 This is Melanie Joseph, and this is our genocology and we co-lead the Foundry Theatre. There's a few things we wanted to say before we get started. We're really excited to get started. I did want to say, for those of you who don't know the Foundry, that the notion of radical imagination is something that we have been chasing, seeking to inspire, cajole, and fury for almost 20 years. Pretty much everything we do in some way is a question, what is that, what's the what if? What if you do theater this way? What if you think about justice this way? What if is a big part of what leads us? And so it just is so moving to, I think, both of us to actually name that a collection of glorious human beings, each of whom has a what if in their hearts, and to invite these two amazing people who walk the talk of radical. And so I thank you so much for coming. It means a great deal to us to be in this room altogether this evening. And also some of you may have noticed on your chairs was a wee card with a little pencil, and if you would be kind enough to take a moment, if you haven't already, to share your a-ha what if. I wonder if on that little card it would be really divine for us because we want to post them on our website, on the radical imagination page. It'll just be interesting to see what people's experiences are. And so now I'd like to introduce my other professional half. Thanks, Melanie. A couple pieces we want to say hello to our national and international audience who's joining us through HowlRoundTV. Our dear Giga is filming right now. If you have anyone that you want to bring in to watch, they can go to HowlRound.tv. And we'll also post the recording of the evening on our website. So if you ever want to come back to it or share it with anyone else, you can go there. Another piece, as some of you hopefully have noticed, we have some beverages for you in the back. Feel free during this conversation to get up, use the restroom, you know, go back and get something to drink. We want to have that kind of feel to it. And if you need to find the restroom, it's actually down those stairs, around and down some more stairs. What else am I supposed to say, Melanie? Yes, very important. So we've come up with kind of a unique structure for the evening. The first part is going to be just Robin Kelly and Taylor Mack up here. We've crafted some questions for them that they have not yet seen that will appear on these numbered cards. We've taken great care to write them, to put them in order. And they may throw them away. They may or may not use them at all. The second portion of the evening will be joined by a beloved foundry family member, Lisa Solomon, who will sort of come up, join Robin, join Taylor, and be a third person in the conversation. And then we'll close. Get on up here. And if you don't know who they are yet, you'll just find out. Okay, is this working? Yes, it is. That's working. All right. Do you want to just jump in? Sure. All right. Taylor to Robin, number one. What is an experience in your life that lit you up to other possibilities of how the world could work? How did this affect the way you live your life, the work you do? Okay. I'll just look at that thing. Okay, I see. An experience in my life that lit up. That's just so great about having to go through this. How the world could work. How it's affected the way you live your life, the work you do. Wow. I wish there was just one thing. Let me think of one thing. And in trying to sort of answer this question, I guess part of the question kind of implies something in my, some personal thing in my life. Because when I think about experience, I think my experience is collectively. And it's hard to think about one thing. So let me just talk about, one of the great benefits of being born in 1962 is that I was a kid in the middle and late 60s and into the 70s. Which was a moment historically where so many movements actually thought they could win. I mean radical movements, left movements, progressive movements, queer movements, you know, anti-racist movements. And not just win in terms of small gains, but win big. You know, growing up in New York City, you know, middle to late 60s, I remember living on 157th Street between Amsterdam and Broadway and listening to people who are basically black, Nazis and other activists talk about, you know, as a kid, talk about like what it meant to create the kind of utopian possibilities by seizing state power. You know, of course, it's a problem. But the fact is, you know, to think that that's something like my elementary school, my public school can be a place where, you know, we didn't salute the American flag, we had like a black nationalist flag, red, black and green, where Marion Anderson had come to our school. And my big sister, two years older than me, actually gave her a carnation and she sang at our school, elementary school, this is 155th Street. And these kinds of things, plus the fact that my mother, I've written about, always reminded us that, you know, we were not poor, we were broke. And that to be not, to not be poor is to actually be, to have some agency, to feel like all the ordinary people around you, all the mothers and all the kids and the fathers who were around could actually have the capacity to change their lives, to turn a rickety school into an overcrowded school, I should say. We had like 45, 50 students in our classroom into these like wonderful, powerful spaces of learning and imagination. And that was in, you know, in Harlem, Washington Heights area at a time when social scientists were writing about how our communities lacked, how our communities somehow were in deficit. And yet that rich culture, which I think everyone, not everyone shared, but at least my inner circle shared, to me laid the foundations for the work that I do. And that work is never really based on optimism. Because by the way, people sort of misread a lot of my work. They think, oh, Kelly's so optimistic. He really, it's not optimism at all. In fact, it's a recognition of how difficult things are. And that struggle is required. Because if things were not difficult, you would need struggle. And so what I recognized growing up in New York in that time was that struggle was necessary, even if you don't win the things you strive for, you're still making community. And so a lot of my work is about that, you know. So let's see the secret question. Okay, Robin de Taylor. What about you? What in your life set you on the path you're on today? There's a lot of different things. I'm going to talk about an adult experience just because people always ask about kid stuff. And I think it's important to acknowledge you didn't come out of a Petri dish, but at the same time, I like to support our adult culture. So I want to talk about what inspired me as an adult. I was a recent adult. I was 18, I turned 19. I joined this political action. A group of people that were walking from New York City to the Nevada nuclear test site. It was a nuclear proliferation, kind of anti-nuclear proliferation action. And we spent about nine months walking from here to there. And it was about a hundred people and we slept in tents. And so that was a very profound experience. But what I discovered was the kind of activists I wanted to be. At the end of the March, thousands of people joined us in order to shut down a nuclear test that was scheduled. And it was a kind of traditional thing that happens every Columbus Day weekend because the land is on Western Shoshone land. They signed a treaty with the Western Shoshone people. They took it away from them when they wanted someplace to blow up bombs. So we get there and there's thousands of people. And we organized this thing where we would lock our necks down to the cattle guard that was blocking the road with these u-locks. And then the workers couldn't get into the work and we would shut down the test. And so I did this very naively. And it's this very early morning in the bed. It's freezing. I'm shivering. I'm lying on a cattle guard with my neck locked down. And I've given the key to somebody who has done too much acid in his life. And he's kind of, he's like acting the fool. Like literally with jingling pant, coined pants. And he's, you know, whew, whew, whew. And I'm shaking. And the workers come and they were very angry that we were stopping them from going to work because of course this was about their families and being able to pay their bills and, you know, and they were not happy with us. And they could not hear what we were doing in any way, shape, or form because we, in my opinion, we weren't communicating responsibly to them. So, but their response to it was to the guy in the front, he decided he was going to drive his monster truck up to my head over and over and over again and screech his wheels like he was going to run me over. And he could have very easily. And, you know, the guy with the key is... So it was this very naive moment where, you know, I was awakened to the realities of political action. And I decided after the walk, which was very dysfunctional, you know, activist communities are dysfunctional in a lot of ways. And it was no exception. And so I decided after the kind of activism I wanted to do actually was about this and the art that I make. And so that kind of put me on that path. It's not to say I don't believe in direct action and don't champion social justice workers and political activists. I just think that an activist are the greatest human beings on the planet. But I realized that that wasn't how I was going to do it. So it was a huge, that was a real learning experience for me. And I think it's... There's another one, too, but we can move on. Well, let's not move on yet, because you turned this experience into a performance, into a play. I did, yeah. Yeah, and some people may not know about that. You want to talk about that? The play was called The Walk Across America from Mother Earth. And it was a combination of... It was an existential play. So I thought, what's the existential play of three sisters? So I said, well, okay, I'll do three different versions of The Walk Across America from Mother Earth that I was actually on. One will be an adaptation of The Three Sisters set in The Walk Across America. The other will be a beauty pageant set in The Walk Across America. And then the third version was a Commedia dell'arte play set. And then I pastiche them all together. And that's kind of what we created, a kind of pastiche. Which I felt like that's what activism is to me. It's intellectualism and fashion and ridiculousness. So that to me was why I chose those particular forms. Okay, okay. I guess I should ask you a question. But here's another thing that I'll say. Maybe you have... The major profound moment in my life was when I was... In terms of my art and radical imagination and community, was when I was 14, I went with my friend. I told my mom I was spending the night at her house and we went to San Francisco to the first AIDS walk in San Francisco. And I'd never seen another out queer before. Because I grew up in this kind of conservative suburban town. And so my first time seeing an out queer was thousands of them. And everybody was singing and chanting and screaming and using their agency and their direct action to build community. And they were using their imperfection, this disease and their deterioration. People were getting pushed in wheelchairs and they were using that to build community and to fight this epidemic. And that is what I try to do in all my work is recreate that for the audience. That experience of being a kid who has forgotten that they have agency to the degree that these people did and is suddenly reminded of that agency. So it's hard to even talk about it without getting almost used to it. Here we go. As a historian, particularly of black freedom struggles and arts movements, how do you define radical imagination? It's a good question. I was thinking about this on the red-eye flight from away here. And I kept thinking to myself, it's the radical part that I probably put greater emphasis on. That's not to play down this idea of kind of imagining new possibilities, but to me the issue is what does it mean to be radical? And I learned a lot from Marx, still do. And Marx learned a lot from Hegel. And what he sort of figured out is that when he says to be radicals to go to the root, it really means to try to figure out what's not self-evident, to go keep asking the question to dig deeper and deeper to figure out what's not in front of us. And to me that's the most important thing. So if we talk about something as basic as like prisons, like where do prisons come from? And reading Foucault, for example. I mean, if we think of prisons in a very kind of self-evident way, a way to warehouse people who are criminals. A way to sort of get them off the street. That's like the sort of service level. When you dig deep to the history of the prison itself, it originates with a way to discipline labor. A way to sort of take people who want to have agency, many people who actually had access to land and get thrown off the land or who end up being kind of redundant, but try to transform these people into disciplined laborers by forcing upon them through threat, through coercion, a certain way of being, a certain way of working for other people for low wages or for no wages at all. And to understand that history is to recognize that almost all the categories that we've inherited, what's a crime, that these are categories that need to be interrogated. I mean, and let me give you a really concrete example. When I talk to my students about slavery, and I mean, I have colleagues who will say, you know, Abraham Lincoln and all these people had so much trouble trying to figure out how to end slavery because constitutionally they couldn't figure out how to do it. And this is accepted that they couldn't figure out how to do it because the Constitution basically protects private property. And I'm like, but Frederick Douglass tells us that slavery is a commission of a crime. The crime was the actual kidnapping of human beings. That's where it begins. So here's the crime, and yet you end up missing the crime altogether because you don't go to the root. And to me, this is such a fundamental question, what it means to go to the root. Because we end up asking the wrong questions and doing work that ends up being very liberal, not radical. And so this brings me back to sort of the punchline here. Something as basic as say, you know, abolishing a kind of system of imprisonment requires us to rethink what crime is. Who are the criminals in New York City? We know they're down in Wall Street. You know who they are. Exactly. You know? So we end up turning people into criminals who are struggling to survive. And that's not to say that, you know, that I condone everything that happens. That's not the point. The point is that the people who commit some of the worst crimes of the century are the ones that are considered heroes, you know? And so to me, that's far more important to figure out what's radical than the other thing, which I think is important too, which people associate me with, and that is how can you imagine a different place, a kind of utopia? The actual definition of utopia is nowhere. You know? That's what no utopia means. And that's great. But, you know, to produce, to have nowhere in our minds, to sort of imagine that beautiful, idyllic place. But that doesn't get us there. Critique, radical critique, understanding exactly how inequality in forms of oppression keep reproducing themselves, you know, is important. And so I'll just leave you with this one thought that I had, because I'm thinking about this whole thing, what is radical? So what does it mean to live right now in 2014 when the number one song right now is Pharrell Williams talking about, I'm happy. Pharrell Williams looks like he could be related to Trayvon Martin. What does that mean when a young black man, not that young anymore, but a young black man has a number one song about being happy. I'm happy. We're all happy. Who looks like the kind of men and women who are being killed by the police or by the state every 28 hours. Is that acceptable? Why do we take that? So to me, that wipes out much of the radical critique that we have to keep waging over and over again if we're going to advance forward. Because the critique to me is even more important than the imagining and the other possibility, because out of that struggle that you produce that possibility. It's not out of just going to sleep and waking up the next morning. So that makes sense. It's a long ass window way to, you know, get to the point. Process. Okay, well, this is the perfect question. All right. So, how is radical imagination part of your work as an artist and performer? And how do you see the artist's work in relationship to social justice organizing? In fact, you want to see that question again? That's two questions. There's two questions, right. Imagine part of your work as an artist. Radical imagination, how is it part of my work? As an artist and a performer, I like to think I'm radical and I like to think I have an imagination. I sometimes am more radical than other times. But the one thing I always have is an imagination. So the radical part is, that's kind of a, the radical part is a thing that I feel like is what I work towards. Whereas the imagination is the thing that just is me because of years of being fostered to be a creative person. And my mother used to do this thing where she wouldn't, my mother is quite wonderful. She's very conservative and religious at a certain time. But one of the great things, she had an art school and so she would teach kids art. And one of the great things she taught was that we weren't allowed to erase. So she wouldn't give us an eraser. And if we made a mistake, we just had to create something out of the mistake. And that was the kind of, it was a lot of problem solving is what she always called it. And which could be related to obsessive compulsiveness. But it taught me to see the problem and create something out of it. So I grew up with that and I feel like I have a constant, a constant creativity record playing in my head. I'm always coming up with stories. Right now I am doing it. It feels a little like mental illness. I mean, at times my lover is talking to me and he's been talking for a while and I haven't heard anything he's saying because I'm imagining this and that and this and that and that. So that's where the imagination kind of comes in. And it's very dear to me. It's the thing that has been the most important to me in my life, I think, is my creativity. Everything else is left or moved on or fails at certain times. Creativity is always there. So in some ways I feel like I need to honor it the most. But it's always there and even if I'm sitting down at the thing, writing or not. So I take it for granted I guess a little bit. But the radical thing is not always there. I was not born with eyelash glue. And I look around at a lot of my friends and particularly my friends who live their art. Their bodies are their art. Their daily walks through life for their art. And sometimes I get envious of that because I feel like that's the most radical thing. This guy I know, Em Lamar. If you know Em Lamar, his sister is Cox. What's her name? Laverne Cox. Em Lamar is, probably, I don't know how Em Lamar defines himself. I know he uses his gender pronoun, but is radical in gender queerness and walks down the street an artist and lives his life as an artist every single moment. And my friend, the world famous Bob, is like that too. She lives her art. She is the art. And also my friend Tigger. A lot of people that I know that I work with in the performance art, queer cabaret, burlesque world and stuff, they are living their art and it is radical to be that visibly outside the status quo at all times. And I do not do that. I need to hide. So I guess I feel a little bit like the radical part is what I'm working at. And the way that it manifests itself is I'm just curious. I just look around and I see things that seem like to be problems and I go, well, how can we solve that problem in a way that cracks people out of their status quo? And in order to do that, I act the fool. And I can talk more about that. Can I take up one of your projects that I've only seen part of? And I have to say, this is very exciting to meet you. After I left New York a few years ago, I missed out on so much exciting things that's happening here. And so I feel like I know much of your work, like internet and videos. And then I'm not going to miss your music performance in LA, but let me talk about that music performance. There's 24 hours, the piece where you really, I think it's one of the most radical things I've ever seen, where you basically take the history of 20th century music and seek out its dot-side. 20th and 19th century and a little bit 18th century. To go back to the 18th and 19th and 20th century, that is what we call, in my field, the long 20th century, by the way. That's what we call the long 20th century. It is a very long century. But to me, that's a very radical project because you end up, at least from what I understand and what I've seen, is you go to the root. And that is you unlock or identify and locate the dark side of modernity through this music. That is the music that we often celebrate. We think of the modern as this great moment of advancement and technology and togetherness. But what you find is racism, sexism, homophobia, violence in the violence of comparison. That's one of the most radical things I've ever seen. And to me, that is the heart of it. Now, I wonder if you could talk about that. I just love that project. Well, I think a little example of this is in the 1770s. So I'm doing these concerts decade by decade from the 1770s to the present decade is the history of popular music in the United States. And when we're done with all the decades, we're putting them together. We're going to do a big 24-hour concert non-stop. You can ask me about why later. So the 1770s, I'm looking for songs and doing research and stuff. What I try to do is tell the story from a queer perspective. That's what I am. And so I want to tell that story. Because one of my goals is to remind the audience of the things they've forgotten, this Mr. Buried. And so I'm always saying, well, what have they forgotten? They've forgotten that the queers were here in the 1770s. And so I discover that that song, Yankee Doodle Dandy. Yankee Doodle Dandy was a song that the Brits sang to make fun of the Americans. Because the Americans were trying to act like dandies, but they didn't have good style. So they were tacky dandies. So they're like, oh, stick a noodle in your hand. Call it macaroni. Yankee Doodle Dandy. So they were both, the Brits were being both homophobic. You know, before homophobia was coined. And they were being homophobic to Americans and also elitist, right? Or snobby, rather. So then what happened was, how it became an American song is the Americans won this battle during the Revolution. And they got the British soldiers and they got them in a circle. And they sang Yankee Doodle Dandy to them over and over and over again while they made them dance. So how I frame this is that America was built on dandy revenge. So it's my way of appropriating the culture, the history to make it work for my people, which hopefully is everybody's people in some way. So that's how I guess it, it's radical because, and it's also that, you know, the song, the Star Spangled Banner was, the lyrics were written much later, but in the 1770s the melody was written and the original song was to Anna Cree in Heaven, which was a British song. To Anna Cree in Heaven. And it was all about a poet society, a men's society that loved to get together and talk about poetry and man-boy love. Kid, you're not. So our Star Spangled Banner is so America is founded on dandy revenge and man-boy love. Now you say that to an audience of mixed people and people don't, they get, but if you communicate it in a way that is responsibly, it can open people up and they can kind of start to go, oh, yes, maybe I don't have to be so tight about my social dictates. Right, right. Well in the history of Iraq, man-boy love, I mean not Iraq, Iran, history of Iran, man-boy love was just normative and then it gets turned around, you know, and part of it, it's amazing how, you know, one of the things that the 20th century and late 19th century actually did was turn around things that were not seen as unusual and make them non-normative, make them in the process of kind of erasing that history and erasing certain identities and experiences, just limiting. And then the other side to this, this is a side note, but the Star Spangled Banner, you know, there was a, I forget what year it is, as far as I have notes in front of me, but after the Civil War there was another stanza added to it that was for a moment and then eliminated, I forget who wrote it, but another stanza added that was about emancipation and imagine what the Star Spangled Banner would have been like with the addition of this particular, and then of course for a minute it was there, but then it disappeared like everything else. Anyway, but that's, but it goes back to my point though. In some ways, not, I mean, but why? Why does it disappear? It's, you know, getting to the root of it. I mean, we know why. We know why, but you know. Well, it's the moment of appearance to me that's important because that moment of appearance was not an accident, it was a product of struggle. Struggle produces that moment and it becomes a phantom because those struggles get overthrown and reversed. So how is it our job then to write that new verse, the Star Spangled Banner, and make it part of the culture instead of something that disappeared? Right. Because it just goes to show you that cultures are very much real, aren't cultures very much real, but it's never separate from the actual political and social context in which it exists, which is why the idea of the underground, like there's always an underground. An underground is not always by choice. An underground is by suppression. And it's when that underground comes overground, the question is, can it maintain its integrity? And if it does maintain its integrity, then you've won. You've actually made a change. Right. But it, you know. But it so rarely can do that. Right, exactly. So anyway, but I'm glad you talked about that because I just love that piece. I look forward to seeing it. And I tell you, when you do the 24-hour thing, I will bring my coffee. We're going to have tents and hammocks and cops and a medical tent. I'm going to ask you a question. Okay. Question three. And, I don't know where to end. What's wrong? And how do you see artists within a practice of radical imagination of transforming the world? Is that, that's question three? That's question three. Okay, so it's... As a historian, particularly of black freedom, struggles in arts movements, how do you define radical imagination? Okay. And how do you see artists within a practice of radical imagination of transforming the world? Oh, right. No, it's a really great question. And it's a difficult question because I could talk generally about how I see artists, though art takes on so many different forms. I actually think activists sometimes in doing their work are themselves artists, in terms of how people try to figure out something as basic as, you know, I think marching to a nuclear facility on indigenous lands itself is a work of art. Right. And then you recognize that. But then, the other challenge I have is how do I answer a question and name some people but then not name others without making people feel bad? So let me just try to go at it in two different ways. One, just in general. Without sounding, try... I actually think all artists, even if their intentions are not necessarily to try to make social change or bring social justice as we know it, that they oftentimes, whether it's in music, theater, you know, visual arts, plastic arts, performance arts, are always trying to create the intangible, you know, not always. I mean, some people are trying to create coffers of money, you know, by just simply catering to an audience thinking that they could sell a product. And I think there's... But I wouldn't call that art per se. I would call that, you know... commerce, right? So I think that artists who are really struggling with their craft are trying to create the thing that they themselves haven't seen or heard. The music, the art form I know best is music in terms of jazz, because I've written about jazz, wrote a book about Thelonious Monk and others, and to take a figure like Monk, no one ever thinks of Monk as a radical figure. When you read my book, actually, you could see that he actually did have a particular kind of politics. But what he was always trying to do was to create that sound that he himself hadn't heard. And without any expectations about what that sound would do to people, he felt like it would be transformative. And yet, he always had the sense that whatever sound I create will challenge people, but it will challenge people from where they are if they can't recognize it entirely that he feels like he failed. And I don't think this is always the case with art, but I think he feels like, you know... he feels like part of what I'm trying to bring is a combination of old traditions that people have always lived with for so long but not recognized as beauty, and then take that and twist it, make it a little bit askance, you know, put it sort of at a tilt. And that's what he tried to do, which for a lot of musicians and artists and people who love this music was transformative for them. It was a radical take on, you know, sort of standard harmony, you know, trying to think about dissonance in a different sort of way. And to me, that's important. It's not the same as agit-prop. Agit-prop is, you know, basically saying we have a message, and I want to convey this message to you through form of art. So there's commerce, there's agit-prop, and then there's art. And again, these distinctions are not so clear. A lot of times you're doing all three. And for artists to make a living in capitalist society, you've got to have some commerce, you know, or figure out some other way to make money. But I want to go back to the second part of it, and that is I do want to name one person who's not here, but whose work is just fantastic and is a dear friend of mine, playwright by the name of Naomi Wallace. I think Naomi Wallace is just... She embodies this... my conception of a radical imagination. Some of you may know there's going to be a series of her work appearing at the Signature Theatre coming up, including a new play that she has written that's been performed at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival called The Liquid Plane, which is the most powerful, most beautiful, most haunting, disturbing depiction of the transatlantic slave trade that has everything you can imagine from the oppression of the crews on slave ships, the fact that everyone was complicit in this process, and many people were oppressed by the process who may not have been enslaved themselves, to queer identity, to love and how love, to borrow something that Taylor had written that you have the distinction between love as a verb and that's partly what this play is all about. And the problem of love as a noun, which in some ways can be easily commodified, and I've kind of taken your ideas. But I think Naomi Wallace to me is probably the best, and she really walks the walk in the sense that when she wrote her plays about Palestine, she went to the West Bank, she worked with Palestinian playwrights and activists. When she did her play, which was in New York about three or four years ago, called Things of Dry Hours about the Communist Party in the South, I mean she did her research and she tried to struggle with this question of what does it mean in the Jim Crow South and the duress of violence and racism to build a multiracial movement that actually believes that socialism is possible in the South as a place it could happen in the 1930s. I mean, you know, I've written about that, but she turned the story into inside out in a way and recognized something that I could never write about. That is that if the people who believed that socialism or New Day was possible in the South didn't love each other and even love those who ended up betraying them, they couldn't move forward. And so much of her plays about that kind of internal dynamic of love and what the cost of love might be and not just about reading Lenin and Marx. So to me, she's someone who's one of many, but she's like my very, very... I don't know. Yeah. I think one of the things that, you know, I think the founder is interested in, and correct me if I'm wrong, but is how the two support each other. Mm-hmm. Or at least coexist. At least coexist, right. Better, together. And have you had any experiences in your life where that's been clear that... I mean, obviously, you immediately think about every time I go to a protest, there's all these crazy people dressed up and they get moves to cut their signs and there's creativity is present. And maybe the form of protest has gotten a little stale where it's just mass gathering with signs and marching or candlelight vigils or something like that. But the creativity is vast. Right. And varied. And I'm not quite sure, though, that kind of creativity, that kind of radical imagination, is actually, does anything... You know what I mean? Other than inspire the community to keep going and build community. Right, right. Which is huge. I can think of two examples, though, where a certain kind of theatricality or performativity was actually very important, not just in terms of, you know, just conveying kind of protest, but in terms of conveying ideas in the context of struggle. I'll give you two concrete examples. One is a couple of organizations that I have relationships with that I really love. One is the Labor Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles. They formed something called the Bus Riders Union. And the Bus Riders Union had been organizing bus riders to fight for a decent fare. And I'm not going to go into all the details, but one of the things they did was theater on the buses. They would actually do performances to... Because you have a captured audience. They can't get off the bus. And in doing theater, they'd be able to talk about and also convince the bus drivers that this is their fight, too. And they were able to win membership adherence and actually win a big court case. But most importantly, develop a massive organization that became the foundation for other kinds of struggles around environmental justice. I mean, they also thought about the connections between things like, you know, the price of the fare, the expansion of rail lines that are really serving middle class and upper middle class communities as opposed to the poor and working class. The fact that poor white people were actually suffering from civil rights violations because of the racial inequality in terms of the treatment on the buses and the price of the fare, but also that you can't just have more buses. You got to do something about the environment. If you're going to have buses, let them all be, you know, cleaner natural gas buses, that sort of thing. Then the other place was, and I have to say, there's a group based in Brooklyn called Sister to Sister, and I've written about them before, great organization, fantastic young women who were struggling with a lot of questions, one being domestic violence. And so they did something that's very, very deep into the tradition. You can see in Latin America and other places where they would stage performances of, you know, the street theater, and these are not trained actors, but performances of street theater that basically show what leads to domestic violence, ways to intervene. And also recognizing something as basic as for a lot of immigrant communities, if you call the police into intervening on domestic violence issue, sometimes what the police will do is, half time the police don't even show up for one, but when they do show up, they will maybe arrest and deport people who may not have papers. So how can the community protect each other? How can women and kids and all those who are vulnerable to domestic abuse be protected by that community? And through the combination of street theater and interventions, they were able to reduce, almost eliminate, domestic violence in the neighborhoods where they worked in. So to me, these are performances where there's no tickets, there's no stage, you know, producer, there's no director. There's, you know, there are performances that actually, I'm not saying that they should take place, you know, be in place of. And it's kind of an agile prop. These performances don't always transform. They could have that capacity. And I don't want to say that this is more important than I think the other thing that theater does, and that is really force people to see and think in ways that are just not comfortable. It makes them really uncomfortable and really struggle with issues that may be hidden and sedimented. So I think all of this, all of this has a role to play. That's something that I talk about a lot in the theater, is that I'm not here to make you feel comfortable. You're here to make you feel lots of different things and everything you're feeling is appropriate. So, you know, I joke about it in the shows, in terms of performance art, that at a regular concert you would go to it and if you're having a, if you don't have a great time and leave happy in singing the songs, then the artist has failed you. But at a performance art concert, you can hate the performer, you can love the performer, you can be annoyed, you can be bored, you can feel whatever you're feeling and the artist is still succeeded. And that there's no failure in performance art. And, which is the genius of it. Right. But it's, I don't know, I got sidetracked. But I wanted to talk about Bayard Rustin, actually, because I think that Bayard Rustin is the, for me, is the perfect example of someone who's both an artist and a social justice worker and who uses his art to foster the social justice work that he's doing and vice versa. So that's, that is, that's my big guy. Okay. Well actually, let me, let's keep Rustin in play here. He's right here with us. Because this actually allows us to go to question three for you, which is, where do you see radical imagination in practice in the world, right? Maybe now that could be in Rustin's time. And what excites you today? So two questions. Well, in Rustin's time, I think that a man could be a conscientious object to the war, get put in prison, be beaten, choose not to use nonviolence with his oratory and his singing and his presence and his personal artistry and vision inspire prisoners and prison guards not to use violence against each other. I just, there's nothing more profound than that for me. So I guess that's, that's where I see a radical imagination that he could, and it didn't come out of a Petri dish. You know, he did a lot of research as a smart man. He read a lot. He went to India, you know, but he experienced things. But that he could envision that the prison guards and the prisoners could treat each other with nonviolence, that he could envision a protest where you go across the country, not sitting in the back of the bus through the south, you know, at least 20, maybe 30 years before Rosa Parks. You know, I mean, so that he could envision that and make that all happen is, that's radical to me. Well, let's stick with this one second. Now, nonviolence is radical. This is a really important point. It's an important point because we're talking about generations of people who grow up thinking that nonviolence is not radical, that what's radical is violence. And you also have a corporate structure that appropriates nonviolence as the not radical solution. And what's interesting is that we're also talking about, you know, groups of people, subjugated groups of people who, in the case of African Americans in particular, who are expected to be nonviolence and that any forms of armed self-defense, for example, would be seen as not normative, that nonviolence is normative. But what you just said, which I agree with, that nonviolence as a practice, as a philosophy is actually what's not normative. What's normative is to pick up the gun, you know? So I wonder if you could just talk about, like, because you deal with violence and the sort of representations of violence and nonviolence and thinking about it. What are your thoughts about this idea of nonviolence as radical, rather radical, in that change? Well, I think my best example of it is walking down the street dressed up in the finery. I call my drag my finery. And you walk down Third Avenue on the Saturday night and people throw things and they scream things and I've had two guns pointed at me. And people get very aggressive and how you then turn that around and invite somebody to the party that you're having is, to me, radical. To see that all you have to do is give an invitation. I mean, I think that's the thing that both artists and social justice workers could work together on is figuring out how to give the invitation a little bit better. Because we often don't know how to invite people into the conversation that we're having. So I guess that would be a big one for me is how to turn that around. And I learned a lot of that through nonviolence training, actually, but also just through seeing, through trial and error, and seeing people, peers, and fellow queens navigate that world. You know, one time I was walking down the street with a friend of mine and we were in the finery and somebody's... Well, this is a better story. Mother Flawless Sabrina is my dread mother. And she got shot in the ass because she was walking down the street and these two people just, they didn't like her so they shot her in the ass. She likes to say, I've got two holes in my ass. And I said, and I was talking about those people. I said, those horrible people. And she said, no, Taylor, no. They just wanted to be part of the show. And she turned it around. She just turned it around. She turned it around for me. So I'm walking down the street and people get aggressive with me. And I say, I'm going to party. You want to come? And it almost immediately diffuses the situation. Sometimes it doesn't. I'm not saying that it's the total solution, but I've found making an invitation to people is nonviolence. Yeah, it's a hard question. I mean, C.L.R. James used to say, people need to organize a police. That's kind of an invitation. And it's interesting because he said in the context of this very amazing historian, historian that some of you may know named Walter Rodney who was assassinated in Guyana by Forbes Burnham and his people. And one of the things that James said, he said if they had organized a police, that they would have had more protection. And one of the biggest urban strikes to play in the Boston Police Department early in the 20th century. But the police actually play a role through state violence of maintaining subjugation of other people, but they're also laborers. So it's a very tricky thing. And what's also tricky too is that coming out of, again, with all these deaths, all these murders, all these killings, the question of nonviolence becomes very difficult when we're talking about state violence is sanctioned violence. It's legal violence. And when you go through the court system to try to redress, you always lose. Not always, but most of the time you lose. And I agree with you. I think that, and I teach this to my students, nonviolence is a radical, challenging position to take because it assumes a lot of things. It assumes that it could stop the cycle of violence, that nonviolence is about breaking the cycle of violence, which is a very powerful idea. And yet, when you look at a place like Mississippi in the 1960s, a friend of mine, I can nearly homogenize this book called We Will Shoot Back, which shows that every single county where you had armed self-defense groups, you had less violence. Wherever there was no armed self-defense, you had more violence. More people got killed when people were not armed. Fewer people were killed when people were armed. Now, by the way, I'm not packing. I don't even have a gun. I'm not even interested in that. But it forces you, again, to think about, what does that mean? I mean, what does it mean when those debates were taking place in SNCC and Baird Russell knew all about him? Well, Baird Russell had to convince Dr. King, like you don't need to have a pistol on your pillow. You know? In the context of constant violence and the threat of violence and the fact that you live in a system where no one cares. Drag queens who are killed, do people care? You see? They don't care. So what do you do in those contexts where you don't even have anyone protecting you? And yet, extra-legal violence and state violence is sanctioned, you know? And again, I don't have an answer to that. But it's one of the really tragic situations that we're dealing with. My friend Nigel, I hope that you don't mind me calling you out. But you were talking to me the other day about... Our government. Our government. You want to talk about that? Talk about our government, Nigel? Well, that's an interesting point. I would have trouble with the our government. And I'll tell you why. It's historical reasons and contemporary reasons. Historical reason has to do with the fact that many of us, and I'm not just talking about people of African descent, but many of us ended up conscripted into this government, conscripted into the state against our will. And again, not just African-Americans. I'm talking about all kinds of people who were conscripted. At a moment when our own democracy is being eliminated, eroded, do you know that 40% of the black community in Michigan have no elected government official? They're under emergency management. You have a situation where voter suppression, other things of basic democracy, is being eliminated and eroded. Then on top of that, we're talking about a situation in which the police in some of our communities are not there to protect us. Well, you know that. They're actually there to control and protect private property. Right? And so that's not to say that we don't have some kind of recourse, but it's very hard to get up the words to make the claim of ownership when the development of our so-called multiracial democracy begins 40 years ago. I mean, literally 40 years ago. That's when we didn't have democracy before 40 years ago. We had something moving towards it. But it does beg that question or statement, you know, fake it till you make it, right? So in the theater, there's this thing where you can't... People sometimes think they can memorize their lives. I'm talking about how you remember all those words. We were just joking about people asking that question. But people think you can memorize your lines just by reading them over and over in your head. But actually, you have to be out loud. You have to engage your senses. You have to do sense memory in order to remember your words. You have to personalize it. You have to get in there. So in order to change the police, do we have to change the language in which we talk to them and how we talk to them? And do we have to own them? I mean, this is a question. I don't... But every time I go to talk to them, they're like, you're under arrest. You know? So... But I hear what you're saying. But, you know, it's interesting because this is where the kind of full circle where you got the extreme libertarians on the one hand and the left kind of come together on this question of, like, what kinds of institutions can we create that alternatives to? Because there is a way in which, yeah, it is our government and there's a way that the hour actually can work when we think about things like, you know, the erosion of social safety net, the fact that we pay taxes, the fact that we have this kind of financial investment in the state. And so, therefore, we can make that claim, state owes us because this is our state. And I could... I understand that. And I'm with that. And I've actually ridden that before. And, you know, to go back to the whole question of what does it mean to go to the root, why do we need police? Why do we need police? What can we do instead? Police are not about public safety. They are not. Some of you might think that because you got the benefit from it, but most of us are actually on the other end of what the police do. The police protect private property. That's what they do. They've always done that. Right? And when the police stop doing that, they're fired. Okay? So, in some ways, how do we actually rethink all of our institutions? How do we think of something as basic as food? And this is where I come back to Detroit. Detroit is like one of my favorite cities in the world where people are taking all the abandoned lots of the messed up areas and greening them, transforming them into spaces to grow food, organic food, which actually has been incorporated into the public school system where kids are actually getting like decent food for a change, grown locally, against the expectations and limitations of the state itself. And so there's a kind of pressure between, like, a local government in Detroit that's now under emergency management that's now basically supported by bankers, bankers who actually make, who bankrupted the city in the first place by stealing people's homes. And then a grassroots movement that's saying, look, you know, forget the government for a second. We're going to do for ourselves, we're going to develop an economy that's about locally grown and barter and selling things and creating public markets. Those two worlds are going to clash. You have the alternative government or governing structures of the people versus a state that's bankrupt. Now, when those things clash, the question is, who side are we on? Who are we going to stand with? I like the government of the people growing. I don't like the government of the ones that have this guy who basically has all this money from big finance who's going to come in there and seize the property, throw people off the land, and basically fill it in with investments, investment bankers, and it's going to be a real mess. So I think there's a way in which we can begin to think about, like, who are our coalitions? Who is our community? What are our communities? What kind of alternative structures can we create to prepare the way for not seizing power, but for creating alternative spaces of power where we can make choices and decisions for ourselves as a collective who believes in social justice as opposed to believing, exploiting other people? Anyway, what excites you today? You excite me. You excite me. What excites me today? It's, you know, I kind of feel like I've talked about that. It's exciting to me to see people like Justin Vivian Bond, who just lives their life. The radical, Harry Hay and the radical fairy communities, they excite me because they, it's the oldest, the short man is the oldest commune in America. They made it work. None of the other communes, it's a queer commune. It's all, you know, it's not just gay men anymore. It's lots of different types of people, but it was just gay men at first. And they made it freaking work before gay was, you know, before gay was shopping. You know, they made it work and it still exists and it's amazing and it really is an environment. There'll be 500 drag queens walking through the woods. And you'll have, we'll be having a conversation like this. We'll have a conversation and somebody will be rimming somebody right there next to us. And that's just glorious. That to me is, that I'm very inspired by that. I don't like all the new agey stuff that goes along with it, but I love the radical, it's all about radical imagination and it's, you know, Dionysus inspires me. So that's, yeah. Well, Alyssa Solomon inspires me. Do you want to join us here? Taka, taka, taka. Remember, ah, ah, ah. Let's see. So what am I supposed to do? Yeah, push this. Push that one. That one. How's that? No, not yet. It's actually not. Oh, there we go. Okay. Thanks. So I'm just here to inject some more questions and mine are surprises to you, but not to me. Although they're fresh and I've been thinking about a lot of this inspiring conversation and coming up with a couple things. So I want to go back to what you were just saying about Detroit, Robin, and maybe come back to the question of the artist and the radical imagination of the artist and the role of artists in Detroit right now and the way in which there's a lot of excitement about how there's space for new kinds of creativity in public art, in new art spaces, in these artist houses that are being provided. At the same time as there's a lot of, I think, justifiable anxiety about a kind of gentrification narrative that we've seen many times before. How do you see artists in that context? Yeah, that's a good question. It's funny because I know a little bit about Detroit in terms of the artists and also those people who had been there for a very long time making work. I probably know more about New Orleans though because in some ways it's a very similar trajectory where these moments of crisis and shock create opportunities for people. And artists actually typically don't have much resources. I mean, it's not as if artists tend to be rich people. They're actually looking for affordable spaces to live and work, but they're often followed by gentrifiers who are trying to turn those spaces into value. And so part of the issue I know with New Orleans is that after Katrina, there was this massive displacement and many people went south to help out but then decided to stay. And many people who had more resources and occupied much of the housing stock that was once low-income housing stock. I'm not sure if that's the case with Detroit, but I do know that one of the things that's been happening is that finance capital is buying up some of these properties downtown. Like some of the old warehouses and I think it's a Chrysler plant, which is going to be raised or transformed into a huge mall. So this is what the future looks like. And what's the problem is that there are people who have been living in Detroit in homes whose value is about $25,000, $30,000. Some are renters. Some own and are behind in their payments and as the tax liabilities go up, many of those same people are not going to be able to turn around their homes into a profit and get out. They're going to end up leaving. And so that's what often happens. We see it in Harlem, where gentrification ends up leading to displacement. So wouldn't it be great to have those artists who say, well, you know, we're not just here to take advantage of low income, but here to participate in the transformation of Detroit so that people stay, so that... And I'll give you one last example of where this is actually very successful in Cincinnati. There's a neighborhood in Cincinnati called Over the Rhine, where there's a group of architects who decided Over the Rhine is the neighborhood near downtown, but it's a very low income, large homeless population. We're an architect, Dutton. In Bangalina's first name, I'm embarrassed to say, just a wonderful person who created something called the Center for Community Engagement, downtown, since then, Thomas Dutton. So Tom Dutton decided, brought these kids, architectural students, to take these abandoned homes and transform them to make them livable and really nice to give to homeless families. And there's a big struggle with the city council like, we don't want to do that, you know, what not, but they were able to win. And it was really quite a powerful idea that, you know, the idea is a chance to form the neighborhood to allow people to stay and not to push them out for property values. So that, to me, is a future that artists who believe in social justice would work toward, I think. I recently read Sarah Silverman's book. What's the one about gentrification of the mind? Sarah Shulman. Sarah Shulman. Yeah. Yeah. Very different. Very different. You know, when she describes her memories of the 80s and stuff in artists living in various neighborhoods, that it was about an investment in the neighborhood for what it is, as opposed to what it could become. In terms of, oh, I want, in terms of I want to go to the Polish deli, you know, as opposed to, I want my whole foods, you know, so that you would go to the various places that were there and invest in the neighborhood that is there and work on fostering that as opposed to changing it. So I guess I just think that there's, we just have to continually call ourselves as artists on our responsibility towards that and challenge each other to not be afraid of going to the Polish deli. It seems silly, but I think a lot of, I think a lot of people are afraid to go someplace that's different from what they know. Right. Well, maybe also recognizing that those neighborhoods have artists in them already. And they have artists in them already. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of the kind that Robin was talking about before and other kinds too. You reminded me of something that, I don't know why you totally forgot this, but in Watts, it's a wonderful book called Black Arts West by Daniel Weidner. He was a student at NYU years ago. And it's a powerful book because what he shows that in Watts in the middle 60s at the time of the Watts uprising in 65 and afterwards, Watts probably had thousands of artists, not hundreds, but thousands, musicians and painters and visual, and not people who necessarily were trained in a sense, but they were all making art. And they were also supported by federal grants and by artist communities, the Watts Happening Cafe, like thousands of artists. And what ends up happening in theater too, performances, is that the federal government will give some of the artists grants but then spend more money on surveilling these communities and actually hiring agent provocateurs who would destroy their work. So they turned a safe way into a 300 person theater, which was burned down by someone hired by the FBI. So they get money from one part of the federal government and the other parts to burn it down. Then artwork destroyed. Beautiful artwork destroyed. So that community, as a result of all kinds of things, end up dispersing and destroying really a core artists community of people, just like you're saying, who were born and raised in Watts. They're not even like coming from the outside but they're there. You know, this amazing story. Let's talk a little more about disaster. As you mentioned it with New Orleans before and it's kind of, you know, obliquely, I think, you know, I mentioned the idea of disaster capitalism, this moment that Naomi Klein has written about of chaos where, you know, neoliberalism can rush in and take over everything. But there's also sort of on the other side the Rebecca Solnit idea of how people come together in disasters and in the urgency of the moment, you know, forget the petty issues and focus on what really counts. Find that love that you were talking about before, the verb kind. And I was thinking when you were talking before Taylor about that AIDS march that was so inspiring to you that it's maybe an example of that as well. I'm wondering if you could each talk a little bit about the, you know, the role of disaster, crisis, difficulty in provoking the radical imagination. Because, you know, one doesn't want to get sentimental about it. No, it wasn't. So here's the thing, everything you're feeling is appropriate. So it wasn't sweet. The AIDS march wasn't sweet. That's what was awesome about it. That's what was, that's what was, that's what shook me out of my own fear was that it was ugly. That it was, it was, it wasn't pretend. It was authentic failure, which at the same time, because it was failing, was succeeding in other ways. And so there wasn't anything cute about it. And I guess, I guess that's, that speaks to it. I mean, I guess I always feel that authentic failure is the most important thing, is the most interesting thing on the stage. So what's the difference between authentic and inauthentic failure? Inauthentic failure would be somebody pretending to fail. So somebody, I mean, it's really that simple. It's, you're singing a song, and oh, I forgot my lyric, so that you're then crafting a moment where you can stop and talk and blah, blah, blah. Or, you know, like Ella Fitzgerald, the first time she sang the Mac the Knife and she forgot the lyrics, really great. But then it worked so good, so she kept doing it, over and over and over again. And the audience, oh, see that Mac the Knife thing, wasn't authentic failure anymore, right? So the first time it's like, oh, she's human. Oh my gosh, she's got craft. She's in the moment. It's brilliant. It's gorgeous. And then it became a trope, right? So she became a parody of herself in that, doing that particular number. And I, so I think about that a lot. A story I tell is that I, I was at this bar called the Splash Bar as many years ago, and I was very poor. I was stealing subway rides and eating beans and rice, and had very little money. And I was, there was a cash prize of $100 for a competition. And I would never normally do this, but I was like, I need to pay my rent. So I went to the Splash Bar, which if you know, if you don't remember it, it was this, what people would judgingly call the Bridging Tunnel gay bar. And it was just, it was a lot of cologne and very muscular people. And they gave you a free drink if you took your shirt off. And my friend, Carrie, she went in their radical imagination and she took her shirt off and they refused her a drink and so she stuck her finger down her throat and she puked all over the bar. So that was a radical imagination. So, but so I go there and I'm performing at this Splash Bar and it's a competition. And I get up and I do my number and I was, I was really good. My craft was extraordinary and I was, I never hit high C's. I was hitting high C's. I was like, my vocal technique was so great. I was, I was on point. My performance art was really great. I was, everything was great. And the audience was like this. Then my friend Juliette's music got up and she did a number and she was doing all of her things and hitting the thing. And it was this incredible number and she lip synced with a vagina and it was like, it was, it was radical imagination but it was, it was crafting. It was, there was real serious crafting in the number and the audience went like this. Then the queen got up who lip synced badly to a song called My Pussy and My Crack. She lip synced. She didn't remember any of the lyrics and at a certain point she took her teeth out and she had two teeth and she went like that and the audience went insane. And she won the hundred dollars. And that was the time when I realized that sometimes and Julie and I were both screaming for her too and sometimes authentic failure that being brave enough to expose your authentic failure is more interesting than perfection. So that's what, I don't know if that describes disaster. No, but it does make me think of Charles Ludlum saying that if you're not a living mockery of your ideals then you've set them too low. Yeah. Here's a radical imagination. Charles Ludlum. He asked, he asked you about disaster? He asked an interesting, challenging question because, because you're right. I mean sometimes much of what we think of the imagination is improvisation and how do people improvise under duress under difficult situations? What do they create? And so in all the cases of disaster what Rebecca Solnitz talked about for example is improvisation. Like how do you, you know, the tragedy is that in Detroit there's food deserts. People don't have decent food and so what do you do under those circumstances? You improvise with what you have and they do amazing things. In the case of, again, go back to Watts. All the glass and all the broken stuff after the uprising in 65 and the National Guard shooting out windows and whatnot. Two artists, nor pure for as one took all the pieces of glass and made these works of art. 66 signs of neon is what the show was called. Beautiful works, which you can see at the Watts tower to this day. Now here are two interesting moments of improvisation of the radical imagination but in the end Detroit's bank, Watts is in terrible straits because what they can't do is stop the outward flow of capital. They can't stop, they can't stanch the flow of jobs. They can't, you know, in other words all the creativity is called even if it's meant in terms of creating alternative economies but the alternative economies that are still within the spaces of decline and disorder because in the end, New Orleans for example, people were trying to take back the housing projects and they revamped them and people could move back into them but they were all, not all of them but most of them were taken out, spaces were privatized. In other words, in the end, even if you can create space for yourself to survive, it's not the same as power and that's why all of us have to be invested in saying, you know, we're all Detroiters, we're all from NOLA, we're all invested in the transformation of these spaces even if we don't have to think about them because they can, they could survive but they can't, you know, create the kind of environment that we think our children should grow up in, right? And so that's what, I know I don't want to be a downer but in the end, you know, there's only so much you can do with, you know, through improvisation, at some point you've got to be able to struggle for power and resources in a certain kind of way. I don't know how to do that. Well, that's organizing, right? I mean, that's, you know, that's, is that the limit of the radical imagination is that, can it go only so far without frameworks for organizing and for some kind of, you know, action plan? Well, what interests me is how the radical imagination can help with organization. That's what, because it seems like the organization we're stuck in a lot of the same forms and the same, same tropes and ideas and well, on the walk, you know, every single, every single action was a die-in because nobody had the imagination enough to kind of consider, maybe we could do a different kind of action. You know, we got stuck in this thing and so I guess that's where I'm curious where, how can a creative life create tools for us to organize? But, but, I'll say, I'll be an aggressive devil's advocate maybe and say, but it's not as if, if he'd had like a, you know, better stage-managed or more imaginative day of action that you would have been more successful ending nuclear testing. Is it? I think, I'm not quite sure that's true. I mean, look at the, I hope it's not. I mean, look at the AIDS actions. It was about, it was about visibility. They had a very specific goal a lot of the time and it was visibility, visibility, visibility, visibility. We're being ignored. Let's not be ignored. Let's not be ignored. So their goal was so clear until it became about medicine, medicine, medicine, medicine, medicine, you know, and they actually did accomplish by being creative, by doing things differently than other people had done them. By putting a giant condom over Jesse Helms home, right? Or, you know, like, I mean, they accomplished visibility and which is what they were setting out to do. Along with other kinds of organizing and other kinds of very concrete, direct pressures. Yeah, absolutely. And also, a giant condom is a problem. Yeah, but also a particular community. It's also important to acknowledge particular communities. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that a lot. Okay. All right. Because one of the things that, that for all the visibility around ACT UP and AIDS organizing, the flip side to that was that over time, the communities that suffered most from HIV, many of them were working class black women and low income, most of the people of color, especially black women in working class black men. And Kathy Cohen kind of writes about this. And part of that suppression also has to do with the internal politics in the black community that says, we're not even going to acknowledge that. We have church leadership, religious leadership, we're not even going to deal with that. On the other hand, there is a way in which the question of AIDS ceased to be a question of inequality. It became a question of privilege. And that wasn't the intention, certainly, but not the activists. But in terms of the representations of it. But I do think, I actually think that different strategies in times of crisis are required or demanded. And I think we always have to kind of think through what would be effective, but also even in losing certain battles, thinking about what to do next. And also recognizing that even though I did make this comment about how all of us need to think about ourselves as Detroiters, at the same time, historically, no, no successful struggle has ever been a mass movement. None. See, we think the civil rights movement was never a mass movement. All kinds of people who claimed they were there, they weren't there. We're talking about really effective organizing that involved not huge numbers of people. I mean, some of the most effective work was SNCC. I could name everyone in SNCC. And we'll still have time. It's kind of an astounding thing when you think about, what does it mean to find the right strategy? What does it mean to be able to be a leader and develop a grassroots movement where you may not have an organization that's mass, but you can actually form a political party that involves 70,000 people in the state of Mississippi. Or, even if you think about something as effective as like rolling jubilee. The whole thing that Andrew Ross and other people are doing, among other people. Well, the idea that you can even if you disagree with the concept, you can sort of think through the way debt is packaged and resold. And you can pull your money together to buy debt and pennies on the dollar and then give it away. So if these vicious, vampire capitalists can buy debt and hold on to it, why can't people get their money together to buy huge amounts of debt to dispense with it? Is that what Occupy was doing? Yeah. Yeah. So this is like a kind of creative way but no one ever thinks it's the answer. They think it's like a strategy in the moment because what it also does, it gets us to think about like, what is debt? Who owns debt? How do people make money off of debt? Like what it even means to own debt seems like to go to the root. But there is craft involved in both art and political action and if we can learn our craft we can be more successful at what we do. That doesn't mean you can't do that. Well, I think that's a really important idea and I appreciated what you said I think in answer to the very first question tonight about cultivating your creativity and your craft and sort of dispensing with the myth of pure talent being, I mean, certainly you have, but then it's not, and you write about that with Colonius Monk a lot. It's sort of undoing the mythology around that. Why is a myth like that useful? Why is that useful? What does it serve? The myth of just arriving from the Petri dish and not having to work for it not having to develop a craft not having to labor hard and fail a lot. It's God complex, don't you think? I mean, I don't know. It's a really great question because I think I have three children my genius daughter who's here she was just perfect all the time. Except for she never had any but I got these two younger sons who are growing up in a culture in which they believe that it's supposed to be right all the time. I shouldn't say the youngest one, the youngest one's too young but the middle one. He is surrounded by the same myth that you're talking about that you're perfect from the beginning and that if you don't do well, you have failed. And I think it's more extreme now than even the genius artist idea which is the center of so many hagiographies and biographies that is that someone's born a genius. Now all these kids who really believe that if you don't do it well the first time, this is what they see on TV. They see kids who are talented who you never see the work that's involved. You never see that. In fact, what you say which I think is so profound, but only if I mean so here's a if I hadn't done a performance that was really freaking great. If Julie hadn't done a performance that was really great nobody would have been paying attention to her. She didn't have craft. So it's a combination that authentic failure works if you combine it with the expertise you have to do both. But it's the same thing about movements. Because you can't, you know, Monk used to say all the time he said to Abby Lincoln once when she was singing, don't be so perfect all the time that part of the issue is that you have actions over and over again because you think they're effective the same chance, the same march the same signs, the same slogans you kind of get stuck but it's when you other kinds of possibilities it knows those moments of disconnection or mistakes that you learn something and I think that's how it is making all forms of art that you, that is that reach that allows you to move something. I mean that to me sounds a little bit like like an elaboration of something we were saying earlier about going to the radical critique, the critique question and how, and you didn't say this what I was thinking and curious what you think about it that's a, there's a distinction between the question at the core, the critical question at the core and traditional protest politics. So what's the difference between critique and protest? That's in fact part of the problem is that sometimes protest has no critique and that was based on an old critique of an old idea and so we always have to kind of keep beginning new with our understanding of how the world works why things are the way they are what is it we're actually struggling against. To me that's you know and again I'm not trying to be old school here but the notion of Grace Lee Boggs talks about like dialectical thinking like what does it mean to think dialectically and it means not to take some old 19th century ideas and keep applying them but to think about in the 21st century what do we not see what's not self-evident what is required of us even the notion of like the state being the most important object well that's old school that doesn't work you know the state's not the most important what is the most important object of struggle you know so these things I think are really important and unfortunately and again I know with people who sort of feel like like I don't like you know academia because I want action that somehow sort of thinking and critique and analysis is in fact you can't do one without the other you know and it's amazing how I grew up and again I'm not trying to save my generation's any better because my generation jacked up a lot of things I didn't act every political organization always had a study group and the study group was more important than anything we read constantly constantly constantly and sometimes you get stuck in stuff you're reading but reading was a very very important part of the process and so that's what I think is required in some ways to go back to the question of theater to me the best theater is the theater that tries to force us to struggle with the hardest questions not to give answers but to present the hardest questions and not to change history either but to really struggle with these questions which is why you know lately I've been seeing some terrible theater just stupid you know and I won't even name some names but there are things that won big prizes terrible precisely because there's a refusal to actually address the hard question exactly just you know I won't even say what they are but I mean that's one of the things I I mean we have to be students of humanity we have to look and see what the problem is where's the problem what does the world need and so many people don't do that sometimes when I'm creating work I'll say what's the one thing about myself I don't want the audience to know okay that's what the work is going to be about and because then that's the hard question I think you know maybe it's maybe it's especially difficult now to put those questions forward when we have a kind of a corporate appropriation of the idea of creativity that would identify all of us as members of something called the creative class for example people who think outside the box and who are part of what makes the city creative and how does their idea of imagination differ from ours or their idea of creativity you said it's commerce that's it if you're I'm not a shopper I don't want to shop and I don't want to sell you anything I don't want to teach you anything I just want to remind you of what you already know but that you're in denial about or that you know so I think when you try to make creativity people say it's creative that means you can sell it at the farmers market you know then that to me isn't creativity that's that's Paul Street I live in Los Angeles that's bad enough enough said enough said and in LA there's some real artists there there are there are but the thing about Los Angeles is so interesting that there's certain keywords certain cold words not cold words keywords the pitch now the mere fact that that you have to you have to reduce your project to a pitch and it's difficult abstract for an article smell you the concept that you're asking permission to be creative as opposed to just doing it that is something that is wrapped up in this yes you know as a writer I'm constantly having to do that but in some ways the way I have to sort of describe my project is to describe its logic and not its saleability the assumption is that okay I'm not going to sell millions of copies of anything but this idea that somehow you have to sell a project because to make work in Los Angeles whether it's film or record you've got to have money big money sometimes to do that and how do you do that you do it by saying okay it's a combination of this and that in other words the things that have sold this is a combination of these of you know Jaws and you know Forrest Gump, that's a good one and so the idea has to be recognizable as marketable as opposed to you know saying it's experimental I don't know what's going to happen you know this is sort of what I want to do and that's not the thing that they get made I think it probably got made maybe in the 80s but now it's much more difficult to do that that's not to say that I haven't seen great stuff and again I've mentioned we have Taylor's work, Naomi's work there's a lot of playwrights doing really interesting stuff and a lot of it's in New York a lot of it's found in the theater these are spaces that are made available which is a talk about a pitch this is one of the reasons why we have to support these kinds of spaces because if they're not supported it's not as if you got like a million producers out there putting up money but there's still all of these projects still are operating in a sea of capitalism I mean it's inescapable and so it's maybe is it just a question of degree or is there something different I mean it sounds like I hear underneath this a kind of old paradigm of the selling out problem which feels like an old paradigm to me things seem different somehow now I mean I admire your integrity enormously and I'm not, you know, challenging it in the slightest but I'm just wondering how we think about those pressures now when there's not institutional support I just feel like if you fall in love with verbs more than nouns then you're going to be okay but if you're really into nouns if you want to have the house and the car and the computer and the kids and the blah blah blah blah blah then you're going to have to make some sacrifices in terms of your radicalism which is okay I mean it's we're all people on the planet we're all negotiating over time it's not to say you shouldn't have kids or anything like that but but if you if you if we just think about falling in love with verbs more than nouns and I don't want anything for Christmas just give me verbs I want a stroll don't give me nouns I don't want that crap in my life so I think that's right I agree with that I also would just add that I'm thinking about the passing of Amiri Baraka and no matter what you thought about Baraka to do was a genius and not always a genius as a playwright, a poet an activist but he decided that he's going to stay in Newark and he's going to make work and you're going to come see that work and he was almost no money he was able to sustain a creative space I think about the world stage in the LA another one of these sort of self-sustaining community-based spaces where for decades has been art that's about to disappear by the way I think about all these spaces that where people have actually created a community space for the sake of making telling stories now the thing is that's old that's so old storytelling in the communal space like that that's much older but then in this age of the non-profit fundraising and everything those spaces they exist but they exist under the radar they don't get review there's no foundation money for these spaces but they exist and I think that if we can rethink the theater as spaces for storytelling spaces of kind of self-ownership much like taking back the land to grow food there's some possibility there it's not the answer to everything but I think Baraka and Jane Cortez all people who have joined the ancestors have showed us the way we could follow that we'll use storytelling in your work all the time I mean narrative seems I thought you said what is storytelling that's a good question too you use it was it Larry and Barry? Larry and Barry narrative you put in your 1920s show for example or other kinds of frames that you use in order to you're a storyteller so we don't have a lot of time left but let me okay so let me try this last thing so you just had a moment to go you don't want to teach people anything you want to remind them of things that they've forgotten or decided or buried or other people have buried for them and you do teach people things I don't know as a part of your profession you arrive in a classroom a few times a week with students in there so what is it or how can imagination if not be taught how can it be unleash itself well you do I'll say this work to give people access to the simple answer for me everyone says you can't do that play with 36 people in it that's five hours long so then you say I'm gonna do it so then you do it get all these emails saying I'm gonna make a durational work I'm gonna do work with big large people now you know these teachers and university are saying oh my students wanna do big work now cause you did it and I said oh great and you did it and we did it with Christa Martin on the small scale we did it with no money and we did it and they just did it down in New Orleans with even less money so you just do it and then you hope and then you give people access to it you know you say well I'm not gonna charge this theater for doing a show and they don't have the money you know so I give people access to the work and hope that it inspires them and they figure out ways it reminds them how to they're capable of doing it as well I guess that's my only way I know how to do it right well I know what I will be doing is showing your videos to my students from that one it's part of my pedagogy I'm gonna change your books in my shelves hahahaha hahahaha everybody will do hahahaha I'm gonna do a dramatic interpretation that's a great idea well it's a very teaching is hard and it gets harder as I get older it gets harder because my expectations keep rising and it gets harder because the more I think I know the more I realize I don't know I'm constantly like I feel like I can't read enough I can't think enough and there's so much out there so if there's anything I try to do as a teacher it's really three things one to get my students to think as opposed to just take notes or say can you post a PowerPoint online please you know which annoys me because it's like they want to just write down things they want to they want to be fed and as Mark said in 1844 in a very famous statement where he says you know the philosophers of the past have kind of you get the term he uses like stood at the podium and just kind of fed us partages most partages and you know but that's those days are over the point now is to critique a ruthless critique of everything existing as 1844 and Mark's wrote that and see I try to live by that a ruthless critique of everything existing everything you think you know we've got to begin again and so it's about dismantling what we think we know but also the third thing is at every step as a professor of history to try to show that nothing is inevitable that at these moments things could have gone differently and here's how it could have gone here's how it could have gone and which I said the 1860s and 70s was a turning point when America could have become a democratic place and it failed and it failed not because of my people by the way but it failed and so it's that sense because we have whole generations of students who think kind of neoliberalism is common sense that there's no way to get outside of this particular structures that we're in but in fact those structures were created were made and were made in struggle and all these different possibilities of roads not path not gone by are the ones that we have to sort of pay attention to and that's what I try to do you know and that includes you know in every single way both in terms of class and gender sexuality in terms of you know other kinds of possibilities of being and that none of us embody our full potential I mean that's what Brecht thought the theater was for as well show all the different ways or to suggest to get us to think about the other ways things might have gone and I think it's what happens with the discomfort that you produce in your work and the possibility that something uncomfortable and surprising and even disturbing might happen and also something beautiful and lovely at any moment yeah my favorite moments are when we did this show at the under the radar festival where it was supposed to be a 90 minute show and it turned into a 3 hour show and I sang this song at the end that was supposed to be a 2 minute song and it was a 15 minute song where the audience member thought I was asking him to sing and I wasn't and he started singing so then I was like well go ahead and I gave him the mic and he sang and then we sang a duet together and it just went on and on and on and on and on but people still a year later said that's my most favorite moment in the theater ever I was there and it was it was an extraordinary moment and one of the things that it wasn't just that it was surprising and unexpected but you're the absoluteness of your presence in that moment and of the radical the very radical emotion of just taking that leap and letting it go where it was going to go was thrilling to experience but it wouldn't have happened if he hadn't failed I think that's the thing if he heard me correctly and done what I'd asked him to do it wouldn't have happened wait it was still a good show but that's exactly it it was sort of that moment of taking out his teeth so I mean I guess by failing can we then there's the hope by the way but you know even though it wouldn't have happened had they started to turn the lights off and close the curtains in other words that the space to be able to extend the space like that well they tried to well I hope we've had a little bit of productive failure in our conversation here and I think we're ending with a verb right? we're going to have some singing before we applaud uproariously for these amazing human beings on the stage I want to use the energy from them to invite you to our next we don't know what it's going to be show I can tell you that Marcus Gardley is turning his brain inside out trying to understand what it is that he's making and basically it's five men it's five men of color in a prison who are done they're just thinking done and it's a comedy and we open April 11th and one of the things that my colleagues and I have to call out my colleagues there's Merobi Pepe where's Merobi Merobi Pepe and Kate Atwell they made this with us they make everything with us right now and we were talking about we didn't want to make a sales pitch but it's pretty rare to have a gathering like this a gathering of people who actually wonder about what it means to be radical which I wonder every single freaking day and where I push toward and so we wanted to invite you to the box the name of the play is The Box a black comedy and we wanted to make cheaper tickets available for you because you're in the audience we want in that way because there'll be all kinds of glorious there'll be so much reach and lots of mistakes and so we have somebody back right there yes waiting for you all and if you would like to come to the show you'd really really love to have particularly this body of people in those rooms for that show so now can we please applaud applause