 I want to thank you for joining us this morning. Welcome also to those of you who are joining us from elsewhere through the live streaming process provided by our generous colleagues at Culture Hub. Before we begin this morning session, we want to honor and respect the indigenous people of Manhattan and the surrounding land upon which we have inhabited for centuries past. Please welcome Joan Henry. I'm going to ask you to do what performers do naturally and put your hearts out for a second. Because in the traditional way of the first people of Turtle Island and the traditional ways all over the world we ask permission for what we do before we do it. And so this opening prayer is a way of not just thanking them for the help they're going to give us before they do it. Because our prayers don't really say please, they say thank you. But also it will let them know who we are. So just put that in your mind I would ask you to make that connect. And if that's uncomfortable for you, you probably aren't really in the performing arts. So I'm going to ask, I also have been reminded of the kinds of things that went on in this room before and we'll try and do something about that. My dad would say, I'm not going to try. Do it or don't do it. She's not good. She's not good. She's not good. She's not good. $400. $1099. $ 어떡. $890. $109. $109. $10. those grandmothers and grandfathers, each and every one of you, to see you as the beautiful beings you are, red, yellow, white, black, and everything in between. Because many of us are between those sacred colors. And I ask them to, I thank them for allowing us to be here at this conference, at this time, in this moment, with the sacred purpose that we are thinking on in this moment. It's all sacred. Don't be fooled. It's all sacred. All our arts are rooted in that. All our lives are rooted in that. Thank you for listening. I thank you for participating. Thank you Joan for creating such a beautiful and important moment. I think that she really helped to ground us and really helped to provide a point of connection and really allow us to lean into this thing called flow. We are pleased to have ICM Partners as the sponsor of this morning's plenary session. Please join me in thanking ICM for making this morning's event possible. You could not help but notice the creative moment we planned to open this afternoon session. The court of living sculptures that you encountered as you arrived on the third floor and entered the ballroom is a performance piece entitled On Display. Conceived and choreographed by Heidi Latsky, On Display began as a simple human sculpture court and is now a movement, a growing portfolio of works that explore and demonstrate inclusion through art. I hope you appreciated this opportunity to indeed see the unseen, notice the unnoticed and appreciate the underappreciated as represented by these wonderful artists and the creative inspiration of Heidi Latsky. Heidi, please step out here so we can thank you for sharing this wonderfully creative work with us this afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, Heidi Latsky. Thank you, Heidi. What a great way to begin this session. So as many of you know, this plenary session is unique because each year we bring together highly creative individuals who have demonstrated the passion, persistence and courage necessary to realize their dreams. We are especially blessed this afternoon to have a well-known and beloved creative artist and creative thinker with us who will guide the flow of events you are about to experience. I'm referring, of course, to none other than Liz Lerman. Choreographer, performer, writer, educator, speaker and recipient of MacArthur Genius Grant whose approach to research on creativity, the participatory process and its application to science, physics and other areas continue to gain global attention. In this past year she was appointed to the faculty of the new Herberger Institute for Design and Arts at Arizona State University. And I enjoyed the pleasure of her insight and spirit as conference co-chair. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming today's moderator, Liz Lerman. Simone's amazing and you know it's funny when you do this co-chair thing you know you're on the phone for a year. So to actually be in each other's presence along with Kevin is pretty terrific. Joan sort of put us in a different place, didn't she? We did a project in Tucson many years ago when Ken Foster was at the University of Arizona called the Hallelujah Project and we worked in all across that city but we worked through the religious communities including an opportunity to work with a medicine man from the Toad O'odham community there, Daniel Preston. Daniel was amazing and he shared a lot of stories with us and also kept going back to his community to make sure it was okay for us to use them publicly. And he agreed to be part of the performance and he opened the second act. So we were backstage during intermission, packed house as these large community projects do, they bring so many people together and he came up to me and he said, so Liz I just want you to know I'm not going to perform and well you can imagine what I did, I mean I was a little calm but and you know he reached out and he touched me for a moment and he said no, I'm going to go out there, I'm just not going to be performing, I'm going to be doing a blessing. And I said back to him after a moment of pause, well if that's what you're doing then what are we doing? The artists you're about to see and listen to and meet are all asking that question so deeply. What are we doing? Why are we doing this? Who is this for? What is this all about? And you all know that this is kind of a fast paced kind of thing and they've all worked valiantly within the structure but we will also have a chance to sit out here and talk together and you'll have a chance to ask some questions as our time proceeds. Usually we have five I'm sorry to have to say that Rulan Tanjan of Dancing Earth who has been in India could not, she's detained transportation why she can't get out of London. She is full of regret and has been on email all night long. We are heartbroken, I so wanted you to get to see and hear what she has to say so we'll look forward to that to another time in the future and so let me come now to our first artist the astonishing Camille Brown. Yeah I'd hardly have to say a word I know Camille an incredible choreographer with such vision and such persistence working now both in the concert dance but also in the theater community. She has many many awards including the Jacobs Pillow Award for 2016 and many more to support her and so well deserved as she takes us into the depths of her thinking and the world that she wants us to see. Here's Camille. Thank you so much Liz. I'm ready thank you. Choreography, social dance and musical theater have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. As a child I would choreograph movements to the opening credits of cartoons and entertain my family with impromptu performances during the holidays. My father a retired parole officer also coached college basketball but his love was and still is teaching salsa dance which is a social dance. My mother a retired social worker introduced me to musicals. When I was younger we would go to the library and take out our favorite musicals like Sweet Charity the unsinkable Molly Brown and watched dance scenes over and over again. In 2009 I started speaking my desires to combine concert dance and musical theater into existence. One day I got an email from a director who was interested in me choreographing a new musical for Off Broadway the Fortress of Solitude. Having no musical experience this was a crack in the door I was extremely thankful for and to my surprise I was offered the job. I found myself learning the ropes of this new world of 10 out of 12s and Sitz Brobes. I never heard of these terms prior to working on Fortress. Sitz Brobe is a German term used in musical theater that describes the first rehearsal which combines both the vocal performers and the orchestra. And 10 of 12s is a 12 hour rehearsal day in which time is spent working on lights, sound, costumes and other technical elements. The experience was exhilarating and exhausting. It felt dangerous and I wanted more. As time went on I started looking within myself and asked what I personally wanted out of the career I had chosen. I wrestled with the idea of traditional commissions and teaching engagements. Those were not at the forefront of what I wanted to do. I wanted to establish myself equally as a theater and concert dance choreographer. The more opportunities I received in theater the more established I became in concert dance. I was and still am at two different stages of the two aspects of my career leaping from choreographing musicals to performing with my company on tour. But this exciting new ground also presented a problem. Time management. The hardship of creating new works, creating nine dance scenes per show, mapping out schedules and reading scripts seemed to be an overwhelming feat. Schedules were colliding and the company working throughout the year didn't align with my theater goals. Also I began to desire a musical theater like process within my concert dance process. It wasn't quite realistic to have a 10 out of 12 stare at a Q4 an hour kind of process but how far could I push this? My mind was spinning and I knew I had to make some sort of shift in order for this to work. Over the course of a year I met with my two agents managing director and production manager to first explain my career goals and then strategize on how this could actually work. They were concerned and I totally understood. Some people may not get the 10 out of 12s all day in the theater staring at a Q4 an hour kind of format and maybe see this process as difficult or wasting time. They knew how important my company was to me and didn't want anything to affect our reputation. There. It wasn't just about convincing them. It was about getting the presenters we engaged with on board. We had some challenges but it was new territory so that was to be expected and I want to thank the presenters and organizations who have supported me on this ride. Together we are all working to create a healthy balance. This shift would affect my dancers the most. One of my priorities has always been to support their career goals. They are teachers, choreographers real estate brokers and mental health counselors. I met with them and explained our new structure that our gatherings would be more sporadic but the space apart allows everyone to be complete as individuals and artists need to be. They got it. While I personally was not conflicted by my choice to navigate between artistic genres others were processing it differently and here are some of the questions and comments I got. So you're getting that good money now. Which one do you love more? Oh. You won't be able to do both. Promise you won't stop choreographing. You've worked so hard and your company is in a great position now. The last one in particular bothered me because it implied that somehow one genre was lesser than the other and there would be some sort of a loss. As this if there cannot be brilliance and mastery in both spaces. My theater and concert work combined have dealt with issues of gentrification, mass incarceration, black female objectification, African and African American rituals, minstrelsy, the great migration, the history of social dance, Afrofuturism and Shakespearean literature. Concert dance is my first language. It teaches me the importance and value of creative freedom, process and performance. It gives me the space and time to create as the director I drive the ship and I'm in control of the vision and I'm free to be uninhibited and purely creative. It is my place to tell my story. When working in theater I create the vision of the director and playwright. I am a collaborator on someone else's ship. Although I do understand my team's initial concern I already knew that our conventional way of working might be described as unmanageable and as a woman, as a black woman it is also important to talk about the double standard of gender and race. If I were a white man endeavoring to do the same thing I would be characterized as being fearless, direct and persistent. Part of my growth is realizing that the most important part of this journey is to be true to myself. All I can do is be clear about my goals and never be swayed. I am riding my wave and feeling my flow with the understanding that for me theater and concert dance coexist and this union has inevitably strengthened my ability to tell stories. Thank you. It's great to hear that honesty and also to see that interaction between personal need and the growth and structural change that these things are intertwined. Our next artist is incredibly accomplished and in these introductions I decided actually you can read about all the amazing things that Greg has done. I'd rather tell you about the time I sat in the Kennedy Center and watched Diagnostics of a Faun and how incredibly changed I was by that performance. I know we say that a lot. I was transformed but I was. His performance what he and the cast showed us the way the story changed, the world changed, our way of seeing completely changed. He has much to tell us about this. Just listen and the other thing I always think when I'm in place I know we have these beautiful images that they're showing us but also pay attention to those images coming into your own imagination. See what's happening. Greg Mosgala. Thank you Liz. That was quite transformative for me too. This is an apocryphal story but one that has become permanently woven into my personal narrative and mythology. I'm ready. I turned 12 years old in 1990. One day I remember being pulled out of class. I was always being excused for physical therapy or occupational therapy but this day was different. Mrs. Brown led me to a room off the library the newly renovated library where there were about half a dozen adults who I had never met before with various physical disabilities. One older gentleman who was blind he had a dog and that was really cool. Mrs. Brown turned on the television and how exciting a movie but I was quickly disappointed to discover that it was some boring news program with President Bush speaking about a podium and signing some kind of paper. What we were watching was the signing of the Americans with the Disabilities Act I had no idea what the ADA was and at that point I didn't care because I was engrossed in my copy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein that I was secretly reading under the table. The television turned off and all the adults started talking about what a momentous occasion this was and I remember thinking this is such a momentous occasion, why isn't the entire school watching this? I went back to school, back to class alone the sound of my metal braces reverberating through the hallways and as I glimpsed my shadow looming and limping large beside me I felt like Frankenstein's monster. I've always had a great affinity for monsters and freaks maybe because I felt like one. Luckily there's a place where the malformed find grace where the hideous can be beautiful and where strangers is not shunned but celebrated. This place is the theater I believe theater offers one of the greatest venues for perceptions about disability to change. Among other things it provides visibility, creates community and serves as a place of inclusion and a forum for ideas. 2015 marked the 25th anniversary of the ADA. I believe over a quarter of a century ago in that room off the library it became something much more for me. Americans with Disabilities Act Americans with Disabilities Act This is a directive, a battle cry, a way of life. It reminds me that I am in control of my own destiny we all are. Equality is not a given however it is a work in progress. I think the work being created with equity, inclusion and multiculturalism in mind is some of the most daring and exciting work happening today and I want to add to that work in conversation. The disabled community and the experiences of the members of that community are incredibly varied and complex but I believe the same thing that makes disability hard to define and codify is the same thing that makes it inherently dramatic and worthy of active exploration. Now I'm a 30-something crippled white guy. I'm the third of four and I was raised by a first-generation Italian mother with strong Catholic beliefs and a father who spent 20-plus years in the United States Navy. I was born with a disability and while I take issue with the phrase that my disability does not define me because honestly how could it not? Disability does not consume my life. Most of our lives I imagine are taken up with the day-to-day struggle for our lives just like anybody else. Now it is my firm belief that the creation of new works and the reappropriation of existing works would help us frame our experience in a historical context while simultaneously creating new mythologies. We are an incredibly rich and diverse community with many stories to tell so I'm curious why aren't we? I can think of three pervasive narratives when it comes to the disabled experience. One of the most common refrains I hear from the disability community in relation to our lack of visibility in the cultural mainstream is something along the lines of did you know that people with disabilities make up 20% of the population but only 1% of characters on TV and that 95% of those characters are non-disabled? These stats are powerful, even troubling, but they are not. These stats are powerful, even troubling, but what I'm about to say may not be very popular but forgive me I was born this way. It's not Hollywood or the networks or the streaming platform's job to provide that work to us. Nobody handed roles or vehicles to members of the African American, Asian American, LGBTQ, you name it, communities. Members of these communities started their own theaters. They organized, they made their own work and they developed their own talent from within. We're not doing this in a serious concerted way and the reasons for this are myriad. Now I have limited time and I can't go into all of those but it's difficult work, just trust me. But does that mean it can't be done? Does that mean we shouldn't even try? So I found this really interesting. There's a recent New York Times article from November about transgender artists, specifically transgender writers and the headline read, transgender playwrights. We should get to tell our own stories first. Now contrast that to an article a week earlier that appeared in the LA Times about the Ruderman's Studio Wide Roundtable on Disability and Inclusion held in Beverly Hills. That headline read, disabled actors and advocates plead to Hollywood, give us a chance, please. Now I've never known a problem that was ever solved by complaining about it. Believe me, I've tried. And to quote a character of John Patrick Shanley's, you've got to be brave for yourself in this world because nobody else is going to do it for you and nobody else cares. Nobody cares about disability with a capital D. Nobody's going to care until we make them care, until we show them how. And if it ain't on the page we're not going to see it on the stage. I know what the problems are. We all know what the problems are, what I'm not hearing are solutions. It's always to me that we have work to do. The difficult work of actively engaging members of disparate communities, engaging decision makers at larger institutions and organizations to have serious discussions about content generation, about training and professional development for actors, writers, technicians, stage managers, dramaturgs and administrators from within our communities. Scholarship, advocacy, activism, these are necessary. But I'm a theater guy. I'm an actor who became a director out of necessity. I'm trying to be a leader. Most days I don't know what I'm doing. But I know that true leaders don't make followers, they make other leaders. We should be inspiring the current and future generations. Broadway over the last two seasons has seen plays like The Elfman, which is the third Cripple of Vinishman, Glassman Agery, and it's coming back. Disability is everywhere. And before the advent of radio, by the advent of radio and mass media, Broadway was termed the fabulous experiment. I find that fascinating. The stage is set. This is ours for the taking. Let's stop talking about it. Americans with Disabilities Act. And that's what I'm trying to do. I don't know if it's possible. Maybe you can help. My company, the Apathite, is an experiment. An experiment whose mission is the production of works that explore and illuminate the disabled experience. I don't know my own history. I don't know if we have a collective history. It is rooted somewhere in performance with things like court jester ship, the anatomy theater, freak shows. I think that I would like to continue to find the disability community through my artistic practices because I know that the disability community is a series of communities with a series of histories and a series of stories just beginning to be told. Thank you. Take a deep breath. I mean it. You know what we ask the artist to do for this session? You know, they have to tell these stories within a certain time frame. They have to select a certain number of slides. The slides run for a certain number of seconds. It's kind of a thing they have to fit into. And I just thought it might be interesting for you all to take a second and try to imagine what that would be like. Now in this case, you know, they have their whole lives to tell us about and they're going to slip that into six and a half minutes or something like that. I just thought maybe since 2016 was such an interesting year that you guys could think just for a second, if you had to do a pachakacha about your 2016, what would be the first slide and what would be the first thought and then what would you put at the end? What would be your last slide and your ending? So I know some of you hate this part when I say you have to turn to somebody and talk to somebody, but actually we're going to take a few minutes and the reason I want to do that is also because I want you to have a second to kind of almost clear out everything that's already happened and prepare yourself for two more people. So I'm going to give you a few minutes so you can talk to somebody next to you with this idea how would you begin an end 2016 and again I just remind you of the rules. You know if the person on this side turns that way and the person on this side turns that way and you are abandoned, I believe you should act and join one of the people next to you. Okay, so take a couple minutes. Talk among yourselves for a second and I'll be back in a minute. Everybody, we'll have to start coming back. You can kind of finish the sentence here on finish that story you were telling. Okay, you're done and you're back. Here we go. We're back. Where's our stage managers to bring us back? I love that expression after a break. We're back. We are back. One of the great joys of traveling around the country and visiting other communities is getting to meet artists as we travel along or if we're lucky enough to be home and the artists come to our community we get to see them. Such was the next artist for me, Paola Prostini. I found her work again extraordinary and I was thrilled to see this beautiful woman composer doing her work and then we had some interesting conversations after that trying to manage well one to have children and how that was all going to work out and there is a whole other set of conversations we have among ourselves. What's interesting to me now to see the beautiful work that you're going to see in a minute of Paola's is also something we're beginning to hear from some of our artists and see which is the way we support each other. The kinds of platforms we build so that we can all move forward together. This is an amazing story Paola. I'm ready. My musical life began on the border near that fence. Looking back the division, disparate energy, wishes and dreams informed every aspect of my DNA. We had immigrated from Italy for a life on the border, on the Mexican border. My parents quickly separated and my mother and I began our life as a team. My mother's ability to face the unknown and the seeming impermanence of our life was an inspiration. Those complex steps of the past informed how I approached my life to this day. I always thought these steps paint the perfect image of Juilliard. Small, difficult steps that lead to more steps a pyramid with no top, a steady climb. The ten years following my graduation from Juilliard were seminal. I started my multimedia production company Vision into Art and I failed continuously. The failures of course were the moments that taught me the most and that they forced me to rethink success and in the end I learned that a steady climb for what I was trying to accomplish was more fitting. I learned to trust my inner compass. In school I knew I wanted to be a composer and a multimedia artist. I had experienced tangible limitations as a woman composer and realized that the only way I would be happy would be to create the context for my life, meaning it was not enough to commission myself. It was not enough to create opportunities from only my works. If I didn't attempt to fix my surroundings my own path would be limited and my future not as bright. I took to heart the words of a great kind man, Paul Soros, from whom I received the Soros Fellowship, the only award I've won to date. He said if there's only one piece of pie left don't divide it, make more. In my 20s Philip Glass came to see one of my early VIA shows and I thought he was going to tell me I was awesome. I had arrived. That didn't happen. Instead he told me to focus on my own work and that until my music was strong I could not cart around a community. I learned then that collectives rarely work and I needed to own my music. I needed to own my leadership. Seven years ago I got a call that changed my life. A man named Kevin Dolan wanted to create a space for composers and by the way that's not Kevin. I had the blank slate to create a home for artists and I could create it from the rubble up. That was what was the seed for what is now national sawdust. Kevin had a resolve and $8 million and this was his statement. I understand that for many music is fundamental to their being and to some it represents a salvation of sorts. So the basic purpose of this endeavor is to help composers and performing artists, particularly younger folks and future artists. Music had saved Kevin and as it has for many and he wanted to give back. I became his partner in crime and for seven years our team of designers, acousticians and architects worked on that building and for seven years I worked on a mission and on raising the remaining $8 million to launch our dream. The building blocks for national sawdust in many ways resembled building vision into art. We built a clear mission and showed shows in our raw space and did XC2 shows to attract an audience space. We took hundreds of meetings and built a board of adventurous donors and today we have a soaring, daring, beautiful space that hosts 350 performances a year. As community was important to nurturing my evolution, national sawdust is about artists and the artist community and it serves a 21st century artist one who is part entrepreneur, educator and activist by giving them performance opportunities and resources to rehearse record and distribute their music. It was important to me to help create a bridge from emerging to professional life as this is what was truly missing for me as a young artist in my 20s. As an artistic incubator we help seed and commission music and music based multimedia works and give artists the opportunity to create ambitious works that may not fit in elsewhere. Our residencies are year long and they include guide posts for the next phase of their careers. Curators serve as artistic guides and discoverers of new music and each residency is tailored to the artist and it's given one-on-one time with our team financing and physical space and that's a little diagram of how this kind of circular education works. Our newest initiative is one I'm very proud of and it's called The Log. It's our work to create a form and context for artists and audiences by bringing on the esteemed journalist Steve Smith, the only reviewer at the New York Times that I wasn't afraid of. We hope to acknowledge and reinforce bonds that have always existed between artists and the media to frame those bonds within a context of a mutually sustaining community. In each year we choose a large theme to explore as an institution. This year it was opera and activism we produce ten operas and commissioned works of artists who see themselves at the edge of their craft and who dare to grapple with today's searing issues. This is a slide from the unbelievable show Requiem for a Tuesday by Helga Davis, DeVon Tynes and Reggie Redge-Roch Gray. At National Slotice and in my own works big multimedia works which we'll see in the following slides, I tend to plant seeds and I let them emerge at the right time. I think it's important to plan but not to overthink things and to trust one's instincts and to understand that the puzzle of life is made for many small choices while keeping an eye on the overarching design. At National Slotice we plan for the future but we allow for the unknown. I'm never of the opinion that we're creating the solution because I don't believe in that that would be way too simplistic. It's more about adding to the scene, collaboration adding another perspective and as Paul Soros said it's about making more pie. I think as artists we need to not be afraid of big words like legacy and as institutions we need to resolve to stay nimble so we can adjust to the needs of audiences and artists. Impermanence is our only constant and we must build as if the sand were stone. I see risk and joy every day as mysterious strangers that walk side by side holding hands. They illuminate in me the difficult contradictions of being an artist and the resolve to find my happiness my musical voice but to build it in context to the larger question of how we nurture the space for art in everyday life. Barters in my early development as a person made me borderless and as always, always curious for what lies beyond and I'm grateful for this collision of seemingly disparate worlds because I realize now that what makes me tick my flow is bringing together worlds that don't seem to belong together and their subsequent alchemy. Thank you. Some of the wonders of partnering are the people that you get to meet and one of my science projects I was taken to meet one of our Nobel laureates of fruit fly geneticists and in speaking with him I was curious how he asked himself a question you know what sort of sustained him and his inquiry and I said so I asked him that how do you decide on the questions you ask how do you sustain it and he said I'm fueled by my ignorance which I kind of loved like this drive this persistence to try to understand but I also know as an artist one of the things that maybe drives us crazy it's not so much good bad as it is when we're misunderstood how we feel about that what do we want to do about that our next artist may soon has a lot to tell us we were together at ASU for a couple of months but we could never find the same second to be in each other's presence until I got to see her performance and I wasn't prepared for it and I cannot prepare you for what you're going to see may soon I'm ready! That means I'm ready too I may soon and we're talking about flow so I figured I'd start off by talking about the fact that the day I was born my airflow got cut off the doctor who delivered me was drunk so I lost three minutes of oxygen and as a result I have cerebral palsy which means I shake all the time now the doctors told my parents that I would never walk but my dad had a mantra and his mantra was you can do it, yes you can and he was determined to teach me how to walk and he had two different techniques first he would place my feet on his feet and he would just walk I walked miles on that man's shoes his other technique was to dangle down in front of me and have me chase it my inner stripper was so strong I was running in heels by kindergarten that's me and my grandma I grew up in the great state of New Jersey but every summer my father would send us back to Palestine because he was convinced that if we didn't go back every single year we would forget our roots and grow up to be Britney Spears and every time I went to Palestine people would try to heal me they would give me goat's milk but hot cups on my back before Michael Phelps ever even knew what they were they would dip me in the dead sea and pull me out my eyes would be burning and I'd be like it's working, it's working but nothing healed me the way Disney did Disney is the most magical place on earth and I was convinced that every single time I rode the teacups you know the teacups that's been round and round they healed me, I would walk off and walk straight for about 6 minutes it really was magical most disabled people don't run around the world waking up every single day hoping that they were healed we're not desperate for our cure, you are desperate to cure us what we want is something very different we want it I'm going to take a 10 second break to just tell you guys that like especially for people who are doing theater stuff at colleges or anything at colleges sometimes people can't fit into the box and when I got my Pikachu assignment because I like to call it Pikachu I couldn't actually fit into the box but I decided hey I can do it, yes I can, so here I am I have no idea what's happening at this point to be cured we're looking for something called equality we're looking for something called accessibility and in my case I was looking for something called fame, yes it's true, I have a disability and now it doesn't define me because I got 99 problems and palsy is just one in the oppression Olympics I would win a gold medal I'm disabled then, I live in New Jersey most Muslim girls in this world I had a dream and my dream was to star on the daytime soap opera General Hospital so I went to Arizona State University and pursued my dream and I didn't get cast in anything why? because college was reflecting life Hollywood has a horrible habit of casting non-disabled actors to creep up on screen and we in the disabled community we're not a monolith so I do know one girl who disagrees with me but we in the disabled community believe that visible disability much like race cannot be played so if a wheelchair user can't play Beyonce then Beyonce can't play a wheelchair user but I looked at the screen and even though I didn't see many images of disability I did see people who looked like me I saw Richard Pryor, I saw Muhammad Ali I saw people who did comedy and I decided to become a comedian and I toured the world doing stand-up comedy and even did comedy in the Middle East uncensored and uncovered and what I didn't know was I was supposedly the first person who ever did stand-up comedy in the Middle East I don't think anyone should ever claim first I'm sure there was someone in 1950 that no one else knows about but that's what they said to me and what I did was I got to establish it as a women's art form usually people think women are funny especially when they're dressed like that but we are hilarious so I'm just going to backtrack to one of the other slides because it's really how I want to end which was that was my class I went back to ASU after I got famous they were like no we'll cast you but I went backtrack to one of the other slides which was a picture of me and Muhammad Ali because I believe that after 15 years of doing comedy my life has changed this year Muhammad Ali symbolizes for me everything that was great in America that is now under siege he was a man of color he was a Muslim he wasn't a draft dodger he was a conscientious objector he floated like a butterfly he sung like a bee he had Parkinson's and shook just like me and now I suddenly live in a country where I no longer feel safe the greatest has gone what will we replace him with and this is what I ask you the world is broken but we can fix it we can fix it by saying no to arming violence worldwide and saying no to violence on our campuses I should not feel safer walking by myself at 2 o'clock in the morning in a war zone than I do on an American college campus we can do better and we must do better and you can fix it by saying no to being silenced your voice is your weapon against inequality I beg you, use it my name is Mae Soon and if I can can, you can can thank you so much thank you guys have to say incredible all four of you thank you, thank you Leonard Bernstein got excoriated for trying to be a conductor a composer and an educator I mean they were after him no please, confirm that confirm that and what we see every one of you identified yourself in multiple ways we know that's happening talk to me about that how does that serve you why is that happening and what are the implications of this anybody? I mean so my parents couldn't afford physical therapy so they sent me a tap class and they couldn't afford occupational therapy so they sent me the piano class so I think that's like where it started was that like I had always thought of myself as a performer and when I grew up I was told I couldn't be a dancer so I looked for something easier and decided on acting and then what gave me my multiple identities was the fact that I couldn't make a living during acting so I had to do other things so suddenly I was a writer then I was a comedian then I got back into acting then I did a TED talk and I became like a disability advocate and my responsibility was totally inappropriate like offended everyone in my community and had to learn that like whether I liked it or not I was one of the people that was seen as a Muslim as a disabled woman these were images they weren't seeing so it was against my will that I was kind of like okay I have to educate myself and properly represent these things because even though all I want to do is tell jokes I have a platform and so many people don't there's a lot of information in what we just heard the idea of need and urgency but also even though you are who you are your own expansion of knowledge and how we feel like we put someone for it oh I'm going to bring you and therefore that means a bunch of things well it may or may not so how about the rest of you I went to school in a very classical institution where being anything but a composer at the time that I was there was not accepted so I was interested in multimedia work and I wasn't you know I could see that the future of my teachers wasn't going to be my future they were not concerned about our future and so I had to be and so that immediate reality and the desire that I had to not just do one thing forced me to look into what my opportunities were and to just create them for myself one step at a time and why we would ever think one thing was nothing but let's hear from the others well sure I just want to echo the idea that all these things were born out of necessity and just a desire to work so I was just saying yes to opportunities that presented themselves to me whether it be a reading or a dance piece or whatever it was because no calls were coming in and then as I got older matured it is these things of like oh I'm becoming something within a community so how do I educate myself in that part even though I can have a particular voice and a point of view because I put up a website suddenly I have a platform I have a website and an idea and a drive suddenly I am more powerful than a single actor one thing that Camille said really resonated with me which was that I didn't necessarily want to be a teacher so I think that was also something that immediately led me to thinking about my own company and really having a more alternative life as a composer and then eventually as a leader and somehow teacher becomes failed artist right because right before I went back to ASU I was like oh no don't they say those who can't teach should I really go back and then when I went back I learned so much from the students that I was teaching that empowered my comedy on a level I never expected and I was like no everyone should do this I think it was we thinking I want to hear from Camille but when we think about this we're the myths that have to die in order for this world to exist in its fullness and this idea about teaching is one of those most of us especially most of us keep learning in many ways as we possibly can and teaching is one of those ways but Camille what about you well in terms of my voice my literal voice hasn't changed since I was about 13 so it's extremely small and because of that when I was younger I didn't really like to speak much because people would tease me so movement was a way for me to express myself, feel my safe space now it's important for me to tell stories particularly from the African American experience because I don't see sometimes the authenticity of black people depicted in the ways that I know they are and particularly in the midst of black lives matter a lot of times people will come up to me and go it must be so hard to be black there's a lot of work that needs to be done there are struggles but there has never been a time that I did not want to be black and I think that that is part of people just looking within and starting to crack open the stuff that they're dealing with first because that's less about me and more about their perception you know what they say to us all the time I would die if I were you all the time when people see you I would die, I couldn't do it I'd die, I'm like oh okay thanks like what you guys I'm going to add one or two more questions but I hope you're starting to think of your questions there are mics here on either side so as you come to start thinking about what it is you want to ask please feel free to stand and I'll get to you as soon as people start showing up there I know you all kind of address this in the stories you told us but in light of the fact that we began with the blessing I'm curious for your relationships to your cultural backgrounds your traditions, your families what you know where how is that either a source for you or was it ever a thing where you pushed back and said no that's not it, I'm doing this any thoughts about that go ahead go ahead Paula and then Greg go ahead by living on a border informed a lot in that I was constantly thinking about and looking through different lenses but mostly I think in and I'm talking about the new music classical world the stages are white and that does not represent the life that I want to live or the life that I'm living and so when I'm thinking about curating when I'm thinking about my pieces I think very deeply about making sure that the stage represents the life I live the life I want to live and how I can make that look like today okay yes yes I agree I think I'm going to start to say I'm not disabled I'm Catholic like that's a it's a huge impact on me and you know my mother demanded participation A which I think was very important and we sat around the dinner table every night and we said grace every night there's also a huge ritual and church at least for me in the Catholic tradition is highly theatrical you know a man puts on a costume and gets in front of people and there's a script and you know it's a communal engagement and well the roots of theater are religious in nature so I think all those things follow through so I think being born in New Jersey as a Palestinian really just made me the equality junkie that kind of defines my work so like I grew up always being very tolerant of other religions and other races because I was spending my summers in a place where people were denied equality simply because of their faith and because of their race so my heritage as far as being Palestinian made me an equality junkie my heritage as being like a vague Arab is kind of what made me a star in comedy I wasn't known as a disabled artist until 2013 15 years into my career because who I was I was an Arab chick doing comedy in New York City post 9-11 shamelessly I was on a tour called the Arabs Gone Wild we were you know fighting back about these negative images that were permeating the media television shows and taking back our comedy roots because like Thomas was a comedian and Vic Tabak and Jamie Farr and we were like Arabs are comedians we're not terrorists on 24 and that's where I got started and then I became aware of how important it was to be someone who was loud and proud and disabled and someone who showed that disabled people aren't eternal children we grow up we have sex we have relationships we have disappointments we don't need J.F.E. this french fries like that became so now it's all about being a Muslim just it's all about being a Muslim and just constantly I feel like I'm constantly going out on stage and trying to explain to people like we are not the demon that you've been told we are American 10% of slaves were Muslims were part of the fabric of this country and it's the most defensive I've ever been my other identities I felt like I was so empowered whereas being a Muslim woman in America in this strange orange apocalypse has really changed what I focus on I've been much more vocal about my faith so I want to ask one more thing here and then I see people are starting to come so I'll please add on the microphones but just as you look at the four of you and if you were designing you know a performance platform for this group and saying okay how would you do that what would you say how would you link yourselves together how would you say here we are America this is it extremely talented regardless of what our separate identities are I think for every single person sitting on the stage just seeing a bit of their work these are people who are amazingly talented and all the other identities are gravy okay and how else would you do it well how would you say hey guys come see this well we got dance, theater, music and comedy yeah that's a pretty good night you know in my book we'll start here hi my name is Sam Simon I perform the actual dance and I would have two offerings one is that I've been very active over the years particularly with the world institute on disability and one of the things we did was every year at the urban awareness center in San Francisco have its annual event in which they presented the arts by people with significant disabilities and I hope that you folks are in touch in fact with the world institute on disability the Americans American Association of People with Disabilities are major organizations who can and should integrate art in presentation of art in their work and that's relationship I would like to only say that a slight other version of this idea is at 70 I found a new purpose in life because of my relationship with Lynn Fielder who is significantly impaired with Parkinson and I would never be here in doing what I think I've been made to do but for my relationship with Lynn who unfortunately right now is cannot be moved or type on our own but is part of me now it works both ways it's not just people with disabilities presenting but for us in relationship we can be changed as well thank you can I just add I think my this obviously if you heard me talk maybe not but my definition of the disability community is always it's a question for me I don't know but for me it's never my experience as a disabled individual is an integrated one and I don't think the disability community is just people with disabilities you've got parents and families and lovers and caretakers and aids and everything like the sphere of influence is broad so yes it's not just we're not about cloistering I think some of that is important at times and necessary for a community need but yes it's about to just be with disabled people A is not interesting to me and personally and it's not reflective of my authentic experience Mark Bermuthi and I for a day and a half got to spend time here with 24 artists it's a new part of what APAP's doing and we spent a fair amount of time talking about this idea of spheres of influence this notion that not for us to get so narrow and to think about who's touching who's touching who's touching who when we think about how we want to bring our work into contact with people so I'm so glad you said that and that list that Greg just rattled off is profound for us to think about so thank you and could you introduce yourself that would be great Hi my name is Aaron Cooper I'm a student at LIU Post in Long Island and an aspiring director and actor my question for you all is not only truthful but can be controversial without facing isolation Oh you can't care about that Or is isolation okay? You can't care about that you can't control how people are going to react to your work all you can control is the honesty that you put in creating that work and it's going to let the work speak let the work speak if you do it for other people then it's never going to be honest if you put it in place first then that's all that matters I want to piggyback what she said I've been told a million times shut up about being Palestinian that's what's getting you not hired stop talking about it and the decision I made was number one exactly what she said I do my work as if there's no such thing as censorship as if there's no such thing as racism, bigotry I just do the work that I want to do the audience that needs to hear it and that audience that I'm talking to rarely hears their voice so that kind of empowers me but also I don't want to work with people who don't want to work with me and not because I'm a diva I'm better than everyone but because I know that my message is equality equality equality if my message of equality makes you uncomfortable if you think my mere existence is controversial you're not the person who's going to amplify me I'll find someone else to do that let's hear for a minute, Paul I'm interested from your perspective about the nature of an incubator and how many people in this room are engaged in trying to incubate work move work along, catch work at a certain phase how you feel about this question because actually yes one is directly committed to this vision that you need to put forward but you aren't alone in the creative process or you don't have to be alone so what about that well I'll tell you one thing about ten years ago I'd written an opera and I had this great opportunity it was my first big thing and I cast this extraordinary singer named Helga Davis who has this five octave range and can't read music and I tell you this because it's important to the story and finished the performance and the audience loved it and I felt so good not because the audience loved it but I felt like I had really spoken of truth and weeks later I was waiting for the review because I knew it was getting reviewed and I just knew it was going to be great and it was the worst review I'd ever received in my life and it was really isolating and on top of it I had four other colleagues who I really esteemed who had got great reviews and you know that really stung and I think we can say that it doesn't matter what other people think and it doesn't in terms of the content but I do think that you know acknowledging that criticism is a really functional part of our society and we have to accept it and find our private space of creating and nurture that and find the right people and the artists who support you so that you can create that work in a world and an industry that is constantly changing and it's very hard for artists so you know that's another reason why I did start when I started because I wasn't getting the opportunities and I can't do anything but create I mean I can't do anything there's nothing else for me to do so I had to create that opportunity but criticism is a complex one that I still grapple with and think about and every time now I can't do anything without getting reviewed and I really it stresses me out which is another reason why at Stadas we often don't invite reviewers for a lot of work we call things in progress all the time until the artist feels ready to call it not in progress so it's complicated and I know I kind of straddled two things because I know we're talking about two separate kind of separate things this is blood and some additional information but I think it's useful to the criticism I think that's why it's so important for you to validate your work for yourself before you let other people do that because it protects you and it creates that safe space also you have to know the consequences you know what are the what are the losses, what are the gains by you going out and doing this I named my piece Black Girl Linguistic Play I knew that possibly most presenters were not going to be interested in it because the title was Black Girl Linguistic Play and people did not want to talk about race you know and I said okay I have to be okay with that thankfully that's not what happens people actually started responding to it but wow how would I feel if I would have changed the name in order to kind of shift and make people comfortable and it's not about making people comfortable sometimes comfort for me I get worried and I just I really want to add this when I just had the idea where I'm doing a comedy series with a network every single person told me if you attach yourself as the lead this will never get made and I waited seven years to get it made so you decide what to sacrifice and what to not so like that project for me was no way I'm not going to land non-disabled actor play this role I know that there's no actresses cp that can do it better than me but at the same time I did comedy shows that didn't mean a lot to me so that I could put bread and butter on my table so it's not always a fight like fight the battle and then do the work so that you can survive and grow and make the connections so let's hear another question thank you Hello my name is Paula Dioningrum and I am a singer and I just want to first say that it's my first year here at APAP and a huge thank you to everyone it's my first time and I just think the blessing that started this off still is speaking to me in a way and I wanted to say thank you to you all as artists first and foremost for bringing your authentic self my question is this we all have to make choices I had a career first and then I had family and I'm doing a career now continuing my career what is home life not everyone chooses marriage or children it's that part of you that is your foundation with your dreams and aspirations to go far how do you balance it who wants to start hello everyone patience with myself patience with my career and patience with where it's going and patience for my family who are incredibly important to me at times and patience is the word knowing that you know you don't change the image of yourself you just allow yourself to take one step at a time and you'll get there and it may be 20 years later than a colleague but it doesn't really matter it's your life and you have to choose the assemblage of things that are important to you Camille? I can't figure it out self-care is probably the hardest thing that I've had to do harder than creating work I drive myself down and I think that we are conditioned to think that if we don't rest then you're not working or you're lazy at least that's how I was conditioned to think and I had to personally work at making sure that I cared for myself first because there's the product and there's Camille and really making sure that above all that I put Camille first and it's still a work in progress that I'm trying to work through I'm not responsible to the clock and the clock is moving so I want to catch a couple more questions if possible you won't be able to hear from everybody but let's at least get one more question Hi thank you so much my name is Maria Regina Firmino Castillo and I'm an associate artist with Dancing Earth and I'm also a soon-to-be PhD in dance studies and performance studies and I have a burning question that's related actually to my academic both academic and artistic I'm curious and this is a question to everyone but provoked by something Greg Mangala said I'm sorry Mangala said the question is can we imagine an ontology of freak of the other that's different for the society that we share and this question is informed by indigenous ontologies indigenous ways of defining reality and hierarchies and what exists what doesn't exist, what has value what doesn't have value specifically I'm thinking of in Quechua and Aymara world views the disabled and I'm putting that in quotes because it's a very culturally specific term with a historical background it's very very wrapped up in power so in the Quechua and Aymara world view WACA is anything that is sacred and so-called disabled people are considered WACA in that world view and so this question is also provoked by what Greg said about the collective history of disabled people and it's all wrapped up in performance and when I heard that I thought to myself that this could also be the same I just played with thinking about that in terms of indigenous peoples and you know, also right, side shows and in the US this was also the big spectacles made with indigenous culture still and the other right and then the freaks that the society is making related to the fears and so how can performance play with that and turn it around and also something that I love that Liz said about killing myths and what are the new myths, the new ontologies the new ways of envisioning possible realities around that thank you Greg? That's a thesis right there I think but I can tell you what I'm doing at the moment and my thinking has evolved on this and I'm sure it'll evolve again but I think in this day and age it's a radical experimental act to put a disabled person on stage or in film as a disabled person and I've been experimenting with this and people don't quite know how to take it or it's a new, it's strange that it's a new idea even though, but I'm interested in the history that we were on stage and put on display for centuries and beyonds, you know, before so I'm interested in finding vehicles or material where there's seamless integration of character and disability because I think it's there's this term called the uncanny valley do you all know what that is? like where you CGI put a computer generated head on a living body and the human brain knows that it's not real and can't accept it so I think there's an uncanny valley effect happening with disability in theater in media, right? and performance so until you can show people until you show the disability and people with disabilities are in the fabric of society and the cultural landscape we've been presidents, kings, villains fuck ups the whole spectrum that's why I'm interested in one of the stories what's the history, where have we been alongside culture and history from the dawn of time since the dawn of humanity because we have been there and so that's what I'm interested personally in telling and showing so everybody, I'm especially sad to say that our tribunal standing that we can't get to those questions although I'm sure our panelists our artists will be very open hearing I do think this last exchange just indicates how broad our world can be and also the nature of repair that is to say Maria's question comes from a vast culture of history that says the way of seeing is possible and if we don't have that way of seeing we have to construct it and it can be because of the performances you are making or it can be because you guys are adding context and helping us see and build a culture that allows us to to be as beautiful as that it will exchange us you guys, we have to stop we're going to bring Simone up to help us and but can we thank these amazing artists please join us in thanking Liz and the speakers for a thoughtful and inspiring session and thank you to all of you for your participation thank you once again to ICM partners for your sponsorship in addition you don't want to miss tomorrow's plenary session on finding the flow together the importance of collaboration our creative moment features a cast member from the Tony award-winning show Hamilton that's Sunday morning here at 11 a.m. in the meantime take a break and then head downstairs to the second floor for the opening of the expo hall at 2 p.m. thanks all have a great day thank you