 and dance with me, your company. You know you suit me to a tee. Honey, come and dance with me. To step in out to the blue. Fabulous Elise Santora and Desmar Guevara on piano. Welcome, everybody, to Pregones Theater. Welcome to Let's Talk. My name is Arnaldo Lopez, and I'm happy to be your host for tonight. I want to tell you a little bit about Let's Talk. It's really the latest iteration of a long-time tradition of conversation and performance on the stage of Pregones Theater, now Pregones Theater and the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, giving it a new spin, a new life. And this is the first of many of these conversations that we're having here in the Bronx and also in Manhattan. The format for tonight is artists, friends, scholars who have supported our work and to whom we like to give an insider's perspective of what it's like to create theater. And of course, a live audience, a live audience, you who are with us here tonight in the Bronx, but also for the first time, a live streaming audience through our partners in HowlRound. So we welcome you to the Bronx and we welcome you around the nation. The Appalachian Puerto Rican musical, that's what we're here to talk about, is really the outcome of many years of collaboration between two companies that have 21 years doing things together. We've had previous stage performances. We've had travels. We've had productions showcasing the culture of Puerto Rico and the culture of the Appalachias. I believe that we're going to be cued for the first intervention and I'm really pleased to welcome someone I admire immensely. She's a folklorist, an anthropologist, and a culture maker. She's associate research professor at the University of Arizona, trustee of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and executive director of the Southwest Folklife Alliance, which is an Art Plays America finalist for this year, 2015. She's visited and dialogue with the artists of both of our theaters during the last year and a half or so during the development of the new staging of Betsy that will premiere in April in our theater in 47th Street, Manhattan. And she will frame for us the nature and the contours of this intercultural musical and what that may mean. So joining us from Tucson is Dr. Maribel Alvarez. Welcome, Maribel. We're holding out for the cue on the sound. Can you hear me? Now we can hear you. Yes? Yes. I was saying what it already is. Thank you. I was saying what an honor it is for me to be part of this collaboration. I love the work of both of these companies and it's been a real joy to be a witness to the behind the scenes of love making between the two companies, if you will. So a little bit of a voyeuristic sense that I bring to this experience. But my job is to do a little bit of intellectual framework around what this work represents. I've been asked to read some small portions of the essay that I've been writing. It's a draft. So while we still welcome your feedback, all families have secrets. But not all secrets carry the same weight of significance. Something that people prefer to keep under wraps are nothing more than harmless anecdotes left untold to save the guilty from embarrassment. But there are other secrets that possess the gravitas of life-altering scenarios. A facsimile of a birth record accidentally discovered in a box in the basement. Or honestly, by a visiting relative or that photograph that hung on the back of the closet for decades. In the musical Betsy, secrets attach themselves like flies to scraps of memory. In some instances, they are revealed in plain sight. But most of the time, they are only hinted at, acting like some kind of honey that one wishes to skate and teasing and acting in this way on the audience itself. In the opening act, we are introduced to Betsy, just as she is about to come on stage to sing at a club in the Bronx Panorama. She is described by the announcer as incomparable. There she is, bilingual, biracial, urban, and accomplished Latin jazz singer on the verge of fame, the spotlight of self-assurance shining bright on her. And she comes to sing a Caribbean guaracha. But soon, we learn that the past refuses to wash away and de una manera insolente, insolently, insists on disrupting Betsy's life. Historical trauma has this mischievous way about it. Precisely when song and triumph ought to command all the attention, ghostly reminders of unfinished family business contaminate the scene. The audience is clued very early on in the play to an elusive truth that you will try to pursue throughout the rest of the play, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so. Something happened to the child, way back in the recesses of her ancestry before her conscious mind was able to understand how the wishes of the dead travel in time. And here we find that the admixture that makes Betsy beautiful and at the same time exotic is also a toxic cocktail of sexual violence, of a history of boss against miscegenation, the mixing of the races, harking from yesterday's year when love was trumped by shame. In Betsy's Scots-Irish Puerto Rican lineage, the safe house of kinship gets hit by a historical tornado. Among the events that come to disrupt her life, we are reminded of the large role that indenture servitude and indeed white slavery play in the nation's development. We are asked as audience members to confront a shameful past that we barely know. But we begin to learn Betsy's stories through these darkened alleys of recollection that will surprise Betsy herself, her urban world all of a sudden turned blue from vestiges of a rural past, her Spanish English code-switching tongue twisted by a sudden drawl, her Puerto Rican identity stretch northward across the Atlantic, bathed in shades of emerald green from that Irish nation. And at the place most vulnerable moments an additional meaningful resonance that rises like smoke from the city's underground pipeline. And we then come to the realization all of a sudden that Betsy's story is our story. It's America can prove her roots is also a kind of gargantuan family secret in its own right. And from there, I have tried to frame the beginning of the play as a revelation because a lot of facts within the story of Betsy are historical bits and pieces that are not very common, very well-known. And I also tried to then move from that in the direction of asking to what degree American theater has been able to grapple with this phenomenon of interculturalism which I'm very interested in defining as separate and distinct from a response to multiculturalism. I think that there's been an impulse in the last 25, 30 years of the white theater companies responding to the plight of minority or minority sized art forms. And that has been the model of the multicultural presenting a theater scene. In Betsy, we see this taken to a different dimension where two stories of two often marginalized identities, two minority sized positions come together to weave even a more complicated cloth of that American identity than a simple powerful and weak story would narrate. And in that sense, it is complicated because it's not any more a story about a simple line of inclusion or outreach. It's not any more a story about a simple realization of one's blind spot about race. It's the story about the intermixing of marginalities and positionalities in a way that causes a deeper resonance of the spirit or of the spiritual truth that are being worked through the characters. Like I said, I think that that's been a really interesting experience for me as a writer, as an anthropologist to observe. And I believe that what we would see in the play is this intermingling of the personal story of Betsy and her own family goes accentuated and having an echo into the larger story. As a matter of fact, in some of the previous showing of Betsy, the public has already reacted to this truth. Not only have the Bronx and Appalachia have been iconic sites mythologized and folklorized forever, but the public that has been coming in previous productions has seen this resonance in their lives. There is a particular story about one man in the Bronx so deeply affected by the play that he walked out in Midway and explained to one of the Pregones members out in the lobby that his own story parallel Betsy in ways that he had never been able to confront. And yet we know that impact and steering emotions in this way, the kind of message that we are used to to hear about our reach to vulnerable populations is not all of the story for companies like Roadside and Pregones. That there's a desire to extend meaning making in a different kind of metric of impact that reflects also on the ability to make art out of these scraps of memory, out of these sort of fragmented stories and neighborhoods and mythologize and stereotype areas with the specificity of colors and music, banjos and cuadros, music and movements and rhythms, baladas and guarachas that challenges an aesthetic that has, we have been so unfamiliar with and that represents in so many ways our present reality and our future as we continue to move into 21st century. Those are some of my thoughts at the moment. Thank you so much, Maribel. We really appreciate it. I hope that you will stick around for the live stream. We really, this really helps us put into context and we will continue to dialogue with you. Thank you much. So thank you everyone. History, trauma, memory, ghosts in the closet, but also possibly the opening into an intercultural moment that is new to a different kind of mixing and to a creativity that really is navigating different kinds of connections. So a lot to think about and we're gonna now ask Dudley Cock and Rosalba Rolón to join us. Dudley Cock is the director of Roadside Theater and Rosalba Rolón is the artistic director of Pregones Theater and they're collaborating as directors and dramaturg writers for this production. Anxious to hear a little bit about the idea of collaboration, both in terms of the collaboration that the two of you have led for both of these theaters and maybe a little bit in terms that Maribel is suggesting that this intercultural moment is different and that Betsy is an example of that. Well, it seems, was it 93 or 94 when we got started? One or the other? One or the other. And it was kind of a brilliant move, I thought, on Pregones's part because we'd been introduced but we had never been to the Bronx. We're from the mountains of Central Appalachia and that's Eastern Kentucky, Southern West Virginia, Southwest Virginia and Upper East Tennessee. So it's a pretty isolated place. There's no public transportation, the closest airports, couple hours away, no bus service. So here we were gonna come to the Bronx. Now, we had been performing around the country so it wasn't like we'd never been away from home but we had never been to the Bronx. Now, one reason we got interested in the Bronx, back there in the 80s, they used, the government would put out the poverty statistics, right? And Central Appalachia, our home, was always at the bottom unless the Bronx beat us. And so we were flipping back and forth, who's the poorest neighborhood? And it occurred to us that the people in the Bronx must be our cousins. So we said, we will go to the Bronx and the brilliance that Pregones did, we had no idea, nobody knew us but they made the event mountain to mountain. They didn't say Appalachian mountain to mountain, they just said mountain to mountain exchange. So the mountains come to the Bronx, that was the advertisement. So who knew what mountain that might be? Thank you. Well, this is really a love affair that has taken 21 years and I feel that we're an ongoing honeymoon between the two companies because it's a constant exploration of each other in so many amazing creative ways. And when we wanted to way back bring a roadside here and then they brought us to Weisberg, Kentucky to perform one of our plays, I thought, how do I tell our community, our neighbors that these people are coming from Weisberg, Kentucky? And I thought, well, they may not know about Weisberg, Kentucky but our neighborhood knows about mountains. And sure enough, there was a huge response. I think that one of my favorites which became sort of an anthem for both companies is with one of our audience members came out from the first performances they saw of roadside, he saw and he said to me, you know, Rosalba, I didn't understand anything but I understood everything. And the reason about that understanding is that we all have our accents, have you noticed? And so we would be in a room looking at each other's mouth to make sure that we were understanding each other correctly. And I saw them for the first time and I thought that they were vegetarians and we didn't know what to think. And they thought, you know, that we were going to the mountains and they're saying, well, there are no Puerto Ricans around here and then we go there and then a bus load of Puerto Ricans from Tennessee drove like what, five, six hours to go and see the work and we knew that we were onto something special. And that's why we have kept exploring. So this is our third piece together. We did our first big piece in collaboration with Jumbo Productions, Jumbo Theater in New Orleans, African-American troupe. And we worked for six years on that project and toured 17 states I believe at the time together. We also did put together a children's show and we run stories, we're gonna be running a moment. And then Rowside had already begun to work on Betsy and we'll talk about the Betsy life in a moment. But I want to say that there is a key member of these collaboration along with Desmar and Dalia and myself who is home right now at Norton in the Rowside office and we would love to introduce you to our dear, dear friend Ron Short. Just a few words about Ron. Ron, like Rosalba says, is a core member of Rowside Theater for the past 35 years. He grew up in a family of singers as an award-winning master of all-time music, a gifted composer and performer, a playwright and co-writer and co-composer for this production. Betsy, take it away, Ron. Thank you. And so glad to be here. Yes, I am in the mountains and we're covered with snow now. I look out the window, I can see that one of the highest peaks in Virginia all covered with snow. And so for those of you who love snow and mountains, this would be a perfect scene. I set out to write Betsy because I knew in some ways that maybe this would be the last play that I would write. And there were still so many stories to be told. And but yet somehow in all my long career, I never managed to get farther away than my family. I couldn't get to the big stories until I told the family stories. And then I began to realize, I began to understand as we went along that the story of my family is the story of America. The story of your family is the story of America. These stories just haven't been told. There are other stories that have been told. We know them well, but these stories haven't been told. I understand how important environment is in the shaping of personality, of culture, identity. Our environment shapes who we are. I believe this strongly. And America has this dual identity. Well, more than one, but there is this identity that has been when people think of America, they think of the cities. They think of New York City. They think of Chicago and LA. But you know, there is an older story, a much older story. Living in a rural environment, looking out at these mountains, seeing these mountains every day, you get a sense that the world that we live in is more important in some ways than those things that we build for ourselves. The world of the mountains around us. Here in the mountains, we have gotten used to solitude. And it's been that way from the beginning. One of the more interesting aspects of my people's story and the story of America is how many pioneers stepped out across boundaries that had never been stepped across before. The plains and the prairies and into the hills. This is a story one of my ancestors who stepped out on his own and helped shape America. This is Betsy's great, great, great, great uncle. Three days the wind's been howling, going across in the air. Red-tailed hawk, he was shining. Ron Short, coming to us from roadside. Thank you, Ron. You're welcome. So, Rosalba, we have a good sense from this beautiful performance of one of the hearts driving this story. We'd love to hear the other ingredients. Sure. You can imagine. I mean, working with Ron is one of the privileges of my career, really one of the highlights of our collective career is working with this man. I get emotional. So, Betsy, when Dudley said, you know, the original iteration of Betsy actually was, as the story as Ron was saying, he was just telling the story of his family, of the many Elizabethan besties in his family. And also, there's another component to this, which is that jazz legend, Beji Adair, and Beji, I'm sorry, Beji Adair, and Beji, a musician, an amazing musician, jazz player from Tennessee also participated in the creation of some of these characters. And Dudley, maybe later in our Q&A, took a little bit about Beji's role in the original, you know, as Betsy took off. So, I think the roast, I felt that Betsy's story was complete, and then we began to talk about it. And then we said, wow, we have gone this far in our marriage, right? We have to have a baby together. And so, I decided that we were going to have a baby, and that baby is Betsy. In other words, that story that they had been telling, the story of Betsy, needed to go even further. And through the generosity of everyone involved, we decided that this Betsy is going to be the child of Elizabeth. And Elizabeth fell in love with Pedro Garcia, Betsy's father. Elizabeth is called Irish from Appalachia, and she came to New York City to study music. And she falls in love with Pedro, and they have this baby Betsy. Elizabeth died when Betsy was a child, and Betsy grew up as a Bronx Puerto Rican Latin jazz singer. So, the Irish in her was dormant for many years. So, if something happens, I won't tell you what it is, because you have to go see the play. Something happened that makes the spirit of all of the Betsy's come back to the stage, come back alive and confront our Bronx Betsy with that part of her that has been dormant for so many years. And so, what our challenge now was, is how do we construct, how do we build the other side of the story without having to, you know, going into the deep historical moments of Puerto Rican history because it was not about that. It's about who Betsy is. It's about the way she walks. It's about the music she makes. It's about her persona. It's the music she likes. It's about the love and something is holding her back. And that is the Betsy we bring to the story, you know, the result of all of these combinations. Let me ask you, Rosalba, that development, is that something that comes from an idea that you had that developed itself and how long a time? Well, we've been, actually, we did a first round in 2006. And at 2006, Elise Santora, who played, you just heard her singing, she's coming back in a moment, the spirits, and she continued to place all those spirits. She's possessed. And then we did it in 2008 again. And we haven't done it since. We have been working on some of the development of more music, instrumentation, which we're going to talk about in a minute, and we're going to listen to some great music. Here's some great music. So, but it is about processing from moment to moment. We don't do it in a hurry. It cannot be done in a hurry. You have to find that moment where you say, I have to get it out of my system. And we said, you know what? We have to get this Betsy on her feet again. And this time, with a new rush of energy, if you will, in terms of developing the Puerto Rican sort of persona of this Betsy, of the story. And that's what we have been working on. We're still working on the second act, but very advanced and tight first act. And that is just the process. So, and very grateful because we have so many artists involved and some continue to be. I mentioned Elise Santora, who just, you know, a star in her own right, who has been really a pivotal part of a member of this ensemble. We also have other actresses involved, like Meredith Burns, Yaris Apizarro. It's like alumni of Betsy's, you know, and spirits. At this point. But we also have had Desmar Guevara from the very beginning, our musical director, our composer. And I think we owe our musicians and our composer a huge debt of gratitude because it is a part of their own connection amongst themselves that help us develop, you know, the script and the energy that we need to bring to the play. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Rosalba. Those last comments are meaningful to me because I have a sense that this kind of work, as much as this particular play, is really a process that evolves over time. So there's this sense that each time that we've seen a version of Betsy on stage, it's brought something new and the idea that you're bringing it to the culmination is really very exciting. I'm going to walk over to the piano so I can chat with Desmar. In as much as the entire production evolves over time, there's also a great sense that music is a big part of this show and that there's something particular about creating in a way that is authentic to two very rich and distinct musical cultures. And Desmar, I'm hoping that you can tell us a little bit about what it's like to do that, what it's like to create a play where you have several collaborators bringing very distinct flavors of music, bringing distinct instruments, and tell us a little bit about that. Yes. I know many times we hear that music is a universal language and that's true. That's the truth. You can relate to other cultures through music, but in this process, the first time that we started collaborating with Roadside, we were working also with another theater group from New Orleans called Jumbug. That was back in 1988, 1997. We were doing another play and in the first week of collaborations, we, all the musicians from Roadside, from Jumbug, and from Pregones we met in a room and started to create music and playing. And for two days, nothing happened. And we weren't communicating because everybody were, you know, defending their own music. Until we stopped one day and started to listen to each other's history and stories of how we became musicians, how this music came to ourselves. And after we did that, we started playing and literally magic happened. Music started happening and that's my experience with this, with the month, with the Palachian Company. Also the music, the new music that I'm trying to bring in this next week, next time we do it. For the first time in the play, I'm adding a Puerto Rican cuadro that will be the counterpart of the banjo. And just recently that idea came because Rosalba told me, why don't we do this? And that created my inspiration to call these two musicians and put them to collaborate together. Yesterday they met for the first time and we play here and it's beautiful, beautiful. Also the history of the instruments is very similar, because come from struggle, come from oppressed people, that music is from the mountains and divides, for example, the Iwara music from Puerto Rico, it comes from the melodies, varies from towns and towns and I just learned yesterday that the banjo tuning is a different tuning from town to town. So there is a similarity. We need to listen to each other first and then come together. So I would like for you to have a little taste of what I had yesterday if it's possible. We would like to bring Antonio Guzman and Silvia and to play a little bit of what you're going to hear in March in April. Silvia Ryerson and Banjo and Antonio Guzman on cuatro. Thank you so much. Let me tell you a little bit more about them. Silvia has worked at Apple Shop for the last five years producing public affairs programs for community radio and she co-directs Apple Shop's traditional music project. Antonio Guzman was born and raised in Puerto Rico and he's a freelance guitarist in the New York City area and we are happy to have them in this particular production. And now we're going to turn the conversation to casting is so much of what gives the production its personality and I'll start off by saying that both of these companies respect music in its own right as a character. So there's the music that fills the room and gives it more than ambiance brings the heart and speaks and connects directly to story but I'd like to call Elise Santora back to the stage to see if we can talk a little bit about her experience. Welcome Elise. We'd like to know more you've had the fortune of being in this play knowing this evolving production through a number of years your spirit I think at one point you played seven seven ladies and that was before act two and now it's three Yes So tell us more about those three characters you know the exciting thing about this is really that I get to be these people that came before her and sort of unveil the history of who she is in real time so I get to be the character that puts the pieces together of something she didn't even know she was missing and these women the women that encounter what Maribel and Ron spoke about which is these women went through history of being indentured servants having to sell themselves never owning property to actually eventually owning property and raising their children in harsh mountainous regions fighting poverty fighting being a woman at that time and fighting for their children and the interesting thing that I want to highlight about doing this spirit is that spirit turns into all the Elizabeth and Betsy's that came before her actual ancestors and when I was doing the rehearsals I there was you've heard some of the music it's just beautiful it just it comes it sort of feels like a heart pulse and so what happens is that during rehearsal I'd be in tears trying to sing a song all the songs that I sang just seemed to hit me so deeply and so my question during rehearsal to Rosaba was why am I because I'm Puerto Rican and Cuban and I got nothing I like the Irish people fine but I don't really understand why I'm so connected without even having to do that much work as an actor and come to realize in the conversation with Ron and Rosaba and Dudley we came to the conclusion that it's because we were all colonized we were subjected to oppression by colonialism we know we Puerto Ricans know the oppression of that we know not owning we know the idea of being estranged we know the idea of being an immigrant it was all and we're connected to the land a lot of these women are so connected to the land and that was what was I was hearing and feeling in the music and so that I my work was made very easy by the music which is another character and there's the genealogy leading up to Betsy and what do we know about the new the new Betsy yeah so I you know we get all the way to the mother of Betsy but you know we really kind of need to know who Betsy actually is going to be we will know right now we're going to make the big cast announcement first of all let me tell you for a moment about Elise Elise is a huge star a member of our ensemble for many years a staple of the Broadway scene an incredible amazing artist at all levels and we kept thinking in this new life of Betsy we need a match and so you know we would love to announce tonight our new Betsy our own Bronx Spoken word hip-hop artist singer dancer star and here she is okay what are you trying to do Betsy this Elizabeth that I'm a Garcia I'm not a swindle none of this is me and you and my people as you know so let's just end this madness okay bye okay okay okay just for the sake of argument what happened to Swindle after all according to you he was my great great great grandfather he disappeared into the wilderness before Betsy's baby brother Wesley was born Wesley never knew his father no he didn't and Elizabeth rarely spoke of him when she did she did so with bitter tears and warnings regarding the reckless and foolish nature of all men I came to this country an orphan a refugee from Ireland's green shores a woman alone has only two choices to be a wife or a whore I decided that no man would own me for more than an hour at a time I know but I claim my life as my my children will never go hungry I saved my together we will leave the city and go to the Cumberland now JC he is my eldest he is ashamed of me it is so but the others still call me and I hope they will never know last night I dreamed of the green hills of Ireland and I walk with a fever in my head JC prayed for me most of the day but I will never rise to this bed on the car when my boy Eli was born Eli he was your great great grandfather was Eli's father unknown no his father was Eli Phipps he stayed around just long enough for me to bear another boy surely after that boy's birth he sold me a parcel of land from 18 dollars nine acres on the waters of Elk Creek yes indeed tossed and battered on life stormy sea what we should James Jimmie Jim an inch and a half round snake well I sort of whooped the toenails off in the grizzly bear I never was what's the fiction to tell you about that when old Deacon Smith for a meeting I got there I was hard enough to melt throw the pond in Deacon's bear went where it spent until it got there pulled off his old red flower hunt shirt of mine was in the pond a baby looked out on the bank seat the devil pure tea devil standing right there he made a grab at me and I stepped back and said hey I ain't no man for standing in another man's way well he made another dive at me I grabbed him by the tail give him six or a half dozen circles around that large mirror come to a big old white old stump rocked his tail around that stump said now you stand there you pull that stump out by its roots or your tail won't touch I can soon see he gonna stand then I looked and I seen Brandon six or a half dozen old hounds from hell come across that big old mirror I know this all going to pile in on me and kill me or the difference now I do it so I told that devil I'm gonna take Deacon's bear and he grabbed me by the seat of paint coke color pitched me over north side south of mountain into a beach white oak black gum cherry tree as well as our hornet's nest peccastanian worms and more some of them stung me some of them stung Brandon some of them stung him old hounds Betsy Gallum I ain't he an awful sight thank you Ron thank you so much for being with us we appreciate and thank you so lovely to see everybody thank you so much and to see Elise and all of you again and to meet this wonderful talented young woman thank you thank you and we're gonna open it to the audience and uh I welcome everybody who was up here before to join us again and uh see if we can get some additional talk going questions from you comments from you or comments or doubts you know you wanna ask something go ahead we could get started maybe I'd like to ask Caridad if she would like to give us I mean I know that you've become familiar with this only recently and uh it's a world of discovery and other performers have come into it and I'd like to see how it feels so far I feel like not only in the play is Betsy visited by by spirits and of there being a message I feel like there's a message for me personally um that it came at the very right time for me so I really believe that this is you know kismet and and meant to be and I'm so honored to have been chosen and I mean I get emotional too and I haven't even learned the whole play yet but just what I know that it means to all these people and the trajectory to know that is based in a story you know that's real and that it comes from the mountains and to be connected to both the mountains in Puerto Rico to the mountains in Appalachia or Appalachia to learning how to say this right um you know it just means so much to me to be able to join these worlds and to be chosen to represent you know this character is just beyond amazing and I am so so grateful and I hope to do it justice for those generations that are alive and those ancestors that are watching because I feel the spirit of it and and it's a blessing thank you, thank you so much I have a related question for Dudley and Rosalba which has to do with when you cast somebody when you've had would you work with somebody like Elise for some time and I'm curious how much does that feedback into the development of this evolving script and in the case of bringing in Caridad only recently and had a chance to have some work sessions what that's like very much so and actually at this time that we have been working on reworking the first act actually we invited Elise into the conversation because we knew not only what the challenges were for us but also for her as an interpreter of this character you know what was the memory tell her from her first participation in it so it's been a great conversation to have one of the performers in the room as we developed and then of course Ron who has been a performer on the piece as well a creator of the character of the man that is yet to be cast then Ron also has participated in contributing some notes and things that we need to know so I think that this Betsy that you're all going to see in April April remember April from the 8th through the 26th at the Puerto Rico Travelling Theatre that Betsy is going to have a great mix of ingredients not only from Dolly and myself but from the performers as well which is amazing and I'm really looking forward to working with Caridad because as I said we have said Betsy is this Latin jazz singer but I have the feeling that this Betsy is also pulled by hip hop and pulled by spoken word and we want to see where that best is going to take us next so this is great and the gift of these two musicians I can't imagine what has begun to he has fantasizing about where this is going to go that's my take on it you know like we said earlier this began as a one person show Ron telling and performing his family history and then we took that show down to Nashville to work with some Nashville jazz musicians and one of those musicians was B.G. Adair a wonderful pianist a Steinway artist and so forth many many albums and she said you know this is some of my story too I'm from Horse Cave, Kentucky and this is a weed knowner and she said I want to get my story in so we got B.G.'s story in and she composed for it and then we said well we got to take this up to our friends in the Bronx and they'll tell us how we're doing and we came up here and performed it in the little White House over here packed, you couldn't get in and they said we like it and some of our story is there so this is just growing and with Caridad it'll grow another another layer and that's how we make art over a long arc of time we've been collaborating for 21 years there's really no hurry as long as it keeps getting better and also of course the layers of the music because we're on our way to the mountains in another two weeks to work some more work with Ron for this matter to work together and work on some more composition and then all in a room together this is not just director-actor I tell you what to do when you move it's about doing it together with the degree of integrity and love for the piece so that's a little bit more I really would love for all of you to come see it and please don't be shy if you have any questions or comments or anything we'll talk some more after this but we certainly would love to get your input or anything that you think might be missing or if you want to share a story that's great too Any hands, please Short answer Yes, I think this is the time finally has come to to do a great recording of this piece Yes And the company has produced some of its prior productions as audio recording so Desmad is sort of the not only the musical director and composer for Peregonis Theater, PRTT but also head of the production department for that I could say too just a little bit about Apple Shop from Appalachian Workshop Redside Theater is one part of Apple Shop and Apple Shop began in 1969 during the war on poverty and the idea was to train young people in film so they could get jobs these are young people in poor communities so that they could get a head start on some jobs so from that little beginning in 1969 after the job training program it has grown into this Appalachian voice so we have our own record company our own radio station we make a lot of documentary films we have an archive we publish, we have photography and of course the theater but it began as just a little idea a head start economic opportunity and in some ways the reason it succeeded and the reason it failed is because Washington couldn't get down into the mountains to mess with the program so they couldn't enforce their little curriculum on these young people and so the young people just took the cameras and made film everywhere else in the country they were over there scolding them and making them go through the curriculum so they never got anything made when the government pulled out their money to show except here in Appalachia and then it took off from there I'm really excited because I feel like we are going to be able to move mountains and show people that may think that these two cultures are so different to show them just how alike and how human we all are so I believe that this is going to be monumental and helping bring people together on just on a whole universal scale because we're considered so different we all look at each other like far apart but we're all connected and I know that this play is going to really bring so many worlds together and that's what's so exciting to me Thank you so much in addition to tonight we are rolling out some interesting conversations online Betsy, the musical is on social media please seek us out on Facebook and keep track of what we're doing and contribute your opinions your stories your comments and your questions which we will be happy to answer online too I want to bring somebody who's been pivotal to a lot of what we're doing in support including this particular conversation, Jamie Haft you can join me outside theater now for eight years and she's associate director of imagining America which she will tell us more about Thanks, Arnoldo my feeling here in this room is that there's something special here that needs to be shared and imagining America is a consortium of more than 100 colleges and universities across the country who believe that colleges have an important role to play and who are tapping the power of the arts, humanities and design in our work to address social justice and I've been having chills sitting here in the audience realizing how this play which is trying to get us to have a more realistic history of America relates to our organization's name imagining America and so we've convened a dozen scholars in Makulata, Laura Benila at Hostos is one of them to generate scholarship in collaboration with the artists in real time during the play creation process one thing that another scholar in our cohort pointed out was that there's a lot of material from artists after they produce something reflecting but there's very few high quality multi-media material that's produced scholarly material in real time with the artists as they're making creative decisions so through social media and with our guest editor Jose Zarate who's collaborating with us in South Korea and with the roadside team Zhivko Ilyev our web community coordinator and Donna Porterfield longtime managing director for 35 years and playwright we are attempting to create scholarship and make it public so thanks to HowlRound launching on March 22nd there will be a blog series it will feature Maribel's essay that she's working on an excerpt of it and the theme is beyond cliche dramatizing our American identity and then in April we'll have several events with college programs across the country as well as in this region and open to the public so you all can come back again tonight we have students from Cornell University University of Oregon Ohio State and University of Kentucky tuning in and they will come for an institute with thanks to Eduardo Gonzalez from Cornell Cooperative Extension in collaboration with this network of organizations come in April to see the play and to learn from the artists thanks thank you Jamie thank you to all of our partners thank you to our in-house team associate artistic directors Alvan Colón-Lespierre and Jorge Merced Jessica Moya who is chief of technology behind there we have Omar Perez who's also helping us with this live stream I want to thank you all for being here on behalf of Pregones and to invite you to join us I see friends in the audience and I hope we get a chance to chat a little bit more informally and we do hope to see you again here at Pregones as you see know next week we have a great beatbox program here Omar is the director and Marci's music is fast approaching and after Marci's music we head downtown to Betsy so we have a full spring ahead of us and thank you for coming tonight and thank you to our host Arnaldo independent scholar and longtime development officer with Pregones and Puerto Rican traveling theater