 Hi folks, how are you doing? Good morning. We need coffee. Really bad. Welcome to Culture Bot, to our conversations here at the Under the Radar Festival. Under the Radar I've been working with Culture Bot for like three years now, and designing these conversations. And there have been amazing conversations there. They're really taking a lot of life, and I've been really proud of it. This is being streamed live up into that web thing. And so just know that, that you're here with someone you aren't supposed to be here with or something. That's, take that into consideration. So Andy, would you want to just start this? Thanks again for coming. Move in. Andy will tell you how the table works and what the conversation is today. But thanks a lot, and this is the last point for this year. Yeah, and then we'll do it again next year. Oh, alright, I'll hold you down. Thanks a lot. Here we go. Alright, good morning everyone, and our afternoon guest technically. So first off, why doesn't everyone just move the circle in closer? Because we got, you know, you guys want to turn away. Because it works best when everyone's using a, one event mark, everyone a big hand from Mark Russell. She, along with Randy, out at the theater down the street. And she's been doing excellent work in creating non hierarchical democratic forms of discourse. This is one that she came up with. We've modified it a little. Hers is totally democratic. She doesn't, you know, she just puts the table out and invites whoever. I like to invite people, you know, because we're tackling some pretty big ideas. We invite people to sort of seat the table. But the way it works is like, there's open seats. So if you feel moved to speak, please come to the table. If you feel moved to speak and there's not a seat at the table, you're welcome to have somebody out. They are welcome to refuse to give you their seats. You know, if you're at the table, the only real rule is you have to be at the table to speak. So don't speak from the circle. You know, you have to actually come up to the table. Or even if you just want to come up to the table and listen from the table, that's cool too. Come on in. Oh, hey. Everybody has bios in the... All the inviting guests have bios in the program. So I'm going to dispense with that. Today... Oh, there's etiquette guides to the long table. I think they got handed down. And today, what are we talking about? American humor. We're talking about American theater and the aesthetics of politics. And it's kind of... Yeah, so we'll just get into it. I'm looking around. Of the four conversations, this is the lightest this room has been. And at the end of the course of the Brooklyn County Project, we really had... The Brooklyn County Project is at grassroots projects at Bryant. You know, and, you know, we had really... The past four discussions have been very diverse. You know, we had a lot of people. For the Brooklyn County Project, as they know, we actually... Although we extended invitations to many people, it was part that it's been harder sometimes to get their perspectives this table. And we talked about it in different contexts. So I wanted to sort of integrate it in a separate way, because that would be convenient. And when you talk about the... You talk about politics, and democracy, I think you're about to say that, how do we... At first, you know, how do we... How do we invite each other to make better practices? How do we create spaces that people invite in our spaces? How do we, you know... You know, young people, if you weren't here, you'd be able to talk to each other, and it's pretty well organized. What do you want about this? Like, how do we... Allison, where are you? Because I want to talk also about when we met the other night, and we were talking about, you know, well, you wrote a report. And a lot of, like, we wrote a report. And a lot of the... Allison just wanted to talk about it. Allison was at the side of the house. He was at the organization there, and we had a lot of really good information there. And yet, you know, the reason we happened there was because there was a lot of... I just sort of wanted to open up that question to you. It's a really complicated... I feel like I spend... I'm a maker. I have a theater company called The Foundry, and I make theater in lots of different positionalities. And I think I spend a lot of time wondering how to... How to... I just had a really interesting argument about an invitation the other day because it contains within it also a positionality, like, I'm inviting you out. Yeah, well, I don't know if it's an invitation. If you're making an invitation, what happens if I talk about an invitation? And I don't agree. Because I understand the positionality. I understand it as a positionality, like, I'm doing something. Would you like to be a part of what I'm generating? Right? And that's the difficulty when you're making art and you're inviting people to do it. Yeah, but that's a really problem then. Right? I mean, in any way. Well, that's the thing. So actually, let me just get to the end of this part and then I'll throw it away. The notion of invitation is, for me, an item of no answers whatsoever. I'm absolutely confident about it. Honestly, I already read it. What is its direction? But where are you throwing it? How are you presenting yourself as transparency and meaning for this possible invitation? So, for example, there's a lot of questions we hear when we're inviting people to do this. We try to do... I don't even think we know of it, but we often start with certain questions and get those different questions that are generally to work and that everyone is grappling with this. So throwing that question out in a certain way as part of the information feels at least like we mean it. But the problem is how muddy the water is with marketing and how the muddy language has been made for marketing. So it works like I was thinking... I was wondering if the word aesthetics in the invitation of this was an open enough word. I'm not... I'm just saying that's something we would go, should we use this word or what we mean, but how is it received in the world? I think that's a great question. I think two things that come up are different people that feel aggressive. One is sort of like the whole model of how I'm going to put on a show and invite people to come to it, which is inherent in the reason we need to disrupt the social panel discussion. Correctly not. It's that idea of presentation and invitation to come watch other people do something. And I think that the language is statistical but if you want to learn something about aesthetics, I think that the way that Abby and Michael work with... Start. Start out being real or not. I mean, that function is, you know, artists love to save all artists and they're like, you know what I mean? It comes from all of that in the form of privilege and honor to the South. And then the way Allison works with her is to see whether there's to be settlement with her kids at the appointment and where they... You know, we get this tension of sort of aesthetic rigor and community rigor and is there a kind of like privilege and error when we don't hold both sides accountable for these things? Totally. Another one of the terms in your invitation and this little theater and this whole, you know, reminding us that before there was regional theater there was little theater, there was community-based, as you said, locally responsive. A community-based, locally responsive model of theater. That sets up different conditions than the location. It sets up relationship. So if you're working with people who are geographic, they talk to make you quite naturally make great changes. And so you don't have to ask, you don't have to be a person being on your prenatal lens and inviting someone else in. You can find that because of who you know because your kids go to the same school or you go to the same church or you shop at the same supermarket or grocery store, you can find that you have interest in common. There are issues there. You end up wanting to make work and you want to know other people's things and you end up working together. So that's a kind of vitality and I think that, again, going back to our starting point here, I think it's such an interesting moment with regional theaters where so many of them are looking back to the local. This institution, we do one of them with local works and the work that they're doing is amazing. There's Michael Road, that's a lot of it. When Bill Ratch left Cornerstown to run the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the biggest budget country who would have thought they were going to go for it. So there's clearly a desire to find meaning in common locally. Well, you know, it's funny, I totally agree with you about the point that these things happen naturally, but you know... Oh, I didn't say naturally. Well, that they happen in your day-to-day life. In relation to Bill, which is worth it. Exactly. It's not hard and that's what I mean because I'm using it rather, but that model actually really has been served essentially so well in the last seven years that we've been together. We found, we thought, oh yeah, so you know, we're very diverse minded people. We're going to want and encourage diversity in the way that we, people have to work with, but as a result, we found that there was still, after seven years, we're going to be together and all the way around. And it did. It did. And we decided to think whether we're going to be in contact. So we decided to make it a much more diverse objective recently into, and it was not an easy choice to figure out how to really pay a little track-managed level that the policy, especially racial diversity that we can really see as it being in the face of a new play about politics. Plus, we had time to talk, to bring that together with what Paul supported by me and what, you know, again, sorry about. Yesterday we had David, Tommy, and Harrison from who can sit there for a year. You know, they just made it and it's not here called and David gave me sources to save their lives. You know, and so they were like, you know, all these great weird men of color that are our friends and these writing folks were down. You know, they just seemed to have to hand it hard. It's sound insulation. I don't want to say something that does that with voices around me. They do what they do and they built it with their local statements like this and then you got to go see. And, you know, so there's a few random talks and he's actually a really de-efficient person, especially in general who are as as practical class-based, race-based, cultural-based segregation goes through that group of people. And I know that I'm not a particular. So, I'm a CEO of a theater. So, I basically have both these topics of general information and these that I do I do feel that we love being this wonderful community and really trying to work with the community and shape our co-writing and responsibly answering both the down-down theater scene and then certainly truly challenging and safe with and a real art work. It has been so fascinating to kind of always, of course, invite everybody and try to make it so that everyone can walk out the slides. There's of course a number of students and people so you have to be very careful about protecting these things like that or that marketing that, of course, time goes by but that doesn't really make it a fail-off. It does. Sorry, I'm going to tell you it does. We've done now since, I guess, three or four years for everyone that at least want sometimes more Spanish translation offered. Sometimes it's not even used. Right. It's not I mean, look at making yourself clear to people when you're inviting them it takes a long time yet. You can't, you have to invite people sometimes ten times before they can trust you enough to consider it. That's right. Good job. It's made of time. I'm going to ask you about that because that really resonates a lot for me because, you know, these things, and I'm sure it makes me hear a lot of people who said, you know, when you do come from a place of access to resources and for a lot of settlers here, they do come from sort of radical share and they don't have resources to share them and that's for a lot of people that's actually more, you know, value. It's like, well, if I had access to these resources it's worth that I'd share them with others and I'm not trying to figure it out but at the same time, I acknowledge it's like, it's hard to build trust and it's hard to build relationships and it's hard to, you know, that that image is what you call like, more as a hearer as to really struggling as an African from Africa to from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from from It was a really, really solid show that both embraced the St. George's aesthetics and the sort of more popular community aesthetic which were working, but it also had great performers and was authentic, it wasn't some sort of performance of, and I think it was authentic. We have a huge marketing efforts because I'd say, you know, I had someone help me work with me, definitely. You know, the thing I know how to do as a director is to build trust among small groups of people and I think about this a lot in many, you know, because I do have a lot of ideas how a computer should work and I can enact them in a small group, but I think for us we don't have the tool or the experience through the... I don't know how to reach out to many different communities now. I just think they're a very specific way that people are bound for it. Can I say something to you? I think if you focus there, you're going to go next. It's bigger. I really feel like, I mean, I know, I know, okay, because I have to invite people to links all the time and we also don't have a space. We don't have a space, right? So it's not like there's a place for it. But I think that this idea of invitation attached to marketing is what really gets us fucked up. And so if you kind of wire us back and you think about what's inside the work, what are you making that you want other people to talk to you about? And you can't involve everybody. All the time, sometimes you can, you can involve us people thinking, and we do. But there's different ways of making it. We have to be careful we don't end up in this cantaloupe score. The only good art now is art that is one way or another. It all happens in pieces. What's being made isn't necessarily the play all the time. It was show or the performance or whatever. When you were just now talking about how you have skills, you know how to build something with the actors, I felt like you were saying is there kind of a clue in that how you build something bigger with the larger community. And I'd say, or Pottinger, someone who does how to do that, sitting over there, so hopefully she'll come here in a minute and talk about the way she does that. Michael Rode has written a lot about how he does that. He makes the distinction between civic practice and social practice. Different people make that distinction differently. For performance people, I find the way he makes it really useful. He says when someone invites him in to take his skills and use it in context, which is not a performance context, that's civic practice, he could use those same skills when he invites other people in their context. The performance in an example is he's been working a couple of years with Catholic Charities and here these people, all of their countries, this enormous organization, and they come together in national convening once a year. But they still feel very splintered from each other. And so someone found out about him, I don't know how, a father or somebody from Catholic Charities found out about him and said, could you use some of the skills you've used to build community in the theater to build community in Catholic Charities? And he does now. He's been working in their conference, big conference, little conference. So one thing is, I think we live in a great corner of the question, what is what holds right? And it's not just a war, it's not just a talk, correct? It's not just a performance. You all make beautiful performances. I would be impressed. Many of us would be impressed. But that does not have to be the train for the whole thing. One of the exciting things now is, I feel that artists are being invited to claim what really drives them. And for somebody, it might be involved in the invisible government. And, you know, here in the Biscayne has been quoted talking about the importance of her religious upbringing. And she wants to make the kingdom of heaven on the stage just fill it in place. But how we bring the certain things we care about is this larger way, and we can't do it necessarily with the usual suspects. So we're not being able to favor by the channel. I think that's really important. It's a feeling that here's this thing I want to do and I can't do it without what it really is. I'm going to say it over and over because I think dual, shared, magnetic, shared, sense of necessity is absolutely important. That's right. But I also think it's really important that people don't feel that the theater or performance venue is a intimidating, scary place. I walk into theaters sometimes, and I see a lot of shows, and I walk into like, it's like a part of a car where you're about to talk to something, and that is really sort of off-putting. Especially, so think about it, if you're someone who does see a lot of performance and you don't, oh, why would you want to be there? But just to speak to what you were saying, Kana and Jess, you know, I first sat down for private women and we noticed a large shift in our audiences, and I think that it's important to distinguish when we're talking about audiences versus artists because even though I think it is the same relative conversation about the mutation of participation and social or civic engagement, there is a difference of what those conversations are. But our audience is dramatically shifted when we're casting dramatically. And it wasn't intentional. We started working with certain performers, and then all of a sudden realized that we didn't have small houses made up of black journalists for lack of a better description. It's people's parents, it's their cousins, it's their next-door neighbors who are coming to see them in a play, and I think that there is something, while it is great to create a theatrical environment that feels necessary and important and vital and valuable, and those words are important, I also think it's important that it feels open and fun and playful, that it's not intimidating, that someone's uncle can't come see them in a play because there's my nephew on stage, and this is fun, and not that we have to make saccharine-sweet, easy plays, but that it has to be inclusive in some capacity. Actually, I think it was Mark Yeoman who said at the keynote address, or this symposium under the radar, that if it's not well-made, it can't be perceived. People would say, well, you didn't get it, or it wasn't... No, that's a sign that it wasn't constructed well. It should be... We're not talking about dumbing down, we're talking about well-constructing the art itself, so that it involves the invitation of different factors. I'm so sorry, I had to rail, and I decided to rail. I tried to piggyback on that. So, what were you going to say? No, I only had time to sit in my office and talk behind the wall of our theater and hearing the opening of the door performed by several boys. And how... Yeah, I did have to play about the suicide masturbation. I think for both of you, it's definitely a kind of position that we need to offer, that we need to like...