 Can you put a break for me? Sound is cutting in and out for me. I can't hear anything, actually. I only hear Darra. Open source platforms, which is really exciting because it lets us do things like dissertation defenses and panels and discussions for a broad audience. In a way, this is taking things forward where maybe years ago we would feel like we might have been doing this in a vacuum or is anybody hearing this discussion? And now we have a platform to distribute it across the country and around the world. And in addition to live streaming it, it will also be archived on HowlRound site. So for those of you who find this incredibly interesting or have content within it that you might want to share after the fact, there will be an archive on HowlRound site that there will be a link available. I'm going to check in with Jose, see if we're getting ready to go with the content. And once again, thank you all for joining us. Yes, my name is Dr. Carolyn Kenny and I'm serving as Jessica's the chair of her dissertation. I'd also like to thank LaMama and the Culture Hub and all the incredible staff here who have helped to put together this. This is a very unusual dissertation defense for our Antioch University program. It is a theater production, a theater production as well as a dissertation defense. So I want to thank everybody who's involved in putting this together. Also, I'd like to welcome you on behalf of Antioch University and Jessica, of course, has been working very hard to get through her years in our program, the Antioch University PhD in Leadership and Change. And this is a culmination of her many years of work. This is a pièce de resistance, the endpoint, the demonstration of her project which she's been working on so wonderfully and fiercely and elegantly. And so we'll be participating in that today. I do want to also introduce you to the other committee members. I, as I said, am the chair. And here we have virtually, we have Dr. Dara Cole-Hain who is at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. She's a professor of anthropology, but so much more. The list is very long and performance studies is her passion right now. So, and she's an amazing scholar so she has participated with Jessica's learning and independent study and also her dissertation committee. So we have also, not present, but who also participated was Dr. Solini Madison who is a professor in performance studies, anthropology and African studies at Northwestern University in Evanston near Chicago. And she also did an independent study with Jessica and also has been on her committee but she was unable to attend today. So she sent a lot of feedback and I will represent her feedback later in the program in the defense. We also have Dr. Magdalena. Okay, here we go. Kazubowski, is that right Magda? Kazubowski Houston. She's an associate professor in the department of theater and performance studies in the grad program in social anthropology at York University in Toronto. And we also have my colleague from Antioch who is the other core faculty member on the committee, Dr. Elizabeth Holloway. She is a professor of psychology in our program at Antioch, the PhD in leadership and change. And my own background is I'm a professor, I'm now a professor emeritus at Antioch University. Jessica will be my last student who I'm chairing before I retire from this program. So it's really a wonderful way to end my many years working in this program. And I'm also a visiting scholar at the Indigenous Education Institute of Canada at the University of British Columbia. So that is my welcome to you, my introduction and now we're gonna give you over to Jessica, we're yours. Just good enough. Carolyn told me that she has chaired 50 dissertations, so I'm proud to be her 50. I'm sorry, I can't hear. You can't hear, okay. No. Can you hear me now? Well, could you hear Carolyn when she was talking? What? Excuse me? It was there. Okay, well, can you check your own audio? I am told to tell you that. Check that your own volume is turned up. Dara, can you hear me? Okay, well, should I begin? And while my, yes, okay. Yes, ma'am. Yes, of course. I should also let you know the format because, well, Michael has attended some of our defenses, but we have a formal format for the defenses and it will be that we've made the introductions. Now Jessica will offer her presentation and then I will offer comments from her different committee members so she can have a dialogue with Dara and Magda and Elizabeth and Sojeni's comments. And then I will be leaving and calling back the committee members on the telephone and we will deliberate, God bless you. And we will discuss any minor revisions that Jessica does need to make technically for her defense. And meanwhile, she'll be in here discussing things with you and if you have questions of her, you can ask her then. Then I will come back in and announce the results of our deliberations. I'll come back from the telephone then. I've never had any trouble being heard before so this is quite new to me. But okay. Welcome to my dissertation defense and thank you for coming. These good dear friends in the room and those far away streaming virtually, I don't know who's listening but thanks to how around it could be global, which is fabulous, I hope. Thank you so much to Carolyn, who is my chair and without whom this work would never have been pushed through the birthing canal of the academy into this room. Thanks to Tammy and Deb, who are my heat collective partners and so much thanks to Culture Hub and La Mama. We will do next weekend, I'll talk more about this at the very end when we're having our discussion, that next weekend in the La Mama Club we will be performing the play that is the heart of this dissertation and that is chapter four of the physical dissertation. And that will be dedicated to the spirit of Ellen Stewart who pushed me towards the East metaphorically in this very building so long ago, I won't admit how long ago it was. And those of you watching out there who don't know about this incredible woman, I think you should please look her up. I also thank Ankur, who's gonna come up here a couple of times and help me share some bits of art in the service of theory. So my heart is in the East, exploring theater as a vehicle for change inspired by the poetic performances of ancient Andalusia. In this presentation I will share my research, examine the ways a particular period of history informed the creation of a piece of socially engaged theater aimed at instigating change. My heart is in the East and I am at the edge of the West. The research began for me with this poem. However, the interest in the material began as many of my adventures do with a lesson taught to me by one of my daughters. Emma was introduced to mnemonies in a high school philosophy class. She came home with stories about a period of time when Muslims and Jews were brought together through performative poetic exchange. And she was so excited by it that I began to research and it actually ended up in a family trip my two daughters and myself took to Southern Spain to Cordoba where this play takes place in part. And as I began to do theater work in the Middle East encountering conflict and paradox, peace sometimes seemed like a romantic fantasy. So when I chose my dissertation topic I knew I had to go back to this ancient period known as La Convivencia, the coexistence. And discover more about how this history might help me as a metaphor for poetic performance as a peace building tool. I was also interested in juxtaposing elements of contemporary life, theatricalizing and theorizing the paradox itself. So I was inspired by this quote as well, this academic quote, this scholarly quote. Now hear this mixture where hip hop meets scripture and develop the negative into a positive picture. Hill, L, 1999. So positioning myself as a hybrid being artist, scholar, activist is important as context for the research because the subject and the methodology are multifaceted. I'm a teacher, I'm a registered drama therapist, I'm an actor, a playwright, a core member of Theater Without Borders, and there's my bio. I also do that. Okay. I haven't perfected the, changed the slide gesture. Is this good? Okay, yeah. My company, the Heat Collective came after trying over and over again to explain the four aspects of my ongoing work. My passion for healing, education, activism and theater caused me to lead a collaged existence often outside of any cozy box of belonging. I've been a theater artist all my life as certainly all my adult life. So the language of theater is the only language I speak fluently. Everything else, including the language of scholarship is filtered through that. So that's both an introduction and a warning as we move forward. My heart is in the East is the script that's the heart of this dissertation. Half of it is directly autobiographical and takes place during my field work in conflict zones in the Middle East. The other half is fictional based on history, takes place a thousand years ago. In the modern half of the play, the main character was originally called Jessica. And then I changed it to the researcher. And then I finally gave her another name, Miriam, so that I could explore her more freely. So the nature of engaging in performative auto ethnography and autobiographical theater is just before diving in, you ask yourself, oh, can I say this? Should I tell this story? You have to tell the whole story. I can't write my dissertation until I do. You can't gain entrance into the other world until you do. You'll have to protect the guilty embellish the innocent. Change some things, change names, no names at all. My name is Miri. I am named for my grandmother, Miriam, who sang me Jewish lullabies. My grandmother's name was also Miriam. Her lullabies were in Arabic. His name is Abu al-Hussein al-Hujir. Just Abu. He's not really here. Of course I am here. I am as much here as you. Looks, there are going to be some details of the story I'm not going to be able to. Some parts will be truth in fiction. Fiction in truth. For your safety and my own. Some parts may be hard to do. Hard to hear. Sorry. She begins. My research question, how do I utilize theater as a vehicle for personal and social change became clearer to me as I worked. Finally, this is the question I put to myself as a challenge and a barometer of my efforts and the efficacy of my work. I'll come back to this later. The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the power of theater as change agent, using history and poetry as subject and form, to investigate the gap in the literature, the existent literature on theater and change, to combine all four aspects of heat for the purpose of artful service, to experiment with theater and drama therapy techniques that embrace the goal of personal and group healing through theater, which includes puppet building. I brought some of my friends with me today. And to develop theater performances, discussions and workshops that are effective in changing perception and behavior and that can assist in building community, awakening compassion and provoking thought. And finally, to explore history and poetry as vehicles for change in the context of performance. The literature search involved looking at articles and books that examined various uses of theater for personal and social change. I investigated the areas of theater history, applied theater, theater's peace and justice builder, et cetera. And then I created a Venn diagram with the elements of heat and search for literature in each category. This is just examples of four types of literature from the four aspects of heat, from David Reed Johnson, a drama therapist, from Keith Johnstone, who is one of my teachers who speaks about improvisation from an educational perspective, Augusto Boal, who speaks about theater and activism and Solomon Febreis, who is a wonderful scholar and champion of theater. My historical research was fascinating because it was a genre of literature I'd never really delved into. I have an aunt who's an historian and so I stayed away from the subject, never knowing I could never be an expert. I've used quite a lot of historical inspiration in my plays, I've written quite a few plays that deal with history, but in terms of scholarly work, it was fascinating to me. And in the chapter on literature and my dissertation, I compared examples of various historical researchers and found a wide variety of styles and relationships to questions of historical interpretation. I also explored questions about the ethics of using history as fiction. I studied mainly the Golden Age in medieval Spain, which is where la convivencia took place. It produced major poets, philosophers, and scientists. And the cooperative interactions between Jews and Muslims were deeply rooted in poetic expression. And so I extrapolated from that history to create the play. We'll talk more about that later. These are just three favorite quotes from my literature search. If I can't dance, I don't wanna be a part of your revolution, oh, I can't do it. Sorry, but Emma's gotta say that herself. If I can't dance, I don't wanna be a part of your revolution. Theater is an ally to traditional justice, Febreze, and finally, the great John Paul Letterac, who says we must reach out to those we fear and imagine the possibilities of peace. My methodology was a bricolage. I included auto ethnography, performative writing, arts-based research, historical research, and performance ethnography, utilizing something that, a term that Audra Cole uses called scholar artistry, looking at the crossroads, the boundaries, the borders, the intersections of scholarship and art. A bricolage is a methodology that combines multiple methods of inquiry. And one artist that's associated with this form is Joseph Cornell, who makes these amazing boxes. I don't know if you're familiar with his work. He's wonderful. So I tried to make one, and I made one that incorporated all of the aspects of this dissertation, performance, history, poetry, social justice, and Arabic and Hebrew letters. I'm not a plagiarist, so I have to say the little Jewish man in the corner was made by my daughter, Emma, but I did the rest. Okay, thank you. It was very useful, by the way, and you'll see as I move on to make physical metaphors of some of the theory, so I theorized the art quite a bit, and vice versa. So another methodology is performance ethnography. Spry talks about it in a beautiful way that really spoke to me, the convergence of the autobiographic impulse and the ethnographic moment. And that's what I really wanna underline in this slide, and I will come back to that later on. And you'll see how that works for me. The use of ethnography in my dissertation was theatrical, so that the people that I met and spoke to are, I should say, artistic, creative, the people that I met and spoke to during my field work were represented in sketches and then puppets and were embedded fictionally in the dramatic expression of the play, which is the core of one of the six chapters of the dissertation is this play, and in that I've embedded a lot of the ethnography. So the convergence that Spry spoke about boils down for me to truth is fiction, fiction is truth. Auto-ethnography, tricky methodology, this. Wonderful, wonderful scholars, Tosig, who one of my committee members, Dara Culhane, who you just heard about and will meet later, shared these wonderful, wonderful scholars with me. And he wrote a book that really encourages ethnographers to keep a journal, to keep scratch notes and drawings, and I did, I kept use sketches and journals and puppets to record the people I encountered in the field, and this was tremendously inspiring and helpful. So as a researcher that exists within a social group, writing from the perspective of the subject, it's a different, it's a little bit different than what I was doing, I was doing field work, but I wasn't looking at Middle Eastern culture or even in my historical research, medieval and Alusian culture as an anthropologist, but I was looking as a performative ethnographer, as an auto-ethnographer, looking at the research creatively, character logically, and also very self-reflectively. So my own narratives were also viewed in the frame of ethnography and the frame of my own research, so I was researching my own experience in an interesting way that kind of had to go back and forth between self-reflection and then bringing it back to the scholarship. And historical research was a great big part of my experience as I've said before, before I was talking really about the literature and the search for historical material, here I'm talking about the methodology of historical research and historiography. One quote I love is Dennis who says, to write history means to quote history, which means to rip the historical object out of context. So there is no way to maintain absolute accuracy. If my historian aunt is listening, she may be rolling her eyes or throwing something at the computer because maybe a true historian has a very different relationship to the science of history. For me, I was always taking it through the lens and through the filter of my own scholarship and my own research. So I quite literally ripped historical objects out of context while trying to be accurate and careful about that. My research was not just done in books but some of the methodology was visceral. I went back and back and back to this room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, second floor, third hallway, Islamic wing. Imagining the world I was researching until I could sense it, this is from the play. I stand in the doorway of an ancient room, a replica of a room in medieval Spain. Do you have a sanctuary? This room is mine. Calligraphy lines the walls, Arabic letters and gold. The voices of the ancient poets inscribed on every surface. I can hear them. They speak in Arabic and Hebrew and just for me in modern English, a language not yet born. I wanna dive into that world. Another methodology in this Bricolage is performative writing. When I first heard about performative writing, I thought it was something like interpretive dance that I would be performing until I realized that actually the words are performing on the page and that vitalizes the methodology. So I say here, performative writing has helped me understand how to link my own poetic voice to the scholarly voices within the academy and there are many great scholars. Pelius writes about this complex view, scholarship that incorporates contemporary and oppositional logics to resist a coherent theory of performance with attention to aesthetics and meaning so that each word carries an ideological kick. So it really was wonderful to know that when you place a word on a page, you are giving it or not giving it an ideological kick. I love that. So the discovery process, bless you. Fieldwork, writing, paradox boxes, drawings, puppet building, rehearsal, readings, audience response. That's the chronology of my dissertation journey and because of the typo, let's speed up and go to the next slide. Fieldwork, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, all of these pictures, by the way, are taken with my iPhone so this was all either in classes I was teaching or experiences. If you come see the play, you'll see these scenes embodied theatrically. This is just another image from my travels. I'm teaching theater in a Palestinian cave, theater at the oppressed festival, theater work in Basra, Iraq, community building throughout these various conflict zones, teaching theater in the West Bank, making puppets at the Freedom Theater in Janine Refugee Camp. The first thing you do in this process of puppet building is you make the puppet's brain. You take a secret or an image or a memory or a poem and it becomes the brain of the puppet and then the newspaper and masking tape form the head around it and a face emerges and the stories come. So this is one puppet building workshop. So what I'm doing with this form, theorizing this form, is really incorporating drama therapy into the work of a theatrical medium being puppets because when you place a brain into the puppet, you're really creating a relationship to that puppet. Now the audience that you're working with will never know what's inside the brain of the puppet, but the creator of the puppet will know and it gives the puppets a lot of meaning and weight. Writing, it was one of my independent learning achievements that Soini Madison gave me was to embed the theories into a play, not write a play with a paper, but embed the theories into the play. Terrifying concept, I'd never tried it before it ended up being my heart is in the east of the play. My writing went back and forth between scholarly and a scholarly and an artistic process where the scholarly writing was solitary, theatrical writing process is often a collaborative one. The paradox boxes. I encountered so much paradox along the way that I started thinking, whoa, I could make Joseph Cornell type boxes, little boxes that within which I explore different paradoxes, so these are just a couple and my house is filled with them now. And then I also use sketches to capture the people I met both in the field and in literature and they often ended up as puppets. Rehearsal is research. This was a wonderful concept that Dara helped me understand a little bit more than I did. I always, many, many years of working as a theater artist, I see rehearsal as a means to an end, not so much as research itself, except the early days of experimental theater when we would rehearse every play for six months, but who has the funding. So this was very interesting. So I rented a studio space and I engaged in a process called One Puppet One Hour and I went into the studio space for an hour with a puppet and experimented with text and movement and puppet handling because these puppets are not their odd in the way that they work, which you'll see in a minute. At times solitary experimentation was more conducive to the stage of the research process, very challenging to be in a studio alone, trying to understand what am I trying to say and do with this puppet? What am I trying to do with this research? Are these stories actually viable for my work? For my scholarly work, does this make sense? Very different process than going into a studio to make a performance piece, quite different. Once the script was written, of course, I rehearsed it with others to discover more about the material and the research continued, some more rehearsal shots. Several times I engaged, invited audience in readings to discover their responses to the material. So in the process of my work, I had several different focused events. One was the scholarly artistic conversation and so this took place in two parts. One was in a Los Angeles hotel room with members of my PhD cohort who are leaders in non-artistic fields and the second was in a space in New York City with only theater practitioners and I did the same material and then asked them the same series of questions and did a kind of small focus group study on how they related to the material, especially the material that was, how did the theater artists relate to the more scholarly aspects of the work? How did the scholars relate to the theatrical aspect? It was a very interesting reading process. All parts of my heart is in the east or what I was reading. And then I did an international political conversation, performed sections of the play at various international venues, performing the world, the International Peace and Research Association Conference in Istanbul, the Global Mobility Symposium, Global Economic Forum and then the script development conversation came with readings as development of the script. So there were many readings that were just script development and then we had a culminating event which was on December 12th upstairs on the sixth floor, the Heat Collective held a public reading of the script with the poetry contest afterwards and a guided discussion about the potential of peace building and performance and that's what you'll experience if you come next week. We'll have a poetry contest and a discussion after every performance. These elements were incredibly important to us and we had a wonderful evening and these are just pictures of the poetry contest and post-show, that's fine, that's fine. That's great. The process of creating my heart in the east and so this is where things get, whenever you do this kind of work, there comes a point where things get tricky and so this is the tricky part. It was enjoyable and it has been wonderful and it's also been arduous because the amount of resistance that I encountered on the path of generating the work about Jewish and Muslim relations was quite astonishing and as Tammy and Deb, my Heat Collective partners will attest to when getting ready to stage this culminating event, I interviewed more directors than I care to mention who turned away because of the subject matter. A prominent artistic director said, and this was relayed to me, that he could produce a play about anything in the world except the Jewish, Muslim, Israeli, Palestine issue. Audiences responded positively to the topic but some directors and producers declined official involvement, the facilitator at a New York playwriting retreat where I was working on the script said she wouldn't moderate a discussion about this piece if I paid her. She was worried about the adversarial conversation that might arise. While I was writing my dissertation, irreverent cartoonists were massacred in Paris, black men were murdered in New York and artistic director was fired from a Jewish theater in Washington DC for producing pro-Palestinian plays, discrimination prevailed in schools, prisons, hospitals and courtrooms. Don't we need to talk about peace and justice? Are people fearful of conversation? Any post-show discussion threatens to evoke tension, anger, fear and other feelings about an issue both ancient and present but doesn't American theater exist for that very reason to raise issues, to combat fear and revel in the green zone of free expression at the heart of a free world? At one point in the play, the researcher threatens to remove the character and silence, the character who embodies her own inner antagonist, the voice of controversy that I embedded in the play to challenge myself. She turns to him at one point when he isn't following her protocol and says, okay, your lines are cut, from now on you are silent. You are marginalizing me. Marginalizing you, I wrote you. What gave you the right to write me? Very good question. And I put that to myself and asked, did I have the right to write him? Now, I also had some other challenging characters in the play to challenge me to see if the academy is going to accept this dissertation. How can I balance art and scholarship? So the scholar puppet who only speaks in citation shows up while the researcher is trying so hard to find her way as an, ah. A room is not a thesis, a dream is not a theory, poetry is not summation. True scholarship is grounded in reality. Be thorough, be careful, be exact. Coonley, A.L. 2011. I am careful, I am thorough, I am exact. See, I am trying. What? Who wrote your book? A puppet show? It gets more and more far-fetched. Know your reasons for research. Do not waste the academy's time with your abstract music. Little Hall, 2007. Okay, thank you. So he is constant and is a constant force in the play pushing me towards looking at that boundary between scholarship and art. So the researcher argues with him quite a bit. Performing Cordoba and reflecting on modern times. The play mirrors the methodology as a bricolage of characters from different centuries and cultures. The modern day scholar tries to, not that scholar, the researcher, forgive me. The modern day researcher tries desperately to get back to ancient Cordoba and to find peace. She finally does, she finally breaks in through this room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and she earns a moment of true poetic exchange with an ancient poet who says at the end of their wonderful poetic coupling, I have not, he says, I've not had such a poetic exchange not at the contest, not at a wine party. Forces are closing in around us from outside Cordoba. They will tell us apart, poets are the last peace builders, we have to keep writing. So they challenge each other creatively, they laugh, they hold each other and over their closeness, this sort of wonderful moment of true peace 1,000 years ago, we hear these voices perhaps. If you click on that little icon of the, of the, yes, that thing, is that not working? That's okay, it's all right. What you hear, what we hear, we don't know these lines, I wish we did, but what you, because they're recorded, but what you hear is the voices of these characters 1,000 years later, talking about what is going to happen. I don't have it with me. What is going to happen later? So it, so as you see these people playing and laughing and trading genders and breaking custom in the service of peace, you hear their voices saying, we will be torn apart in 1492. We, Jews and Muslims will be expelled from Spain in 1099. You hear all these historical things that are going to happen until you hear anti-Semitism will rise in the East and fear of Muslims in the West. And we hear this juxtabiscition of the bad news that will come juxtaposed with this beautiful, tiny little period, what Aviva, the character in ancient Spain calls our small, sweet pause in the ongoing wars. Okay, so responses to three questions that I got from my committee, which were very interesting to me. What was the most vivid paradox? How do you see arts as leadership? And how is peace a radical intervention? So we'll try to answer that. So the most vivid paradox. One of my goals was to negotiate my own complicated relationship to Israeli-Palestinian Jewish Arab strife with some grace. I wanted to overcome these emotional challenges without losing my patience, temper or nerve in order to offer a vibrant, meaningful and productive piece of work in these places. This happens to be a photograph of me in Iraq in a building that used to be a synagogue. I was told to not even say, oh, how beautiful, and this was taken of me, and then I was told not to look that interested in the building because I had to hide the fact that I was Jewish and any emotional reaction to this building could be very dangerous. But going to Israel and Palestine stunned me. Gonna check the time, and I'm gonna just, can you go back? Sorry. I'm gonna just read a little bit from the play if that's okay. The wall is a surprise. It's a surprise because it isn't. Because you've heard about it since you were a girl, because it's an icon and a sermon and a cliche. You make your journey there because you have to, because it's your heritage, and you cover your arms and you write the secret note and you stuff it in the cracks and you walk away from the wall backwards in respect. It's just a wall. It's just bricks, and walls make you angry, especially in Israel, and this one is maddening because the women are sequestered on one side while the men are close to the Torah and the Talit and the Bar Mitzvah boys and the moms and the aunts and the sisters are standing on little chairs looking longingly over the partition. It's just a wall filled with prayers, light stones with trees growing through crevices. But still, it surprises you. And when you try to go to the golden, beautiful, mosaic dome of the mount, the man outside says, just for Muslims. So you go back to the wall. Your wall, the wall you somehow inherited because your grandparents were Jewish, because your mother taught you to be, because you are. You go to shul on the occasional Friday night, right? You fast on the holiday. You throw bread in the river. You dove in a tone. But here you are conflicted and you teach a class in Tel Aviv and suddenly it hits you that every single person in the room is Jewish and that thought fills you with comfort. And then you go back to Palestine and your friends call Israel 48 for 1948, the year of independence, catastrophe, exodus, expulsion, a miracle, a butchering, a paradox. And they tell you that if you believe in them, you won't go back and you don't understand why, but it pains you. How can you feel two things at once? You're not supposed to love Israel. You've seen the violence for yourselves and the settlers, when they can't kill Palestinians, kill olive trees. But still you go to Yad Vashem and you look at the boxcar and the children's memorial where the voices of dead children are read in endless succession to the light of one million candles. So simple, so dumb-founding, so true. Both sides. Both sides you wanna cry for. Both sides you wanna buy guns for. Both sides they expire. Both sides they are liars. Both sides they have kids. Both sides they are kids. Both sides we see them bleeding. Both sides speeding towards death. Both sides ain't no dreaming, just scheming leanings towards dark. No spark of hope to cope with the dopes who sit in offices, point guns at maps. They are killed that, spilled that, grilled that hillbill with your Mohammed, your Moses, your Christ, your improvised explosive device far wide. Both sides. I need to go beyond the practice of John Paul Letterach's theory of paradoxical curiosity. I took it one step further, teaching myself and others to become comfortable and dexterous with paradox. Workshops in peace-building performance that I teach with David Diamond all over the place. We expand on this practice and this theory of digging into paradox, which is a tool that's not appealing for most. It can be confusing and uncomfortable and people are afraid of it. But it can be extraordinary if we dive into it wholeheartedly. Theater is leadership. Let me just ask these questions. If the arts were part of leadership training, how might leaders practice imagining change before taking action? Could dramatized history be a model for peace and justice? If political leaders were trained in the arts, could that training manifest in a more feminine principle of inclusion and hybridity and a more dexterous relationship to paradox? What if world leaders practice role-playing, placing themselves in another person's shoes as a creative exercise? What if voice and movement work could free leaders to express their authentic voices? What if the clergy were trained in the arts? Would that change the practice and the structure of churches and synagogues? If doctors were trained in the arts and attuned to their own sensory experiences, would patient care be enriched? And what if leaders, if artists were trained in leadership? Would the arts be richer in service as a result? These are the questions I will continue to ask myself as I move forward in my life and work as an artist and a leader. Is this work useful? So Brecht wrote this poem, The Seminal Poem, changed my life when I was young, called On Everyday Theater, and one of the last lines is, what the man at the corner did, you would be doing less than him if you made your theater less meaningful with a lesser provocation, less intense in its effect on the audience, and less useful. So I ask myself, is this work useful? I always do. Going to the theater or reading a book of scholarly theory, the same question comes up, why did you say make this? If I don't have to ask, then in my opinion, it's good theater and good theory. If I know why the author has done it just because of the passion or the idea's authenticity. Peace as a radical intervention, this is what we're trying to do with the Heat Collective. I'm gonna tell a very brief story when I was a kid, my dad's very close friend, Earl Shorris, who's no longer with us. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant man and kind, good-hearted person who devoted his life as a scholar to enriching the lives of people less fortunate. And there was one point in my life when I was sick of theater, I was like, I can't be involved in that narcissistic commercialism one day more, I wanna help the world, I wanna do something, I'm gonna quit theater, which my children tell me I say yearly. I'm gonna quit theater and join the Peace Corps or something and we're talking and he's supporting me and I remember we were in a Chinese restaurant we left and I'm walking one way and he and his wife are walking the other and I hear my name, Jessica, and I turn around and he says, remember, all art is revolution and that has been really in my heart ever since. So at the Heat Collective, we try to work using art as revolution and I'm very much in this dissertation, it's something that I've tried to embody. So I'm gonna end with the ending of the play because I don't know any better way to end, so will you come? And so here ends our strange love story without solution, without glory. Deep at sea in a school of sharks instead of answers, more question marks. Man versus woman, edit versus Jew, east versus west, red versus blue. There are some who fight to see rays of light in this dark cold world where it's mostly night. A distant glint in their upturned eyes, look, a slight bright gash in the shadowed skies and through the breach from either side fly two flocks of birds with their wings spread wide. One covey predator, one flight prey, there will be blood by the end of the day, or the field on which these birds alight will not be the scene of a gory fight. Perhaps the gods that favor geese will prevail on these birds for peace. Perhaps the hound won't bite the fox and will make friends with paradox. Perhaps the lamb curls up with lion and Mecca fastens hands with Zion. But it's your decision. It's your choice, dear friends. How will this story reach its end? You must act fast. And choose which track and solve the riddle before the lights go black. In our vast lost choir, what deeds win through? And faced with war, what will you do? Thank you, Jessica. For the committee who isn't here, I just want to say that yesterday I had the great privilege of seeing a run through of the whole play, which was really amazing. So for those of you who are here, Jessica is surrounded by some of her closest community members here. I hope all of you will be able to attend the full play next week and see. So this portion of the defense is when we go into the even more questions and comments from the committee members, I'm going to start with the comments and questions from Dr. Madison. So Yeni Madison, because she was unable to attend today. That's okay, we don't need to. So first of all, I want to just read out some of the comments she made on Jessica's work on the actual dissertation. I think this is a stunning combination of performative writing, precise theoretical analysis, excavation of a vastly important moment of ancient history, and richly informed citations of scholars, artists, and activists engaged with the broad range of theater, performance, and social activism. I give this dissertation a very strong pass. The fieldwork alone is substantial and groundbreaking. The play is beautiful, skilled, and significant. And the academic analysis is of a high standard. Jessica, indeed, has given us a bricolage or scholar artistry of information and experience of the highest order. The points below are what I will emphasize as comments. The discussion of morality and imagination is nicely manifest in the multi-layered ideas of personal risk and public injustices alongside the poetics of her journey as a scholar, mother, artist, and activist. I appreciate that the intellectual rigor does not suffer under personal ruminations, but makes both stronger and richer and more politically relevant. There were many examples of citations and references that stood out. Litwack is a generous scholar and artist, and I appreciate how she acknowledges names and engages the work of those who have informed and inspired her own. Indeed, there were many, but one that really stood out was her discussion of malpite, malpite. And the question, what do I live for? And what do I die for? This is one example of several moments in the dissertation where she not only cites the work of others beyond parentheses of name and page number, but engages it in rich and plentiful way. I found this is rare in dissertations. And the last comment I want to mention, oh, a couple more, the paradox boxes are another stunning moment in the dissertation. The images here were such an important inclusion. Again, another moment of the artist making symbolic material out of guiding conceptual framework, beautifully done. I appreciated how Litwack presented the shifting paradigm for heat into circles. This was very interesting because the dissertation took the reader on this journey also. We moved with her discovery into circles from the introductory chapter to the play and into the final chapters and conclusion. This is in itself an example of performative writing in rain, visioning circles emanating from each other in this way. It also speaks to her work as embodying performative paradoxity. So as you can tell, Dr. Madison was quite impressed with this work. Congratulations. She does have some important questions. So you can respond to these questions. Where are the voices of her interviewees and folks she met and spoke to during the field work? You already have addressed that somewhat, but do you want to say a little more about it? Well, I think that, I think, no, it's okay. I mostly have embedded them with, since this, I didn't include traditional interviews, so for me, the interviews and the people showed up in the expression of art and it was actually her prompts that had me embed them into a script. So, okay, good. Okay, so there are a few other things that we can discuss later, small things in terms of a few minor revisions, but I'd like to now move on to Dr. Dara Culhane, Professor Culhane, are you there, Dara? Yes, Dara? Do you have your audio on? Oh, there's Elizabeth. There's Elizabeth. Jose, we are looking for Vancouver. Or, you know, now that we have Elizabeth, maybe we should go ahead. So, Elizabeth, we can't hear you. Oh, yes, now we can. Now, yes, I can see you and everything. Yes, I heard everything, so. Good. Shall I go ahead, Carol? I'm glad that Elizabeth is one of our tech geniuses in our own program, so it's wonderful to have her on the other side of being on the screen, instead of her being in charge of all the technology during defenses. Okay, Elizabeth, go for it. Well, to the points and the field experiences, those melodies, just follow through the proposal and the vision of the journey, the great artistry, and of course, I regret to say I don't know, it also is from the different focus groups. It became quickly apparent to me that regardless of parentage history of positioning in the scholarly or artistic world, the play held meaning and relevance to human struggle, fear loss, and hope. I'll actually sum up my questions in here today. So I'm going to move forward to your question. But I think we're going to continue your studies for the further advantage of that. And that is, we're going to hear from your viewers. How much do you engage our students in learning? That's a wonderful question. Can you hear me, Elizabeth? Can you hear me? Okay, great. It's a wonderful question. I'm so pleased to have one of my cohort members stop by here today before flying out to Santa Barbara to our last residency, which I'll miss because I'll be performing. But I don't know if Mike remembers this, but it's a physical relationship to scholarship. So when our very first class was a class that I was surprised and not all that pleased to discover that we were sitting in rows facing the backs of each other's heads. Mike's nodding, so I think he remembers that I, my first revolution was to, I'm not sure it was done with such grace, but I really didn't understand why we weren't sitting in a circle, that it felt like when you're a theater practitioner, you're incredibly sensitive to space and to the physical relationship between people. And because the professors are very, very kind, they immediately acquiesced and we made a circle, but that wouldn't have been the way that that first, and the funny thing was, Elizabeth, that it was a check-in session, so we were actually meeting each other for the first time, and I was meeting a lot of people's backs of their heads, and it was fine because I could hear everything they were saying, so intellectually I was getting it all, but I, as a theater person, wanted to make a circle and see everyone, and that is such a tiny, tiny little thing, but I think that starting from the physical, there's a practice that I do, and David and I use it in our piece, and performance and piece building, we actually start with it in our workshops, which is a practice called Sociometry that Jacob Moreno came up with, which is really placing, so instead of doing a check-in, I would have the people in here say, if you're in a, if this is the best day of your life, stand in that corner, this is the most miserable moment you're having, and then make a diagonal on that continuum, and then I would go around to each person on the line and see how they were doing, and they could move back and forth if their actual, if their truth authentically shifted within that check-in period so that you were actually engaging their body in something as simple as check-in. So I mean, in one way, I would, if I were to develop a course for the Antioch Leadership and Change Program, one of the things I would do was break out of the sense that we are literally talking heads, that our bodies are still from down here, and that we begin to engage our voices and bodies in the process of learning about leadership. Does that answer your question at all? It's somewhat. Well, it does, it's a wonderful beginning just for me. It's a beginning, yeah. I'm gonna go to the stage. Thank you. Okay, thank you, Elizabeth. Just want to mention to those of you who are participating virtually also there, this is not an earthquake happening when the thing is shaking. This building is a floor after floor performance space, and so there are rehearsals going on above us, and people are, people, so the ceiling is shaking a bit, so don't worry about us, there's just a lot of performance going on here. It's a very big physical theater happening above us. So, okay, Dara, we see you. Can you offer Jessica your questions and dialogue with her a bit? Yes, yes, we can hear you. Okay, can you hear me? Well, it's amazing, I just can't, I can't get over the fact that you're sitting in Vancouver, Canada, and so it's just wonderful. Gonna just hold this. So, yeah, they were plentiful. The one that actually got broken, and I have to fix it, but it was the one that was the first, and it was actually a very sharp reminder to myself about my own internal paradox, and it's an image, so it's interesting that it broke, but in any case, it is the image of a little girl in extreme happiness on a farm somewhere holding a pig, and she is laughing with such deep-throated joy and completely dirty. It probably, it looks like it's photographed in the 1930s, and she's holding a giant farm pig and laughing. Behind that is an image of a man in a suitcoat, in a storm holding on to a tree, and the tree is blowing, and he's barely, he's holding on for dear life as the storm is blowing this poor tree. And then I have a ring of little wooden blocks that were giving to me at La Mama Umbria last summer that spell my name, but like a little kid, Jessica. And then there's this tiny cup of coffee, like a ceramic cup of coffee in miniature that is there. And so I put it outside my door, and so it was every morning when I get up, before I have coffee, I look at my name, and the choice is always there because it's not one or the other. I always have that happy pig child in me and also the sense that I'm about to fall off the cliff. So this was one sort of internal paradox. Then I looked at the paradox of the woman in the paradox box with the Che Guevara behind her. The aspect of art as revolution, she's holding a knife and a heart, so that's the paradox. It's not one, it's not a choice to make, it's holding both. And then I looked in one at America, so there was a Norman Rockwell image and an image of African-Americans in one American context. I looked at a lot of Jewish-Muslim issues, so I went from a very personal paradox of being someone who contains both those realities to very global paradoxes, and I thought it's something that might, that was an exercise that I'd love to try in a workshop in terms of people being able to hold in one box two truths. Sure. Thank you. The scholarly theater one or the more international ones, any particular ones that... Well, it was... Okay, I'll talk about the Antioch one that was very, it was a skewed study because I realize now when I'm saying it scientifically, the Antioch group had wine and the New York group was sober. It was, one was during the day, one was even pure bad science, bad experiment. But the Antioch group, I invited my cohort into my hotel room and I had to kind of convince them that there would be beer and wine. That's the only way you get people to do things after hours at Antioch. Mike will attest to that. And so I bought a lot of liquor and then we, but then I read to them and I had no idea and they were sort of shoved into my, and these weren't, you know, Antioch is a very, these are leaders and they're leaders in that room. There was somebody in the medical field. There's somebody in the higher ed field. There's one of our colleagues is in higher ed administration. There was just a very vast, vast range of people. One woman was an executive at Macy's. You know, these were all people getting leadership and change doctorates. So their response was amazing to me and they seemed to relate to the material so closely because it was expressed performatively. And then the group in New York, Andrea was there, was a, was really, it was very interesting to see, I was very worried that the scholars were not gonna get the poetry and that the theater people were gonna be really bored by the theory and it was not the case. And it was very interesting that I was kind of, it felt like the scholars were hearing things in a new way and they were happy to have that different language and that the artists were actually pleased to be engaged in a kind of discussion that they weren't usually engaged in, a kind of intellectually rigorous conversation. So it felt, and there goes back to Brecht's poem, is that I felt that it was useful more than for me. It was useful to them and so that was astounding and that was partly very joyful for me. And I had two really wonderful moments where I've been able to express myself because in our cohort I'm the only artist who's a member of this cohort and it's been challenging at times. I felt very lonely and twice that time and also my dialogue group had a presentation and I again dragged them to another hotel room in a different city. I think that was Seattle and we made puppets and then they each flew home with their puppet which caused some airport problems but it was wonderful so it was great finding that connection. Okay, I realize this is being televised. Okay, no, no, that's a great question. No, it's a wonderful question. No, no, it's a wonderful question and of course I can't get into it too deeply because we don't have an hour now. But I think one thing is I've really embraced who I am as an artist. As I said at the beginning, this hybrid sense of myself as an intellectual artist, my plays have often, what's that word that's didactic and believe me that's not a compliment in the theater as you know, Dara. So I like to use, I like to get people thinking. So I have plays about neuroscience and lab monkeys and plays about Emma Goldman and plays about 17th century pirates and I tend to ask the audience to think and I've not had the kind of success that is concomitant with I feel the plays themselves. And I think it's because of that sort of hybrid nature and then the more and more that I work in, I'm going to Egypt in 10 days the more I work in far away places that are challenging and get the question is it safe there which you just kind of roll your eyes and say well that's all relative. The more I do that, the more I realize that I am not ever gonna fit into the model in the New York theater world and what is such an amazing thing is for this dissertation and this is really a testament to Carolyn and her work to push me towards this choice which is to have the defense in New York is to come home to LaMama where I, I'm gonna out myself here. I started working in this building, rehearsing, I was in the resident company of LaMama in 1979 when I was four. No, not really. No, I was young but not that young but I was right, so it's coming back to this place and that's why the spirit of Ellen Stewart like the spirit of Emma Goldman, like the spirit of the strong, wonderful women on my committee inspires me towards this. So part of it is coming home to LaMama as myself, as myself fully which is a hybrid. I'm not a playwright. I'm not an actor. I'm not a scholar. I'm not an activist. I'm all these things. In fact, David Diamond who I've mentioned a few times, we teach together and we have this practice of introducing each other and he would always introduce me the same way and I got more and more furious until finally I took him outside and said if you introduce me that way one more time we shan't be working together. I didn't say that but it was, but he always said the first thing he said about me is Jessica is a mom and she has two great children and I was horrified that our students, that's what they, that's what you gotta say about me after all you know the resume. But this was, it was very important because probably that is the most important thing I've ever done and that was a compliment from him to introduce me as a mother first because that's the one thing that's not hybrid but it is part of who I am even though my children are grown and don't necessarily wanna talk to me all the time. There is a sense that I can come with that too, that I can come with my full self. This scholarship has enabled me to step fully into my being as an intellectual and as an artist and as an activist and even as a mother. I can't, I don't know if I'm waxing poetic, I didn't cite one scholar in that answer but I thank you for asking it. Thank you, Dara, thank you for all your help. Thank you. Thanks, Dara, I do want to mention here we're gonna have Magda engage with Jessica here but I do wanna mention that all these women who you're seeing on the screens who are members of Jessica's committee are also poets and playwrights and actresses and screenplay writers and scholars. So she's in good company here with people who are simpatico with a lot of what she's done and so she's had kind of a dream team to really support her along the way. So Magda, can you give us, yes. Yes, hello Jessica. Hello. I'm one of the women we have actually never met and I wish we'd have, I wish we were able to have nation but I know the first material which you engage with. So if you're managing the astronomical situation so I'd like to thank you for this, for inviting me. So my first question to you is, and I think you just, you know, quite extensively in your response to Dara's late last question. So my question just pretty much built a little bit on that but I think you can maybe approach it a little bit I've seen artists for many years, obviously, prior to coming to the PhD competition, all that work has been very fascinating. You've done many wonderful things in the playwrights and the theater practitioner. But I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you think your work in an artist and practitioner might be enriching but also impeding your ethnic background and why I feel that you just, I just found the same response to Dara, especially the part about, you know, how you feel and I wish at this point in your career and your personal life. So I want you to think about what are the advantages and disadvantages and potential and challenges of being both an artist and an ethnographer and you also respond very eloquently just as you mentioned earlier about scholarship and myself and I've made young and old so much of a craft within artists but I used to be a theater director and a performance theater. I always found that kind of juggling of those different types and enriching but also very, very challenging and I just, in many respects, very limited to my work. So I was wondering if you could talk about a little bit more today. Absolutely and I just want to say that I've read your book and that, you know, it was one of the books that Dara first recommended for me to read and I have, I think my brain is sort of missing some cells. So can you say the name of your, it's staging strife, is that correct? Okay, I didn't want to get it wrong, thank you. Okay, which was just so inspiring to me and I think one of the things that you were able to do very well and it's something I still don't know how to do that well which is to critique your own work with the kind of sharp eye and sharp tongue of somebody who's really able to see and Dara has helped me with this too, to not get sentimental or emotional or romantic about the subject matter. I felt you were really, really honest and it was both fascinating and heart-wrenching what you wrote about. What I find, because I've been a practitioner when you say what impedes my scholarship, I think one of the things that impedes my scholarship is the desire to make it happen is that, let me put it this way. When I was first, I had to take a course in statistics when I became a registered drama therapist, I had to go through an MA in counseling psych and I had to take a course, one of those intense graduate research courses with lots of math and it was not easy for me but I remember learning about the null hypothesis and I went to two people, I can hear someone laughing, and I went to two people, one was a psychologist and one is my uncle who is a sociologist and they both described what the null hypothesis was and I thought was fascinating to me as the psychologist spoke about when you're trying to prove a theory so that you can say, for instance, if I'm working, I worked in a, I did theater and drama therapy in a shelter for domestic violence shelter and the lights were always very dim and I thought, wow, if we had brighter lights it would help the women, it would just help them. There was like one broken light bulb. I said, why can't we just get some new light bulbs in here and then I had to do a study to see if that would work but the fact is I wanted it to be right so my study, my desire to prove that more light bulbs would help these women was skewing the study whereas when my uncle, a sociologist, would have a study he didn't care what the outcome was, he was more interested in the research process than the outcome and it was a much more honest form of research in my mind because he didn't, he was really going with whatever the research brought up is what the thesis would be versus let's see how we can find our truth that we want to happen and in theater we always want the show to open so no matter what somebody said to me the other day, well, your collective, we call it the heat collective that's a misnomer and I said, well, it's only a misnomer this week because we have to open next Friday and so basically if it's not working then the leader steps in to say this and that need to occur I mean, so it's a false kind of research in some sense because you always have opening night that is looming and I think that's an impediment if I'm making myself clear that the theatrical process always has an outcome and I feel that way about my clients as a drama therapist as well, the outcome is healing or the outcome is performance or entertainment so Ankur who's so beautifully, beautifully helped me today and is such a fantastic actor for anyone who can come see the play we can research all we want but at a certain point he has to learn his lines and make a decision about character and get up on stage so the research has to end so I think as an artist, a result oriented artist I've had to the relationship to time and space with research has and scholarly pursuit and following an idea to its end no matter how long that takes no matter what it produces is an impediment I've encountered if that makes sense. Yeah, thank you, thank you, that's very helpful and so I guess to further build on what you just said you talked about the process versus the outcome so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your understanding of social change because of course they're the intent when we produce this kind of work whether it's art or from a filmography or space research, whatever we call it we sort of pretend and hope that it somehow is going in a direction or inciting or inspiring social change but I think this is also a question that I frequently asked myself what does social change mean to you? And do you think that performance at least which you now generally search both for social change how do you even ask these questions yourself? But I think for me I'm always sort of especially in recent years very conflicted about the kind of potentiality I've imagined before natural making of a different in a new I kind of appreciate that it could be in all the process and sort of I understand the vertical level of affect in which performance has been sort of you know I ask why I changed and what do you feel about this motion of social change? It's a great question. We've had a lot of conversations about this. We're building the Next Theater Without Borders conference and it's based on socially engaged theater because we felt that that was a topic that we knew something about. Social change although I'm involved with organizations that are human rights organizations. The triangle that I'm not sure it's in my dissertation I don't know if you remember it but there's a triangle and it's really the triangle of cultural diplomacy human rights and peace building. The Heat Collective exists at the center of it the various organizations that I've worked with lie more in one or the other. So Katrin for you who's here has done amazing work with theater in Cambodia and this social change that she's experienced and has brought back to us has to do with telling stories that have not telling bringing stories to us that we've never heard before. Doing playback theater in Palestine. I experienced working with people whose stories were not told and their most challenging relationship to the West or to anyone outside of for instance the West Bank is no one has heard our stories and so for them to hear each other's stories was very powerful and we had to make the choice there where not to do Boa, not to do Forum Theater because they didn't need necessarily at that moment community expression they needed individual expression of storytelling in that heightened state of trauma and that they were in conflict. For me right now with this piece for next weekend the goal, the social change that I'm looking for is actually what will happen in the conversations afterwards. So the poetry contest that we'll engage in is really just a warm up an icebreaker to get people to a place of doing the real work which is to actually have a conversation not about the play but about whether what is, how can theater change anything? So I talk about personal and social change. Another thing that just occurred to me is that for instance this woman here I spent a lot of time in the Middle East seeing women dressed like this and one interviewer when I came back said to me how can you as a feminist just let that happen? So what do you mean? It's not my culture, it's not my business, this is nothing to do with me and in fact the only way that I can understand this woman is to really try to understand what's in her brain. So in her brain it says I found a poem really understanding why she's dressed like this and it said I am a sacred treasure of shrouded light. Shrouded light, so my light is protected by my burqa. This is why I'm wearing this and I put this in her brain when I made her because I didn't want to judge her in making her, I wanted her to express herself fully I wanted to understand what it was about what it was about for her not as a white Western woman but as an Egyptian woman. So I think there's something about that paradox, paradox, dexterity of looking at how we can truly stand in each other's shoes and how we can really grapple with the discomfort of crossing borders, of negotiating borders or as Dara said, like hanging out on the borders, not jumping over them so fast. To have some personal understanding of what another person is going through. So that's, you know at this point in my life I do and have done and will do work that has to do with getting actresses out of Afghanistan when their life is in danger where you're really talking more about social change being like how do I get a visa for this woman and where does she go? But right now I want to just get people talking. So my entire sole act of resistance right now is to make a play that will get the audience having a conversation they might not have had otherwise about the most unpopular subject on the block. But how can we lovingly talk about it? And I think there are just so many ways in the play I talk about a woman I met whose sole act of resistance is sneaking Palestinian women to the seashore when they're not allowed to go to the Israeli beach and we find our own little ways of, Catrine wrote a play about the man who coined the phrase genocide and that was his social change, a word. I think that we each find our own ways of doing it but I don't have big glorious notions that I'm gonna change much except tiny little things along the way. And in that sense, yeah, thank you, thank you. And I just wanted to finish by saying in that sense probably being a mother is the most political act I've ever done because hopefully my children will change the world and I'll sit and watch for my rocking chair. Thank you very much. I don't have any other, I don't have any other questions I just have one suggestion on the question for the dissertation. I was just wondering, and I know you say that multiple times throughout your dissertation and I probably haven't seen the most, the most recent draft but I was just wondering if you could, if there's any space somewhere at the beginning of your dissertation and if you've done that and I've missed it, I'm sorry, but if you could articulate really clearly what do you think your contribution to the field of performance ethnography is? And I think that you say that and I mentioned in many different ways through different chapters so there's this thread that sort of brings us to this kind of understanding of what you think your contribution is but I think it would really be important for you to do so because I think you make a very good contribution to the field of performance ethnography and what you're doing is you're doing all these wonderful and imagine the escalation at the end of the process at the end of the process where, and there are also, and I think that's a familiar in a large way in this presentation but less at the end of the process so I think you sort of, you really appreciate it. Thank you. So thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you Magda. So I've been working with you quite a bit over these months Jessica and so I won't carry on about, but I do have one question for you. So I'm not sure exactly how to frame the question but it does involve four very big ideas and one is romanticism, one is imagination, one is innocence, and one is resilience. These four concepts. And so my interest to hear from you which will help other people who are doing work similar to yours is what keeps you going? What keeps you from becoming a cynic or feeling like a victim when you go into danger zones and regions? Are these some of the concepts or are there others? I think the word that you said, the word resilience is a big part of it. Watching video when we, ISIS took over the Kurdistan recently when they were in the refugee camps right at the beginning of that. I watched, I was watching the video and I was watching all the adults just completely shattered and the children were playing and I was like, wow, children will do, they were like, well this isn't home but this is a big open space and I'm gonna chase her just like I would chase her and everything. And when we were in Istanbul and Cindy Cohen is doing a lot of studies about resilience, I brought that up and I was like, where do we lose our resilience? When do we lose that ability to just find a way to play no matter what the circumstance is? And for me, the theater is that. I'll share a very personal story. I was not a nice teenager. I was one of those teenagers that I wouldn't want my teenagers to play with. I was unsupervised and lost and had a very, very difficult home life and I was basically on the streets and this PhD process is quite an honor because I was pretty much a high school dropout. And my life was saved not by a rabbi or a priest but by a lady who had an improv group for troubled teens. And I remember something, and I think I've shared this with you Caroline but I'll just say it, that this, I was a completely insular and miserable teenage person. And I went into acapella choir and I stood in the back and I sort of muffled, but there were cute guys in there so I thought I guess I should be part of it but I was too shy to sing. But the teacher noticed this and she said, she wrote me this note and it said, Jessica, you seem to have a flair for the dramatic, would you help Ulysses and Peggy with their scene from Guides and Dolls after school on Wednesday? Now why do I remember this 40 years later because it changed my life? Because she was the first person who recognized anything in me and said it. And from there I went to this improv group and people laughed when I spoke in a good way and it was just changed my life. So I've worked a lot with young people. We had a theater company for eight years called the New Generation Theater Ensemble which was young people and I feel like that, that moment when I decided not to let the world ruin me and it was through theaters, through the act of performance and the collaboration and the magic in the studio eventually led me to New York, led me to Ellen Stewart and the Mama, led me to get my BFA at NYU and my MFA from Columbia and then pursue a PhD. It's all because that lady wrote me that silly note and made me realize I have a flair for the dramatic. I don't know how she saw that from the back of the room but I guess it has some. So when I'm in difficult situations or when I lose my hope, I remember that. I remember that. I remember that the power of the beauty of theater and one of the hardest paradoxes I've dealt with is loving the theater so desperately, so much and not really loving the business of it and not knowing where I fit in the business of theater but loving the art of acting is one of the most sacred arts I can think of and the art of playwriting and the art of directing and deeply, deeply the art of teaching theater as a means of expression has kept me from being cynical. Romantic, yeah, I fall into that trap quite a bit and as I go to the Middle East quite a bit as I'm heading towards to Egypt next week to speak at a conference on theater and censorship, I have to look very carefully about what our censorship is versus the censorship that happens in the East and traveling to these places really helps cut the romanticism in half but am I still, if I wasn't somewhat of a romantic I would just give up, life is just too hard and my life has been pretty hard but I've gotten through some hard stuff and each time it's kind of been a creative reforming of life and I go back, when I was coming here today I was very nervous and I thought maybe I can give them something that maybe they'll laugh or have an idea or maybe there's some service I can do it's not all about me and my dissertation it's about maybe I can be of service in some way and I just go back to that lady in that classroom who thought this miserable child in the back row needs to pick me up and so I think I just keep thinking every time that I approach theater in this city or approach theater in the Middle East is it useful, it's that Brecht poem and that's really where I get, I keep moving because every day I have to keep moving and every day I wake up and have to regenerate that enthusiasm for the new day so does that answer your question? Thank you and I think what I'm gonna recommend is that in service of others who are gonna read your work or know about your work, it will be really great if you could add two or three sentences about how you keep going. So the sense of innocence, how do you keep your sense of innocence and openness and how do you in the romanticism and the imagination how they feed your resilience to keep going because so many people drop off through cynicism or becoming a victim so that they're not functioning in a good way because they're kind of replicating the problem when they're acting like victims. Absolutely, I'll say one thing that I forgot to say the most innocent thing is listening is remembering to listen and I think that's the thing when Encore is up here I'm listening to him and moved by his innocence and his willingness to put himself out here and take up his Saturday afternoon and it moves me that basically people as Trogan Trump or Rinpoche would say we have basic goodness in us, we're basically good and yes, a guy did hit me on the subway yesterday and I'm sure he has basic goodness too but I mean the point is there is that listening if I truly listen to another person their innocence and my innocence meet, there's a witness and it's there, it's there in all of us so but I don't hear it all the time because I'm not listening. Thank you. I'll write two sentences. Yeah, okay. So this is the part of the program, the defense where the committee and I will deliberate I'll go into another room and call them and maybe Anna, can you help me or someone help me with that and then you all can continue and converse and enjoy Jessica, comments, questions and then I'll come back in and announce the results of our deliberations so thank you, yeah. So Dara and Magda and Elizabeth I'm gonna go into the other room and call you all on the conference phone and then we can have our discussion. Okay. So we don't have to call in at all. And are we still being? We are still live. We are still live. Yeah, that's why we need to come to the screen so that they can deliberate in private. Elizabeth, are you trying to say something? Should we hang up? Oh, Dara, you're supposed to hang up. Should they hang up? And then Carolyn, should they hang up? Well, they've hung up. So, but. Yeah, they're still on with Jose, they're just not on the screen. And I'm trying to get this mic to get active. I'm trying to get our wireless mic to get active so that we can have the mic for the audience. But it looks like, I know I think it looks like the battery might have died, unfortunately. So we might have to do the wired mic. Okay, Jose is coming to the rescue. So audience members now is the time that you guys can ask Jessica some questions. And let me just holler for Jose. Could Blue help Carolyn make her call in my office, please? Is that possible? So Blue is gonna help you make the call in the office. And so audience members just be aware we're gonna try to get the wireless mic sorted out. But if you're not on mic, you can't be heard on the stream. So if we can't do the wireless mic, maybe what I'll do is I'll take this mic off the stand and give you a wired mic. Okay, we've got a new wireless going. Is this one here? Are we live? Can we liven this mic up? Just triaging a little? If we need to use the wired mic, I'd rather move on and use the wired mic than hold any longer. Is it live? Is it live? It's live? Okay, fantastic. So while Carolyn, there we go, yay, got it. Okay, so while Carolyn is calling the committee, we have a little under 10 minutes. And do any of the audience members visiting today, would you like to ask Jessica some questions? I'm just, there's so much flowing through me right now. And I'm so inspired by what you just did. You will remember our conversation year one and you mentioned in your presentation that feeling of being an outsider in the cohort. As I reflect on year one, I realize that you may have been on one side of the mirror, I was on the other, in terms of feeling a bit like an outsider as well from a different perspective. So you have been an inspiration to me personally. Thank you for that. And it came through so nicely and the wonderful work you've done, the depth just blows me away. For somebody who is so far from the arts to be here and as moved as I am, I think you did what you were supposed to do in terms of that. So I'm curious as you think about your journey and reflecting a little bit on the question that Elizabeth asked around the bridge to kind of more traditional leadership and how the arts can influence maybe the development of leaders in more traditional business settings and so on. And whether your journey has changed how you see that whole process. Well thank you, that's a great question. I think you can also remember that when I got to the program I hated the word leadership. I wouldn't use it. I like the word change. I could relate to that, but I couldn't stand the word leadership because to me that means like, you know, the pale male bureaucracy up on the hill. And so for me, coming into terms with what it means to be a leader, taking responsibility, looking at myself as a leader, and we've had many conversations. We just had one a couple of weeks ago about this where I've had to look very hard at that in myself. Like, how am I a leader? And how do I lead poorly? And where can I give someone else the focus but still lead? You can't stop leading. You know, you can't, but even if you give someone else the spotlight. So it is, it's really interesting. I mean, I am, hopefully I'll go to Barcelona to do something at the leadership, international leadership conference and talk about arts, leadership in the arts and really start to build some workshops around that. I think when David and I teach, we talk about leadership and we mostly talk about, you know, whatever we've taught you this weekend, don't do it at home. You know, don't just smash your way into a conflict zone and think you know what you're doing until you've established some mastery or some cultural competency. So I think it, I've embraced the word. That's how things have changed. And I really feel like I now wanna see how I can possibly teach in this arena and bring the arts to leadership as well as leadership to the arts, if that makes sense. Do we have any other questions from the audience? Anyone? David has a question. David, you have a question? I saw his hand flitting nervously. Yeah, well, I'm like in awe of you, okay? At this moment, and so it's been a little hard to talk. You're, you know, like he said, you're inspiring and what you've achieved even up to this point through this whole process continues to amaze me. And so I have to incredible work. I have the same questions that you asked at the very beginning about the relationship of art and theater to social change and what you talked a little bit about the level of change that you feel that you can achieve. And I kind of agree, I agree with what you were saying about it's in some sense very small but it has reverberations that we don't, or unexplored we don't know what they're gonna be. But the place where I think that you're the nexus of your work in drama therapy and theater and psychology and art making come together is in the area of resilience after trauma. To me that seems like a place where you really can see the change happen when people go from a place of either depression or inaction or lethargy to a place of renewed inspiration. And so I don't know if it's really a question but if you have any comment about ways in which you see people be re-inspired, that's to me very... Well I think it's a real question and I think it's a question of the community of us that Roberta Levittow said once and I've said this too many times because she called us thoughtful practitioners and I don't know if that's the right phrase but there are few of us that are working with theater as a vehicle for change in whatever way we say it. And it's a question we have to keep asking, we have to keep talking about it and I think that we don't talk about it enough. I think that you do it in one way, Kat does it in another way. I think what you did last summer, what David did, he runs the Lamama Symposium and what he did last summer was invite all artists for the whole summer who were involved in this kind of work, whether it's Belarus Free Theater or Yalmar who works in Afghanistan, me, Roberta, Hennalon from Israel, Katrin, it was a summer filled with practitioners teaching theater and social change in one way or another, what didn't happen and couldn't have happened but I missed greatly was us all talking to each other and meeting with each other and I guess this is what we're hoping for at this conference is saying, how are we gonna do better? What do we do? How can we support each other in it and how can we actually do it with efficacy and funding, no, forget that. But I mean, but there's something that I feel, I just feel that we need to keep talking about it and that the more work I do, the more I realize that I can't do this without a community and I think it was Polly that said it in the film acting together on the world stage, she said, I think I'm alone doing this work and then I realize there's people in Pedro and people but it's not good enough for me, I need to be in the same room once in a while to actually know that there are people who are concerned with these issues and in this case it's not so much the border between scholarship and art is the border between art and activism and where do we cross that border? So I'm very interested in us continuing to talk. Kat has a- Okay, I think one more question. We're trying to get Carolyn back in the room before the live stream ends in about four to five minutes. So we are finishing up with the last question and I'm gonna see if Carolyn can come back in. I think you guys- If they're deliberating a long time, is that bad? It's like a jury. If they're taking a long time, does that mean- I'm really sure that you can do something else. I'm guilty or innocent? Okay, sorry sweetie. Jess, I wish I could say something funny but that's not part of the PhD process, right? I think it is at this point. Karaoke. Yeah, they're out of the room, you shouldn't say. Should we talk about our karaoke act or maybe later? Later, yeah. But anyway, I just want to say how extraordinary you are and in terms of this word leadership that you didn't like, you are an extremely powerful leader. Thank you. Thank you, Kat. Thank you. Jess, I just wanted to say I'm also so proud of you and I loved when you were talking about your act of rebellion being to initiate conversation. Do you have any other plans, future plans for My Heart Is In The East? Well, next weekend and then hopefully, let me just get through the show next weekend and then yes, I'm hoping to keep going. I'm gonna interrupt because a lot of feed's gonna die. Okay, we are back with Carolyn. So the committee has deliberated and I am very happy to introduce you to Dr. Jessica Litwak. The feed is gonna cut out momentarily. I think, I like to think that this was a historic first. I don't know to the best of my knowledge that anyone has had their doctorate conferred upon them during a live stream ever before. And we'll just close by saying as a component of this incredible dissertation, there is a show at La Mama. My Heart Is In The East. It is at the first floor theater. No, it's in the club. Oh, it's in the club, okay. And I'm gonna just give the salient details May 16th and 17th, Saturday at 3 p.m. and 10 p.m. Sunday at 6 p.m. At the club, at La Mama, it is co-produced with Jessica's Collective, the Heat Collective, and it is a performative component of this dissertation. So those of you who watched the live stream, I'm addressing the camera. These are, that is the show that we have cited during this live stream and tickets are at LaMama.org. And I think we are about to lose the feed and thank you all for coming. This has been a really short time. Thank you, Anna. Thank you.