 Hello and welcome everyone to the anti-racist strategies in Dramaturgy roundtable. I want to start with a few thanks and acknowledgements before we begin. I want to say thank you to the Society for Theatre Research for their generous support in making this event happen. Thank you to Howe Round for partnering with us to platform this roundtable and thank you to my colleagues at the Dramaturgy Network including Tomo, Sarah and Catalin for helping to make this happen and of course thank you to the audience and participants without whom this event wouldn't be possible. My name is Lee. I am one of the organisers of this year's Dramaturgy Network event. I'm a writer, dramaturg and educator and I mostly work in a freelance capacity across organisations and companies to support the development of new work. I also want to briefly introduce, you can't see them necessarily, but I want to introduce Adam, our technical wizard who's going to be working away in the background to make sure things run smoothly and I also want to briefly introduce our panellists, although they will obviously introduce themselves in more detail shortly. We have Lynette Goddard, Kane Huspins, Samantha Ellis and Sudha Bhukhar joining the session this evening. I want to give some really brief context for the audience and listeners who perhaps happen, who are perhaps not familiar with the starting point for this session where it first began. So this event was organised to help build up a dialogue, started in an open letter circulated in March 2021 by over 140 artists from the global majority. This was titled We Need to Talk About Dramaturgy. The signatories addressed 11 key points about dramaturgical practice and what they defined in the letter as, quote, patterns of injury, unquote, experienced by artists of colour whose work had come into contact with Eurocentric dramaturgical practices. The letter went on to address several topics including accountability, dramaturgical processes in script and new work development, the commissioning process, the predominance of so-called objective criteria or universal criteria for what makes a great play and all of these aspects of the letter are what we will be covering this evening in this discussion. So this roundtable really is about bringing together writers, artists, scholars and theatre makers from the global majority to consider the question, how do we collectively move beyond the narratives and forms of Eurocentric dramaturgy and towards a decolonised model of creating and developing work collectively. We want to ask the question as well, what does change look like and how can dramaturgical practice, new or established, help shape this change? Before I introduce the, before the panelists introduce themselves I should say, just a few reminders. This roundtable is 90 minutes in length. There will be a 15-20 minute section for questions and answers and it will be archived and recorded as well. So if you know of anybody who can't be here this evening to watch it live then there will be a version of this available on the DN website to following broadcast. And that's everything from me. I'm going to hand over now to Lynette Goddard who is our chair. I'm going to bring them in so just give me a moment. Lynette, over to you. Hi Lee, thank you, hello everybody, thank you and welcome again to everybody who's watching this event. I'll be your chair for this evening. Yes, my name is Professor Lynette Goddard and I'm a professor of Black Theatre and Performance at the Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance at Royal Holloway University of London. And my research interests are really around Black British, for most years it's been playwriting, so Black British playwriting looking at questions like identity politics in the plays and questions around kind of race, representation and performance and also looking at Black adaptations of European dramas as well. And I'm currently working on a project that's specifically focused on how we capture the careers of Black British directors, it's particularly about Paulette Randall but also Black British directors, how do we capture their careers. And I'm joined by three speakers, three panellists who I will now invite each to introduce themselves. So we have, first of all, Sudha Bukar from Tomascha, formerly of Tomascha Theatre Company. Hi Lynette and everyone, you know, thank you so much for inviting me to here. Yes, I'm Sudha Bukar and I am an actor, playwright, what I call a slasher, you know, having to do everything that's required to put on theatre. I am the co-founder of Tomascha Theatre Company with Christine London Smith and I've set up my company Bukar Boulevard in 2017 in my post Tomascha freelance career. And, you know, as a dramaturg, although I, you know, found it really difficult to sort of own that term, but you know, I have sort of helped and steered writers, often, you know, all actually writers of colour and mostly doing their debut plays. So I'm sure, you know, we'll talk about that as the discussion goes. Great, thank you, thank you Sudha. And then we have Kane Husbands. Hello everyone and hi Lynette and Lee, thanks for having us and really excited to be here grateful for this space and that this conversation is even happening really. I am a lecturer in performance design and practice at Central St Martin's and I also am the founder of a theatre company called The Pappy Show. The Pappy Show is an ensemble company we focus on training and the majority of our work really that we've performed has been around identity, gender, race. Our next show is called What Do You See? So we're just at the minute in a kind of about to go into rehearsals and that's just part of the Mime Festival to be on in January and that's all about difference and thinking about how do we hold spaces that allow many identities to thrive and what does that look like. So I'm right in the belly of the beast at the moment of thinking about genre material that she is. So it's great to be zooming out and having a white good thing. Thanks Lynette. Great, thank you very much and then our third panelist today is Samantha Ellis. So if you just introduce yourself. Hi, thanks Lynette and hi everyone. Thanks very much for having me. Yes, I'm well mostly a playwright and I've written a lot of plays that have sprung I suppose out of my experience of my parents are Iraqi Jews and they were refugees from Baghdad. So a lot of my work centres on that. I also write books and I work a little bit on film. I work a little bit sometimes as a script editor for film. So I guess I sort of had the dramaturgy from both angles a little bit. Great, thank you. Thank you so much. So yeah, so just as Lee has given in his brief introduction, the session is really in first part and in the large part a response to the open letter. We need to talk about dramaturgy. We'll be focusing on kind of yeah, what is the problem? Let's identify some of the issues, let's reflect again upon some of the challenges that were outlined in the letter and then we'll move on after that to kind of think about the question of change. What does change look like? What needs to happen? Do we have some ideas about how we might decolonise dramaturgy? This is both inside and outside of kind of institutional context and then lastly we'll think about dramaturgical practices. So what practices are there that are currently within dramaturgy that might help or and what practices can we devise? How might those practices need to be remodeled and reshaped so that they can really embrace this question of anti-racism and change and then there'll be about 15 at least 15 possibly a little bit more minutes time for questions from people that are watching. So if you have questions please post them up in the chat and we'll try and get through as many of them as we can. So if we can have all panellists visible and we'll open up this discussion and welcome. Yeah it's good to see your places again. So I think we'll start really with this question of Eurocentric dramaturgy. This idea of us, dramaturgy is helping a writer to get to the best possible play and the kind of question that's in the letter around well what is the criteria for the best? Whose best is the best? Where do we learn what is the best? What kind of values and assumptions are we bringing in? Where have they come from and how might we start to challenge them? I was really interested in the thing saying we're all trained through the Eurocentric gaze so no matter whether you're let's say a white dramaturg or a person of the global majority you're trained through the same structures around what is the best play. So I just wanted to kind of open up first of all with whether anyone on the panel has any responses to this question of the best and how it's either shaped your work or yeah. So I just wonder if anyone's got any thoughts. Kane. Yeah I could go. It's interesting this idea of best because it makes me think of like even form and style and to go like my family are Caribbean so to think of ideas of performance over there it's not a style of like my auntie is sitting around a table telling stories is performance that is where I learned performance and to think that they now need to make it a little bit more authentic or to tone it down a little bit or it's like but in a way that's becoming less authentic in performance style. So the idea of best it's like by whose gaze who's like who's quantifying this concept of best. When we started The Papi Show and our first show Boys I guess we're not from a writer led practice that's not how we make our work necessarily but we do work with dramaturgs visual dramaturgs and to think about how we can't be meaning for an audience and we didn't really have anywhere to take our work because it's not a play so you can't put it on in our theatre and it's not a dance so you can't put it here so really I'm so glad I held tight to the form that we found and that it's found and carved its space because actually we would have adapted and changed and squashed and cut out and made it more words and wrote it all down and lost the identity of what we were effectively trying to say to appeal to somebody else's best. And so do you think then that the fact that you're you said not writer led so the fact that your work is within a maybe a movement forms or forms that maybe the kind of European gaze might not be able to kind of govern do you think that that's helped you to be freer then in your I think so I think having our work is devised and we and we mainly really play ourselves we're not really that often playing characters we've really recognised that our oral histories that's how they got passed down they won't go to the library and hear about our people the people that we might work of so for me us being ourselves and voicing our stories our histories our futures of what we want our worlds to be our utopias is it in a way saying that our lives matter that our stories are important I always come back to this idea that like you could walk around my grandma's house and you would see a museum a black curated museum and art gallery that is photos that she's taken and put up and it's going to be very different to walking around one of the museums in London you won't see it and it's as special so I often think of our work in that same way and it's curated by these artists in a different way and it might not appeal to everybody so interesting because there was also something in the letter around the kind of the the dramaturg's experience and you know if you're a dramaturg that is not of the cultural experience for the work that you're dramaturg in what does it mean when you try to kind of shift that work towards something that maybe you're more familiar with don't know if there's Samantha or or Sudha you have anything to just to say this point a lot of what you're saying came you know completely resonates I mean I think for me you know the journey of running to Marsha you know we've absolutely had to navigate you know the gatekeepers at theatres doing you know work that you know in a sense in context might be Eurocentric in shape but in content it's it's exactly you know us making our own work wanting our own voice and you know a lot of the time what we realise there's a sort of disparity between audiences like if say for example we did a play called Strictly Dandia which was about the Gujarati community during the festival of Navratri the constituency audiences was full of you know Gujarati people who had been part of the engagement and yet the show gets written about and badly reviewed by Charlie Spencer in the telegraph you know who sat in the audience with 500 Gujaratis who loved it and said you know you captured us but the person you know the who's judging what's best is not from that you know so in a sense that climate you know has is changing and it's great to see you know that's just one example but if I could just say a little bit like what I've now come to in my journey you know my personal journey is I'm making a lot of work like co-created within communities and so during lockdown I did a project around the theme of touch which was a revolution and you know welcome collection and actually all of that work was exactly what you say Kane it's like I work a lot from verbatim I put myself in it so you know it's very explicit that this is the voice of real people talking to the writer Suda you know who is in that work and that's the gaze but we're doing it together as it were you know and that's similarly you know the recent show I did with the quara which is final farewell you know where people shared their stories of loss during COVID so so where's the dramaturg and where's the writer and where's the you know in a sense they're all intermingled but anyway that's probably you know I'm going to come back to the question of gatekeeping straight after Samantha has spoken actually yeah mine sort of touches on gatekeeping a bit I mean I've had so many experiences for example at a meeting with a dramaturg who um we were trying to schedule a reading of a play about orthodox Jews and it was December and he wanted to do it at 5 p.m on a Friday and I said well it's we can't can we do it any other day um I said it will be me or I mean I'm not religious but I go to my mum's I was like it'll be even awkward for me but we're not going to get the people come on and um he was not Jewish and he said no but I know the Jewish Sabbath's on the Saturday and I was like um and that situation would you really question a Jewish person in front of you anyway so a lot of situations like that I've had obviously that's not about the content of the play but then you're getting notes from the same person on the plane you start going well you don't even know you haven't even gone on Wikipedia and when I when I corrected you about I mean honestly I'm not religious so if you came up with any more complex I wouldn't dare to correct anyone but I know when the Sabbath is when I corrected you on a very basic fact you you um you you contradicted me so really am I going to take your notes then later into the play I find that that I find difficult because um in terms of the structure of the play I was helped a lot in these meetings but it put me massively on the back foot to start a meeting like that where I had to sort of justify these basic facts that I felt I didn't I shouldn't someone should just go oh sorry I made a mistake as I would because I've made mistakes of course for other cultures um and uh and and then this question of yes I mean as a playwright working in a more I suppose traditional way than anyone and Suda and Kane I mean I am what you know my plays are sort of going through the literary system you know and I don't make my own work um on my uh you know with my own company um so yes the dramaturgs are usually gatekeepers and um sometimes that's amazing because you start your conversations on a very creative level about your idea with someone who is really interested in the literary side of what you're doing um but sometimes then you do feel dismayed I think if it's not working out and um I often feel there's a this question of authenticity is very difficult um so the same play that I wrote about orthodox Jews um I was pushed quite hard to have a white person in the play who the people could explain um so people could say things like oh and by the way it's about to be Friday night so and um I then I put I put someone in um actually I don't regret that because it was a good character but and I gave him a massive journey in an arc and they said oh he's taken over the play I said well I don't think he has he's got the same I don't think he did um but I think they just wanted him there just to kind of go and now is it Friday night and I was like I'm not going to do that I'm not going to do that if he's gonna ask questions and be there then he has to have an arc I'm not having someone to sit like a tool on stage like there's no you can't ask an actor to do that as much as something else it's embarrassing um and then um uh just just um there's lots of sort of um I suppose what is authentic so uh during the first Iraq war I was asked like in for quite a few meetings and I think I could have quite easily got a commission to write a play about the Iraq Jewish community and relations like well if they had been anti-war but many much of the community I mean a lot most of us have changed our minds now and you know I was not in favour at the time but it was the case that most of my community were pro-war they had suffered under Saddam they wanted him out they felt very on a very personal visceral level that it was on balance a good thing and I said well I can't really write that play that's of them all sitting around being anti-war because I have to make it up it wouldn't be authentic and you know it was a very tricky conversation because I said well what about these other ideas I have that wasn't we didn't that we didn't they didn't want those um that kind of speaks into the idea that there's a expectation that that people of the global majority wherever you're from that you will write the play that is that is responding to your specific community I want to just go back to the gatekeeping thing actually because I I until I read that letter I had not thought about the dramaturge as the gatekeeper I think of the gatekeeper as the person who reads the plane decides whether it's going to go on in this venue or not go on in this venue right and that's for me that was the point where the gatekeeping happens right that there's an expectation of the kinds of plays that people will write and someone will decide we will put this play on and we won't put this play on so I just want to tease out a little bit more this idea of the dramaturge as a gatekeeper in the way that you're talking about there you were talking about there came and you've spoken also that you're talking about now Samantha um um tell tell me a little bit more about about about that about I know you're giving some examples of course yeah I mean I'd be very interested to hear how um you know it works at Tamasha because I haven't you know I've worked mainly with sort of you know the more traditional building where um yes my first contact as a playwright will normally be the literary manager and the literary manager will be doing a lot of the dramaturge and I mean I'm often a situation where I'm having a lovely time with a literary manager dramaturging my play and I love them and then the artistic director will come in and not like it and either it won't get programmed and so often the final decision is somewhere else but sometimes in a situation where I'm having an unsatisfactory relationship literary manager I think if I just get past you maybe they could tell me they like it or not so it's gone either way it's gone either way and I have had amazing relationships but yes I mean in terms of your first contact on the person you work with most in my experience in more traditional buildings um that's been the way it's worked for me um Sudeh do you um you know in terms of Tamasha I mean you know that company came up organically from my friendship with Christian London Smith you know and we sort of you know we wanted to make work for ourselves and then it grew and grew and you know eventually like it took 10 years for us to say oh this is much bigger than us you know let's be a full-time company blah blah blah and so in terms of for us you know there was levels of gatekeeping you know people could say we were gatekeepers you know because initially we were trying to just you know find opportunities for ourselves and then it grew from that but every time you know we nurtured new writers new writing you really believed in them you know they would come up with the play that only they could write you still have to you still have to find a space to put it on and that's where we often had the you know what are we calling it the patterns of injury you know we had so many patterns of injury and one of them which happened lots of times and you know it would be the mainstream companies you know like the royal court where they might go oh like you found all these writers oh we love that person's voice but that play that you have spent carefully nurturing them for 18 months is not quite what we want you know so why don't you introduce them to us and why don't we take it over because you don't know how to dramaturg I mean I'm being crude but that happens you know we'll have the writer thank you you know and that play that they're writing in their authentic voice which has their dialect you know it's got sort of Kashmiri Punjabi English it's not quite you know it's not a proper play so that would happen a lot you know and then we would sort of go and you know luckily sometimes the right you and you felt like oh that writer do you want to just say look please you know go to the royal court or go to the river and leave us out of it or actually let's help you because you're already vulnerable you know let's put it on your first play because that's going to be a more sort of satisfying experience you know thank you for that because that actually leads nicely into my next discussion point that I've got because it's around this question of dual audiences and of course like so that writer might may well want to you know people want to get their play on at the royal court you know they want people aspire towards that venue not everybody but people aspire towards that towards that venue and I mean but I think it was when I was doing one of my recent books I came across an article by Paul Gilroy where he was talking about you know black writers who aspire to having their plays put on in the mainstream have to learn how to appeal to dual audiences so they have to learn how to appeal to the let's say predominantly white audience of a venue like the royal court or mainstream venue while also doing the job of bringing in the new black audiences and appealing to those audiences as well so I was very struck by the open letter kind of talking about this question of plays needing to appeal to dual audiences and I guess I'm wondering about what the dramaturg can do or not to do really not to do in order to help the plays or the performances to have this dual appeal I just wonder if you have any thoughts Cain you've been yeah I think I was in I think it's about asking the right questions is it as a dramaturg to be thinking and even that question who who is the audience for this it's like often doesn't get asked it's often like we've already started to work on the piece or we started to restructure and you're like oh one of the fundamental questions of who is this for is being this like I was thinking recently and the tragedy of George Floyd what happened that video became a performance and it's like who needs to see that video because none of my black friends none of the like we didn't need to see that this trauma it was for maybe there are other audiences who did need to see that and that's how I was trying to talk about work but to just assume work is for everybody it's not the right thing actually we make different choices I make different choices if I'm making a children's show so if I'm making another show like I really curate and direct it in a very different way and it's the same with our audiences so I don't think it's wrong for us or it shouldn't be a scary question to think who is the audience who do I want to bring in here and that's where it's so frustrating when it's like you get these people with louder voices and they take up space writing reviews for big publications and you go but you weren't my audience you weren't the person that this was intended to but you've got this platform that speaks to a much larger audience and when we when we were making our first show and it was quite tricky for us to get a space for it that we performed in the vault festival in London it was like you kind of hide that venue for a week and you perform it there and I was it was hard at first but I was it was a gift in the end because it made me think we would do this in the middle of Hyde Park and people would come and make a circle around us and come and watch the performance but it meant that we got to make the art that we that we wanted and that we weren't necessarily shapeshifting from the beginning to try and occupy a space that performed to an audience that was of somebody else's venue. That's so important I hadn't thought about that like because I think there's a thing where there's an assumed sense of who the audience is for X venue or Y venue and that's maybe how then the the dramaturg um tries to work with the writer to to develop the work without saying well actually yeah who are you writing for it's a really important point to reiterate. Samantha I realize I cut you. I um I had a wonderful experience a few years ago I was writing a children's play about an Iraqi girl who wants to go back to Iraq and can't want to go to her mother's country and eventually went all the polka but this workshop was with a Birmingham rep and they just took me to a primary school um in Birmingham and there was um about 60 kids that was quite daunting um and uh and it was we did this amazing exercise where I said okay what are your assumptions about Iraq what are your assumptions about things like flying carpets I had various things I wanted to put in the show some were sort of you know fantasy some are real and um and I wrote them all down and it was so interesting because you never get to ask and if I asked an adult they might think I can't say because that one kid was going dust that's my so I was like okay because I'm like you know an adult wouldn't say that but I knew I was going to be having an audience of six and seven year olds so it's useful to know that they think it's going to be dusty either I can make it dusty I can not make it dust I can do something with the dust you know it was so useful and they were they were you know they were absolutely forthright and I thought oh my god imagine if you could do that with adults but we you know people are too polite it's tricky um and it was just a really interesting because then like the whole show we had those notes we had the notes on the board in rehearsal I mean it was amazing it was so useful we played two and against these you know these um cliches stereotypes assumptions all the way through and it was so much fun and it was so easy because kids were so open to having their minds changed as well um and some of the conversations afterwards were phenomenal um but yeah I mean another thing on this question of who is it for is I often feel like um I've been asked and will you be able to get an audience in from your community and I often think well I'm not the marketing person and maybe I won't um but maybe I don't have to you know maybe it will be an audience of lots of different people maybe it will be a very diverse audience um I love going to see a play about a culture that isn't my own because you feel like you've been invited to someone's house so you might not know anyone from Sri Lanka you go and see a Sri Lankan play and you feel like you've like suddenly like been able to go behind the curtain and you can and it's an amazing thing you know and I feel like you know that I don't mind if people don't if people don't get everything if they don't understand every single word if I use a word in Arabic or use a word in Yiddish fine fine they can have don't get the sense of it won't they I mean you know I feel like I I don't like to think of yes maybe sometimes you'll have jokes that will land you can sometimes hear a laugh in one half the audience and not the other that's okay I think that's okay I mean I might you might find things funny that someone else in this room doesn't that's okay um it might not be cultural it might just be because you find that funny I but it's sometimes it's as cultural and I think that's all right I I think that I don't think everyone has to laugh at every line if it's supposed to be a funny line you know um I try I don't know I try and kind of free myself a bit from this idea that I have to either attract just one audience and get everything right for them or be everything for everyone like it can be a bit in the middle I think it was was it Debbie Sucker Green or someone years ago kind of responding to this kind of question of you know well are there going to be enough black people for example to come and see the show and I think I think pretty sure it was Debbie Sucker Green who says if the marketing do their job well enough then there will be it could be her it could be Winston Pinnock I'm not 100% somebody said that and it was like yeah and also in terms of going to a show and not getting it all I I went to see um Depot Aguilage's uh EILA the first wife and there were jokes there was it was very much um based within Yoruba culture Nigeria it's a culture that as a British Caribbean person I don't know that culture and so the audience who and some of the jokes were in is it Yoruba as well and the audience then would get the joke and then it ripple and I'd almost be checking with the person next to me there were some jokes that I got because they were in jokes for black British black people and you kind of recognise that as a black person but some were very much I didn't get them that was okay I get them by the person next to me that that gets them so um you know why the question on um the marketing person bringing in the audience it's much broader than that it's like but is your venue accessible let's talk about the structures within your venue for why these people don't come here you know what I mean it's not just to put the show on and we'll come doesn't necessarily work like that I mean for me you know I everything I've done are you the audiences are you have you know you're trying to get constituency audiences who are affected in the work that you you know um and you know one of the things we've had to kind of deal with so much over the years was you know in the early years of Tamasha was oh you know um the work speaks you know white writers can say my work speaks you know I don't have to think about my audience I mean I was always amazed as actually really well known playwrights they never think about who it's for but then they can have to you know and and that that becomes one of those things of you know who's benchmark because your your work obviously doesn't speak because you're only speaking to your tribes you know literally had people who are you know who are actually people I would consider as allies you know once been in fact it was about my locker adaptation the house of Wilkie's baby which was the house of Bernadette Alba transposed to Pakistan and you know I had a little bit of Punjabi in it and if you were open it was literally you know the servant is cussing the beggar in Punjabi like you're not you know I'm not trying to you know um disengage white audiences but I had to go on Radio 4 and I was on the back foot to try and explain why my work was not indecisible because it had a bit of Punjabi in it you know and I mean literally this this kind of trope of if your work if your work will transcend and endure because it will speak you know well it's taken me a long time you know to have that confidence to know my work speaks you know it doesn't speak to you because you haven't lent in and opened your ears you know exactly because you're not listening or yeah allowing it in um thank you this is all moving quite nicely so I have two things one thing is around universality but this might that might build into actually the next area actually that um it's not quite formulated but I'm going to jump ahead and maybe we'll come back to this question of universality because it's it's a it's a slight bugbear in my mind sometimes when a when a black playwright for example says well my play's universal and I sometimes I think does it have to be um what what is what are you doing by trying to assert that and I want to tie that in somehow as Sudha has just mentioned um adaptation and uh as I said before we we went live I was a big fan of um Tamasha yes I used to do strictly Dandia as well I saw that as well and I saw Ghost Dance in which was adapted from Therese Wakan and a yearning which was adapted from Yerma Yerma I was in Highs now as a bookish BB and then of course there were the adaptations from like a fine balance um for example that's adapted from um Indian Indian work already so you've got the kind of the adaptations of European plays but also the the adaptations from Indian plays and in the open letter oh yeah 14 songs two weddings in a funeral from the I used to teach my students that the Bollywood film which had no English in it at all but they had to watch it and then the the adaptation I couldn't know so I I love that work so in the open letter I was quite pleased that it sort of talked about adaptations and critics of adaptations and how we kind of what the who are the so you say we're going to adapt something from an Indian novel but a white critic is then going to be the person that judges um its value I just wonder if you want to just open up a little bit on this question adaptation for us as with us yes I mean I think you know you've sort of listed the kind of range of adaptations in the way that you know been involved with you know and I think for us it was always it's always an artistic impulse you know that makes you do something so it's not like you're cynically trying to say oh this will be great for audiences you know you it first of all you know you love the book and then you know that it will make a really good stage play and then you know that you know as I said you know audience development you know my sister's sum and we know we have just always it's always hand in hand you know so that's always been the case but you know this thing in the letter about um you know don't always assume that people of color want to place adaptations in the countries that are there supposedly you know countries of origin you know but I can also say the converse is that when they do want to do that you know like let them let you know don't try to be a barrier either so I think it has to come from your artistic impulse you know when I went I'm I'm married to Pakistani and you know I've been to Pakistan a few times and when I travel to a small town there's a small town called Chang in Punjab you know where they're the love that's sort of a Romeo and Juliet story the Punjabi story of he ranja so the tragic hero in he you know her her sort of mausoleum is there you know and people go to sort of you know pray for their wishes to come true and I I sort of thought of Lorca's play that's there because I also noticed about you know through through immigration how there were a lot of single girls and families who were waiting for you know brothers and the men who were abroad to find matches for them and and actually they didn't have that agency you know and somehow that play and that setting it just spoke to me you know and that's how it started but it's very problematic you know because you do have you really do have so-called white experts saying you know who are you to do Lorca that isn't Lorca you know and then how do you you know you've got to navigate all that and yet our Indian audiences Pakistani audiences came and for them it was like a new play certain Pakistan they didn't have to know you know Lorca. There's also something about choice isn't there so again this is just from the research that I did before and from how I used to teach the play so I used to kind of teach on the one hand say Jitinder Verma's approach and all the work that he did around kind of English theatre and how we might remake classics with a particular kind of British English Asian Caribbean kind of fusion and also then I think it's Yvonne Brewster from Talawa at the time kind of said actually if I do an adaptation of Shakespeare I'm from Jamaica which was a colony a British colony I grew up with Shakespeare I have the right to do it straight I don't need to have to adapt it I need to have the choice to do it as I want to do it rather than there being an expectation that I'm going to adapt it because actually after all I was educated in your colony. I think there is an expectation all the time you know Samantha you were saying about you know from you know will your communities come well I've always had like as to Marsha it's like oh let's book them because they will come with but then that is that is quite a thing to carry because if they don't then so you know you not naively but you know I did think oh the Lorca lovers will come yes and we're working really hard to get but actually you know again you know two sort of lukewarm reviews by white critics who said this isn't Lorca and that audience is gone and but actually then you have a huge audience from your own backyard but it's as if it didn't happen in the theatre. Great and just on that just want to try and try in the universality and I'm going to come to you Cain because when I sort of said universality even though I hadn't really formed anything you sort of went what was in that? I guess I'd ask what do you mean by universality or the way I understood it was maybe something around appealing to everybody which made me think that therefore my job is to make my work clear and appear to everyone and actually I'm not quite sure and do you think that I think I often want to divide the audience or I actually want everybody to leave feeling different things or I want to sit in the complications or the difficulty that I love when like four people laugh in the audience and nobody else does and it's complex and we go oh what does that mean and so this idea of like we're not trying to just make entertaining work you know what I mean I want to reflect back the complex world we live in I want to present relationships that are difficult but I think it's that that's the thing so I think for my sense of it is that people say well you know you might read my play through the relationships that are difficult and think about that in a political way or you might just go actually it's a difficult relationship between a father and their their child or a mother and their child or a brother and a sister and it's the it's the looking at it in terms of the the brother and the sister the father the father the child the mother the child the parent and the child but that's the kind of universal universal whereas the kind of specifics is well it's about a father and a parent and a child and the issue of x whatever that issue might be and and that the playwrights would say well although we've got these issues some of the playwrights although we've got these issues in our plays actually they're about parents and their and their and their children and the parents wanting the best for their children and and everyone can tune into that and so that means that they're universal whereas I was always like yeah but they're also specific yeah because they're about a black parent and their black child you know so yeah yeah Samantha um I was gonna say um I think there's this pressure on particular characters as well like I mean I've never written almost never written a Jewish character without being asked why why do they have to be Jewish but why not and and I think that assumption is that the default is white and probably cv and maybe male I don't know um whereas for me the easiest character for me to write is an Iraqi Jewish woman uh obviously I'm not going to write every single play with that um I would say when I write anyone they're going to be infused with my sensibility um and so I wrote a play about wolves in Scotland wolves being returned to Scotland and I thought this is the one where I'm just literally not putting myself in at all there's not going to be any of me in it and a friend of mine read it and was just like okay this is the bit that's about rocks and I was like oh yeah yeah I'm busted but I mean you know you didn't need to know that's you know you didn't need to know that if you sort of play um so I think what I'm saying is every player writes a rocket Jewish but if I happen to write if I think that if I think that the best way of getting across this story and the person he's the story who I want to tell is a Jewish woman or an Iraqi woman or someone who is a rocket Jewish I think there's no there's no way I could suddenly kind of make them a different ethnicity just because and um I find this question very difficult you know I to answer in a because when if you say to someone that suggests that you think the default is a white is a white person that's a very aggressive way of starting the conversation but I've never found a good way of having the conversation I always just go well why not and someone would go well I find it easier to write these people which I think makes me look like I can't write anyone else which you know like arguably is true but I don't want to why should I have to be you know doing myself down here in these conversations so I found that difficult but also I so agree with what you've both been saying about all been saying about um specificity because actually I think the more specific um someone is um about their own experience actually the more weirdly the more it lets you in you know and I think it's a something memoir you know those very specific memoirs where you think well I'm not going to be able to read this I've not been an alcoholic and lived you know on Orkney and had a farm oh actually I feel like I've got more out of this book than I had about the one that was from some written by someone in my community you know because something about it spoke to me and I think if you're if you sort of make it if you know if you try and make it universal you end up writing these bland nothing new characters and I have been there I've been there where I've taken the specifics out they've just become so boring um and this you know the specifics don't have to be personal to the writer or the maker of it but I think they have to be specific in some way you know whether you give someone a love of chess or a fondness for cheese or whatever the happens to be it doesn't have to be ethnicity but it does have to be there I think and the minute you sort of go they just like all these just go well that's not a character is it so I don't know why you would do that in terms of culture and ethnicity why you would sort of go it's fine for them to just go I just like everything I'm just like everything you know I'm just universal thank you for that that again chimes in quite nicely with the kind of I guess the last point that I've got to that that I wanted to kind of bring up and before just inviting you all to to to have a response and it goes back again to this thing of the best possible play which kept coming up over and over and over again and and somewhere in the letter it kind of talks about well actually as a dramaturg one of the things that you must do is that you must trust the person of the global majority to to know what the limits are for how they want to write their play right because it it's I think there was something where it says uh don't be reverential so if we want to send up our communities then we want to be able to do that and you we don't want you as a person who's not of those communities potentially to be pulling us back from that if it's something that we want to do and I guess um yeah trust us as writers that we know what we're doing and I guess if we're going to say that what does that mean for the role of the the the the dramaturg then because in a way it would be like well I'll just do what I want and what role would the dramaturg have what would be there how would we see their role or perceive their role to to kind of I guess give enough space for us to do what we want but also still doing their role of of dramaturging and what's being requested I guess when we're when we're saying trust us um I think um you know I think from from sort of you know when I as I say you know mostly I've dramaturg young writers who are writing their debut play and they've been sort of writers of color you know and essentially the thing I keep coming across is people having this default position because they think they need to of leaving themselves aspects of themselves outside the door because they think it won't be they won't be able to translate it to a bigger universal audience so my job has always been to sort of say you know write the play and and I this is not you know one of wonderful dramaturg Lynn Cochlan and Phillip Osmond that I've worked with you know one of the things that I've taken away is that you know write the play or the piece of theatre which might not be a you know play um that only you can do you know that you've brought your full self to that you can hand on heart look at that and go actually no one else could have done that because that is me you know and that doesn't mean that you've you've kind of made yourself vulnerable and scavenged yourself and you know wrung yourself dry on stage but it does mean that you've brought your full self and what I find is that's been my job and a lot of it is is actually you know it's like a pastoral job as well it's not just you come there or you're going to be there for six weeks to dramaturg your play I mean I have worked with writers over six years you know um so Tien Doe who wrote her first play summer roles you know she first came to a Tamasha acting workshop writing workshop and actually what she was encouraged to do in drama school is to is to wipe to kind of keep her vietnamese side outside the door and that my job was really to to bring that right in and if you're going to write about that you know community and and actually there's a vulnerability you know and I and I feel that myself you know I go through I give advice to people that I can't take myself that I would feel my well because a lot of it is to do with we are standing there such a vulnerable place because you're trying to write something really personal you feel the responsibility of the communities you have language you know that's the other big thing you're writing characters who are who don't speak english so if you're going to write them in english how do you do that you know and so I think my job has been very much like really really holding the hands and pastural as well as being the person who questions you know in terms of the practice you know is the story coming through you know right where dramatic arcs you know what language are you going to you know all of that yeah I think that's I'm not sure if I've answered your question yeah no it's interesting though because it's this idea of the kind of craft yes a question of craft I think I guess you're speaking about but also the questions of the kind of content in terms of maybe the politics or the narrative or something else what that's a set you know and also what I wanted to say was that we're not we're not divorced from for a centric you know toolbox as it were so question of what you want to take what serves you what doesn't you know yeah I really agree with that idea of the pastoral role it is and the idea of holding the hand of people it's like I'm working with like we're going into a relationship like if we're gonna work together and um and it's delicate and fragile and bold and stern it's like it has all of that but we kind of have to set it up in the right way and I think I'm often asking what are you trying to say and then I can reflect on thinking is that coming through it might not be to me it might be to other people but I'm really curious about what do you have to say and what you're trying to say and then I'm also going to know why now why now why why now we like why are you making this work now and often that's a deeply personal and it might not appear in any way in the performance but it's fueling the making in some way to know why I'm making this work I think when we answer that question it gives such a focus to to the direction we're going in that's wonderful what's driving you and so just are you going to speak because otherwise I'll just jump on a little I'm going to move on a little bit because I'm just quite aware of time as well just to kind of um have a moment really to to think about um change and this question of change and there were a few things in in the letter so one thing was um for Eurocentric dramaturgy to change everything's changed inclusion must happen everywhere so I'm interested in kind of what might what might we need what needs to happen there whether there are some ideas and there are a couple of things that are lists that are mentioned in the letter one is in the response to the open letter where um the dramaturge network talks about you know we want to be good allies so allies as a as a response and the other was kind of in recognizing that that european or eurocentric dramaturgy is not it's just one model that's what came was talking about right at the beginning right with your grandmother I think you were saying the house the archives the stories the way that that she tells stories right and so the eurocentric model is one model but there are other models and I just wonder whether you've got any thoughts there about um or ideas about what needs to change so that we can log those in this in this recording that we're making specific things a couple of things I think I'm actually just picking up on what you guys are both saying about trust I think I think um that I think the relationship being delicate um when I was going to say another sorry another thing that um as a playwright I've had a lot of dramaturgy from directors and that's often where it happens and from actors as well and so in the room you know when the work's actually being made I should say that it's not just purely with dramaturgs and literary managers of course and um and um I think if there is going to be change I think I think often as a playwright you feel like you um have to please the person you're with you have to um you know your I mean I think some of this is reflected in the structures for example in rehearsal when you make might be doing major rewrites you might be doing your biggest rewrite yet in rehearsal um you're paid an attendance fee as though you're just sitting there attending so you're an audience member to the rehearsal um and I don't say this because I want more money particularly I'm just saying it in terms of like let's not call it that let's say that the person if you I mean you may not be touching it you may you may have dotted every eye and it's all done but actually I've never been in a rehearsal room where I haven't been going okay let's do something massive here you know as a result of the brilliant questions I'm getting asked of provocation watching the actors work you know it's a very very important time in my process and that you know and I'm going home at night and I'm rewriting and I'm bringing stuff in and I'm on the phone to the director and it's you know it's a huge thing for me that's probably the busiest time of my every whenever I have a play on and yeah I just think if we if we're going to be constantly feeling like we're not really there we're just watching um like we have to please people to get to the next day I don't think any change is going to happen then because you you have to be very bold to fight against that and I haven't been and I and I know younger playwrights much less bold than me you know when I was starting out as well and I you know you want to say to them you know you've got to fight that but actually that doesn't always work sometimes it means you don't get the commission or people don't want to work with you so I don't know there has to be a sort of I don't there's something to do with the status of the if you are working with writers the status of the writer in these conversations um and sorry one last thing is I think you have to have the freedom to be stupid I just kind of feel like there's a point in theatre where I felt if I said I'm really sorry I don't understand any of this because you just sorry I don't understand what you said could you explain to me like you couldn't say that people were just the guy oh she's an idiot we're not going to work with her she sometimes it's very useful to say to ask the stupid question you know sometimes you need to ask the stupid question um and so I don't know I feel like often I'm in a position where I both have to like please and you know help you know do everything right and also can't can't say I really don't understand what you said I you know let's can you rephrase it for me can you help me uh actually so I so I can't ask for help either and so if I want help I can't get it you know there's something about that relationship that just in those individuals individual relationships that I think you know and I and when I have worked with people who are great oh my god it's great it is like as Kane says like a good relationship you just feel like here I am it's like going round to dinner at your best friend you know where the wine is you know where the corkscrew is you can relax you know they're not going to laugh at you if you say I'm stupid but they might laugh at you tell other things and that's fine you can laugh at them and then you can make really good work and I just feel like obviously that's hard to make and it's not all on the director of the dramaturgs set that up the writer has to bring something to table but yeah I mean I have to say when I've been feeling like I'm sitting at the back of a rehearsal room making my notes and not not part of it that's not made for a good situation so there's a few things there great freedom they're not at all freedom I've got a bad habit of not knowing when people are stopping so I don't know freedom trust the idea of co-creation so that comes back to something that was already said earlier kind of co-creating the work again like you're saying working with the the playwright the oh yeah the recognising the playwright is active in the rehearsal room that's something really important working with the playwright with the director but also with the people the actors the people that are performing the show Kane so do you have any ideas? I love change change is so important it's like every time we do one of our shows or bring it back it's like we've got to change it all it has to change because the world's changed we're six months later everything's adaptive like how are we going to make it relevant now how is it relevant in this space in comparison to that space we've changed cast like we've changed identities how are we going to do that now putting this body there instead of that one tells a totally different meaning so I'm so open to change I might hate it I'm wrestling with it at times I'd be like I need to go and have a walk around the car park because this is really difficult but I really embrace it and I think it's necessary because like how are we going to make a better future if we stick with the same it's like we have to in our rooms in the small ways we can try to embrace the change right I think it's all I mean what I've also you know because I've literally almost you know always had to produce my own work you know whether at Tamasha or you know now at Butcher Boulevard so I guess that's the kind of lived experience that I've kind of encouraged as well so for younger writers you know well actually you know Nila Levy who does my bomb book look big in this and Tiando you know with summer rolls but the most decent people are dramaturgs and you know they they applied you know they applied for arts council funding with my you know I helped mentor that you know like okay let's don't wait for you know the building to commission you or the company to commission you because it might not happen you know so curate your own voice so you know just encouraging people to be um yes to see their work in terms of content and context because actually that's that's the way forward because you know if you want more agency in a sense you have to have it you know I mean I've never had it given to me you know it has to be something that you you're you're sort of shaping yourself great thank you for changing in terms of changing thank you thank you all for this for this discussion um we're starting to get questions through in the chat so I think I'll start to invite you to respond to some of those questions and then hopefully about 15 minutes time there'll just be a time for a few final comments if you have any um so we've got a question from Holly um and it says um are there any aspects of creating performance which can which can be universalized uh can we all agree on clarity of intention as being important for the for the best version of the play for example um so I read again are there any aspects of creating performance which can be universalized would we all agree on the clarity of intention as being important to create the best version of a play for example can I ask clarity of intention when I mean when you when the play opens yes it's you know I think it's quite good to be clear then but what I struggle with is you know I go in with a weird idea that I'm going to jam on to another weird idea and it may not work and I want to be able to be unclear and mess about and fail um but sometimes if I'm writing a play about my um you know my um community that I know better than the dramaturg perhaps they're like but is this correct is this authentic and I'm like well I mean this isn't how it's going to end up but this is where I'm starting um so I think we need to the freedom maybe to be unclear at the beginning I think I want to be sorry why all those questions from the beginning sorry Kane I'm sorry for interrupting you um I think I want there to be a space of big feelings I want to go to the theater and feel in the audience like so I also like often I leave feeling sometimes not much and I'm like oh so I'd say for me one of the things in performance that I'd be looking for is trying to at least create feelings in the audience big feelings somehow um I mean it is hard to sort of be prescriptive isn't it in terms of you know have a manifesto of you know what was performance then what we all agree is a universal way of you know making performance because I would go back to you know be bring your full selves yeah the person is bringing you know I mean I'm now from you know I'm now doing like a one woman monologue which I've been developing for you know more than two years which is inspired by my conversations with my sons and it's called evening conversations you know and it's not a play and it's me you know talking to my sons playing my sons every time I do it I I do have to change it because you know as you say you know Kane the world has changed since the last time I did it you know so I did it like a week before lockdown and then the it wasn't until you know this summer that I did it again so I have to think about my conversations with my sons in the context of lockdown you know but what it was still a performance you know yeah I think that like for me that's why performance is special because performance has existed always whether it has been like I said earlier sitting around the table telling stories or whether it's been performing on a massive stage it's like it exists in all cultures it's like often theatre is quite and centralised and has a more narrow way of viewing what it could be but performance has always been there just coming back to this question the idea of creating performance I think I've been in many rooms which might be another question around bad practice you know what I mean where we've seen it done badly the creating is not done wholeheartedly holistically we haven't embraced like it's felt hierarchical it's like I see much bad practice so I'd say to at least choose some values in the creating stage that are kind involved listening that embrace the outside world and can't just be this into like I'd say in the creating I'd like some of those values to be universalised that also goes back to the idea of there being different models of different ways of creating performance and that we you know we don't all have to do it the same way which is you know the trained way that say you know let's allow space for people to find their way I suppose as well so so there's a question from Sarah in the chat which is about allies so returning us back to this thing around allies and Sarah's asking what can dramaturgs do to be an ally to artists of the global majority in both institutional and freelance contexts and yeah what can dramaturgs do to good allies because that was definitely one thing that was in the response was we want to be good allies and now it's inviting us to say well what might that mean from from the perspective of people who are making performance or work in as dramaturgs I think on the outset you know when I think about you know what I've been through both as an artist myself who's written the work and trying to be an ally you know I think interrogating somebody's work from a eurocent from your own perspective when you haven't been reflexive about where you're coming from I mean I have so often been on the back foot you know like one of the things I wrote which was called on my name is you know based on the true story you know from testimonies which was very delicate you know I won't sort of it'll take forever to describe it all but you know the journey to that took six years because of this constant like you know I had testimony and I was ostensibly sending it to receptive people who kept saying we're so receptive to unfinished work you know we were so receptive to this story and then critical something it for it's not being and then saying we love verbatim but actually oh it's verbatim and we don't want to do verbatim you know so I think in a way yeah just being open to where where have you come from you know what what do you bring into the room and so not interrogating the the writers to a point where they lose confidence in what they're doing but understand from their point of view what they're trying to do whether they want to include language is it uniform what are they doing and therefore supporting them you know the best way that you can yeah there was something in the letter as well about you know if you don't know like be be know what what you don't know and and then maybe bring someone in who does know I don't know they didn't quite put it like that but like you know maybe you might need some help from someone who might know a little bit different different stuff to what you know and maybe just being aware of that so yeah I think I agree I come from that probably psychotherapeutic approach of like the more I understand myself the safer I am for being in the world and I really believe that like so now where my limitations are my boundaries where my unconscious bias is it's like can where I'll trick myself up or can start to make me think am I the right person for this and I think we have to always be aware of power who has the power here and if if we're walking into a big institution in your HR material in that space it's like to know that it's not an equal relationship and what could you do to take yourself off the pedestal almost and make sure that you're listening as much as offering yeah wonderful goes back to your Friday night person doesn't it your Friday night Saturday person yeah I think I think it's really nice if you I'm sort of echoing what everyone else saying but I think um I like to work with someone who is another person rather than someone who is like the decider and who is the person who's telling me oh this is wrong in craft terms or you can't do x or you can't do y coming like it's really nice when a dramaturg will say okay so this is my cultural background and this is why I'm finding this bit tricky to get and you know they can be vulnerable too because as a writer you are so vulnerable especially if it's personal I mean especially when I've done stuff that's based on my own family and my own work I so I mean it's very difficult sending an email where you're attaching a play in which you've talked about family experiences for example or community experiences that you may not have been able to really talk about so anyone and because it's work in progress and you know you know you send it to a dramaturg and if you feel like they are sort of this sort of authority figure who has never kind of you know shared any vulnerability I'm not saying you have to share all your vulnerability all day but you know who's just been this sort of authority figure it's very frightening I find it very you know then you feel very sort of skin that you know it's skinless in a way um and I also think you know you have to be thin skins to make good work so if you're going to ask someone to sort of peel themselves you don't have to be a bit a bit unpeeled yourself you're a bit gentle you know as can't just go focus both ways I think the writer has to also allow the dramaturg to make mistakes that's fine too but that's not often how it feels in the room you know so it's person as well as role isn't it you're a person as well as a as well as a role that you're that you're in and yeah sorry Suda no I mean in fact I'm sort of you know mentoring a young writer at the moment and actually like she's really really keen on starting with form you know experimenting with form and you know I had to be really like honest and say that I've always the way I make work I always start with you know the content and the voice and I don't have that I actually don't have that parameter of helping you with like oh how do you start with form first because that's just not my instinct you know actually my instinct is to say to you like bring your full self because she's also really like wanting to almost disguise herself before she has actually you know brought herself she's you know what I mean and actually but then I'm conscious that you know I love the way you said you know to take yourself off the pedestal because I actually might not be the right person you know because there are people out there who start with form and they're brilliant at what they do and I'm not that person you know but it's also maybe it sounds like you're talking about kind of dramaturgist conversation you know a conversation between makers right rather than the dramaturgist a hierarchy and again something that struck me in the open letter and it was something around the best and it talked about the objective best or something and my immediate thing was what objective right and I'd written objective it's subjective it's and I added subjective right so maybe there's something there around yeah knowing what your positionality is the places from which you're speaking and and bringing your positionality together with the and experience together with the person that you're you're working with and therefore there's a conversation to be had rather than a hierarchy we're saying kind of try and squeeze in one more question and time is going against us this is this might build from what we were just talking about and it's a question from Tomo and it says can we decolonize theatre whilst it remains an extractive capitalist enterprise? Question mark. Who wants to take that on first? Go, you do it. My first thing because this question comes up or the concept of decolonization comes up so much and I just think we need to stop talking about colonization what are the colonial practices that we see the behaviors that we see as colonial that we want to dismantle but often we kind of jump straight in to decolonizing and I'm like whoa let's just actually start to list all of these things that we go I see this every day happening and let's now begin to change them but yeah I wanted to throw that in. And one of those is objectivity and another is hierarchy and power and anybody else wants to come in on theatre as a capitalist an extractive capitalist enterprise how can we dismantle that I suppose can we dismantle that? I mean I think I always I mean I'm sort of I believe in sort of small cumulative acts that people can make you know the change that you can see yourself you know doing I mean I find from on a personal level you know if I think about how I'm going to decolonize theatre you know it's just it seems too huge you know but I can look at like theatre doesn't have to be you know the well-made British play that people pay 60 pounds or more to go and see you know I have long given up you know I went through my own thing of wanting to be in the mainstream and have been and have not been and I constantly look at you know articles about you know people's body of work and I'm never in even in those sort of footnotes and actually you do what you can yourself in spaces that that are open for you and that you open yourself I mean that for me is decolonizing you know instead trying to take on the whole big shebang which I can't sort of mean. There's a wonderful image that I've kept with me for years and years and years and I think it was about feminist theatre and it was about like when you're in if you it was an image of a lawn a perfectly laid lawn and that if you're a feminist you think of yourself as a mole so the perfectly laid lawn just you just pop up and you create so now that perfectly laid more and has a little hill and it's just about you just you're just rupturing it and because your presence in the room your presence in the dialogue if you like will just create those little ruptures just to unsettle so it's not about completely annihilating but just starting to create the rupture so that people have to look differently because you have to look slightly differently when they were or walk differently move through the lawn differently when there were little hills in it compared to it being perfectly laid so it's quite a nice image that I've kept. Yeah I just actually really inspired by that image yeah I mean I think like you know like I said I have mostly worked in buildings but I've also worked for example with a miniaturist and that was an idea that the playwright Stephen Schuchy had he came round to dinner actually and we were all having a big moan and there were four playwrights around the table and then he called up and they come to the mine because I've got a better idea I've got an idea I was like okay and he said let's just put some stuff on and we went and have to talk to buildings and the idea of that was that the writers would you know assemble the team so you'd actually contact director you wanted to work with an act and you often would cast it you know it was the writer would assemble the team so instead of being sort of the person the team was sort of given to and I just doing some 15 minute plays with them really revved up my confidence I'm not saying they were particularly good and they might have been you know I might have chosen the wrong director for them but just being able to go okay let's just try working on this one with this person who I really like and see what that does and the fact of them being 15 minutes long just really just on my you know on my personal level really helped me because I didn't have to go okay I'm going to completely change the way I write and then send in my new play in you know you know Samantha 2.0 send that in to the world court and see if they take it I just did one over a weekend and saw what happens and so yeah I think in terms of making these changes some of it is going to have to be people just doing things and seeing what that does to their own practice and to the theatre environment as a whole and you know I mean Samash is a huge brilliant example of that you know sort of landmark example really that um but you know lots of people have done it on smaller you know in in much smaller and more short-term ways and I don't think that's viable too you know people just popping up pop-up they either pop-up shows or pop-up ways of working and short plays as well as you're saying they can be quite raw right they can be yeah it doesn't need maybe all of the dramaturgical input that we that maybe think we need for the two hour play or whatever it might be I think the wrong says you know taking charge I mean I belong to a writer's group called The Plot and you know we are mid-career writers middle-aged mid-career and we meet and we you know we read each other's stuff and dramaturg each other you know somebody might have written the whole play somebody might be feeling wrong done anything and actually it's a really brilliant sort of great so again kind of collaboration coming in there co-created work so so we've only we've only got a few minutes left maybe two or three minutes left and I just want to just give you each of you an opportunity to just say a few closing words anything at all that you want to say that comes out of the discussion or any point maybe that hasn't been raised yet that you think actually I just want to make sure that that's heard in this in this discussion just a few words of you know 30 seconds 40 seconds in each or something um Samantha you're smiling I'll invite you I'm smiling because I'm trying to think what to say um I mean it's just no no no but I just like say it's really good to actually have the chance to talk about these things and maybe it would be amazing if a writer-dramaturg relationship began with a conversation like this with the dramaturg about what's not what what's worked and what's not worked for you before on both sides you know um and you know what's what's been what's made you anxious what what are you worried about you know what are you excited about you know but for both you know the dramaturgs tell you as well um you know they can say we're really worried you're not going to deliver until the night before and it's going to be a nightmare I mean that's fine I'd like to that's useful for me to hear that and I can say you know maybe and this is kind of conversation about specifically how it's impacted on on you on your work in terms of universality in terms of trying to translate to different audiences or across different audiences I'd love to start I'd love to start a working relationship with this kind of conversation I don't think I ever have so maybe we start too specific yeah thank you very much Suda um yeah I think it would be also interesting that if writers I mean I I don't have that much experience of being the writer commissioned by a you know mainstream theatre but if writers are asked you know who would be their ideal dramaturg like actually you know whose work do I love and who's who I would love to I think that would be quite something you know um as a way of starting but also just I mean I am very much for you know also making theatre which isn't necessarily commissioned plays from a single voice as well thank you yeah who do you want to work with okay yeah I think I'm thinking in similar ways really like I always come back to this but I'm asking it in my friendships really of like what does support look like for you I think it's such a great question that I'm always going I want to be supportive and what do you need like that helps me also I really run with the one that is the story I'm making up in my head is this it means that I own my own rubbish sometimes or I realize what I'm bringing to it um I think I'm really it when I when I work as a movement director or a choreographer now I'm so not talking about the content of the work but I'm talking about who we are as people and to go before I can even say if we'll work together it's like I want to know what you stand for and why you're making out what your values are and all of this stuff and I think the working world could embrace that a little bit better rather than it just being about the content of the play because we're going to be in relationship for a particular like potentially three months or three years making something together yeah great or six years I think it wasn't entirely as well so thank you so much all to all of you for this discussion I've really enjoyed I never thought that much in my work about dramaturgy before I mean I look at kind of finished plays and I analyze finished finished plays so I hadn't really thought about the dramaturgic practice so it's been really interesting to kind of listen to it but also to I'd written down four things to think about dramaturgy as therapeutic as friendly as kind I'm doing a lot of stuff in my mind at the moment about kindness and kindness with people it's been really nice to have this discussion and to kind of hear kindness come up so much and then the fourth thing I wrote down was kind of personable kind of recognize that we are we are people and we are responding to each other as people and connecting as as people and and yeah there needs to be space to kind of listen to us so just to before I hand over to Lee for an outro just thank you all again to Dars, Mantha and Kane it's been a really enjoyable discussion and thank you to everyone that's listening in and for the questions that have come in and I'll just hand back over then to Lee. Thank you so much I just want to say very briefly like thank you so much for the compassion and how incisive this conversation has been and for holding space for each other it's been incredible and I just want to say a few things before we before we leave you all. I also want to thank the creators and signatories of the open letter actually the open letter we need to talk about Dramaturgy because without that intervention and I hope many of you are in the audience watching and listening to this conversation as well but without that intervention we wouldn't be having this fantastic conversation and so you made that happen and so thank you for that thank you Lynette Kane, Samantha and Sudha for being so insightful and generous and forthright in your in your discussion and also for bringing so much of your own lived experiences as artists to this and how you navigate this these very unequal power structures in making work so thank you for that. If you have day tickets and this goes for all of the audience watching as well these are valid for the remainder of the day's events so if you do have the rest of the evening free we will be reconvening in one hour for the Kenneth Tynan Awards ceremony so do join us for that if you can and yeah and thank you to the organisers Katherine, Sarah, David, Tomo all of the team for helping me coordinate this and get you all together to have this amazing conversation yeah thank you so much and that's that's all from me thank you thank you see you see you soon everyone take care bye bye