 Well behaved we are. I show up and you're all here. So people are running up from the bathroom, so I'm going to riff for a couple of moments. I still have two pairs of glasses. If you don't pick up the sunglasses, I don't own a pair, I'm stealing them. She brought me an iced coffee today, just totally out of the kindness of her heart, so that was a fair trade. And if anybody was at the Dance Dramaturgy event last night and picked up an errant blue scarf left on a chair, would you let me know? Because I know to whom it belongs. A wise man once said, how do I love thee, let me count the ways. I am thrilled to turn this over to Brian and a bunch of people who are going to share their love for Mark Bly and the projects that he helped make possible. Enjoy. Thank you very much Beth. Good afternoon everyone. Mark Bly just, this is Mark Bly if you don't know. Mark Bly just leaned over to me and said, he lost sunglasses at the TCG conference last week, so if anyone is there and picked them up, that would be very welcome. My name is Brian Quirt. I'm the Artistic Director of Night Swimming, a dramaturgical company based in Toronto, and also the Director of the Banff Center Playwrights Colony in Banff, Alberta. Thank you very much. I also had the pleasure of serving as LMDA President not quite as long ago as Liz Engelman, but almost. I succeeded Liz and it was a great pleasure to do so. I just wanted to take a moment to reminisce briefly on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of LMDA here in New York. My first conference was in 1993. Didi Kugler had mentioned LMDA to me a year or two before and I was able to attend in 1993 in Montreal, the first and only conference so far in Montreal. Thank you. And a couple of snapshots from my time at LMDA. There's two from pre-conference and one of them was going to be the dead body story in Tacoma, and I feel a bit ripped off that Jeff got to it first. My memory of it as a Canadian was a little different. It was a lot funnier than Jeff's version, but it was a great start to the conference. Really hasn't been beaten since. The other moment from pre-presidential era in my world was in 1996 in Toronto. We had a conference downtown in Ryerson and on the final day we all met, all the Canadians met after the conference and I've told this story a couple of times, but it was seminal where we got together and talked about what the repercussions of having the conference in Toronto might be for us in Canada. We talked about it out on the front steps of the university and at some point someone said, you know, what about a newsletter in Canada and, you know, is anyone interested in doing it? And I put up my hand and here I am 19 years later and I can't say that there really has been any downside to putting up my hand like that. I want to thank everyone who said you put your hand up, get to work. The other thing I had a pleasure of doing a couple of times with Liz and then with a group of other artists including Mark and Vanessa Portius and Madeleine Oldham was representing LMDA in the UK around the beginning of the Dramaturgs Network there and collaborating with them and also representing the organization in Mexico on a delegation to a festival in Mexico City. And I guess my point about that is that LMDA has continually opened the doors for me, not only here in the US, amongst my colleagues in Canada, but internationally as well. And I think the message there is that LMDA can serve you just as much as you can serve LMDA. The machine works both ways and it can really contribute substantially to what you want to achieve in your work if you want to make that happen. I had the pleasure of running two conferences, one in Toronto and then one in San Diego and two memories there. One is a beautiful bonfire that concluded the Toronto Conference on Toronto Island on the beach with a drumming circle on the final night. And I guess the thing that I most remember about that is the kind of pure beauty of a group of artists coming together for talking for three days and concluding with this kind of fantastic, magical, astonishing, alive, fire-driven event that was vivid and wordless and for a group of people that talks relentlessly concluding with a wordless event I thought worked beautifully. And then the other one a year later in San Diego was at our final banquet. I think Shelly referenced it in her reminiscences of where I think I managed to make fun of way too many American things including Oscar Brockett for whom I apologize. And then the final thing is we've done a lot of meetings in Louisville at the Humana Festival for the board. And so my final reminiscence involves Bourbon and substantial amounts of it consumed with Daniel Carroll, our administrative director, Paul Walsh, and on a separate trip out into the Bourbon Trail, Vicky Streich and Bob White. So as a Canadian and as a Canadian who is a huge fan of the conference bar, the Bourbon experiences in Humana have been a sort of a salient and ongoing attraction to this organization. My point ultimately is that it's the personal and the professional pleasure and laughter and colleagues that I have engaged with over the last 20 something years in many countries that have provided a platform for my ideas and a place for me to become the artist and the dramaturg that I have become. And I want to thank LMDA and all of you for contributing so much to all of those experiences. More recently I've had the pleasure of working with Mark and a really talented group of people on the Bly creative capacity grants. And I'm going to shift us over to our esteemed panel now. Thank you. And allow them in a moment to speak to the larger issues and then to the specifics of the projects that they have initiated through this program. I think this is a program and a creation and a granting idea that really does move us and was designed to move the field forward. Today we're going to talk about two things, two types of process. One, the actual Bly grant process itself. And I'll be asking Mark to speak about his impetus to create it and how it's progressed from his point of view over the last year since we gave our first grants. And also the process in action of the four projects that received funding last fall. Personally I want to thank, of course, Mark for the generosity and the insight that he has brought to driving this to its fruition. And then to the committee, indeed. And then also to the committee that helped create it and adjudicate it last fall along with myself, Beth Blickers, Liz Engelman, Jeff Prowl, Cindy Sorrell and Vicki Stryge. Thank all of you for your labors. There are details about the program in your conference package. So please have a look at that. The next deadline is September 15. In 2014 we had more than 60 applications requesting more than $870,000 in grants, which showed us that the need is there, the desire is there, the projects are there. It has helped drive membership because membership is a requirement of applying. So it has been beneficial to LMDA as a whole in a very immediate way there. And even more importantly, it showed us who's doing what out there. And there were many projects that some of us had not been aware of prior to this. And while obviously we were only able to offer four grants, the knowledge that entered LMDA through the adjudication of the program I thought was fantastic and hugely valuable in and of itself. We made four grants and we've invited the leaders of those projects here to speak about their projects. And I'm going to just take a moment and ask them to introduce themselves. Philippa Kelly, California Shakespeare Theatre. Lydia Garcia, Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Kotalin Trencin, Dramaturg from London. And I just want to say thank you to Brian for mentioning the Dramaturgs Network because as co-founder and former president of the Dramaturgs Network I'm very, very proud of the relationship between the Dramaturgs Network and the LMDA. And I hope that it will continue to grow in the next 30 years. Absolutely, thank you. Janice Perrin, Dramaturg for Memory Rings. Jessica Grindstaff for Phantom Lim Company, Director of Memory Rings. Heidi Taylor, Artistic and Executive Director at Playwrights Theatre Center. Jan Derbyshire, Playwright, Dramaturg Director with PTC for this project. And I'm Mark Bly, who's endured and... but with great, great... has put it very simply, I've had a lifelong love affair with LMDA. Thank you, Mark. Before I ask them each to talk in detail about the actual project that they're engaged with right now, I wanted each of our teams or individuals to speak to one of the larger issues that each of their programs addresses. And part of what was beautiful about how these played out for me, for us at least, is that they've landed on four really key, very vital, very important topics that we've discussed in Dramaturgical Circles and indeed at this conference. Inclusion, multidisciplinary creation, diversity and dance dramaturgy. So I'm asking each group for a quick three-minute snapshot of the landscape in each of those areas and the impetus that they had to initiate the project. And then once we go through that, I'm going to ask Mark to speak and then we'll move on to a more detailed observation about where each of the projects is or what they are and how they're functioning at the moment. So if I may, I'd like to begin with Lydia and Philippa and ask you to speak and I know we've talked about this but I think it pays, it always pays to continue the discussion but the state of diversity and what drove you to enact your project. So I'm Philippa Kelly and it's a great honor to be here and to have your faith in us. So both Lydia and I are from companies that are in different phases of developing diversity as a company-wide model. And basically last year when I saw the Bly Awards advertised, I phoned Lydia and said I think this is something that we should really work on together because we are at these different phases. We have different forms of specialization, different forms of particular tools that we can blend and have worked together. So we started to think what is diversity and inclusion and how does it work practically in the theater for dramaturgs? So what tools can we set up? So we had this idea that we would produce a handbook and it will be about pointing out the questions that dramaturgs might want to ask, opportunities for dramaturgs to explore rather than providing a how-to, how to make your dramaturgie diverse. But I think the questions and we'll also have some case studies, very short snapshots of models that could be useful more later, but onto Lydia. Thanks, Philippa. Absolutely. When Philippa first called me with this idea, actually, when Philippa was already in conversation with Carmen Morgan, who I believe many of you might have already encountered out of the other at TCG as part of their Diversity and Inclusion Institute, but also because she is a national leader in the conversation around issues of diversity, inclusion, and equity in the American theater and about helping us progress the conversation to a point where we move beyond diversity to talk about inclusion, which is a very different thing. You know, I'd always say if we talk about how diversity is a given, this is a diverse country, this is a diverse world, but inclusion is active. It has to be created, it has to be fostered, and it has to be maintained. And so how do we as arts institutions create the environment in which inclusion is not only possible, but it is desirable for our survival as an art form? And so I was very excited for this opportunity. OSF has been blessed with having artistic directors who in their own way have been trying to open the door to having the conversation about artistic representation, about cultural authenticity, about not propagating problematic narratives on the stage in over the years with various levels of success. And we find that even with the best of intentions, with even, you know, our growing awareness of how unconscious and conscious biases work upon us as people, we still found that even with the best of intentions, we were putting work on the stage that we would realize afterwards, oh, I think we fell into that trap. And so how do we as artists, first of all, translate the conversation about diversity, inclusion, equity, about social justice into art to find the terminology, to define the concepts, to offer, I don't even want to call it advice because I think one of the things that we're really starting to uncover as we try and feel out the edges of the situation as we're trying to define it is that it's actually much bigger. And with every rock that we pull out, we uncover something else. There's a danger in believing that we have answers to offer. And instead, I think we both hope that this is a platform for conversation. And this is a competition that we want to have with you because you are all artists in your own situations in your own environments. And the questions that you have might be different from what we as resident dramaturgs at large institutions might be facing. So, you know, I spoke up a shared, I think that like the idea of case studies, much like how a business school for example would look at situations in various enterprises with certain individuals, things that happen with audiences, things that happen with guest artists working at regional theaters, conversations around kinds of plays and what makes a good play. Let me tell you how loaded that is. And for, you know, us as dramaturgs who, let's face it folks, objectivity is an illusion. We walk into a rehearsal room with the people that we are. And so how do our identities foster or hold back the conversation? I think it's something that is valuable for us to engage in as artists together in the field. Great. Thank you very much, both of you. I'm going to move on if we could to Catalan. If you could, whose project is around dance dramaturgs and if you could speak sort of an opening statement about dance dramaturgs in your sense of its importance and... Well, the point I want to make first of all is that dance dramaturg is not a European import to North America. The role of the dance dramaturg evolved simultaneously and around the same time over here as it happened in Europe. The development of the role of the dance dramaturg in the Americas emerged from the seismic cultural shift that took place in the 1960s and gained momentum in New York City, San Francisco and other urban centers and spread across the nation. One of the New York City hubs of this artistic revolution was the Judson Dance Theatre, the birthplace of postmodern dance. The birth of dance dramaturgies in the United States can be located near the origin of these collaborative interdisciplinary processes. The history of the emergence of the dance dramaturgs ruled in America originates from collaborative processes and cross art forms. Dance dramaturgies and the new role of the dance dramaturg appears to have grown from the meeting of theater, dance and other art forms and of those cross genre or site-specific performances where physicality and theatricality were brought together, their possibilities were further explored and the borders of theater, dance and visual art were blurred. I also think that the artists working at Judson Dance Theatre discovered collective dramaturgy well before the term was coined. Their work has influenced the way today's dance dramaturgs in America think and work. And it's not only that the group's work changed the landscape of contemporary dance, its aesthetics and its dramaturgy, but also that there were two relationships within the group that can be considered dramaturgical and I just want to quickly refer to Cunningham and Cage's relationship and also critic Jill Johnstone's work who reviewed Judson from the inside as a participant or observer of the work being made and I can't think of, can't have thinking of lessings very, very similar role of being the inside a critic brought into the process and reviewing and reflecting on the work from within the company. In Canada, well by two decades later the job of the dance dramaturg was forming too with the driving force behind it being the Toronto Independent Dance Enterprise and the collective invited artists to work with them and one of them was Didi Kugler whose work with TIDE in 1986 and 7 was some of the earliest work by a dramaturg in dance in Canada. And alongside the ones already mentioned today there are established dramaturgs who have contributed hugely to dance dramaturgy in North America and we've got some of them sitting here Mark Lord, we've got Elisabeth Langley, Catherine Ruffetta, Jacob Zimmer. So there is a very, very rich tradition of dance dramaturgy in America. There are many choreographers, Jack Fever, Doug Alkins, Dean Moss, Ralph Lemon working with dramaturgs. With one dance dramaturgy conference held in Toronto and York in 2011 and two forthcoming books on the subject written or edited by North American authors and I'm thinking of Phil Hansen and Darcy Collinson's edited volume that's coming out soon dance dramaturgy, most of agency, awareness and engagement and the other is Catherine Profetta's monograph that's coming out later this year with the dramaturg motion. North America is in the forefront on the discourse on dance dramaturgy. Just briefly about my project, the importance of my project is and my research is to build on this knowledge and help disseminate ideas and practices as well as contribute to the further development of the vocabulary of dance dramaturgy and I will talk about it later. Great, thank you very much. I'll pass the mic along and Janice and Jessica. If I could ask you to speak to multidisciplinary dramaturgy which your project lives inside and yeah. I think we're the only project here that's actually very specifically performance oriented, the creation of work around a specific project that is Jessica Grindstaff's Brain Child. I am actually here as a former recovering completely text based dramaturg who in recent years I've moved more and more into multidisciplinary work so I don't have an overview of the leading figures in multidisciplinary dramaturgy in the Americas over the past decades. I only have insight into my own emergence into that field over the past several years. I spent many years as the director of play development at the MacArthur Theatre in Princeton and subsequently as Senior Program Associate and Senior Dramaturg for the Sundance Theatre Program where I still work but since leaving the institutional theatre in 2005 partly by Hook and by Crook and partly by Luck and Inclination my work as a freelance dramaturg began taking me into realms that were more or less previously unknown to me although I had worked in musical theatre work as a dramaturg at Sundance, MacArthur and elsewhere. So for me this has actually been a wonderful experience, a kind of expansion of horizons in my work as a dramaturg with obvious links to the kind of inquiry that I've always been interested in specifically from a sort of structural and organizational point of view that's a bias I have I guess in all the work that I take on but I think it's been an interesting development in my own work that the past few years have seen me begin to move into the realm of dance dramaturgy as well as my first opera and now with Phantom Lim in a hugely collaborative highly multidisciplinary work called Memory Rings which by the way just opened in Nashville last weekend it's the first stop in what will be upcoming landings for that elsewhere including UCLA next April and BAM in November of 2016 we can talk more about methodologies and I actually am here I think in a way as in to speak against specialization one of the comments that resonated with me in my own it was actually Twitter you know how Twitter one thing leads to another and there you are reading something that you didn't intend to read I came across a conversation actually about dance dramaturgy that took place in Amsterdam in 1999 and one of the participants in that conversation perhaps known to you named Hildegard Devoist said something that immediately made her my champion a lot of the conversation was about different methodologies in dance dramaturgy and the different kinds of roles that dance dramaturgs play as opposed to how they work in other disciplines and even though she's speaking specifically of dance dramaturgy I felt that what she had to say was not only resonated with my work in multidisciplinary work but also just as a dramaturge in whatever I'm doing she says I've worked with different choreographers and directors and I feel that it works best when I'm not really needed somehow when I'm not the embodiment of something that is missing because it feels like if I'm not necessary in fact then I have a sort of freedom and a playground to stand on and for me that not knowing that lack of expertise that inauthenticity has been completely freeing for me Jessica do you want to talk a little bit about getting together on memory rings before we move on? Sure when I met Janice I had a piece of paper with 12 words written on it about four of which were repeated and I had just finished a two week residency where I was to write our play and that was what I came out with and I was so excited and I showed it to our producer and I had read several books and listened to lots of music and had a whole wall filled with papers and strings and it looked like a crazy person's studio and this was the culmination of my work that I was so proud of and then she said that's great I want to introduce you to this dramaturge and the next step was that we were to go to a residency the Robert Rauschenberg residency program and Janice came and was very quiet for the first week or so and actually kind of filled me with confidence over my one page 12 word script and that was the beginning of our journey which is not concluded but premiered and will continue to work on it until it opens next spring in UCLA and I'm proud to say that we now have I think the script is 16 pages it's mostly stage directions the only word in the script is atchoo what's the other line? who is this? so to me it's been a great success and I can't imagine ever working on another project without her and I don't know how else to speak to multi-disciplinary dramaturgy but that's it you're living inside it thank you Heidi and Jan can I ask you to speak to inclusion from your point of view and the state of it and the instigating moment to mark for now I'd like to start just by describing playwrights theater center we are a theater company a non-producing theater company whose mission is to find and advance Canadian playwrights and we do our work on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish people and it's a part of our cultural practice to always acknowledge the territory where we're working and this is sort of emblematic of my experience of our project I failed to discover the precise names of the peoples whose territory we're on right now beyond the historical experience of the Algonquin people and further north the Iroquois people so if anyone knows that and can shout it out can you say it again the Lenape thank you so I would like to acknowledge that we're working on the territory of the Lenape people right now in Canada the Truth and Reconciliation Commission just finished its work which is the beginning of a very big project of work to move through the reconciliation of a cultural genocide that has not ended in Canada and my experience working and learning from Indigenous practice certainly laid the groundwork for my understanding of how limited PTC's practice has been with regard to inclusion particularly for artists with a lived experience of disability my experience also comes from my family my mother is adaptive phys ed professor so adaptation and relationship to experience of disability has been her life's work and my uncle lived with cerebral palsy and I was involved in his end of life care so I have some family roots which I have discovered I mean not very much in terms of my own ability to practice inclusion in my own practice practice however it did do something to cultivate a certain willingness to come towards these questions so partly in response to a theatre engagement project that I've been part of in Vancouver and it has as one of its pillars diversity I was very aware that inclusion and the experiences of people with disabilities was not a part of that conversation and so when the BLI grants were announced I thought about what I might be able to do from the platform of PTC and I called Jan Derbyshire who's been a collaborator to me for a number of years through PTC and we talked about what we might be able to do together so we came up with the ACLAB project a hacker approach to inclusion and Jan will discuss what that terminology means but that's been the impetus for conversations that will lead to a process in the fall to apply creatively the discoveries that we've been making together and this has been very much a process of learning for myself in conversation and while we were talking about what we would talk about today I said yes it's been making a process of making my own learning visible and then we talked about using a different word thinking about who might be in our audience who might be listening on HowlRound and it's just one small example of what the conversations are that Jan and I have been having which are about listening to my own experience and limitations and being curious about how to shift my assumptions so I'm hoping that by engaging in this process and as we move forward sharing that process more widely it will give other practitioners access to their own process of questioning and I'd like to also acknowledge that these conversations are taking place at PTC in a space that is not accessible so the process the state where we're at in Vancouver and I think in the rest of Canada is that we're working from individually ableist practices that we're working from ableist companies and within an ableist community and that until we begin to recognize that and understand this as a social justice question that we can approach through our practice but that's not the extent of what we need to do I think that to me is our beginning place that we have a very very long way to go and within the resources that we have this is the time to begin Thanks Heidi Mark, could I ask you to speak to the impetus to create the BLI grant and some context about your observations on the first round and then we'll come back and hear a little bit more about the details of where each group is at right now Well, you have in the your conference folder a two-page document that describes the grant, the fellowship and I'm sure you've gone online in the site and everything so you've seen details and you know how to apply for it so I don't want to go into too much detail the impetus for it some of it's personal obviously but I suppose the starting point in many ways again I said a little while ago I have a 30 year love affair with this organization I saw a little earlier Alexis Green in the audience who was the first president of LMDA if you have never met her she's right there in a red sweater so touch royalty if you will I bring that up in not a casual way part of the impetus for it was over 30 years and this is personal and not personal is that with any organization it goes through cycles it goes through ebbs and flows energy flowing up down sideways whatever I've witnessed some extraordinary moments I've witnessed some ebbs I've witnessed incredible moments where someone like Anne Catania suddenly says we need to do this we need to do that what ideas do you have and so extraordinary moments happen where the university caucus happens the script exchange happens dramaturgy source book happens production notebooks happens this man and his guidelines for God's sakes one of the most extraordinary pillars of this organization and many many other things highlights extraordinary events and a couple years ago and part of this again was personal and no one's interested in my personal life I'm not interested anymore why would you be I had moved from Texas to New York and Cindy from Texas Cindy Sorrell the board chair a commenter I said I wanted to talk with you Cindy and on a day when I was walking across Manhattan and she called me I was in Bryant Park and it was loud and crazy and noisy and birds were flying overhead but it was a summer day I could barely hear her on my smartphone and she asked what I wanted and I said I felt the organization needed some new energy it was at that moment I felt that I felt my interpretation maybe totally wrong that it needed something it needed to be propelled forward at this moment and she said what do you want to do and I said and again this is from those of you who know me it was my own little puny personal metaphor I want to give it artistic oxygen and I said I want to give it a donation and it became the Bly Creative Capacity Grant Fellowship and I was blessed you know it was easy to just exercise one's hand it's even easy to have some ideas to come up with a phrase on the spot you know she was saying what does this mean and I came up with phrases like to give critical support to projects that address and no one knows that's what I said on the spot projects that will give to others and have an impact on others and go beyond the present moment to an invisible future I said that on the spot with all this noise in Bryant Park but that's what I knew that's what I understood and and that would have meant nothing except for this incredible group of people of Beth Dicker's Brian Court, Liz Engelman, Jeff Pohl, Vicki Stroit and others too who talked to me about this who drove it forward step by step by step and this incredible Cindy Sorrell, oh my god please give her a hand because she drove it forward the rest of the group including Brian and Liz who really helped on the guidelines were extraordinary it would not have gotten beyond the 50 yard line the metaphorical 50 yard line without them so you can thank me for doing this exercise with my hand but the fact is they made the difference you can see I have great people what could I say and the great thing is these applications I'm sure the great thing is these applications there were 60 61 applications we didn't know how many applications were going to come in we were stunned that there were these applications and that they were not about another line on a CV or resume that's what was so thrilling about these applications and they had a genuine curiosity about them for staging events for the stage and for breaking down invisible or visible events that prevent artists staff and audiences from expressing themselves and that was truly moving and I mentioned the word curiosity a second ago and about the same time a couple years ago two things happened and you remember this September 2012-13 something like that Voyager 1 which had been launched in the late 70s NASA Carl Sagan was part of that was sent into outer space as an ambassador to the future if you will with a whole bunch of messages on it and some time or a year or two ago it passed the heliosphere going out of the solar system some scientists say it's not quite there yet but who's debating it's not going to reach the nearest star for 40,000 years that's why it's a little equivocating it's a very lonely hopeful messenger for us also about the same time came out this amazing again connected to Sagan television program new version, new iteration of it of cosmos led by Neil deGrasse Tyson getting to the point stay with me deGrasse Tyson's second and third episode got talking about revolutionary scientists who each time they made a breakthrough astronomers, whoever they were looked around and said how big is your universe how big is it and I remember hearing him say that on this PBS program and my brain stopped and I went yeah how big is my dramaturgical universe each time I work I've got to make it bigger how big is the staging the stylistic investigation is it big enough I've got to ask larger questions is my dramaturgical universe taking into consideration also the societal issues as well out there I talked about curiosity a moment ago one of our most important traits and this is very connected to everything that's going on with these and I think it's why our group that selected it a group of six people were drawn to these there was a great curiosity about human beings again not about a CV line a curiosity about humans and when we're curious and when we're not curious I should say we begin to ignore each other ignoring leads to exclusion not inclusion which leads to a lack of empathy which leads to hate which can lead to violence as we've witnessed in Ferguson in Brooklyn and now Charleston and whether or not you believe we are that country we need to incite and we need to arouse with other artists curiosity through dramaturgical impulses and acts of dramaturgy and we need to insist that other stories are told and shown and that flag must be waved and not taken down Thank you Thank you Mark I'm going to pass this back down to to Jan to ask you to talk about the act lab and you know a snapshot of where it's at and where you want it to get to and then we'll go and get a snapshot from each of them and I'll give you a little warning just so we can kind of keep towards our time but thank you, Jan Thank you and thank you Mark and I've forgotten your name, we just met Thank you I was really nervous until I get nervous talking about theater when I can't sense any emotion so thank you for that thank you for part of my work involves reclaiming the full spectrum of emotion back from in the days where it used to be a good thing to have an artistic temperament so thank you for that and also thank you Mark for this grant, for the reminder of the value of curiosity which is what I wanted to thank you about these grants because outside of the academic framework it allows that curiosity to stay front and center and it also takes away the pressure of having something to prove which is where discoveries are made so the act lab is a approach to inclusion so hackers generally are associated with the computer world and they generally look at a system and see that it's not working as well as it could or it could be used for something else they don't invent something new they look at the pieces and they talk amongst themselves and amongst people in the world they just start conversations and they figure out how to reconfigure a system so that's what we wanted to do with this whole idea of inclusion and diversity as it pertains to a persons with perceived or acknowledged disabilities it's kind of like a kaleidoscope we don't want to throw away our expertise or our privilege or our power or our knowledge it's a little piece that we have unfortunately we have to get used to those pieces floating all around and working together to bring them into focus maybe for 10 seconds or so so we're doing a lot of things right we're doing a lot of things right however we need to really I think place this lack of inclusion in terms of persons with disabilities into a proper light and I wanted to read to you an employment call from one of the most progressive theater companies that I know that shall remain anonymous but I just wanted to read you the call and to say that they really do answer to this kind of work and this kind of employment Blank Theater is a company founded on the principle of diversity and we hope to receive applications from candidates with a broad range of backgrounds including not limited to race, ethnicity indigeneity gender identification sexual orientation class and physical ability in parentheses though our office is on the second floor and not wheelchair accessible so why I mentioned the kaleidoscope is because it doesn't these conversations that I've been having with people who are involved but we have to start from where we are and we have to take responsibility for the weight of what is in that parentheses we have to have these conversations and what I appreciate is this is not a condition that I'm particularly comfortable in or at my best in where I operate best is one-on-one conversations and so that's the form that the beginning of our work has been taken based on the idea that comes from inclusive design which is just skewing our perspective slightly and beginning to think of disability as a condition and not a trait so in that way I can acknowledge to myself that the conditions here today don't allow me to be at my best which is okay it still allows me to be here I can still negotiate it but some people cannot so these very conditions are keeping voices out the conversations have been starting at based on I had to change my conditions of working because of a brain injury that didn't allow me to work in the same way so I had to figure out I had to hack my own practice I had to figure out how to write again and how to talk to other people again and how to adjust working hours and how to accept that I couldn't do things the way they're supposed to be done and that led me to working with artists with disabilities and all those conditions all the conditions of working what inclusive design also brings us those conditions can benefit us all if we change them the example that they use in the built environment is a curb cut so we're all familiar with the little dip in the sidewalk that was originally designed to help people in mobility devices get around easier be able to just cross the sidewalk where able-bodied people cross the sidewalk but we've also benefited cyclists love it people with baby carriages love it and any kind of wheeled device loves it so we're talking about these conditions how can we change the conditions not arbitrarily but by working with this idea of not one size fits all but one size fits one so for my particular way of communicating this is a great way for me to get ideas across so that's one change so what we're going to do is by having these conversations and recording what we're coming up against it's empowered me to go and have other one-on-ones with artistic directors and gatekeepers we're recording all of these conversations and the things we're coming up against it's also going to allow us to work on a project called one size fits one hacking the normal playwrights colony and putting people in one-to-one relationships a person with a perceived or acknowledged disability and an artist who does not identify that way we're going to be yeah reporting back on all those conditions on an online free format open source format called scaler and if you want to look at it it's quite awesome it's kind of for non-linear thinkers you can kind of go all over which I appreciate and also you can follow a path which other people I work with appreciate so the final challenge I'd like to invite you into this project that can become you know a bit of ethnography a bit of self-study for all of us is just to commit to observing your own practices of making and see if you can identify how you've made any changes or adaptations or chosen preferences that help you work better it's just an interesting experiment to see if you could share that knowledge with others and also to make a commitment to work with a person one person this year with a perceived or acknowledged disability just one person thanks thanks very much Jan Janice can ask you to speak to your project and I know you just had an opening happy opening and it's very touched Jessica I think you should give the sort of capsule description of what the piece is which we haven't even we sort of skipped over that piece and it's so fascinating in both the subject matter and the degree of collaboration and the fact that you come from a visual art background make this I think an unusual piece how do you describe memory rings memory rings is second in a trilogy and the thread through the trilogy is humans relationship to nature in the environment and the first one was called 69 degrees south and it was about started from the story of Ernest Shackleton and the endurance expedition and Antarctica and my partner and I are fierce researchers from Antarctica to research for this piece and gather visual and audio and work with scientists there we often work with scientists in our work so that was number one and we worked on it for four years and when we finished it we thought what did we like about that and what will we do next and the inquiry into how people relate to the environment what seems to be kind of for us one of the most important conversations all the other conversations that are being had on the stage right now so I can't actually remember where the anchor of this tree came in but there is a tree in the eastern Sierra it's called the Methuselah and it's almost 5000 years old and so we thought well let's look at how people's relationship to nature has changed to the forest specifically over the past 5000 years and is it different or is it the same so it brought us to the epic tale of Gilgamesh which is I don't think I need to tell people in this room about that but a story that was carved into stone tablets right at the same time that this seed was germinating so that kind of seemed like the perfect story to start with and weave through the show and then we started to pick up some other fables and fairy tales and then have written a kind of new fable that we used throughout the show so we are visual artists and my husband is a composer and we work with puppetry and dance and video and we kind of just like throw a lot of tableaus and a lot of ideas together because it feels right and we do tons of research and we went on an expedition to find this tree which we did but we really need I think someone like Janice to who I would say would almost say as a co-writer with me on the show as well as our dancers there's a lot of improvisation, our choreographer I mean everyone is writing and we have a lot of very strong and kind of beautiful minds in the room doing that at the same time but someone's got to kind of be accountable I mean obviously I have to but I'm not always doing that because I get really wrapped up in the sort of beauty of things sometimes and so it's been really amazing to have almost always amazing to have this person sometimes all I have to do is just look across the room and know that what we're doing isn't going to fly or is and I've just been constantly surprised by the relationship and what you've brought to the piece you probably have more intelligence not at all just in terms of where we are that the development of this piece has been a huge challenge and even the dramaturgical model of how this piece has moved ahead was an unusual one because it's not a commission from a single institution it doesn't have the backing of a single producing organization so it's been developed through a series of workshops and residencies really put together by our producer Mar Isaacs who has been sort of single handedly designing a way we should also acknowledge the dramaturgy of creative producing because she has been responsible for crafting a way forward for this piece when collaborators are spread all over the country and because of the multi-disciplinary nature of the work authorship does not happen except in the room with all of the ingredients and everything available which is why when we had finally our first three performances in Nashville we felt like oh now we see where we need to go now we see what the work ahead of us is because it doesn't the story isn't constructed in space and time until all of it is available to us which is just another challenge to any of us working in Newark so yes, stage one is done but lots of questions we've already had our first post-mortem to everyone around the table throwing those big questions up for continued discussion the only thing I want to add about our dramaturgical relationship that has that's made this I think particularly fruitful and endlessly fascinating for me is it took me a while to realize that you think spatially and I think temporally and that's the intersection I think of building meaning in space and why we continue to need to figure out what a shared vocabulary is because what I'm looking for in delivery on a kind of expectation in the building blocks of the piece is different from your sense of completion and vision in two dimensions and I think that's just a fascinating aspect of a dramaturgical relationship that has opened these methodological doors in my brain that are eager for you know continue poking great thank you very much both of you what's beautiful about the Bly grants this year is that they're all about process and they're all engaged in the middle of it right now Katelyn you're heading towards publication of course did you fill us in on the progress on the publication and your work on it? I want to give a bit of a bigger context before getting there just briefly Andre Lopetsky noted that dance has gained an increasingly catalyzing role for the arts throughout the second half of the 20th century and became an inescapable force in the art scenes of the arts decade so my research builds on that and I want to bring awareness to this field of dramaturgy because I think that it can inform and informs other trends of theater making and performance and I also wanted to encourage international discourse and exchange of ideas on this subject and to further develop the starting point is the rehearsal diary of the first ever dance dramaturge Raimund Höyge he worked for the Tanztheater Wuppertal that's Pinabasch's dance company and he started his career as a journalist then he became the dramaturge of the company and then later 10 years later when he left the company he developed a career as a dancer and choreographer but throughout that 10 years he didn't give up writing and he continued working as a journalist as well and he published essays and articles about the company's work including the diary documenting the way the company worked and today we take many things for granted and we think about collaborative processes that we go into the rehearsal room and improvise and ask those questions well those days Pinabasch was experimenting with that it comes in Europe at least it comes from her and so it's a very important piece of document and Raimund Höyge wrote about it Bandoneon that was the piece they were working on in 1980 when he wrote this diary presenting the work week after week and he wrote Bandoneon was one of my first pieces as dramaturge for Pinabasch and as a writer I followed the rehearsals from the first days of the creation until the premiere of the piece in December 1980 so the aim of this project is to get this diary published in English translation the translator is Penny Black and the publisher is Oberon Books and the book is coming out next April, April 2016 and I was also given the opportunity to write an introductory essay to accompany the diary just to contextualize it and write some more about dramaturgy and the research also took me I had the pleasure of meeting Raimund Höyge and I could interview him so this interview will be included in the book there's one more thing I wanted to say that I really I am very proud and grateful to be a Bly fellow and I took seriously what Marc thought and wrote about this fellowship and this grant so I thought that I should bring it back to the LMDA and the LMDA member should benefit from that so I built in this research project a workshop where I extend my research and invite the LMDA members to be part of this research and contribute to that and we had this dance dramaturgy research and action workshop yesterday at Gibney Dance and Jessica and Arie Robinson choreographer and her three dancers through this journey and it was a wonderful evening I am very grateful to everyone who came what I am taking away from this workshop is that it was wonderful to allow the dramaturgs to come out from the corner of the rehearsal room and offer them the dance floor and just realize that as a dramaturg you also utilize your mind and your body when you work and it was nice to free the dramaturgs and nice to see how they enjoyed this freedom and the other thing that I am going to take away from this workshop is how seamlessly those people fitted in the process they were 25 people some of them who have never worked with a choreographer before yet in their dramaturgical toolboxes that they could utilize and that was really, really beautiful to see that choreography and dramaturgy we share a vocabulary and this is the vocabulary I intend to further develop with my research so thank you to all who came and I hope that the book will contribute to this discourse and will inform contemporary theater making and performance great, thank you very much Lydia, thank you Fantastic so Phillip and I have been in conversation about this project for several months now and we're in still early phases of the project but we are rapidly moving towards the more active information gathering phase of the project because one of the things that we realize in talking with each other about the situations that we have faced in our respective institutions as resident artists as dramaturges working in collaboration with artists in the room and also as staff members at institutions that are striving towards putting diversity and inclusion into action is that for as many examples and in case studies as we could come up with we knew that we were only scratching at the surface and to the extent that we realized that we really needed to engage all of you in helping us to formulate what exactly are the questions that you are hungering to have answers for what is the terminology that we can help provide that would advance the conversation because one of our very earliest conversations about what we thought this resource would help to address would answer what I think we were talking about a lot about what's happening in the personal room, what's happening with the stories on stage and the more we opened up the lens we realized we were talking about dramaturging the entire American theater and so how could we even begin to address that was a big question for us on a parallel track to the project at hand this diversity and inclusion handbook I've also been working very closely with Carmen Morgan who is about to launch what's called the Art Equity Institute which is dedicated to training a cadre of well trained facilitators across the country to talk about issues of diversity and equity in arts institutions recognizing that without being able to address issues of equity we are putting our art form at risk we cannot continue doing business as usual as the world is changing around us and so I'm very happy to be part of that team of trainers along with Ty Defoe from theater communications group Michael Robertson of the LARC and Leslie Ishii from center theater group alongside Carmen Morgan and Nigel Porter of Art Equity so if you haven't yet seen information about that I absolutely encourage you to look it up thank you Lydia just a couple of comments about things that you might be interested in recently I've been writing little pieces or partly sometimes for howl round and various outlets where I think about even say journeys like Aphelia's journey in Hamlet which an actress friend of mine called the most unearned journey in the whole of Shakespeare so she basically comes in she's depressed and then she kills herself and so when we think about a diverse world can we think about embodying Aphelia in any other way than a 19 year old beautiful asian you and can we give her more of an emotional journey so that's one question that people might have in other words how do these how do I practically apply diversity Lydia has been working for the first time at OSF with a wheeled actress now there's the physical actuality of how she gets on and off the stage and then there's the question if there's the virtuosity of her performance can easily overwhelm all other considerations so then how do we factor that actress and all of the relationships that go on around her into the overall performance that's a really fundamental and complex dramaturgical question so we really want to start being a resource for dramaturgues questions for scenarios that you may have which we can sometimes we may get several that are similar which we can distill into one or two scenarios basically so people talked a lot yesterday about fear and about a lot of that has to do with seeming to be an expert and yet worrying about whether one's answer is going to be enough is going to be alienating is going to be too much so that's really at the core of what we're looking to do and it's very exciting to be preparing this handbook last little question do you have a time frame for the completion at least of the first edition of it? In the next six months because we've been writing a lot of materials already that we're sort of banking up to put into a frame but what we really look for now in the next few months is and also anybody who writes in will be cited so you will be a part of the conversation that is formally cited in the handbook as well and that can actually be a form of networking for contributors and how could anyone access it when it's released? Well that's what we've got to talk to Beth about because it's going to be online and published through the LMDA Yeah absolutely I think in crafting this project one thing that we were very clear about is that this is never going to have an end point the kind of resources the way that the discourse is developing and evolving in recent years the discourse has evolved beyond race ethnicity and gender for example to start encompassing new diversity to start encompassing non-normative physicality even the use of negative language to describe a certain sense of being has been a huge shift using an online platform to begin also allows us enormous flexibility to continue to add materials and if we reach a point where this becomes more of our like a wiki project it'd be wonderful because that also it creates a sense of investment because this is something that we all that we want you all to feel invested in to create this together Part of what I think appealed this project why it appealed to us was this group did not present themselves as experts and that was really critical they said we are in many ways learning and we intend to invest in learning as we're doing this as well and that this is not a set document this is going to be an evolving document and that actually made us feel this was worth investing in that was important because of the nature of this project sorry just to hold for one more second just so you have an idea of what you might write into us about I've been recently writing a piece for a British journal on adaptation of King Lea called The Shadow King so Lea is adapted both linguistically and in its whole scenario against this sort of red dust Australian background we've got Regan sitting barefoot having sent off her drunken father her husband's in jail and it's just it's a magnificent production so adaptations like that how does that fit into the conversation a lot of what artistic directors say at the moment about casting is we want to cast open up casting open doors that were formally closed but then we move into the whole question of well what about intentional casting not just that more familiar colourblind model so that's a real question that dramaturgs will have moving forward great thank you very much I wanted to ask the same question about the accessing the community accessing the information the content you generate over the course of the next period of time so that's the open source scaler model that comes out of a big university in California sorry I can't remember but it can be continuously added to and paths can be found through it and so it will be an online continuing growing resource open source available to all great thank you very much we have a few minutes are there any questions from the house anyone with questions about any of these individual projects or how you might access them Saturday afternoon yes thank you hi thank you very much I'm not familiar with this problematic narrative notion could you help me with that hi so in talking about problematic narratives and of course given this could be an entire conference in and of itself the notion that it's not enough to just have for example let us say actors of colour on a stage the characters that they are being asked to embody the stories they are being asked to portray also factors into what we are perpetuating what we are problematizing or what we are upholding sometimes so for example it's not enough to say that we have a diverse acting company or a diverse ensemble on stage if the actors of colour are up there playing maids playing garden workers playing criminals or playing characters that they have maids it's not enough just to give you one example from OSF and this was something that we own as learning experience for ourselves in what happens when even we are not conscious of what we are doing we had a musical that we developed a love of musical that came out of a company impulse created by company artists that went on to receive a full blown production at OSF a piece inspired by comic books it had such a verb the music was incredible halfway through the rehearsal process we realized because one of the actors raised it that the heroes of the piece were all cast by white actors and all the actors of colour on the ensemble were playing prostitutes pimps and villains and as you can imagine there was huge emotion in that rehearsal room because these were actors that were invested in the characters that were created that they were creating they were invested in the process and the joy of collaboration but there was a real heartache in a sense of not feeling safe in racing the have you noticed that yes we have an incredibly diverse cast but what are you asking us to tell what are you asking us to portray and so that issue is not unique to the theatre it is it's happening in television it's happening in film and we all know the saying seeing is believing and as such how does theatre, television and film help to perpetuate the societal problems that we are seeing play out on the streets that we are seeing play out in political and legal policy how laws are being carried out it's a cycle and as such the way to interrupt that cycle is to be aware of it and to ask the questions and so that's what I mean by problematic narratives about who are the voices who are the performers what are the stories that we are telling when are we upholding problematic stereotypes and when are we subverting them it's a slippery slope and when we are doing that how do we mark those places while keeping the places of ambiguity that are so essential to great theatre so we don't want to tell people police how people are staging we want to take note of what's happening and still provide that ambiguity it's such a tricky thing for every drama too absolutely great thank you very much any other questions or then I'm going to end it on that inspiring and beautiful note thank you very much everyone thank you to all of our participants take 15 come back for a short and snappy AGM