in Boston, was space, mainly because we did it at the Museum of Fine Arts, a very white institution with very white art in the walls. And when we were talking to the museum about doing this theatrical piece there, there was this ongoing conversation about exploitation. I think there's a responsibility of, if you're going to do responsive programming, that you have a responsibility and an obligation to maintain these relationships with these communities and that if you are not doing it, then you need to call it what it is, which is exploitation. And it was very clear that during these conversations everybody involved was like, no, we are continuing this conversation, which is kind of how we got many people to the table because we knew we had to get people who wanted to continue. But the other challenge of space is that in this predominantly white institution, why we are bringing all these beautiful black people to this place is why there? But part of it was driven by the centrality of the location and also the MFA's ongoing mission of really bringing in communities of color, especially after a controversy that they had a previous year of putting people in geisha outfits in front of a painting. So they had a lot of work to do and we all do. So it was really great to open up those doors. You want to take this question? I'm working within an institution. So it's very interesting being on the outside right now and trying to work with organizations that have such an interest in doing the type of work that I'm interested in doing, but navigating the red tape and bureaucracy that I've been encountering. So that's been a personal challenge for me, but while I was traveling it was very interesting that I would find myself interviewing a lot of artistic directors and executive directors. And as soon as I noticed that I was getting even a little bit away, far away from the art itself, I made the conscious effort to get back to the artists and the work that they were doing, you know, their art and how it is transformative in their community. And so something that you brought up that reminded me was my first interview on the podcast that I started, which was, you know, on the whim sort of of a project, but was, I met a trans poet of color at a art gala in Seattle, Washington. And the frustrating part was that the whole issue of the art gala was on affordable art spaces and how artists cannot afford to live in unaffordable housing when there are no affordable art spaces anyway. And it was located in a new building in a newly gentrified part of town and all of the other artists that were speaking were white and had an opportunity to explain their art and had a, you know, and this poet did not. And so finding those juxtapositions within this work that maybe, you know, is being held up as making an effort, but not really doing so. And then an interesting thing that I keep hearing that I'm really loving throughout the conference is how we as dramaturgs can hold organizations accountable and the way that I would pick out some of the organizations or theater companies that I would reach out to on my research project was by their mission statement. And if they are claiming to be an inclusive company, if they're claiming to be a diverse and doing the types of works that are appealing to their community and representative of their community, that was always a very fun topic for me to reach as a dramaturg because I like to ask questions and I went to Baltimore after the riots and I met with theater companies and I said, so do you believe that your theater company, the ensemble, the whole company is representative of your community? And the answer was 100% across the board from all the theaters that I interviewed was no. And then the next question was, do you think that your audience is representative of the demographic of your community? All the demographics and the answer was always no. So being able to ask those questions and keep accountable in a little bit. That's great. So it feels like one of the things that's really arising out of this conversation about challenges has to do with the ethics of creation and performance. And I'm wondering, I know several of you are really concerned with that and have thought a lot about that and others are sort of thinking in new ways about that for yourselves. I'm wondering what's important to you or what are the questions you're asking? I think coming off of your comment is really helpful. Thinking about the ethics of trying to understand, navigate and intervene with responsive programming. How do you guys wanna talk about that? I'll just briefly say that a lot of the work that I do, it's where I see gaps and I try to address it in that way but the first thing that I ever learned working with homeless services or with people who are temporarily or currently experiencing houselessness is to never assume is to always ask. And so I enter any project or organization or company of people that I'm with by asking, what do you need not assuming what they want? Great. Paul's wants to take on this question of ethics and how you navigate that in responsive programming. I can. So as part of the every 28 hours project, I worked closely with Claudia and a couple other folks to put together at 10 steps towards greater cultural humility towards greater cultural competency for as part of the national producing guidelines packet that we gave to all the theaters who were participating and that was a way for us to, and there was a labor of love from lots of people to create that and sort of a few things that jump out at me that I try to always think about in my work is how are we centering the voices of the people most impacted by whatever issues we're exploring in a given project? So as a white woman, I am not most closely experiencing the impacts of police brutality in this country. I know that. So how, what is my role as somebody who's trying to organize or pull together folks who are doing this work all the time and who experience those realities all the time in ways that I do not and will not in this country? How do we lift up those voices and enable that to be the center of the conversation? And that looks for me like leadership, how are those folks leading the project and how can we imagine leadership to not just be common table at a thing and then go away but really at the center of it, making decisions, a decision maker on the project? So I think that's one ethical piece for me is whoever's closest to the issues, those folks should be making the decision about whatever we're doing, whether that's within your institution or organization or in the larger community that your institution is situated in. That's one piece of it. And that document is public slash, I think we can, it's out in the world, we could maybe share it with folks because there's I think other really interesting stuff in there. Thanks, anybody else wanna take this ethics question? Yeah, audience is incredibly important. Because again, we were at the Museum of Fine Arts and there's a certain audience that's already built into that system. And so we had decided that we are not selling any tickets for this performance until like noon and the performance was at two, I believe. Because we knew that if we had sold it earlier, those audiences at the MFA would have access to that. And then we'd be packing it up with people that we didn't necessarily want, or like didn't necessarily think that this was for. And so this was our way of getting communities of color to be engaged. We also made an opportunity, like an obligation to ourselves to invite specific communities of color and that they were allowed to have block tickets and that everybody else had to show up like the noon day of. Because we were specific in packing the audience. Right, and I think one of the things, I'm just gonna pull a thread out of there just to highlight it, it has to do with who uses what forms of ticketing access. Right, so I think that's one of the things that you were talking about is how do you make sure that the standardized way that we ticket things isn't exclusionary to groups of people who might not know about how to find a ticket on the MFA website to a thing. I also just wanna add, this work should always be free, or if it's not free, then tickets, it's just free, I know, I know, I have assumed. But just in case, so people aren't assuming, always free, or if you're raising money, then it's like I pay what you can and it goes to some kind of organization or somebody who's really driving this work ongoing. That came up as something, just as we looked around the country at producing this so that no organization is ever, even though all of our organizations are likely non-profits, still that that money doesn't go back into that but sort of goes out into the world. Yeah, and I feel like this ethics conversation is leading really naturally into a conversation about the flexibility of the groups that might want to produce responsive programming. The space within organizations for individuals, which I know a couple of you are concerned about, to spearhead or promote or propose these kinds of actions within an organization that maybe isn't set up to hold space in a season, for example, right? Or hold space in a set of coursework, for example. So I'd love for us to like link maybe these two conversations. I can speak to that. So, and I guess I'll give two examples. One is a really simple example where it was relatively easy to be responsive within a structure. And that was right after 45 tweeted 45 tweeted about Hamilton and about theater as a safe space. Theater should be a safe space and we wanted to respond. And actually the chair of our department came to me and he said, I think we as a department need to respond to this, but I don't wanna respond unilaterally from an administrative perspective. I want the students to be involved in our response. But the only time that all of the freshmen are together is during your survey and analysis of dramatic literature class. This is at the end of the semester. I've got a syllabus, right? I have to decide what do we lose if we don't have a second conversation about this play. And the fact of the matter is we do lose something. But I have to make a split decision because there's a certain urgency to the conversation. Can I give up that 45 minutes of class time? And in this case, the answer was yes. So that was a very relatively easy thing for me to do. So that's one kind of flexibility. And the second kind of flexibility is more complicated and it involves what I think is, again, a really productive conversation with colleagues where we actually surprise ourselves at how interested we are in making sure that we're approaching our desire to be responsive ethically. And this was when we were season planning. And I know there was a really interesting article in Inside Higher Education today and that's sort of related to this. I won't get into that, but oh, this is so hard to be succinct about, but I'm just gonna try. Okay, day after the election, I'm going back. I do this all the time. I'm going back in order to get to where I am. Day after the election, I woke up and didn't really, really, really did not want to get out of bed. Really did not want to get out of bed. And then I realized, oh, we're talking about mother courage. I guess I better get out of bed. And then something really surprising happened. I did get out of bed. I think I even, I posted on Facebook about how I was getting out of bed to go talk about mother courage, right? And one of my students, former students, said, would you please, please, please Facebook Live your class? And I was like, Facebook Live? I don't know how to do that. And then I walked into class and I said, oh, isn't it so funny? Alums are asking me to Facebook Live. And the students, the students went, yeah, we could show you how to do that, you know? So then they set up Facebook Live and we Facebook Live the class and we just, we had our class. It was messy, it was ugly. It was not, it was definitely not a demonstration of me as awesome teacher. It just wasn't, right? And but something like 600 people checked in to that class. It was so unexpected. Well, okay, so now I'm gonna get to where I am because another thing was that the students in response to that were like, you are a genius. You picked this play because you knew what was gonna happen, right? And I was like, oh, no, right? No, there's no world where that's true, right? And what I just kept saying was, and then they said that about every single play in the syllabus afterwards. And I said, I didn't pick a play knowing what was gonna happen. I picked plays that I felt were true, that I knew that could be responsive, that could be flexible. Okay, so now I'm where we are in the season planning discussion, right? And we're thinking about what are the plays that we wanna choose? Are we gonna choose plays that we know are directly responsive and that are literally responsive, topically responsive where the words coming out of the actor's mouths are direct references to current events and the plays where we have to negotiate the relationship between what's going on currently and the history of the play itself. And how do you make that work? Well, what came out of that discussion for us is that we, as an academic institution, we are going to do plays that have a history. We can't just say, please, please wait for our mic. Let's, can you wait for our mic please so that we can hear you? Here comes one up the hall. Thank you, and Diane with all due respect for your capabilities, your training and everything that the panel is bringing up and for having this panel about responsiveness. So I'm gonna be responsive. Please do, yes, thank you. I just wanna circle back to, you mentioned Andrew Bloody Jackson. And then just now I wanna link up about because you're an institution, you have to do these plays and they're gonna have histories. But we know now in time that when you do certain plays that communities have been traumatized by, you really have to check that. Andrew Bloody Jackson absolutely traumatized, in fact did damage to the indigenous community and that sets a precedent for other marginalized groups and other communities of color. So that's part of our research as dramaturgs now is to understand when we have bodies in space that have been traumatized historically, do we do that play? Like when you gave, it sounds like you encouraged the students to explore Andrew Bloody Jackson. But at the same time, is there anybody there leading that discussion so that that full narrative came into play and did you ever consult with the native community where that was incredibly traumatizing? So I just wanna bring that into the space because just for the sake of covering something, doesn't do it anymore. It's just too much historical trauma and bodies are affected. Our minds, bodies and spirits are now ridden with disease because we carry the internalized oppression of it and when that's perpetuated and replicated, we pay the price and we just can't anymore and we don't wanna separate from you, we wanna work with you. I'm an ally here for you and I want you to be one for me and I just wanna hope offline we have a conversation because I'd love to support you in best practices so that we can all work together around healing and creating all the processes we need to forward our practices and beautiful work. Thank you very much for your comment. I appreciate it. And I wanna give, Diane, I wanna give you just a minute. I know this topic cannot be covered completely in the time we have and I wanna make sure you get a chance to talk and I also wanna make sure we open up to the whole room because this conversation includes that as well as many other things. So I wanna acknowledge the space for this at the moment. So do you wanna? Yes. It's hard to find exactly the right words in exactly the amount of time that I have and oh wow, am I feeling emotional? When I read that article this morning, they mentioned bloody, bloody Andrew Jackson, which was the first time that I realized that there was that part of the play and I thought to myself, don't be an idiot, don't bring this up, don't talk about it. Cause it's, cause that, you are right, that was a mistake. But what this does is it raises the very dilemma that I'm talking about and that I'm trying to get to of how we as an organization are trying to deal with it because the reason I didn't know that is because I was being responsive in the moment and I didn't have time to do the research to find out if this was the right thing to do, if this particular project was the right thing to do, what happened was I had a student who felt compelled to have a kind of conversation about democracy and a complicated conversation and I felt that it was my role to facilitate that but as I'm doing that, I didn't do all of the research and then I didn't even get to go see it because five minutes before it started happening, I was vomiting, do you know? And then I moved into the rest of my life. So, and I know this is way more than a minute, okay, okay. So because of that and because I am also as a teacher, as a citizen, as a person, deeply, deeply, deeply concerned about our total intolerance in our community, in the world right now, for things that are complex and for really looking at things from multiple angles, how do we facilitate immediacy with depth? So what we are doing and what came out of our season planning discussion is that we are going to, as an institution, simultaneously do things that we know are historically problematic, take the time to wrestle with the connection between those historically problematic things and their contemporary impact as part of our season in the way that we have always done and then also develop a reading series that is connected to classes that we're teaching, where students then have the opportunity, students across campus then have the opportunity to come into conversation and to research and come into conversation about the thing, about the plays that we are reading, but it takes a lot fewer resources to support a reading than it does a full production. I can see, Allison, I see you want to say something. I just, before you do, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for being vulnerable and talking about that process and thank you for speaking to that. And I want to say that this exact moment is modeling what I'm interested in around responsive programming, which is if we believe that we're just going to get it right all the time, then we're going to walk through it without really seeing what the full topography of the moment is. And these moments of being able to speak truth to power and being able to be self-reflective I think are part of how we will be successful. Allison, please. And I don't disagree with anything you just said, but I want to note that Leslie talked for about 30 seconds and you talked for a very long time. And it's not in the moment, and I don't know if in your support of Blood Ability and Interjects and you read the play, but it doesn't take an enormous amount of research to see what's in the play, right? And so if you didn't read the play, then that's a whole other conversation, right? And I understood, you know, but it also, you know, you Google bloody bloody Andrew Jackson for five seconds and the damage to the indigenous community is ongoing and continual. And so it's not sufficient, I think at this point in the history of our country and this point in the history of a field to sit in that, right? And it's not that I fuck up all the time, right? And I'm not, but I don't think, I think in a moment as a white person instead of being like willing to own your fuck up, it's no longer sufficient. You have to like, if I'm gonna fuck up, I'm gonna step out of the conversation, right? And I'm not gonna hold the power, even if I have been given the power by my institution because there are other ways of doing it. There are ways of releasing your power so that you don't have the opportunity to fuck someone else's life up. Great, and as soon as you say that, I also wanna open it up because I were, I wanna make sure we get more of this, but yes, go ahead. Thank you. I wanna open this up to the room at large and so I'm gonna steal a couple of our mics so that we can distribute them in the audience. Great, just one, fabulous. All right, so let's, Kat, I wanna actually start with Kat if that's okay down here because Kat, we had originally talked about Kat participating in the panel, but then I asked her to be a first responder in a way. Yes, hi. So I just wanna say a couple of things that this work falls on different bodies in different ways. Yes. And so I think it's really important to spend some time really thinking about that. I hear contextualizing things and all of that, but I also really want to echo that doing it, dipping the toe in, even with context and deep dive and really important might be educational in one way, but it's going to be that and traumatizing for some bodies. So I think that's really, really important to name. And I think something that is helpful to think about that came up yesterday in the fringes conversation that featured, if you weren't there, cabaret, drag, circus, and there was one more. Berlesque, thank you so much, which is so weird that I missed that one because I left going, I gotta look into Berlesque. But expanding our definition of theater, I think that we are thinking about this a lot as capital T theater, institutions, and also like capital P play. And I am very inspired by my hometown community of New Orleans, second lines, parades, different modes of performance. When I talk to artists back home, the conversation is, well, everyone's always practicing theater, everyone just lives it. And it's not necessarily the way that we as theater practitioners here, like in this context, or those of us who are embedded in institutions are necessarily thinking about it, but there are other ways to create theater and to have performative practices that are responsive. Because I think when we do short play, whatever, it's great, but oftentimes I think we end up creating problematic work because we don't spend enough time thinking about what is actually in there. I'm obsessed right now with tending to the politics of everything that we do. I think we're going really super on the news. And it has to be about something in order to be about something, but every show, whether it's Christmas Carol or Bloody Bloody, has a politic to it. And I think so often we profess to have a certain aim and end up producing the exact opposite and feel really good about it because our expressed intent was whatever. Anyway, those are some of the things we're thinking about. Thank you for jumping in, Kat. We've got, I wanna, let's take a, there's a question over here on the side. Over there, please. Thank you so much. Over there. I want to bring attention to the idea of access as it pertains to disability and deaf community. As we sit in a building built for my community named after disability rights leader, it's important to think about how theater can include disabled people. I often hear the excuse access is expensive and time consuming. Honestly, that's bullshit. I think really there is a lack of desire. I've been looking for ways to bring access and inclusion into theater, makers, consultations, conversations. As part of the dramaturgy of when we help help a theater team build the world of a play, make that world design to be, to follow principles of universal design. Thank you. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah, I just wanna jump back to what Kat was saying about fringe artists. Yes, I should know to eat the mic. Sorry. One of the reasons is because these are art forms with a very long tradition of responsive art making. And I wanna lift up what you said about inviting these artists into your building. This is a great opportunity for your audiences and their audiences to meet each other. And the other thing, I would just like to offer as an example, the bearded ladies cabaret have a long standing relationship with the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. The resident cabaret company of the Wilma. And after the Orlando Massacre, we were able to work with an intersectional group of other responsive artists that included organizations like OutMuslim, a group called, I'm gonna get this right and I'm gonna get it wrong because I'm not prepared, Pangea, which is a Latin X artist organization. And a number of other individual artists, including an all lesbian rock band. And the Wilma gracefully offered us space. And so one way that I think institutions can work with these artists is to just provide them with the resources that you all have and trust us to make something that will be the kind of responsiveness that you want. Thank you so much for that. Yeah, Vivian, go ahead. Hey, my name is Vivian. I use they them pronouns. An issue that I would like to raise in this space right now is I'm gonna center my own community, but I do not mean to center myself in doing so because this applies to almost every axis of domination that I have dialogued with and communicated with. And that's, so if you look at the most recently commissioned study on trans discrimination in the workplace, about 50% of trans people have faced overt ridicule or harassment for discrimination in the workplace and about 78% report erasure or other forms of microaggressions. But beyond microaggressions, just sort of flat line non acknowledgement, which is the most common form in my life and the life of many of my peers. And then you look at the numbers of theaters that participated in Ghostlight, which I believe was around 500. And if you ask any of my friends, literally all of us who have worked in many of those theaters have faced pretty intense discrimination, including myself at major and small theaters. So who benefits from the social and financial capital of getting to say we did a Ghostlight when you don't care about the employees that are in those spaces? Because at this point, just learning is not an adequate enough response. And it's quite frustrating to hear about how much people care when it is so absent from the practice. Super great question. I'm so thankful that you brought that into the space. Thank you so much. Yes, down here. Let's get you a mic. Oh, I'm sorry. Was there somebody else back there who was ready? Yes, I'm sorry. And then we'll come down to the front. Hello, okay. Brad Rothbart, they them. I just have to go back for a few minutes because I'm lucky enough to be on the board with Diane Brewer. And I'm lucky enough to have been trained by Leslie Eshe. And there are people outside here, people in government who want all of us dead, okay? It is very easy for a movement to move together when we are against something. It is much harder to do so when we're for something. So I don't think we should brush over conflict. I think we should talk about it. I think we should work it out. But I think there's a way to address the conflict and the problems of the work without attacking or jumping on the person who we are all stumbling. We are all figuring it out. We are all trying. We are all making mistakes. So let's keep it to the issue and not to the people. Thank you, Brad. Also, one last thing personally, as a white male and an ally, I have no idea how to wake other white men up to the trauma that has been caused to indigenous folks and other marginalized folks without showing them images of that trauma. And that's my own struggle for right now. Thank you for saying that. Yes, please. Thank you, Phaedra. We had a person who wanted a mic down here. Hi, Kate Langstorf. Is she her or they? First of all, I love all you guys in this room. I think you're so great. Beyond that, when thinking about responsive theater, I spent, I'm in LA now, but I spent my last 10 or so years in the Washington DC theater community. And I also walk with a cane, don't do stairs so well. And I appreciate and value that what you guys were all talking about and what I experienced in DC is that when there was a responsive production, it was either free or very, very low cost. What created a barrier to access for me was that because of that free access, I couldn't get up the goddamn stairs because it was like in the off-brand community center basement, how many elevators and how many staircases do you need to get to the elevator key scenario? So I want, I'm a white lady, super-duper white, and I really wanted to be able to participate in conversations about theatrical responses to Trayvon Martin, for example, is the one that comes to mind, but there wasn't a way physically in for me, and then there was not a way digitally in for me. I spend a lot of time on the internet. And so I just want to speak that out and think about what are the ways that we need to get to the money, I think, to allow everybody to be involved because I want to be a better ally. By not hearing those stories, I can't participate in the revolution, the way that as fully as I would like to. Thank you. Thank you for saying that. Yes, please. I may entio she, her. So I would like to say that for me personally, with no power that I have, I would like to relieve anyone who does not think they can respond to not respond unless you're in the conversation. Why are you responding if you were not in the conversation? Perhaps it is the place to listen, to listen deeply. And it is, we are made to be makers, so we always got to be in it. And we got to always have the checks of I'm doing this and this and this and this, maybe you don't. Maybe you need to let the people who have done it. I'm sorry, but are there any theaters of color that have not been making responsive theater? Can we name a theater? That's what we do, right? So to me, I'm really concerned by this idea of immediacy. Thank you. I'm very concerned about this. And when we talk about things like we need to do something now, action without understanding is part of the capitalist system that is killing us. Thank you. Krishnamurti says, sorry, I'm still going. No, no, I'm encouraging you. Please keep going. Right? Krishnamurti says I'm sorry, I'm gonna paraphrase it. But the understanding of something will change it. And we take action too quickly. And so we don't understand the actions that we're taking. And I'm not saying don't act, but I'm saying we got to understand first very deeply before we go, how do we respond? Thank you. Thank you so much for that comment. I really appreciate that. Was there a, Kat, did you wanna? We have a couple minutes left. I'm really aware of time, although I'm also aware that this conversation cannot be contained by this time. So, Kat, go ahead. Yeah, girl, preach. Like, yes. Like, there are folks doing this work have been continued to, and I think it's really, really, really important to acknowledge that and to really interrogate, right? Like, what is the impulse behind entering into it? There's a book called Racial Capitalism, I think, that I would encourage you all to look into. And I think that, I just wanna lift up what Allison said earlier too, that this is something that should be at the core, right? And so, I know that art equity was with us. Look into anti-racism training as well. And I think something that, I know Ilana and I talked about, maybe bringing the LTC, the Latinx Theater comments into it, something that we're doing in recognition of the fact that we are not as inclusive as we want to be. And we need to really look at ourselves, look damn hard in the mirror, and figure out why that is, that we are all on the steering committee committing to taking anti-racism training together. And when we recommitted to be steering committee members for the coming year, you sign this letter of this commitments. And the last question was, I commit, or the statement was, I commit to taking anti-racism training. And the options were yes, or no, and I will be stepping down. And that is the kind of action required of each and every one of us. I think it's important for the board, for everyone who's in decision-making, right? And this is something that theater companies, as far as I'm concerned, must implement. Thank you, Kat. Can I just add one item to Kat's list? Yeah. There's a lot of research and information available on trauma-informed training and trauma-informed best practices. So moving forward in works, I work with a lot of native artists and we do a lot of indigenous work. And being trained in those fields is not an option anymore. And I just want to, I've been writing down quotes all weekend, so I just want to lift one of my favorite ones up that is a tangent to May's comment. And I hope, Jen, I have your permission to say this, but the quote was, listening is a radical act. And I think that identifying who we are and acknowledging that privilege, that's sometimes the most radical thing we can do. Thank you. So the constraints of the conference schedule tell us that this moment is coming to a close. I also want to say that this is not the end of the conversation on many, many different levels, and I'm aware the LMDA is trying to create more structures to continue exactly this kind of discussion. I also want, before we end, I want to pull together a couple of threads that I'm hearing. One is, first, before anything else, I really want to thank the members of the panel and the audience who were doing some intense emotional and intellectual and artistic labor on behalf of the room. That's really graceful and generous of you to do that. I also want to thank those of you who made yourselves vulnerable and explored and articulated things that perhaps were received with some friction in the room, because I also think that together as dramaturgs, one of the things we must do is create spaces where people are allowed to be wrong or allowed to discover a path, whether that's wrong or not wrong. I think it's important, it's come up a couple times at this conference, that we embrace the notion of failure, that failure isn't a declaration of one's moral fiber, but rather it is a mark along the path, a process of growth, and that as we are talking, I don't think there's a single person in this room who gets it right all the time, and there's a lot of us who get wrong a lot of the time, myself included. So I want to thank those of you who made those moments vulnerable, and I also want to thank those of you who felt the desire to hold us to account in many different ways. These conversations about these subjects cannot happen unless we are all able to listen and to be brave about centering things that we may not be as familiar with as somebody else. So a huge thank you to our panel, I'm including Diane, thank you so much, and the rest of our panel. Thank you to the room and to those who are watching on HowlRound. And it seems that one of the things that's coming out of this is that responsiveness is important, the quality of how we respond and the notions of inclusivity and how universal that is need to be part of our conversations. So I hope that we will continue to talk about this as we move through the rest of our day. Thank you so much.