 Thank you all so much for sort of trying to get back in. We are a little bit off schedule from what is in your program, but we appreciate people sort of shortening today. We're gonna extend today's panel by a little bit and then adjust throughout the day. There we go, wonderful. And then adjust throughout the day slightly. So I'm Jojo Roof. I'm the managing director of the laboratory for global performance and politics. And first I just wanna echo Kevin and Derek that it feels so incredibly moving to look out and see so many friendly and inspiring faces. We have a phenomenal group gathered here today. We have artists and theater practitioners, policy makers, scholars, faculty, students, future leaders from nearly 25 countries. We have representatives from Central and South America, from Europe and the Middle East, from Asia and Africa. And we're thrilled that so many people have flown literally thousands of miles to be with us here today. So it feels very moving. An integral part of our global pre-conference is not just the discussion on stage, but opening up the conversations to questions from you, our audience as well. So every panel will allow for significant time for that. So have your questions at the ready. And we have mics in the audience and we'll have volunteers that bring the mics to you so you can stay in your seat. But please do clearly state your name before asking a question or making a comment just so we have an idea of who's talking. Throughout the day, we'll also have people joining us via Skype, like we do right now. And two of which are joining us that way instead of in person because of their own refugee status. So Natalia from Belarus Free Theater, who is joining us from the UK where she was now living, will be joining us for this first panel. And Reem Alsaya, a Syrian refugee turned actress who's living in Amman, Jordan, will be joining us for tonight for Prevented Presented Performances. So it feels apt that we begin our first panel discussion of the day with humanizing exile, a creative response. So this is an opportunity for an extraordinary seven panelists to speak about their own experiences about how theater can document exile and migration and what are the conditions and parameters about which exiled artists can and cannot discuss. We're thrilled to have Dr. Nadia Oadad, a Smith Richardson fellow at New America and frequent collaborator of the lab as our moderator here today. Enjoy. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, everyone, for coming. With me are very impressive and very well accomplished people to discuss, as Jojo said, art and exile and refugees in three different regions in the Middle East, in Latin America and also in Europe. So with me here is Wendy and Wendy Young. Wendy has received the president, is the president of Kids in Need of Defense, the leading provider of legal services to unaccompanied migrants and refugee children since its launch in 2009. She brings extensive immigration policy experience to her role and most recently, she served as chief counsel on immigration policy in the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Refugees for Senator Edward Kennedy. All of my panelists are very, very accomplished people and I can spend 20 minutes just reading their credentials, so I'm just gonna, because of Brevity, just mention a little bit about them and I encourage you to read about them in your folder. I also have Marisa. Marisa Chebas is a Donde seeking theater artist and recipient of the TCG Fox Foundation Fellowship in Distinguished Achievement. She heads the bilingual initiative Donde, Cal Arts, that collaborates innovative Latina artists to make adventurous theater. Her solo daughter of the Cuban Revolution produced by Cal Arts Center for New Performance, premiered at Red Cat in LA and went to New York City and various other cities around the world. I also have with me Mr. Costa, Martin Costa. He is a director, playwright and professor from Mexico City. He has directed over several plays since 1987. Martin toured also all around. He directed a production of Faust. He is a winner of various awards, including when he won Seven Times. And when he won Twice, I mean, seriously I encourage you to read more about these impressive panelists. How do you win all these awards? What do you do? I also have with me from my region, from the Middle East, Taranj Yegze, let me see, Yegze, okay. Taranj wins with her Iranian and Armenian heritage. She is the founding artistic director of Golden Theater Productions, the first American theater company devoted to the Middle East. Music to my ears. We also have on Skype, as Jojo said, Larry and Natalia. And Larry is a British writer, artist, teacher. He was associated for a long time with Darlington College of Arts, where he was the academic director. He became the founding father of Falmouth University's Academy of Music and Arts, Theater Arts. We also have Natalia. She is the founding co-artistic director of Belarus Free Theater, writer, diplomat, human rights activist and producer. So let's all thank our panelists. And I'm going to start with Latin America since we just saw the phenomenally moving play. So I wanna start with you, Wendy, Mercea and Martin. That was so inspirational. So I wanna first give each of you some space, five minutes to tell us about your background and how you got engaged with this issue. So maybe we'll do it this way. Wendy, we'll start with you. Well, sadly, I need to confess, I'm a lawyer, I'm not an artist. So that may be good news for you because my artistic skills are not very good. But I'm with an organization called Kids in Need of Defense or KIND. We provide pro bono or volunteer legal representation to the thousands of unaccompanied immigrant and refugee children who arrive in the United States each year. And when they are stopped at our border, are placed into deportation proceedings. In recent years, overwhelmingly, the population is dominated by Central American children from three countries, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. And what I think many Americans do not understand is the incredibly tragic level of violence that is really marking that part of the world today. And these are children who are being driven out of their homes and communities by violence that is specifically targeting them as children. And it's generally created by gangs and narco cartels. Families are making the very desperate choice to put their child on the road alone, sometimes accompanied by a human trafficker or a smuggler in the desperate search for freedom here. And unfortunately, our system is such that when the kids arrive, like an adult, they're placed into deportation proceedings. They're forced to go into an immigration courtroom, raise a defense against deportation in front of an immigration judge with a trial attorney from the Department of Homeland Security arguing for that child's removal. And there's the child standing alone with nobody to help them unless they have a volunteer lawyer. And I've been in immigration courts and seen children as young as three, four and five years old appearing before judges with nobody to help them. And they're supposed to be able to demonstrate that they have a well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion. Try doing that when you're three years old. So this is what we do. We try to help these kids through these proceedings. And what we find is that children who have counsel are five times more likely to be awarded some form of protection and allowed to remain in the United States. And we have over a 90% success rate in our cases, but currently over 50% of these kids are going through those proceedings without lawyers. So that's what we do. 50%? One out of every two kids, wow. Yeah. So I can share with you a little bit of the genesis of the project. In the winter of 2014, I was healing from major spine surgery and the loss of my mother. And I was alone, healing a lot. And I was haunted by a story that I had read several years ago about a teenage Mexican-American boy from Texas who was mentally challenged and he was deported by accident. And his parents didn't know where he was for three weeks. So for three weeks, and I was just haunted with this idea, he finally was reunited with his family, but I didn't know about unaccompanied child migrants. I started reading about it. And there was an article in the LA Times in which two people were quoted, Elizabeth Kennedy, who's a Fulbright scholar and at the time was working in El Salvador with children who had been deported back. And Susan Terrio from Georgetown University who was writing a book that is now out called Who's Child Am I? This was a Sunday that the LA Times article came out and I emailed them both, found their information online, emailed them both and heard back from them that day. And I thought, okay, I'm gonna go to the Cal Arts Center for New Performance team and say, we have to do a piece about this. This is huge. Elizabeth was able to connect me, both Elizabeth and Susan were advisors on the project. I interviewed them. I went to a shelter in San Diego where I saw a group of kids, recent arrivals. I interviewed volunteers who were going to the shelter. I did a lot of research and I did research for almost a year. And then during that process, we needed a director and Martina Costa has directed for Duende Cal Arts before he did a beautiful production by Alejandro Ricanho called Timbuktu that was performed both in the US and in Mexico. Half of the artists were from this country and half from Mexico. And we really wanted to work with this incredible visionary director. We knew that it would be also because our countries, the US and Mexico are so involved and responsible in many ways for the crisis. It seemed like this is the perfect partnership. And so he came on board and we did a workshop last spring, basically generating material with an extraordinary team of actors and designers and put up the show in this past spring in Los Angeles in two locations. One was an outdoor park in Lincoln Park in downtown Los Angeles. And then also at Carese in LA, Carese serves Central American refugees and migrants with pro bono legal services as well as educational services. And along with the production, we also have been doing these workshops titled Yo Tambien Soy Un Ser, I too am somebody. And they are youth empowerment workshops with our whole team, designers, actors, everybody involved. Basically focusing on some of the effects of the hate language that towards immigrants that's happening in the country and how that affects the body. So in the workshops we do different kinds of physical improvs with the, that none of them, most of the attendees of the workshops were not performers. But they really took to the work and they would step into the body of a hero of their choice and walk around with that and feel the effects of that and write from that voice. I also interviewed seven recent arrivals, kids who had made this journey themselves at the age 13, 14 from our local high school where we have a year long writing program, Kellaritz has a year long writing program with. And those seven young dreamers were integral from the beginning of the process. So they saw a workshop, they gave us feedback, they were a part of readings, they took the Yo Tambien Soy Un Ser workshop, they were there at opening and we continue to be in contact with them. And one of the things that I wanna share with you in terms of belonging and finding home is that these seven kids, during the course of this process, we saw the power of our work as theater artists. We saw their empowerment of having their stories told and witnessed publicly and the importance of that. And there's a real hunger for that. We've gotten responses from middle schools, elementary schools, high schools, colleges, professional theaters around the country who are really hungry for this kind of work that specifically represents this community and we're really proud to be doing this. Thank you, Marisa. Martin? Okay. As Marisa, I am an artist, not a lawyer, so I would talk about me. Sorry for that. I was a very shy kid when I was in junior high school. But with a very strong ideas about many things and I did promise never to come to United States because I was very angry because many, many things. But I've been weak and I came. In 1993, I did accept a grant for to be in a residence in AdWords, three hours far from New York, at the North and I spent these months working on one of my first pieces, working about James Joyce novel and materials from him. Talking with an artist, which I was sharing a workshop, he told me, 1993, he told me, you are the first Mexican who I am talking and they are saying something intelligent and are not washing the dishes. And I didn't know what to say. Actually, I didn't know what to think about it and I say, thank you. I am very, very surprised because I didn't notice how some artists look to other artists at that moment. But many people around me at that moment encouraged me to do my work and to express my ideas and I am very thankful to all these people but I am very thankful to the guy who told me that. Because my work turned around totally and I have a perspective of what I want to do and what I had to do with my work and with my life actually. And that's migration for me. That's a way to confront your fear and make a trouble and confront what do you want to do? What are you dreaming to be and to have the effort to do it? So I did and from this moment until today, I had a beautiful, great journey and part of the journey was to meet Marisa and to do a great partnership. She talked me about these kids, migrant kids and I didn't know anything about them. Even if they are crossing my own country and I was so surprised about it. I did know about migrants coming from Central America especially because six years ago there were a massacre in San Fernando, Tamaulipas where 72 migrants, Central American migrants were kidnapping and finally, finally dead. But I didn't know that the kids comes on a company to America and it was a very surprise for me and I felt very ashamed because I didn't know. So it was a great opportunity working and sharing the experience with Cal Arts to talk about it and actually push me to do a new play and now about the Las Patronas who are a group of women that give food every day of their lives to the migrants that cross close to their own little town named Amatlan de los Reyes. So these people do that because they wanted to do and the last 25 years ago, they are working on it and with no support of anybody, any institution with the support of many people of course. And I feel that we have a great weapon to talk about this because if more people knows about what these people are doing, I think we can make conscience, we can open doors and we can make maybe the right questions because we have not the answers and this is a great thing for theater. We don't need answers. We need the right questions. I'm actually gonna go to Larry and Natalia over Skype. Would you tell us about your work? Hi everyone. I hope you hear us. Yeah, we can hear. Great. I don't see audience but based on Skype screen, I could imagine you see very big faces of us. Yes. Can you hear their laughter? There are quite a few of them. Yeah, it was a great laughter. So we hear you guys. I would start from just checking. It's kind of small geography lesson. Do you know guys where Belarus is? Yes. It seems like it's very different from laughter. Laughter was very loud. Let's give her a loud yes. Do you hear this? So before we said that Belarus is located in between Poland and Russia. And then my husband, he said, you know what I came up with a great idea? Check with people. Do they know where Russia is located? Guys, do you know where Russia located? Yeah, right here, you know, yeah. So just to make sure, Russia is located in between Belarus and China. Laughter. So, now you will definitely know how important and big Belarus is. So this is the country from where I come personally. Larry is lucky he was born in the UK. That is still part of the European Union. Everything might be changed. Laughter. For at least a few more days. At least one more day. One more day. It's hours. Yeah. And then we are moving to you guys. We will have more refugees, but from the UK now. Laughter. And then you will understand what it means humanizing exile when Brits will come to your country. So the country is under dictatorship, our country, Belarus, for 22 years. And this is where we do theater. Personally, me and my husband were called public enemies or enemies of the state. And it means different things. It means you lose your job, you lose your education. It means your parents lose your job. It means that apartments of your parents, as it was in our case, they're raided by KGB. It means that your children are hunted by KGB in order for them to be sent to orphanages as it was happening with us. And then at some point, when you become a refugee, many different things start to happen as well. You don't have home anymore because your home is back in your country. You don't have friends because they're either in jail or they're in exile in different countries. But in our case, we have a unique situation, 29 of members of Belarus Free Theater are still underground in Belarus. And they perform there on a weekly basis and they teach students on a daily basis. And our real life is split into two parts. It's life in London with a new world of understanding democracy for us personally and understanding that it's not a very easy system and you need to dig very deep in order to find different problems under that particular system. But still you have people back there and in order for us to work with them, we get on Skype with them as we did today with you and with each. So today before getting on Skype with you, I was working with Maria Alokhina from Pussy Riot who was in jail for two years in Russia because now we do a big show together with a member of Pussy Riot with Marsha. And we talk about contemporary artists and their role in different societies and how politicians use them from both sides. And trying to say that we are not heroes, we are not victims, we are contemporary artists and we are very much interested in different interpretations of exile because exile for us, it's a very complicated thing. Exile for us, it's amazing opportunity to meet absolutely fantastic people who work with us in the UK. But same time, our existence is under very big question in terms of financial support. So besides, we're not with you now based on a very simple thing. We are refugees in the UK, but it's a very complicated process and now in order for us to extend our live in the UK, we applied for that status, but it means we don't have any single document. So if we're stopped in the streets by police in London, the only way for them to identify us, it would be to take us to police department and fingerprint. When we get from Italy to Heathrow Terminal 3, we are detained for 15 minutes, 15 minutes of shame for home office in the UK because they terminate our leave to remain in the UK. So exile is not a very simple thing. The only thing as people do who come from dictatorship, they can't stop, they will continue to push and we will continue to push on a personal level and besides we will continue to push on a level of artists. Natalia has spoken so well, I won't add very much time at all, perhaps just to say from my perspective as an educator by trade that just as Natalia has spoken about her experience of being exiled out of Belarus, so she's not allowed there and she's not allowed to travel to Washington DC because she has no travel documents, she's stateless. The work I do with the company with Belarus Free Theatres is primarily education and an idea, a principle that has been entirely exiled from Belarus is the principle of an academically free, interrogative education be it in the arts or anywhere else. And one of the least well-known but most extraordinary things about Belarus Free Theatres is the fact that we run underground in exile but inside the country a two-year theatre education program for we enroll 15 students a year to Fortenbrass Laboratory Theatre Fortenbrass as you know the last man standing in Shakespeare's Hamlet so we have an underground laboratory theatre running full-time education program for students in Minsk it's the only academically free education available in the country of Belarus there's the wonderful European Humanities University in exile outside of the country but if you want to do a hardcore arts program in Minsk there's one place to do it and it's tucked away a humanizing refuge, a sanctuary, a free thought an activist self-determination run by Natalia and the crew in Belarus Free Theatre so I'll leave it there but education is a thing we do in country Thank you Larry and Natalia and Taranj Hello So I came to the United States as a very opinionated 14-year-old who did not want to stay in the US during a time when there was a revolution happening in Iran and my family didn't feel that it was safe for me to be in Iran what I was told that the trip would be for just four months through the summer and when things calm down I would return things did not calm down and I did not return so gradually the rest of my family moved to the US and it became clear that we need to make a fresh start of it here which we were lucky enough to be able to do and privileged to be able to do but it did mean that I had to sort of redefine myself as an immigrant and I had to explore this new territory of living between two identities and because I'm also half Armenian living among three identities so it was an interesting period of growing up in the US as it happened I went to a different high school every year so I actually went to four different high schools which in a way didn't help me build relationships as a teenager but what it did do it actually pushed me further into theater because that was the only place where I felt at home in a way and by the time I finished high school I wanted to pursue theater as a professional career but coming from an immigrant family, economic independence was very important to us so I pursued a career in the sciences to be able to find a job right away and make money which I did and then I pursued theater and by the time I moved to San Francisco the plan was to pursue an MFA in theater and by the time I got my graduate degree I established a theater company and the idea of this theater company really was born I think the day I landed at Kennedy Airport and was asked about my identity and why am I here who am I, why do I think I belong here and sort of negotiating all of those complicated issues as a 14 year old I think all of that was building up and when I was studying theater and I was auditioning for graduate programs a number of times I was told that because of my looks and because of my accent I would never be cast in a leading role in American theater and that discouraged me a little bit but by the time I did finish my graduate studies what I realized was that I'm not alone I have stories that I want to tell and I will write my own stories and I will act in my own plays with my accent and with my looks and as soon as I started doing that I realized I met other artists that are in similar shoes that are looking for an artistic home and that was the impetus for founding Golden Thread Productions which is our theater company in San Francisco devoted to the Middle East and I'm happy to talk more about it in our conversation I do have marketing material like a good artistic director so I have bookmarks and I have my business cards here so Thank you everyone so you know one thought that really is pressing is politicians and the hell need to see this place because they talk as if all these people why are they coming towards us and there's zero recognition that American foreign policy has something to do with why sometimes people leave their countries that we are not completely innocent of what happens and I know in our region in the Middle East so you support dictators and you flood the Middle East with weapons and then why are these people coming? You would do the same thing if you were under attack so you really educate on the truth behind what's happening but you also humanize it ultimately we're all humans and we're all seeking safety and prosperity and so are you having any efforts to actually educate Congress and politicians? This is one question and the other is because we have to stop at one and I really want to engage the audience the other question is I know that as an immigrant myself even when you leave your country you practice some sort of censorship what you can and can't do because most often you have relatives who are still there so what extent has this experience of being away yourself from that and dealing with people who just came or people who are maybe on route wanting to leave or how has this influenced your work? And I'll let you all take two minutes to answer and then we'll open it to the audience. I'll just, with the first question I actually had a meeting this week at the Capitol with a staff of Congressman Bitsera's office from Los Angeles and we are in the process of bringing shelter to the Capitol, to the theater in the Capitol. Because you hear all this xenophobic language that's really offensive from top politicians and it's excusable. Wendy? We do spend a great deal of time working with Congress with the administration with the various federal agencies that are involved in immigrant and refugee issues to try and raise their awareness about why people are fleeing Central America. I think there's again a tremendous level of ignorance about what's happening very close to our borders and I think a lack of sense of responsibility because as you were saying, this really, the U.S. involvement in that region has a lot to do with what's happening currently. So frankly, I think the dysfunctionality of Congress right now has actually helped us on the Central American issue because most of the response that we saw when the child migration crisis really exploded in 2014 was a backlash against these children and a desire to really cut back on the protections that are available to them under U.S. law, which were very hard fought legislative victories over a couple of decades. So as we head into the fall, we'll see what comes next but it's alarming to us to see kind of the tone, obviously, of the rhetoric that's happening currently around immigration and refugee issues. I think if we cannot educate people in the Congress, we can educate people on the end. We like them. Yeah, but first time when I went in Calards we were making a play about drugs and cartels and one student asked me, what do we have to do with that and what America has to do with that and I said, you have the weapons, which cartels kill people and this is a very complex, biased circle but we can share that, we can share that information. In my country, we have not really censorship as an artist and only if you say something about the Birken de Guadalupe it could be very, very, very dangerous. Actually, it happened. Things like people coming into the stage and push the actors, 1982 for example, all the actors went to the hospital after that just because they were talking about the Birken de Guadalupe but we have a very complex instrument in the cultural life in Mexico because there are many artists with a grant like me, for example, but we can do our work about anything social, political issue that we want but they make the way that nobody sees our work so it's something difficult because we have not infrastructure to show, to share our work but we can talk about anything and we have to because our governments are doing very, very bad things at this moment they are killing the teachers this week they killed six teachers in Oaxaca because they are protest against the new reform of the education which nobody on the government can explain what is it so we have to deal with that and our way to do it is with art so our audience is mainly the voter, the public and in every play and production it's a real focus for us to connect the stories if the play is taking place in the Middle East to actually link it to our lives, to our daily lives why does it matter, how does it impact us or how do we impact it so that dialogue and that clarifying or at least I love what you said about helping people ask better questions it's not so much about providing the answers or the solutions but giving some information so that people can ask better questions because it's despite the US having been involved in the Middle East for more than 50, 60 years the amount of misconception and misinformation about the Middle East in the US is just mind boggling and every day we have to answer questions that may seem silly until you actually remind yourself this person asking me this question is the person who will cast a vote in November and it's my responsibility to answer as truthfully and informatively as I possibly can so we take that responsibility very seriously and with every play we try to present complicated political situations that seem complicated and beyond our understanding or beyond our ability to impact we present it as a human story in ways that hopefully invite engagement and deeper inquiry thank you Larry and Natalia I say a few quick words but Natalia can speak particularly on what we've done with the UK government and the two things I would say very quickly one's just a tactical, practical thing which is we have a member of the UK parliament on our board who's chair of the Parliamentary Subcommittee for Women and Equalities so in terms of some of the stuff we want to do having a trustee on our company board who's one of the UK's more enlightened and reasonable parliamentarians has been a useful tactic but a lot of what the Belarus Free Theatre does in its theatre making is it collides the micro narrative story of the real experiences in lives of individuals with big geopolitical shifts and structures that's a key methodological tactic so the company has uniquely in the UK performed and lobbied actively in the UK parliament on the Congress floor but I'll let Natalia talk a bit about and we're doing it again in September when we'll take Petro Pavlensky and Masha from Pussy Riot into Parliament but that's not straightforward but Natalia can say a bit more about that particular tactic we have the campaign in theatre and it's interesting that that particular framing came up only when we became refugees because we never separated any activities we've been performing producing, educating and campaigning that was a nature of the company so every single show will have its particular campaign if we have the issue of political kidnappings and murders in Belarus we will run the campaign against kidnappings and murders and because of it they were awards given to us like French Republic of Human Rights gave a surprise for doing that particular campaign it was never given to any cultural institution before so the whole idea of managing theatre and campaign was not acceptable in the UK because it was called political lobbying and it was necessary for us to frame it the way it will be absolutely clear human rights campaigning and it's exactly what we do we campaign specifically for very precise human rights whether it will be LGBT community we work with them whether it will be rights of disabled people it will be led by disabled people back in Belarus if we talk about death penalty we will organise protests we still call it protests even though I found the way how to frame it in the UK you need to call it artistic stunt but then you do what you need to do one Natalia is referring to is UK legislation which prevents you from having charitable status if you're a political party, pressure group or so we're a theatre company but a campaigning and teaching theatre and then in terms of for example last year it was Belarus free theatre who organised the first public debate on artistic freedoms in the UK it was not about Belarus it was about the UK because there are signs of self-sendership and there is no guidelines for policing and it's happened first time ever in the houses of parliament and the speakers' apartment and it is happening now with the refugee crisis as well we worked very closely with an organisation that is called Good Chance Calle this is the group of just two young English playwrights who opened the door in the jungles it's a refugee camp in Calle in France it's 50 minutes by train from London, Kins Cross to France and you are exactly in absolutely parallel reality among 7000 of refugees now 5000 because in February French government demolished part of the camp so we've been working very closely with them on lobbying interests of refugees in Brussels so I went to talk to Brussels forum and I talked to Martin Schulz who is the president of European Parliament so for us it's not possible to separate what we do artistically and on human rights I mean this is the power of arts that it brings the human, the geopolitical and the personal all at once open it to the audience like Giorgio said there are microphones please raise your hand if you have a question and don't forget to state your name clearly Michael Feldman, create equity I wanted to give Wendy credit where credits do as a former committee staffer in the senate you are a theatre producer they're called committee hearings and how do you take theatre works in the traditional sense and make them committee hearing ready because as we know that's where you actually get the messages in the congressional or parliamentary system so that they actually can turn into legislations or report language that influence what executive branch agencies do thank you that's very true it's political theatre I think very much what my co-panelists have been saying is what we need to do with congress which is to humanize these issues in the immigration refugee world I think we spend a lot of time talking about numbers and there's something that is very very dehumanizing about data so I did have the opportunity to testify before the house judiciary committee this spring it's not a particularly friendly committee on immigration issues and what I did was get up there and tell stories and I think it had some impact I'm not going to say I persuaded anybody on that committee but I think it at least gave them pause and made it harder for them to engage in the kind of anti-immigrant xenophobic racist language that they might normally engage in if there are no questions we'll break for lunch and you can always speak to any of our panelists during lunch