 And start. This book I've been reading that these authors are going to hopefully this type of work are going to be talking. This book I've been reading this book called The New Universal Human Future, which is, I'll talk about later on, but it connected deeply with me about that sort of primary question, that's an essential question about how does artists survive. And so I want to, and the book also sort of talks about this, the symmetry between the past and the future, and sort of the connection between one's ability to understand, to be sensitive to the past, connected and corresponding to how we envision the future. So with that in mind, I wanted to sort of start by going back a little bit in my own personal history to a question that I had first stumbled upon at this crazy place and met Stacy and Carlos, which is, and it's a question that many of the artists, the young emerging artists I come here ask, which is how do you survive as an artist? How do you do this? And I didn't even realize I was asking this question when I first came here. I had, I think I had even given up the idea of being an artist, so I was mostly here as a curiosity. And I was perhaps following some map that I had either inherited or that had been, maybe that was written by predominant circumstances, and, or an itinerary. And the first question that was posed to me, I think it was by Stacy that I hadn't thought of, and I think it's interesting that I hadn't thought of this question, but the question was why not travel without an itinerary? And that really shook my thinking in a way because I was, I was following some sort of map to some very treasure, and that map I hadn't completely authored on my own. And this question of, well really who drew this map? What are the values represented by this map? There were some geographical locales to this map, like cities I should perhaps go to, connected to resources I should perhaps tap into in order to do something that will connect me to some larger meaning. And even that, I think, was unspoken inside of myself that there was a desire and a need to tap into larger meaning. So this curveball was thrown to me, which was why don't you travel without an itinerary? That map, in a way, is also, maybe it's a map of values, or a map of cities, or a map of resources, but it's also perhaps a map of meaning. And as Bruno Schultz writes, meaning, our reality is our meaning, basically, the essence of our reality is meaning. So the first thing that occurred to me was that I needed to be in a space where I could actually be researching and thinking about meaning, that I didn't necessarily need to be running to a place to make something, I needed to be running to a place that had conducive conditions for me to actually have some revelation. That that's actually where there perhaps might be some value first before anything else. So this led to thinking about how do you have these conditions on a long-term basis? How do you coalesce the conditions for research with the conditions, the basic conditions of survival? Whether it's individual survival, or if you have a family, or a community that you feel responsible for. These questions, and I should have known that the question posed to me really wasn't why not travel without an itinerary, but I'm realizing 13 years later why not you travel with a different itinerary, like a double-edged itinerary. It's so malleable. So this question about coalescing, because it became clear that the conditions for the artistic research were inexorably connected to the process. And the process, as we all know, is the product. So then it became, for me, this questioning of, well first, what are the conditions that I need, but then it led to, of course, the group's conditions, the community, the ecology, and so on. This larger context, over the years, has been inescapable. The essay that Schultz quote is from is called The Nevolatization of Reality, and it's in a collection called The Regions of Great Heresy. And I stumbled on the etymology of heresy, which is from Greek, which is choice, which I found very interesting. And that heretics are questioning conventional choices and conventionalism. And I think based on the people that are in this room that we would agree that conventionalism has failed, most of us have failed, as in terms, in many ways, the environment, the economy, artistic conditions, and so on. So I'm sort of honored and proud to have gathered a group of heretics in the room as a way of sharing. I mean the purpose of this really is sharing and thinking. I hope to keep this frame very loose with that in mind. My desire was to gather people like you who are pushing up against conventionalism in different ways and across areas and across sectors and across disciplines. I think by gathering sort of tribal leaders, we get the sense of tribes. We get the sense then of the values of those tribes and the ecosystems in which those tribes exist. A constellation gets drawn. And a constellation doesn't only represent a pattern, a seasonal pattern, but ultimately ends up representing a narrative or a myth. So I hope by creating a constellation with the people that are in this room, we, in fact, create new meaning or at least reveal it. Even though we know it exists in new light and illuminated and subtly have effect on the reality, first and foremost, but then also discuss more concretely perhaps what our work is, what our work has been and what's a way of seeing it, a new narrative that will uncover resources that we didn't know existed or that we knew existed but we hadn't given a name or that we hadn't named in a certain way or that these resources that we know fuel our work and make our work alive perhaps aren't part of the common language, the conventional language of resources. That's my big frame. I had the thought, again, I think when I was reading this book that you were going to have successful, broad, true cross-sector collaborations, everybody needed to be involved. Not just one entity, but there needed to be some deep buy-in, some deep dialogue. So the idea today was thinking that we would have these sort of lenses. I know people have been confused about not only where do I sit, but when do I speak and how is this working? I hesitated to use the word panels because I'd like it to be a conversation. I'd like it to be fluid and interrupted even. I did want to think about specific frames and I had the great fortune of working with Amritha and Javier and Pauli and RJ and Morgan and Michael whose delay will be here this afternoon in contemplating these sort of frameworks, these lenses, which I think are vital ones, but they're not so exclusive. I think many people are in many overlaps. But as they relate to artistry, the focus of how we evolve the art first and the artist and the survival of the artist, the frame of activism that is driven by art at its core, but that is tackling and fighting the different fronts to affect change in different areas. And then the area of cross-sector collaboration where there's very new experiments happening or perhaps ancient for that matter, that is finding new ways of galvanizing creatively and bringing creativity to the forefront of everyday life. I hope this framework is somehow helpful. We have today and tomorrow. We'll go in order but also let it wander a bit. I wanted to thank also and acknowledge that there have been people, organizations that have helped contribute to this event, such as TCG, such as Arts and Democracy, Animated Democracy, NET, am I forgetting any? And HowlRound and ArtsEmerson, of course. So I just want to give a shout out to them. Any questions at this time? Great. I want to pass it over to Hannah so you can do some any logistical Husky baby things. This is being web streamed, by the way. So make sure there's no food or tea. And also on the web streaming, if you have whatever electronic devices you have with you, I'm sure there will be moments that you'll want to be in and out and have access to the internet. That's great, but if you minimize the searching that's happening, it'll help with the web streaming. Also, just wanted to say hello. Welcome. If you have any questions or needs, or finding things, let myself or Joanne know or to see many of the members of Double Edge all around you. You can find the editor here with you or in the front office. The washrooms are also in that area. We're going to do some tours later so you can really see the whole of the farm and the theater here. But don't hesitate to ask me anything that's not yet clear. We also have a materials table, which just has a few things which we'd like to add to it. Let Hannah know and we'll print it out. There's some books. There's an article also by Aaron Langeman that he sent to me which is great and very relevant than me. There's access to materials at our disposal, but if you'd like to check out some of those things. Javier. Great. Thank you. Hi, everybody. My name is Javier. I've been in most of you, not all of you, and we decided to kick it off we would spend some time doing introductions, which is a little bit of a risky business with a group this size and with a limited amount of time we have, but we really felt like there were enough people here who didn't know each other and that we would benefit from just hearing a little bit about everybody's work. So we're going to spend the next hour doing intros and everybody's going to get two minutes or less to share who they are, what your work is, and what brings you to the work. And I think that last question is kind of the most important part is really what motivates you, what drives you, why do you do what you do in the world. And I'm going to time everybody. We've got to stay on track. And so, we'll task master. We'll hear something like this. When you're done. I'm going to pick it up and then we're just going to stare at it around the corner. I'm Holly Carl and I am the director, editor of Hall Around and also part of the creative team at Arts Emerson, at Emerson College in Boston. And first I just want to say if you've been following Hall Around in the last week or two I will not be apologizing this weekend at all. The other thing, I guess a couple of things brings me to the work. The biggest thing for me is I keep looking for a frame with English to work that reflects the values of the work itself. So my work has always been centered around creating a frame that reflects what I believe about the work. And I have found that to be based on the idea that there are some things in the world that are true. I want to believe that. And so I keep looking for what those two things are to try to create frames within which other people can work that feel holistic to the work itself. And then I just say a couple of things. This summer, that's been a huge struggle for me that disjunctured there in my life. And the two things that have proven to be true. One has been a project that I've been working on for some time now about a one woman, it's a one woman boxing show. And it's a grueling and beautiful piece of work. And the process of making it has been true to the values of the piece. And then the other thing that has been true this summer is that I made a commitment a couple of years ago that every summer I would think of biking and theater as equally of the same value. And so those two things have been true for me this summer. So I've been in the disjuncture of the fray and the work not being in sync. I've been thinking a lot about the things that have been true. So that's where I am today. And I will talk a lot about biking. In advance for that. You said you weren't going to do a lot of that. Oh no, I take my apology back. See what I mean? It's like ingrained in me. So why don't we go around this table and then we'll move on. My name's Petrillo. I'm the program manager for Presenting and Touring at the New England Foundation for the Arts. Some of you may know us from different kinds of intersections. We provide grant funding but also services. And despite our name, we actually work nationally. Many of you I know are familiar with the National Theater Project. I actually manage our regional grant making programs and sort of the mission I guess we operate under is that we are a grant maker and those resources are an important part of what we do. But also that we are here as a service and trying to connect people, convene people, get a pulse of what's happening out there, what are the needs and where are our strengths that we can help meet some of those needs. So that is the approach that we take and I personally take in our work. I'm Vijay Mathew. I work with Pauli F. Hall around. And what brings me to the work is really trying to re-imagine what resources are and a lot of that has to do with figuring out the best ways to or really effective ways to use the internet. And yeah, so it's really about re-imagining what resources can be and trying to make what's now invisible visible. I'm Susan Clampett. I'm from Washington D.C. and I've been working on this for 50 years or more. Right now I am working on an affordable housing project for artists in Washington D.C. I'm a grant maker in that I am on the Washington D.C. commission arts commission. So we support artists and arts organizations in collaborative efforts within the city. I'm a board member at the Wayne State Theater in Washington and working with a number of other theaters. I was very interested in particularly in the piece in the arts revival convening quotes because I really was in the middle of the culture wars in 1995 when the Gay and Rich Congress came in and I was the deputy chair of the National Dump for the Arts and in charge of all the program disciplines so my portfolio was the grant money and it went from 100 million to 40 million overnight it required firing half the staff and cutting out major programs and money to artists I think that has been continues to be the most traumatic period of my professional life and I've been just trying to deal with that ever since some of you weren't even in the field at the time but I'd be really interested in hearing about what that has had and what have we done as artists and art leaders to finish it. I'm sorry to talk to that one. No and the resources have shifted are they shifting what do we need because the house just passed this week the same thing so going down to 75 million dollars the Senate and the White House will do something about it but it's rough out there. Thank you. Let's move on to that table. Hi everyone. My name is Amritha Ramanan and I'm currently an artist in residence at Double Edge Theatre. I would say what draws me to the art is very much finding or obtaining a sense of connectivity with art and communities I'm really curious just how the creative process becomes one in the community and to have been really fortunate that my experience at Double Edge has taught me a lot about that exploration and with that too it's kind of the sense of as a society as we go towards growing diversification and what I hope is inclusion even if that's more the dream that's still the vision I see how that can connect to the arts and how we as a field can really push that forward. All right. I'm Laura Sable. I'm from Springboard Clear Arts in Minnesota. Springboard is an organization we define it as a community development organization that happens to be run by 15 practicing artists we're based both in the urban area of the cities and a rural community called Fergus Falls and our programs are in equal measure about how do we think about artists making a living in a life in ways both practical and sort of spiritual and how do we help communities better tap into and access and ask more from their artists. I am drawn to and pulled in this work I think there's sort of two core things for me one is a real sort of interest and deep passion for reciprocity and how we create relationships in community that feel equal in value and in contribution and in demand and I think very important to me is optimism and a certain sense of transformational possibility that this work is possible and that change is possible and that we can find those moments of love and connection and cooperation at least at a small scale. My name is Clive Valentini Executive Director of High Arts formerly known as the Hip Hop Theater Festival we still produce the Hip Hop Theater Festival which primarily helps to present new emerging work from the Hip Hop generation plural because you know there's a wide range of folks now creating that work in terms of age and demographics and background and the reason why we changed the name is that we just opened a space about a year ago in East Harlem some of you have been there and it's a small storefront you know it's the first time as an itinerant organization which collaborated with large and small institutions that we have our own space it's about 300 square feet it's you know an interesting block where you know we have market rate housing doormat buildings with shuttles expressed to 86 and less and then we have you know public housing literally right across the street so it really reflects kind of like this economic diversity that's pretty interesting in the changing community but what's brought me to the work and what's kind of informed the transition even more informing the transition from Hip Hop Theater Festival to High Arts is access you know to stories that are important to tell as far as we're concerned in terms of stories that reflect folks who are often on the margins of the fringes or who don't get to see themselves on other stages or screens or you know even the internet now which is kind of democratized you know people's ability to you know tell their own stories so High Arts is focused more on the development and production of work and that's something that I'm really excited about as we move into the future My name is Marnie Popinger I've been a part of theater making since I was a kid I tried to leave it for ten years and it was unsuccessful I started again in 87 that was inspired by a watch and I did a project called Abundance about America and money and I got to interview heaps of millionaires and minimum wage workers and asked them the same questions and have thousands of people in dialogues and I asked each person to make a small poem in answer to a question and I watched the transformation among thousands of people from all walks of life together in each room time after time and I realized that it wasn't just me in theater that it was something about human beings and making art that opened up something that existed in no other place and that it's that powerful which you all know and so I'm an activist all my life so much traditionally political activist and so I started something called Art at Work and it's to tackle municipal problems in cities with arts projects so the police had low morale and it took a year but they agreed to write poetry and they were partners one on one with professional poets and wrote poems about their lives and it really changed the community's expectations of their relationships with them and it changed them I said once they realized it didn't turn them gay twice as many volunteered the next year and so I left New York City six years ago and moved to Portland, Maine so I actually worked in City Hall I'm on the city manager's staff and what brought me to this is that I'm just excited about the times and what we have a shot at in the next many decades and see the arts and creating it in a different way with many, many more people as being able to really make it possible to turn scary situations into really much more deeply equitable relationships for the rest of us Hi, I'm Crystal Brown and I'm really happy to be here I feel like I'm a grown up in here like this one really big I am a little girl from a little town in North Carolina called Kinston and I started dancing because I really love people and that's how I got to be around them and they got to be around me and then I got this really great opportunity to have a wonderful career in dance which was kind of by happens dance but you know kind of the way it was supposed to be so I worked for some people who thought that art and dance was this and this was the work it was on stage it was how you get the people to take the medicine in the community so I worked for Chuck Davis and Liz Lerman and Jolly Willa-Joe Zala and I had a company in New York for ten years called In Spirit which gave emerging female artists the opportunity to come together and make work and now I'm the chair of dance at Middlebury College so I am oh, right now right now in this very moment trying to figure out how I just grew up in this world and in this work and I think I've gone from kind of like a kind of a muse to like a soldier in the trenches to a practitioner and now I get to be I was a little bit of a spy and now I get to be like a resource corridor to try to level the plan field so thanks for letting me come Thank you, Crystal put it on this table put it out because we don't think you're going to get to me My name is Sarah Zimmerman I'm a Q staff theater in Albuquerque, New Mexico We are very pleased and proud to be here with our long relationship with Double Edge Theater who has been completely influential in our lives I tied very deeply into what Matthew was saying about Stacey's questions helping to guide what and who we are and the questions about one of the great ways it was very important for me is that I stopped looking to the outside world to tell me what I should be and how I should make my work and how that was going to be possible because nobody's ever going to tell you and nobody's ever going to give you anything so from a director to a playwright we don't do funding why? because we grew up hearing that funding was going away and away and away so we had to figure out the way we were going to do it on our own in Albuquerque, New Mexico and so we started building and my partner Richard who is the artistic director of Q staff theater had this dream and a vision that we would create instead of going someplace to try to have them give us something we were going to try to build something and have it be there for other people as well as ourselves and so along the way we've developed our own work and our own theater company and a restaurant and a homestead and all sorts of things and it's amazing how many wonderful brilliant artists are out there who just want to do it their own way they don't want to go to Hollywood they don't want to go to Broadway they want to stay in Albuquerque and Mississippi and Massachusetts and create their own work with their own voices and that is what has brought me to this place this time and this work and this amazing group of people you next? my name is Richard Van Scow and I'm the director and co-founder along with Sandy and Q staff like you said in Albuquerque I don't know what to add so much but we kind of appeared at that same moment in time that you were talking about with the culture wars and the funding kind of going away and we kind of felt like as we graduated college together in the theater department that all of the former models were disappearing just before we got there and we had been in Albuquerque before we started Q staff that was approaching kind of survival in that more conventional model and it just wasn't happening so when we started Q staff we started with the survivalist idea of theater zero budget performance out of garbage in our house and then slowly started this accumulation where we have now real estate and rental income and the restaurants that Sandy talked about and we're currently developing a building that has multiple spaces that we're hoping to create kind of a neighborhood arts center that's a mammoth project for us that's going well beyond do it yourself which has been our habit for quite a while and we're actually trying to expand now as far as we're bringing to the work I think on a personal note I had a falling out with a very strict religious upbringing that kind of separated me from my community and my family and I think I come to group work as an attempt to kind of put that back together in a matrix of meaning that I find to be authentic and kind of transformational and I think that there's that reach or something higher and further Hi, my name is Mark Welbos and as you just said at this moment I was like oh yeah I grew up in Texas and there weren't very many models to follow at least they weren't visible to me and so when Matthew talked about traveling without an itinerary it just made so much sense because I actually don't know how it's kind of looked into it or I'm not quite sure exactly how it happened but when you're talking about religion I grew up kind of in the south in Texas and very religious family and there's something about something about that that plays out somehow in a desire to be of service to serve and because of lack of other skills art was making art was a way of doing it and so a lot of the work I've created is community-engaged work community-based I worked for many years at the theater in Los Angeles called Cornerstone Theater Company I work now with an organization called the Network of Ensemble Theaters and I think each of these is this path of how to how to help how to how to hear that I think is a common thread in things and how to make art I also like this is something about that process and creating an imagination that I think is also very central to how I got to the local parts of the work so yes that's how I got here it's a constant kind of questions and learning and that's it and yeah Carlos Villana I'm a member of Double Edge Theater and I arrived here in 1996 about to be 17 years no it is here I said I came from Buenos Aires via Knoxville and I think my grandma used to call me the heretic and thank you Matthew I understand a little more what she did it was true although I kind of resisted also a very strict Catholic bringing last British education which is not a good combination a lot of soccer which I'm not going to apologize for but I think that what brings me in Argentina I did a lot of activism and I grew up during a war period and I created a group Diablo Mundo which is kind of still alive it was created in 82 like similar to Double Edge and I think what brings me to the work which relates to this heretical identification is there is a deep desire like an instinct and even a selfishness or a sexual drive for the work in the beginning I wasn't in many risky and dangerous activities and then luckily I found this way to protest the conventional and to try to like marry I think I identify with most of what it was said here so I couldn't say this or that it's a combination of all these things that I'm hearing like Borges would say this multitude I can see my face so who knows I'm Sarah Alden I live in New York at present moment and I'm a musician yeah I guess it's really inspiring for me to be here because there's so much conversation happening about a bigger picture something deeper and I think what brings me to the work that I do is connectivity connecting with people like Mark said I think there's been a part of me that wants to also serve like find a way that my art can be to be serving to people sometimes it feels like the box that I live in is like playing for drunk people and there might be some value there's definitely value in it but sometimes it feels like a box and it seems like I guess my question is is there something deeper that I could be doing that could be a bigger picture serving for bigger picture so I'm in I have curiosity about that and checking out and then transition it's really nice to be here and hear everybody's conversation about that let's go to the back of the table I'm Morgan Janess I'm essentially a dramaturg and a creative advisor which I guess means I'm an opinion monger I've got a little button that said everyone is entitled to my opinion which is probably where but I probably don't need to wear I've worked a lot of theatrical institutions I've worked for the last over a decade I've had a couple of agencies probably the most formative part of my over 30 years was 10 years I spent working for Jezapap right at the beginning which really shaped a lot of my attitudes I just recently lost my job so I'm at that point of like oh my god how do I define identity and survival the two things that bring me to the work there's two encapsulations of it one is social sculpture which is the idea that Joseph Boyce put out that everyone is an artist that there is a creative spark in every human being that the very word art comes from the old Norse word which means to be is an art from old English means thou art literally it is being art is inseparable from human being so the idea of a creative spark is the idea of social sculpture is that the human creative spark and the organization and the interactivity of that is at the core of the center of gravity of civilization so I really believe that being of high Romania I like to fan sparks and see fire I like watching things here so the other thing is a stone soup which is the whole idea that's the depression concept there's a potato going on an onion, a carrot maybe you have a piece of protein a pot, a stove you can't do anything separately you all gather together the person who has the table and some silverware and you all make a meal so the whole sort of idea of how to have inter and intra connectivity between communities is really interesting to me and so as of three days ago I had a little consultancy which I will continue to opinion longer from but also it's probably going to be involved with development, production management and touring my name is RJ Mekani and I'm originally from Cincinnati I've been doing paid and mostly unpaid social justice, environmental justice organizing for about 15 years about 10 years ago I followed my partner in New York former partner and about three years ago I joined the Foundry Theater as their community programs producer they created a staff position for someone from the social justice organizing world so I still moonlight doing mostly transformative justice work around gender violence what brings me to all of this I think it's probably true for a lot of us which is just experiencing both a lot of violence and a lot of beauty I think it's what we wrestle with as social justice organizers and I think the most effective organizers are artists and makers and so I really see that relationship there and we're trying to figure out how to relate to all of this violence and all of this beauty through that I think there are things that the arts access that to be honest with you a lot of hardcore organizers have a hard time they can touch with things that are obvious to us like metaphor are actually really missing in a lot of spaces I'm particularly concerned with the question of embodiment how do we as individuals as collectivities embody our values, our aspirations at the Foundry I manage and facilitate our collaborations with members of base building social justice groups and I really question how does our practice embody true collaboration there right now the founder and I are in a process of how would the company itself embody our aspirations as a company looking at artistic rigor a rigorous political engagement and then actually having impact in the world and I think we're also really trying to look at this frame which connects to the person to my right which is a question of who has a right to the theater how could everyone that lives in New York City have a right to the theater of New York City everyone my name is La Nina and I'm here because R.J. invited me and I'm from an organization called the Right to the City Alliance and so we have 40 different membership based or community based or grassroots organizations in I think it's now about 13 cities in the United States and they came together around fighting issues of gentrification and displacement and so personally how I arrived here I think I always had really strong interest in theater and media and how that relates to political activism I'm a baby of the movement right so my parents were active in the Puerto Rican Socialist Party and I was always carried around in demonstrations and things like that so we felt very comfortable in those spaces and then a little bit alienated when I was kind of out of place when I was in spaces where I felt like people didn't have a sense of like a common space or a space to engage with each other and be honest and truthful and have meaningful and relevant conversations with each other so in terms of Right to the City in particular as being Puerto Rican a lot of my family being from Brooklyn and seeing the city change so much over time in New York City in particular and knowing that displacement is just an issue that's happening and it's becoming a global narrative and Right to the City itself is a global narrative that's something that I feel like we should all be aware of and engaging in people all over from Turkey to India to South Africa are fighting for a common space, the public parks public grounds affordable housing public housing and so I think that we're in a place too of trying to figure out how do we just break a little bit from just this idea of these silos we've created with other membership groups and knowing that there's so many individuals that feel alienated and need a place and then how do we connect to this global beating heart right now of a fight for this common space, common energy and all that so I'll figure that out My name is I come from the Kuna Rappahannock Nations here in the United States the Rappahannocks are from Virginia and the Kunas are from off the coast of Panama People who know me, I've been talking to a few people is that I'm an associate director for Spider Woman Theater and part of Spider Woman Theater is working on methodologies to take, to continue my family's work on our methodologies that are connected directly with our cosmologies and meaning that our storytelling, our religion our existence has to do directly to our connection to cosmos with not a Christian doctrine involved and that is how I was taught I grew up in theater, if anyone knows me Spider Woman has been my biggest influence probably other than Joseph Papp at Ellen Stewart I grew up in the theater world as a downtown theater kid and so my whole life consisted of being around people who were creative artists and what does that mean to sustain within the last seven years I was asked by my community and when I say my community I mean my tribal elders, my chiefs to take on the role of working internationally with the United Nations the permanent form of indigenous issues and I had to really think if I was going to take this because let's face it I'm just an Indian girl who won a job you know and I had to really think, I had to really start thinking on the political level and really be mentored and Muriel Miguel, who's my mother she's my biggest mentor and I realized at one point she is never, I have been taught that politics and art are not separate entities they're the same in our communities for me to sustain a survival is really waking up in the morning basically because I have no qualms knowing that the world is not fair and I say that all the time I know the world is not fair I know I'm a native woman who walks into this world and I walk into this world on my own land with a doctrine around me which has to do with Christianity so being part of the UN maybe do a lot of work and try to sustain community development and part of that the other thing is cultural development and how do we do that with theater how do we community build and a lot of the work I do is with associate with American Community House and my husband with the Silver Cloud Singers and Dancers is empowering native youth empowering indigenous youth empowering women through theater and the only way I know really how to make to go into a community other than paper and we've done all of that but how do we get it on to our feet how do we talk about it in the body of the methodologies that Spider Woman talks about and how do we create probably in this year I was asked to be the global the chairwoman of the Global Indigenous Women's Caucus and I had to really rethink again how do I put that in terms of theater the only way to do that is to do cultural events so people can see that cultural and survival and sustainability and community accountability are all connected water is connected to land rights treaty rights we're all going to be on this earth together as my chiefs or in line just to say and he still says if you're not at the table maybe you are because if I'm out of this conversation then I have to really think there's dogs parked and they're after me and really talking about and one of the other things I started really connecting with me and you from my mama and she was mentored by Helen Stewart and we started really talking about these cross references asian methodologies and how we were both talked the same way and oddly enough my mother was mentored by Helen Stewart and she brought her into the theater world so we started to talk about this collective how can we get a collective that for indigenous work to be seen to be heard, to be tasted how can it be safe so we came up with this word called safe harbor to make so it would be safe for a native artist or an indigenous artist and say I want to work on something I want to work on a dance piece about my land being plowed down how do I do that, how do I get somebody from North Dakota, South Dakota and then talking about urban native issues which is a big thing because I was born in Britain New York and we are totally always off of our traditional homelands but our big part of being an urban native person is culture which is language storytelling, theater culture, dance, think so that's what I do thank you so much Carlson, I'd like to get off this call my name is Carlton Turner I come from rainy Mississippi I'm the executive director of Alternate Roots which is a member of service organization for artists that are doing work at the intersection of social justice activism and creativity in the south I'm also the co-artistic director of Mugabe men under guidance acting before early extinction along with my brother Maurice Turner and we are based in rainy Mississippi we grew up there and continued to live there on a small farm not quite like double ed but we grew up in the community feeding the community and creating space in which the culture was about supporting a much larger vision than just ourselves I come to this work because I've always my father was a singer grew up singing in the church choir playing in the high school band junior high band and as a writer my brother was a musician and there was no one in the world that was telling our story so we saw a void in terms of an absence of our image of the storytelling atmosphere so we created the space for our stories to be told and for the stories of the communities that we come from to be shared with other people I think this conversation about art and survival is really important we as a nation have become really good at looking away and we're a decade into a war into several wars that we have going on as a nation and I think I was watching this documentary last year and it was about domestic violence specifically around men beating women and this beautiful quote that says the only way to enforce a lie is with violence and as a country we are a country built on lives we manufacture lives we are all about lying and keeping lives alive and we enforce that through violence both domestically and internationally and I just so this whole thing about survival and about predators and prey and what it means to survive is really important in this moment for us to be thinking about and art to me is not really that important but creating a creative atmosphere and a culture of creativity that allows us to think about the systems that don't work for us for the people that they were designed by and so how do we begin to create and help to support a culture of creativity to create the types of structures that work for us and not against us my name is Nick Sly, I'm from New Orleans, Louisiana and I work with an organization called Mondo Pizarro we create original works of performance over long periods of time and we collectively run a space for the incubation of new work called Catapult with three other companies and I think I was brought back to the work because of my home and similar to Carlton realizing that there were stories and storytellers that were telling stories that I didn't hear anywhere else but in particular the thing that brought me back to the work the most was the Zydeco dance or the Cajun dance where you go to a dance and the level of artistry is world class but the social function is clear and apparent and that showed me an example of the work I want to make in the world where the musicians don't feel an incessant need to talk about their artistry or their craft they usually just get up and they play and then the community gathers and does something really amazing which is they dance really rigorously and it just gave me a dream for a type of work where the artistry had rigor and the social function was apparent and I feel really fortunate to live in an area of the world where that can happen and the other thing that struck me so deeply about that was invariably the better the musician is the more of an internal desire they have to share their craft for the future and it just made me realize storytelling is the only medium for me that's beautiful and expansive enough to tell the kind of work to illustrate the transformation that I want to see in the world so that's me Richard Newman I'm a member of the Hinterlands co-director of the Hinterlands and based in Detroit, Michigan and 10 years ago like yesterday I first showed up to Double Edge like two days ago and so it was I came here as a student and State was here for almost five years and it greatly shaped the way I engage with the world my community, my fellow artists so it's really always a deeply felt pleasure to be able to return and spend just a little bit of time here the Hinterlands we create original performances we work multidisciplinary multidisciplinary so we're not just theater artists right now myself and our co-director are theater artists but we collaborate with you know, JIT dancers and sound artists and architects and for me I'm attracted to difficulty so and collaboration is a great difficulty and joy so I think what brings me to the work continually is these kinds of engagements with people who think differently than myself and who come from different aesthetics, different processes and how can we engage with one another and that helps me think on a larger scale of how I can engage with people who are different than me in my neighborhood, in my city and the world so it's a way of focusing on the small to pay attention to these systems that work together I love my neighborhood you know, it's one of the most culturally diverse neighborhoods in America and the kinds of provisional solutions that people come up with based on the lack of city services and like basic functioning government is pretty remarkable and I see this and I see people I see this incredible artistry you know, in my neighbors they still consider themselves artists but just in how they create these insane garden systems just as like a way to you know, grow food but in this kind of situation that's not conducive to that so anyway, that's all really I could go on but I won't, so thanks Hi everybody I'm Rachel and I'm based in New York and I am a producer, a documentary producer of a project called Housing is a Human Right that tries to connect people around housing and land and home and use storytelling for that and then also recently with Hurricane Sandy happening this last fall sort of started a participatory documentary around the storm that invites people to share video and audio and written testimonies around the storm and sort of take this huge event that has affected millions of people and invite them to collaborate and share and create something together I'm the daughter of a social worker so listening and there's nothing that pretty much wasn't talked about in my house growing up listening was a huge part of my life and my father's a video editor so the idea of sort of like finding the kernels of story and pretty much everything is also deeply a part of me I think I really over the last several years just enjoyed kind of being in this crevice between the social justice organizing world that's constantly, passionately fighting for change as well as sort of this beautiful work of art and the power of amazing art to just have people be in awe and change through that and it's kind of like as you mentioned like a dark crevice that's hard and challenging and difficult that we find ourselves in but I also see like the family and the people that are in that crevice and working and doing this incredibly hard work grow over the years as that family grows and get to see people at these beautiful gatherings around the country and so I think that's what keeps me there My name is Michael Primo from Brooklyn, New York I work with Rachel on housing and human rights and storytelling project and the same storyline project we do a variety of things just exploring how we can tell stories around a variety of platforms and in a variety of settings we've created like interactive installations in laundromats and other unconventional places I have a background as like a political activist, social justice organizer as well as a producer of a theater and performance motivated to this work by like chasing that endless fix of creative perfection that tells the stories I feel like need to be told and weren't represented in what I saw growing up and so like many people in the room was always chasing that dragon of trying to tell the stories that represent who you are in your particular experience but also create platforms for the community around us to tell stories together I'm really interested and fascinated by collaboration and participatory creation and how we sort of step away from the sort of individual product driven capitalist market and model of art production and continue to like go back to sort of the way we were before the industrial revolution and creating things in community with community for community I believe that artists are the midwives of revolution in that there is the potential for this dandelion fire to just keep blowing and growing things and growing things and with the Sandy line the Sandy storyline project are also really interested in technology we're iterating creating a business plan now to iterate the storyline platform to create simple beautiful elegant digital storytelling tools that can be available in a climate where there isn't funding for this type of storytelling it doesn't fit in any boxes but create a very elegant tool set that's available to other artists as well as community organizations that don't have communication budgets yes well, I'm Aaron Levin I make theater and I also perform and I've had kind of dual careers doing both mostly with elevator repair service as a performer and now I've switched mostly to making work I'm obsessed by a lot of things the last project that I'm just coming out of is a three city production called city council meeting that definitely may or may not be theater may or may not be total efforts new clothes may or may not be the most transformative performance experience you've ever seen depending on the night you see it it's made up of local government transcripts that the audience performs with the help of a group of staffers combined with the local I think that addresses a particular issue in the city where we're making the piece we made it through long-term residencies in each city where we were and we're going to a couple more cities over the next year or two that project made me not care so much whether or not what I was making was theater and the important things have become finding the right form to enact whatever questions I want to ask and I'm also really obsessed with questions I can't answer and combinations of story lines or subjects that I can't put together right but that seemed to lodge themselves in my brain or in my heart so I'm starting to work on a project called perfect city that is just research and it's about how major cities all over the world are using seemingly progressive values to create places that are entirely exclusive to all of it very well so I'm trying to do research by asking people who are experts at living on margins and people who are experts at urban design and then also finding out how our responses as a larger public might vary depending on who's asking those same questions and now on a very personal level I feel like live performance and the misfits that make live performance sort of save my life starting when I was about 13 and I went to punk rock shows in Minneapolis all I know there's room for me in this world and cut me out of a lot of other kinds of trouble that I was just starting to get in very thoroughly and I'm also interested in the survival question because some of you saw Harold and Johanna I'm partnered with a brilliant choreographer and we want to continue to survive together and build a family together that is resonant for ourselves and for other people that is impacted by our values and values of people around us Hi, I'm Ann Bogard I'm the artistic director of City Company and 20 years ago I said to the members of my company I said I think I have about 15 or 20 essays to write theatrical essays and I can give you an example perfectly because when Mark Martin said she said something that could be a play an essay which is when you said that you did a project where you asked millionaires, multi-millionaires and they disenfranchised the same questions what is that? what is it? what is it? and then the part that got me is when you said then you turned to them and you said can you make a poem and I'm really interested in the moment that she asked that question and what happened to both the multi-millionaires and the disenfranchised and that moment would be an essay that would be a whole theatrical exploration I could spend a year doing that fantastic but, okay, so I did that and about 5 years ago my colleague Leon Neigelgruss in the company turned to me and he said so what now? we've done all these essays what are you interested in now? you can't keep doing the same thing and I had to think very seriously about it because that's what we do is try to stay on the edge of what is real and I thought, gosh this is a group of people who are so trained that they can do anything meaning actors and designers that I work with in service of what we just go on making plays that's not quite in service of what and in thinking about that very deeply I had to say what is theatre? and what distinguishes the theatre from any other art form is it asks the very question which no other art form asks which is how are we getting along and can we get along better I mean every play is about a social system that's gone wrong and it's the reconstruction of the social system asking how do we get along but it's not only that, it's like in the rehearsal room how do we get along or is the audience getting along is the audience getting along with the actors that question is interesting because there's this group of actors who will not leave me they just don't leave me they're really well trained and they are a community they have become a very functioning community and I think when an audience watches a play they watch two things they watch on a conscious level the play, you know the story but on an unconscious level they're being hit like who are these people on the stage and how are they getting along presents a model society how things might be different so if you see the city company working you watch another hierarchical society and one gets that viscerally so I thought well if this is a functioning community it's just masturbation to keep functioning so what interests me now is that this tool that's a company meets other communities and what happens so we've done a series of projects with Martha Graham's dance company like how do you work with it and recently with Wilty Jones and his company like that's really disagreeable at times and then we're working with Bang on the Can which is a community and we're starting to work with Dan Hamilton the visual artist so in other words how do we cross the field to somebody else's fire and see what kind of tool how much we can withstand because you've got a group that gets along but when you get along with you get along with somebody who you are not even does an art form that's not what you do starts to address that question all over again how can we get along that's what I'm working on right now I'm Stacy Klein I'm the founder and director of Double Edge 31 years ago and we were founded in Boston we moved out here for economic survival and to the other ways families without being in the trash basically where we were in Boston I would like to first of all I'm really moved that all of you are here and I appreciate that a lot and mostly because everybody's really different than me and the Double Edge and that's kind of the idea I think of creating work that's yours and sharing with people who are creating work that's theirs and sharing with communities that are themselves so I love that I want to introduce my students who are all over there taking care of us and also our performers just as a whole and I'm really happy that they should be interested in this conversation and I hope my main student, my daughter over there Ariel I was thinking about her when you were talking I know your mother that's why I do where I can the daughters are great they survive us right now I think I am really working on beauty what is the nature of beauty how do we share beauty what's the power of beauty to transform people not just in art but in our relationships because for many years well for my whole youth I was angry and that's another matter that had its power but I realized that the world is extremely angry and pretty awful and I am thinking what I want to share is what I believe is the antidote to that that I believe is possible and that my community has taught me that it's possible to share on that basis I'll just briefly so I'm Javier and I work on a few different projects one is the arts and democracy project which supports artists and activists working together to do various kinds of social justice work and I'm also collaborating with Marty on art at work and we're working on a project based on the work she's been doing in Portland in Holy Oak Bass which is where I live and I think what brings me to the work is just a profound understanding and recognition that things aren't working the way they are and after having been an activist and an organizer as a young person in high school and then in college feeling like there was an emptiness still in that work and that's what brought me to art making and theater and this place in particular I spent four years here and the work I did here and the relationships I've built here have been feeding me ever since and I'm still kind of that still surprises me because it's been a while but it really was profound and I think it really taught me the power of art and the power of culture and the power of theater practice and what that what a resource that is for us so that is why I'm here John, Jennifer, if you guys like to introduce yourself I'm Jennifer Johnson this is John Hateson my partner in high school and we run the Charlestown Working Theater in Charlestown in Massachusetts it's a neighborhood of Boston we have been working for 20 of the 40 years that it's been open but it's a neighborhood that I grew up in and the theater that I grew up in and in which we are raising a variety of children who are ours or not ours and we've worked with Double Edge as long as we've run the Charlestown Working Theater in Boston so on their way here so now we have two communities that we work in we purchased a house here last year we work here in the summer and other times we work in Boston and the collaboration is done from being sort of artistic to being familial to being very intimate in a way that I think a lot of us are speaking to in the room and that's important to me artistically because our neighborhood of Charlestown where I grew up is a really sort of skeptical when I was growing up I heard Violet, Neighborhood, Boston but what has changed Charlestown the most is gentrification that had the most violet impact on neighborhood and I think that part of our job in the theater is welcoming artists all around the world and importantly keeping it as sort of a portal to people's relations with each other and their own imaginations I had a couple of teenagers writing me under a show that they did not like that I saw the theater this summer and like really intense sort of emails to me that I was of course not okay and it was just a really beautiful moment for me because I think that I entered that theater when I was nine years old and my son is nine years old and it became a world for me and so we want to sort of keep it a world open within this tumultuous luxury condominium world that is sort of becoming Charlestown thank you that's so difficult emotional no it's very important to have to be here and I connect with a lot a lot of everyone here in the way of just sort of the possibilities and imaginations and survival and I like to think of this sort of place this sort of context even to say this sort of resourcefulness and reinventing and re sort of renewing and resalvaging that we're always constantly doing I think that's something that I've learned working with Stacy, working here and just in Charlestown and just been through time of just sort of as we just sort of accumulate and take what remains and continue to cobble together our realities and so I'm very glad to be here and participate thank you thank you everyone that was great there are, as Stacy mentioned our summer interns are here our apprentices are here other ensemble members Milena and Jeremy and Hannah and many others that aren't necessarily in front of us so I just wanted to acknowledge them it is a team effort I want to re-acknowledge the people who might be watching online for you at home you have operators standing by celebrity operator yes, oh we're right behind Gus here is Ryan Fairley as well another collaborator who's work you'll see tonight in Charlestown I'd like to take a quick break so people can get coffee and water in the bathroom just a 5 minute break afterwards we'll come back I want to plan the idea for perhaps it's for tomorrow that we find a way and Paulie and I started to talk about this and I didn't ever concretely resolve the question but find a way to take the conversation tomorrow into some form of a work session that could I was thinking become some form of mapping or some form of organizing it could be some mapping or prototyping a couple of things I don't know I don't need to know and maybe later tonight it'll reveal itself but that's part of this we'll go from this to this so let's take 5 minutes now and do what you need and Paulie it'll be a gathering all together some food and some drinks and lunch also you haven't had one already there will be a few tours of the farm but not taking you to any of the performance locations so I think it's spoiled and ruined I knew this morning that I had asked some of the right people over here because many people who didn't come to the show last night came up to me and said I can't believe I missed the show with a storm like that's the one I want to go and of course I'm survival and Paulie was the third ship the Ray and the new tornado okay great so I want to let people know that this is being documented so this will be archived at new play tv and the double list website and thanks again Vijay I didn't acknowledge your help in setting all this up and also this is coinciding with our first alumni weekend so a lot of our collaborators and former students and current students are here one of them is Jeff who's going to be sort of describing and taking Kofi's note so if there's something that someone says that ends up being of interest to you it'll be reported for the most part as much as possible can I um I hate that I didn't appropriately interrupt it but I am so struck by all the cool things that people have said there's a thousand one liners I could live by that happen in a post hour I have this instinct to get my camera out and document people as they're talking and create some sort of I just feel like we should come out of the way as many ways as possible for you guys like a long video screen is one kind of commitment so I don't know how you were all doing that part of it is that putting everybody's names down they're a great one on it's like a man's hospital or some part of survival that could be part of you know tomorrow and sort of you know work with some of the stuff that's been said in that way we have talked to the folks that animate democracy and pulling some of these nuggets of wisdom and creating some form of toolkit so we can definitely put that on the agenda also I think at this stage now that we're past the sort of nice needs of introductions we should feel free to interrupt I will not say if it ends up becoming more lively they will figure out a way of organizing something if necessary but seriously we aren't having the people aren't being organized the way they're sitting so that we can we'll pose questions maybe at the beginning to a few people but once we're talking please feel free to interrupt for clarity to disagree agree, add something that'll be good okay so this first sort of entry point which I really struggle with the language but that's fine is focused on in thinking about survival I think of survival and evolution as being either interchangeable or really connected thinking about how we evolve artistry how do we grow it how do we further the development of aesthetics and artistic practices and methodologies I wanted to start with a simple question the people that although there are many involved in this the people that sort of brought us the voices are Clyde and Nick, Crystal and Stacey in thinking about all of your work which is quite a collected one put together there are some very strong aesthetics there's some strong ideology informing the work philosophies I was wondering in thinking about as a way of introducing your work in this framework if you might be willing to talk about theology and aesthetics and philosophy of your work as a way of connecting it to how it has grown you spoke to this and your introduction I mean this question about how you manage these these these essences, these energies with your ultimate sustainability I'm sorry I'm sorry I kind of think of this in the idea of what underlies a lot of the work that I do is perception and purpose and right now I'm at the kind of interception of what that means in a very privileged environment I just to some of you that I work at Middlebury College which is a very small liberal arts college in Vermont and I am what is often talked about as being very candid which being the only black woman on the faculty of the entire college just kind of means that I'm honest I think or there's something about me that's not normal in terms of what that club of academia means so what I often am struck by is perception and I've been struck by that since I began dancing because there's something about my body on stage that evokes different things in people no matter what the dance is about and in community that also means that I have a different way of entering community and it means that my artistic career as well as my academic career in terms of survival is always built on how people are perceived there's certain companies that I can't be even eligible to audition for if I'm being realistic with myself as a short African American muscular woman just not going to get in and so in academia that translates into what type of scholarship or what's valid about the ideas that I know from experience and not necessarily from traditional research and so in academia the perception that I am I use this sometimes to my advantage always with my students is that I can I can always play my black woman card of what you can't out dance me so you're not going to what are you going to challenge me about but underlying that is really their perception of how they're buying that and then I change it often times like did you really buy that? you really think that's true? do you really feel like your ideas are not as valid as mine because of what I look like and so that level of survival and perception for me is a constant shift my mother's a politician so it's a constant shift of what you see and how I can use what you see to survive in an environment that may not be conducive to who I am and if I can put it into the realm of your artistic work a friend of mine told me about a performance that you made a dance piece that is about a form of tribute to Muhammad Ali can you speak can you tell us a little bit about that work and how that fits into you know what tell us what it looks like and feels like and how that connects to your public work so for the last ten years I've had all female company and you saw my son running around I often say that having a sunshine light on things that you never paid attention to before and so I have been building my company around a female perspective for a very long time and I come from a family of African American men that have been what I would like to say trapped in a cycle of failure no real no prowess of their own and so I often look at my son as the defining factor of the rest of my family lineage and how I can better mold this little person into being not participating in the perceptions of failure that he's fed from society and so living in a predominantly white environment I'm often thinking that if he can understand the privilege of that perception then he can often understand the power of his own purpose in society so I was looking for I got called to work on a piece about Muhammad Ali by a jazz composer named Fred Ho and so it was the kind of first piece that I was commissioned to do where it wasn't my idea I was just in service of the music and then that collaboration kind of dissipated and then I was very interested in the idea of the fight of Muhammad Ali who I believe had a very spiritual focus and a very kind of divine intention for his life then he had to channel through the perception of other people in a very different way I think a lot of men of color have that impetus to do something great but they have to do it in very circumvented ways they have to be very good at making that spectacular for you to listen to what they really think is the truth and I kind of feel like that's been my career in terms of oh you're the little girl that can dance great let me see you dance and then I'll listen so it's a thing of like show show gives you the credibility to actually be listen to in terms of thinking about Muhammad Ali I was thinking about what that life looks like and it's a very opulent thing from the outside but the inside is very is about integrity of heart and integrity of purpose and so the piece is called opulence of integrity because I was trying to look at the idea of how you continue to speak the truth even in a very tumultuous from a very tumultuous perception of who you are and how all those pieces of self kind of either refract or reflect what you're really trying to do great it's interesting because Double Edge again has an ensemble of all women in its first few years and part of its evolution had to do with having men maybe it's a side note but do you want to speak to that in some way very concrete beginning there which was that I was a PhD student at Tufts struggling with pretending I was an academic and I needed to make work and in that time period at Tufts like they had barely joined the 20th century and so we weren't there were no parts for women there were no plays by women I had to as an assistant to get for color girls on the docket in terms of like some kind of women's performance women's community and making festivals of women's theater there so this was all really setting and there was also no women on the faculty there were no people of color on the faculty and basically there was a bunch of old white men so that was difficult and that's why I made work with women and I also they hadn't joined the idea that theater actors were creators so the actors were all sort of comments to the idea whether it was a playwright or a director or something like that there so I wanted to do something with training so we we were three years both in old women's company and then we actually started to get men because we felt we couldn't define ourselves further as women without men and I think that's true since then about everything about double H we needed to engage this community because we couldn't define ourselves any longer amongst this community without working directly with the people from the community that weren't us and so on I mean I think that's if you're an outsider you need to work with the people that are outside of you the strangers in order to grow yourself I was wondering maybe if Claude you wouldn't mind speaking a little bit about the evolution of your work before because it seems like you're also at a moment of transition not transition but there's evolution happening and also there are some very you know particular aesthetics and I think the philosophy behind it too yeah a lot of transition actually Matthew it's pretty tremendous right now actually and because you know she's with me every day I kind of get home and I scratch my head or pulling hairs out one or the other with the challenges I think there's some value in the tension that comes out of change like if there is a tension and we sat at the table earlier and kind of referenced that she was like there's no descending what's going on right and maybe think about the moment for us now as an organization and transition and like the tension that's emerging from it which is I think pretty healthy actually so I'm optimistic but in terms of the work I think one of the most brilliant things we did and when I say we specifically mean Camilla Forrest, Danny Hot and myself sitting around a table talking about this more than 10 years ago was not to be dogmatic about trying to define the aesthetic right where we weren't going to be the ones to do that in the form that we were creating which was the festival and we were going to be as open as possible and let the artists come in and kind of shape that right and you know choose their form so when was the first festival when was the first festival first festival was in 2000 and you know Danny knew he wanted to produce two artists solo artists, two women Liza Colozaias and Sarah Jones you know Liza's piece was directed by Steven Andy Giergis Steven was just beginning to write plays kind of you know in his own survival mode at that particular moment Gloria Feliciano was really nurturing Sarah Sarah was kind of already doing the thing and we just had a couple of weeks where we were dark in the theater this is the creation story and we just needed to fill it with something you know and Easton Davis wrote an article in the source magazine which was a hip hop magazine it came out in 1999 in 2000 and it featured everybody we ended up calling to be in the festival and we were talking about a generation of artists who were self identified as hip hop who were creating theater some of it was variations on Shakespeare some of it was original work some of it was and we just kind of pulled everybody up and we created a place and named it something so the new name even naming it continuing that from an institutional perspective was a big deal and we've been talking about it since 2008 2007 in terms of what a new name would look like for the organization as we were growing institutionally but with respect to the work I am shaping my thinking about it because we're all making Camilla Directs Danny continues to write I'm finding my way into picking pieces and directing and dramaturgy and work is kind of what's the best way with respect to form to tell this story and then to kind of look at our community and see who are the exemplars of that form and look to bring them in to a process where things like trust aren't easy to come by we're asking folks so there's individual transformation too in terms of folks who don't necessarily folks who aren't necessarily accustomed to kind of work in a particular way because I think the culture impact culture specifically for me it saved me it's inspired me but it's wide and deep and complicated and I've always leaned towards the most positive aspects of that that are about transformation that are about change that are about the positives that I've witnessed and experienced in my community and in myself so it's always started with me in terms of how can I do something to move the need or change because I survived and I'm sustaining we use this term we're going to build instead of meeting we're going to build this build I'm more for survival but I'm more for I'm more for building and that's to me that's another way of saying that sustainability and that's easier said than done so I'm interested in what you guys have created I have an AS220 shirt right now and I'm really interested in what they did up there I'm interested in I appreciate what you've been able to build here with Double Edge and that kind of building I'm still trying to find where to point within my own community of peers because there's a lot of individual arts and artists making work but in terms of sustainability and infrastructure where you can come in because it's always going to be there and you're going to contribute to it and you're going to help that next floor I don't quite know you know in the United States it's a great segue to you Nick maybe you can speak about Mondo Bizarro through your relationship to New Orleans where I think pre during and post Katrina there's a very particular relationship to infrastructure and resources how does that shape the way you make work how does that shape the way you captain ensemble and evolve to the work we were about a year and a half into having a company when Katrina happened so obviously the whole reason that we do the work we do right now I think is in response to or in collaboration with what that storm was and I think the first thing the memory I have is a woman named Carol B. Bell for art center and she invited us she said if you're in town we made fake press passes and snuck back into the city and we had all these grandiose ideas about what we were going to do so we set up a wireless router in our apartment and we made a little office and but Carol said no no no come to the theater and I was like oh good she wants to do some theater work and when I walked into theater just the whole stage was filled with cleaning supplies and she was like take those cleaning supplies and bring them to here and then we went back to the theater and she said now go get somebody's cat out of their house over here and the process of doing that made us sort of suspend the artistic endeavors we had at the time and think about really deeply what we wanted to do in the work and the thing that came to us was that every I think it's obvious to everybody but it wasn't to me at the time that every space is not a place you know that we have been working in spaces some of which weren't places and that what we really wanted to do were places that were imbued with a certain history and a story and we wanted to listen deeply in those places which sort of led us to do our work in a site responsive manner and taking our work out to the streets and to abandon golf courses and abandon schools and a lot of people in New Orleans were doing this at the time because there weren't actual physical spaces you can be in in many instances but also we just started to find that the work was a lot more alive and the conversation and the dialogue about the work was a lot more alive in those places of course many people who had been doing this for a couple hundred years in New Orleans were like well thanks for catching on like the social aid and pleasure clubs in New Orleans who were formed to take care of their sick and to bury their dead and who hold the tradition of of a jazz funeral procession or a second line where they use the streets as the democratized space to share their work and they do it at a really high level so that just led us down a path of I heard somebody say that fix every new space becomes a little bit of that fix and then it started intersecting our work with people who thought differently than us and city officials and government officials and folks in neighborhoods and people who just kept challenging the assumptions that we made when we tried to make a piece of art and like Stacy pointed out that we just ran into difference and it was hard and then we messed up a lot and we aggravated people and we didn't do things right and that has sort of led us to the project we're working on now this project Crye One which is part of an evolution of work that's looking at coastal land loss in south Louisiana and just one little anecdote about that which is about the best one about survival recently Crye One's a two mile procession in a wetlands 11 miles out in New Orleans that's disappearing really rapidly and we're taking the audience on a really large journey but to get on a levee in Louisiana you have to get permission from the Army Corps of Engineers and the federal government and so we have to bring this guy to come see our work and process showing of our piece so we invited him and he's there with all the local stakeholders and he's got like a little dip in his mouth and he's got sunglasses on and he's just watching the whole thing and I'm thinking oh god he hates it and I went up to him and he said I've never seen a live performance in my entire life I've never watched theater and he said and I thought you guys wanted to do fan with opera on the levee and then he like stepped back and like spit in his cup and he's like but I tell you this audience participation shit is blowing my mind and then he went on to say he got real deep in and he said so what do you guys want to do you want to get rid of the levees in Louisiana like I'm hearing what you're saying in your piece and he's like I don't like this job but if I don't protect this levee system I just can't get flood insurance so let's talk about it and then we engage this dialogue that we've been in ever since and not only has he come on to be like a production manager with his tractors and his four wheel drives and his levee system you know we start asking what can we do for you and so he used to be like why do I want to run and play instruments on the levee at 6.30 a.m. you know and now what we do is we tell him where the board's rutted up the levee or this and that and so like he connected so fast is because his job is just about survival which is if I don't protect this levee this community is going to flood and we don't agree at all politically about how that happened or whatever but him and every other land owner every other person since the moment that the thing about survival is the preservation of or the protection of or the attempt to illuminate what we can do to help this land which is going to go away like just for the moment and even we're going to be able to save anything but for the moment everyone can come to a sort of agreement where we stand on common ground and we're moving from there and a lot of really awesome things are happening that sort of illuminate our work I feel like more than a lot of times when we're in dialogue or in exchange with other theater companies or other artistic visions and are asking us to push ourselves aesthetically and to reimagine our training and to do a lot of things that I sometimes don't get from the art world what are the artistic environment I'm glad that you mentioned training too but we'll come back to that later and how that process relates to the concrete practicality to survival but as Anne and Stacy you both have multi-decade long ensemble you mean we're old I was trying to be nice about that Greta I was shocked I was like who is that person I wanted to ask you both and this is really, I'd like to extend this question out so you have a if anyone else is old if anyone else is old I'm not going to respond to any of this stuff a moment a moment in the evolution of your work where there was like someone else mentioned or referred maybe to Aaron to some Darwinian metaphor maybe it wasn't there about adaptability maybe I don't remember someone over here so thinking about adaptability that usually comes in a moment of either near death or near extinction or some very intense diversities in whichever order is there a moment in the history where that your company is either almost folded or you and your work almost folded or where there's some not old but some moment that was near death or near extinction that led to some evolutionary change I have to say we're on that state every day we're seriously it's always about and and I've come to actually enjoy that at some point you've got the attitude like if it falls apart it's okay and because I have that attitude nobody will let it fall apart I don't know why but if I were desperate to hold together everybody else would be desperate too but you know I want to share something tangential have you guys seen the the new documentary on the highway amazing this extraordinary political activist artist you don't know which one first and in the beginning of the film amazing film and you can't miss it it's on Netflix now he says that he doesn't actually initiate anything he said I just react which I found extraordinary because his work is so impressive and he's been in jail because of his activism but then he says and I have a couple of Chinese things to say him being one of them he says well what I do is I just push back a little bit and if I push back something always happens and I find that extraordinary like that way of thinking in other words you don't go into carve something out but you just start to respond to what's there and that's going to be more authentic and more actual and deeper and more related to the world and you actually have your own agenda of what you want to actually get happening and in the movie Chinese I had a Tai Chi of master once he used to say his English was really bad he said to do the not to do that was his central message to do the not to do it's not don't do the not to do he went on he actually said if you're depressed what you do is you do the not to do do the never mind do the good job two weeks you'll be okay anyway what do you do I mentioned something to Susan last night since she's on the board of arena stage something that happened to Colin Smith years ago when I was for one year the artistic director of trinity rap before I was fired a year later and I was having a really hard time with the board and the company and the community and I had invited Molly to come direct there she did a genoso play and she knew I was in trouble at some point and if you know Molly who's the artistic director of arena stage she is and she comes from Alaska she's a formidable mountain woman she loves to come face to face with the bear she saw that I was in trouble and she took me aside and she said you know when you kayak and get to the really fat part of the water the explosive part your whole instinct is to lean away from it your only chance for survival is to lean into it and I was thinking about that in relation to what you said about what happened in Katrina you said in a sense you lean into it you said this is going to transform it and it changed everything so it's not to say I'm going to fight to do the not to do it's not to say I'm going to overwhelm it or I'm going to win but to lean into the thing and to allow that transformation to trust that you're a big enough person and if you stand you have like a strong core which you can't exist in this world without a strong core and then you can enter the current and let it transform you which means you're really strong if you can let something transform you and I think also what Stacey and Carlos and Matthew and everybody have done here is amazing and I was just saying to Stacey I've come here over the number of years and to see the transformation here and to see the community involved and something's really happening and I think that kind of leaning into what's already there is in a sense the key you know I think Morgan you were saying earlier of using what is it that's so real you know that you use what's already there that we have the tools we need and rather than complaining about how we don't is it actually to use actually what's there and those tools will bring you to next tool you know what that is vegan I kind of want to join what you said Clyde and Nick I think the major cities need people who are trying to create community there or work need to go up to other places like here or many many places I think what Nick said but lots and lots of work and different ideas are happening all over the place and in the city there seems to be this idea that it has to be this way or one way or something what it is or it can't be there like people can't eat local food in the city why not you can do it any place or all of these survival things that it took us of course leaving the city to find out and to be really taught in many hard ways like you were saying I mean we made so many mistakes we were so wrong for so many years and we were really taught our children were victims of our stupidity and and then kind of led us to open our eyes to there's people here and they can teach even though we might know something about something they know something about something so that exchange together is what I think teaches one we all need to survive not just artists all people need to survive we need to do our part we can lead some things other people need to do their part the food makers need to do their part so together we find little constellations that will create things it takes I mean for us it's taken 19 years we've been in Ashefield and the last three years I think we've actually been in Ashefield and made a community so it's it isn't something even if we have been brilliant and not like thought we could come here and just do whatever we wanted or be accepted here there's a lot of issues about being accepted here that weren't all our problem the community has its own problems as everybody does in accepting different kinds of people but it still takes time because anything that's real takes time I mean it takes time to grow food and it takes time to grow culture and it takes time to be part of something and make a performance or whatever you're doing so we can't go someplace and expect to make something important or real or of value in a year or whatever so we have to slowly accept that our pace might not be and do little things that are important along the way I'd like to come back maybe a little bit later to some moment of some evolutionary moment for people where they were adaptability kicked in for that leaning into the you know disaster or adversity led to some unexpected form of adaptation you were talking about community Stacy and I Mark I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit about how you see theater artists or ensembles encountering a new mutuality with community that unearths resources, artistic and otherwise I was thinking about just the notion of survival and how it doesn't actually take much time to subsist water to food but the other part is that other human beings of companionship feels like vital to subsistence to survival and so as we think about mutuality and the ensemble form that in its essence is crafted around that companionship or I'm making this up I should be giving for not having all the work but that's companionship it's more than that but it's that I give mutuality and we were they had this event in Hawaii and I think what I walked away with was this that mutuality that we are all interconnected that I am the you and you are the main part of how work happens how we survive and I think that the longevity of someone who was Richard said the collaboration is really hard you don't do it because it's easy because it's like why not because there's you need it to survive there's some survival part of it both kind of I think in a very real like it's too hard to do by yourself you know that you need the others to make it happen but also the more spiritual human part and so I think that aspect of kind of the field about this kind of work I think it's very central to to provide it's not only surviving but now we're kind of going beyond subsistence and survival to thrive and so there's something there's something around and now that we're kind of like part of getting to that thriving part is the cross-pollination part it's just what Anne was talking about about now going outside of ourselves to work with others that seems like an ecology that seems to be something really that's telling us something I don't know exactly what it is but I will kind of point us to that as maybe something we want to investigate an advanced good question that's great we're sort of wandering around the subject right now I'm really curious I haven't been able to really put my finger on this yet but I don't know I think there's a real relationship between our relationship to resources and to the work that comes out of it at times and at double edge we've been making work and needing to you know use whatever is at our disposal so in some ways the aesthetics of the work becomes in some ways about the invention because there isn't the production budget of you know whatever something else well and that and I feel that different companies and organizations and artists have a real particular relationship to resources and that informs their aesthetics and their work in certain ways can anyone speak to that specifically maybe in terms of in terms of their work or specific moment in their work or production or even more generally how that's evolved in their work well I think that we have used we started this land-based project which you some of you saw last night which is some respectable because we needed to use the land as a resource rather than build a set or have any materials because we didn't have any money for that 12 years ago so we basically went outside which was free more or less and used the water and used all of these things and I think today it's grown into we are trying to use all of the resources of this area or this region like sheep's wool or stones stuff like that in the end costs of course a lot of money but still it started out as a different thing and I think that taught us about what is it to work on the land to work with natural resources to work with people who kind of plow those things sow those things or make those things and I think that's cool and we've tried to also take that into our indoor performances now where we're trying to sculpt based on these same type of resources and I really like that and whatever you do with the resources you have to go through a process of like if you have a really big budget and you go through the process of transforming what you choose then it has no substance I'll give you an example I was a young director and I couldn't get arrested for years I always wanted to work in a theater but I couldn't get a theater so I did what didn't happen in any specific or a person remember we went to a lot of other towns you know the unroof tops just part ever it was called then they called it downtown and so we would always have these brainstorming sessions first with the actors like whoever was working on it like what do you imagine oh 15 motorcycles oh 15 motorcycles right it would turn into a bicycle right you know what I mean like you go through this process and you don't have the money for 15 motorcycles anyway long story short I finally got hired in Berlin not that trip more than earlier like in 1981 to direct a show and you know and you get to the essence so the worst thing in a sense you can do it's not a matter of your budget it's your process and as you say it's gotten more expensive now you know the actual work that's not really the point the point is how you got to that place and that's what an audience ultimately feels is your process it's not your ideas it's your process with whatever something that we just started with great we just this past week we had a an expected source of income fall through for some of our arts education program you know that we're introducing into the space and we sat down with the teaching artists that we're working with artists in our own right and it's always important to us in terms of the artists that we work with that they're practitioners first before they're doing anything else that they're actually active in their own process and we were talking about well do we have to modify do we want to scale up from six weeks to nine weeks what kind of materials are we going to purchase and do we do this other track which was from middle school students in 2013 and that's the primary population we've got to look shorties on the block we're going to buy and knock on the door step in when there's openings and we want to do something immediately for them and what just kind of came out of that conversation was brilliant right because all of a sudden it wasn't oh we're going to buy X, Y and Z in terms of materials it was well you know you know some of the world may have even worked through an individual collector we can take this collage based practice and bring it into the community with these young people and we can just take what was around us so that they can start identifying what community means to them in visual expression and it riffs off of a product that we're going to do in the beginning of October with Michael and Rachel in terms of their housing rights so that conversation now so that just kind of happened this week but that was an example of like money no money but we're still making we're still going to make this thing happen and it's going to be brilliant, it's going to be great because we're doing it with community so that's like a concrete first following the artist like if we weren't at the table with that particular person you know where if it was just about money you know, money isn't creativity right? Money is just a means to an end that's you know but the end is in part the journey you know the process I'm just going to say that one of the resources that we found or I found most valuable was for me in building my company and community engagement product for the people that were involved and then the idea of evolution in using those people in a reciprocal manner has always allowed the work to continue whether I'm participating or not and so with my company InSphere what we did is we created an artist executive structure so the people you saw on stage were the same people who were doing the books and they were getting trained by either myself with my or other people who came in to volunteer and so then those women were on stage and their investment in the work was much different because it wasn't and my name wasn't on it most dance companies are known for the choreographer and then that's it so their work was also they were also the repertory choreographers for the company so that kind of reciprocal investment then allowed them to continue working and deepen their investment in the work and allowed for me to step away and three other companies were born out of InSphere and the community engagement project has been taken over by other people who just want to do their own thing so it's a different kind of resource in using what you have there at the moment in the people and kind of asking what's the best thing you can bring to the table might not be very coherent but I think something that art and especially artists have a great relationship with words and I was thinking a lot and we were going to be interruptions and continue to speak about perception and art and how we put words to perception and put words to our art and how that changes our continuity and our survival and I was wondering if someone could speak to that a little I think about that all the time I just want to overwhelm the conversation I think it's the biggest issue I believe in words so deeply and I think we use all the wrong words and this is not my original thought I remember it was started by Yann Whitehead who wrote an article it was very incendiary about 15 years ago in American theater and she was talking about the words we use to describe who we are and she said why do we call ourselves non-profit that's like when somebody says non-profit or try this one honor's income hello that's the most income you've ever had in your life and then I started thinking about the rehearsal processes and I thought oh we have this conversation and we have but the word wrong is killing the rehearsal process but if the director is saying okay now I want you to walk down stage or the actor says what do you want me to do or is this what you want as a director if an actor says is this what you want it's like well what I want is a little bit of scene and it has nothing to do with the plot the rehearsal sets up a sort of parent-child relationship which is not something I'm very interested in and I also think about the way we name our companies and I also I have a problem if I name a company name it's not a very good name we all complain about that but you know a lot of people name their companies like Honest Rain or it's not important it's like I'm not dangerous I know nothing about the following company I know they were a bunch of kids they called themselves the national leader of the United States of America it's like great I think that's fantastic we just think the parents are everything they send out a message before you are I and then you have to live up to what you described so I think that that's the key and then I just want one more thing about language because the word survival is why we chose survival but I wanted to share something also not original it comes from a book a few years ago that when it originally came out I can't remember whether it was called the gift or the erotic life of property but then it's been we put it out again and they didn't use the erotic so it's like we said that we functioned out of two possible impulses we functioned out of the survival impulse and the gift giving impulse and that they are completely completely different so so for example if I'm working with a producer the gift giving impulse is very particular and it doesn't have to do with putting a roof over my head or paying my company or anything like that and the example like because it's the most obvious one it's like a surprise birthday party where you say okay this is where it's going to go we're going to turn the lights on we're going to get behind the couch when she comes in we count three beats and then everybody weep up and say surprise where does that information come from like where does the information weight three beats or no but that's what doing a play is right it's like three beats and then oh it's coming out and then when a producer comes in and says you know you're putting the information too late and I'm like no no no it's where the bank tap and then how do you do that I'm functioning out of the the gift giving and the producer's functioning out of the you know tickets, times and stuff like that but what I think this is important is that both of those are important like you need the survival instinct and you need the gift giving and you confuse which one's coming from where and so in a sense a company has people who are supposedly the artists and then the administration not true right Crystal I think that's so great that you put people right together but you function in a certain way you function the office is working for survival and in the rehearsal room you're working for the gift they have to support each other but there's artists in the office as well you know but then just to take one more step this isn't every human being we have to produce ourselves how do we move through life is this moment am I functioning out of survival or is this the gift moment but the minute you confuse them where you think I'm going to make a decision for survival but it just for here but it really needs to be made in terms of the gift giving you get into superstitious trouble and I think a lot of institutional leaders who died are dead are carcasses because they have really confused those issues and they're run by the marketing department but they can be simultaneously without confusion there is also this is all true and then there is the macro context where we are placed all of us and I think in that there are two words and about the system of lies so the distortion of the words like the distortion of the meanings like we are driven I am driven to look into the money when the money is not the value so I'm concerned about that I'm trained by the capitalist to look into the money thinking oh this is a lot of money in reality it was one point what Christ was saying how do I work with these people how do I relate to the resource so all this confusion the same as the confusion with violence you know how do we handle violence is not that we're not handling violence we are being submitted to violence every day and we're responding to violence but we also have a language that is being given to us in many different dosages in many different media and that's how we begin or I think about myself that's when I begin to lose the relationship with the word to confuse the giving impulse and the survival impulse although I think I'm pretty clear I survive a lot but still I need to remind myself I'm gonna be cropped these guys are out to get me I'm letting myself go into there so I think that that's the context here I think we need to take a look at that where are we I made a conscious decision to come to the U.S and everybody said oh from Argentina go to Europe go to Europe and see what our culture is no I'm gonna go to the powers of the East because we're losing this Muhammad Ali was a great teacher for all of us down south said this is the way to go forward and you know we follow a lot of people like that now the context is super important I mean we need to remember I think or I need to remember that I'm always thinking in response of something that is larger than me and that is stimulating me all the time to go into a certain direction so use this we're talking about resources look at this room it's fabulous but it's so hard to go to his place or to meet Aaron I've been waiting about him but here I am it's me or Michael you know what I mean so the resources are there but I'm not there when you go there I'm too confused too overwhelmed and clustered but you're also smart and you have to use your smart I think everybody has to be really smart in this world we really think a lot and you've been one of the few people and I've started with this because this whole question of language is one which we've kind of succeeded to other people to take and tell our stories and I feel like you've been one of the few artists that you actually value you made a project of Essence because the artists weren't saying anything they were writing it down they were saying tons of things in the work itself but they weren't taking an opportunity to own the language and this has been a great concern and I think the carcasses of which you speak are carcasses that have owned the language for at least since 1980 around what it is to make theater and what communities want and I think we're at a point of enormous opportunity for reinvention I think every morning the first thing I did in my email box is that how would I have an email and as I was reading usually on the question I want to I want to say something about language because I think that's something that really touched me of the network among some of theater's gathering in Honolulu was the importance of having a language like I think that part of our confusion and part of the problem that we don't have the right words is that we're dealing in a language that is designed to enslave it's designed to entrap it's a legal language, it's a language in which words have multiple meanings so you never know what a person is actually saying and what was beautiful about listening to Vicky Takamine and the native Hawaiians and the command over their language and what each word means in this part of the island has a very different word for it than the mountains on the other side of the island because the winds are different and because the winds have a different name so you never confuse the word means exactly what the word means and that's part of the dismantling of the social function is that we are dealing in a language that has multiple meanings and so whenever you're speaking a person has to understand your value system they have to understand your context they have to understand your history to understand what it is that you're saying because you can use the exact same words to mean something completely different and so I think that's a large part of the channel because we don't have a language that we come from, we're in a bastardized language and the language itself is intended to create confusion and so how do we regain back what it means to have a language that represents our values and speaks from where we are versus trying to always adopt whatever the going language is I mean right now we work in a place in which funders and philanthropists and government sectors are creating the language, we adopt it because that's part of the survival you gotta have a language in order to get the resources so if you can't speak this language then you don't have access to these spaces it's part of the whole conversation we're having about cross-cultural all sector work and I'm like well that's not our language somebody invented that language and put it on us and it's used to to create a barrier for access and so if you don't know the language then you can't speak the language you can't get into the secret door that has all the money you know it becomes that place in which we find ourselves really struggling and always behind the eight ball even though the language is being used to describe something that we have been doing in our communities for decades and so they take and look at the practice and they create a name for it and then because you're not the one who creates the name you don't know oh that's what we're doing cross-sector work now but it's the same work we've been doing for decades and so we have to kind of resist the shift to just fall under whatever name it's called at the moment because that name will change or does it change I'd love to put that on some list of how to is that some type of change we could affect strategically or tactically whichever but I know that you're asking to say something we talk about language all the time and I think in native communities what happens is language is such a thing that we are always holding on to part of cultural survival and I think the big part of how with our theater company is why it has survived so long is because we have held on to our language we have really held on to our language and we really held on to okay well we've seen so much taken away because of boarding school systems oppression whatever what the point is is we're going into this environment and we're having our youth or having the youth own this language and saying you know this is the way you say it but this is the way we say it because we come from the traditional method and to take that traditional knowledge and saying it's just as important and yes that is where the resource is from but I think part of the biggest work is looking at the process and what you're saying Nick is to bring a producer in what happens is they see a piece that you're doing and for example we did Red Mother which was based on mother courage and that was a seven year process that was a seven year process because the grain was my mother doing mother courage and she had a different she wanted to do it differently and they said you couldn't do that so going in there and bringing me on and going into and then it turned into a totally different piece I'm telling war stories and taking war stories and leaving them and putting into a one person show and then it finally going into something a total different element so taking our own language and empowering it and you see this all the time because what happens is someone will come in and they have a different way of working but they want to work with you they want to work with you and they say well you know you really don't have an art and it drives people who work in our process really crazy it makes us not it makes my mother not you know you have to hold somebody back or say well I don't understand how that's not funny and that's not those more fighting words so taking and you find out that it presses your buttons because this is the person with resource this is a traditional method this is the way this is an arc can't we not call it I mean I've had like meetings upon meetings is dragging somebody out from a rehearsal so my family didn't kill them and dragging them out and saying look can you do you have another word for arc can we say this part can we say this does you know can you can we work on that language and you know and after and it's draining because this is the resource right and then you find the same thing happening with the you know with funding too you know you have that resource and how you explained it in what is it grant speak right how do you have how does that translate and then so you wind up trying to really you wind up educating and educating and that's a draining process you know glad you're the one just really think about that in itself as the power of translation as a survival tactic like knowing when you have to kind of switch something up because it necessitates that moment necessitates you know you using or adopting specific language and or vice versa kind of like you know but I just wanted to say you know we started to refer to the organization as it's for mission not you know not for profit right so we're for mission right so people are for profit we're for mission right and there's I think there's power to that you know when you really kind of institute that across you know who's working on it that's the problem here with the words pro-life right right it's two family choice yeah yeah yeah we're all of us here probably use the word entitlements to talk about basic human rights you know and our responsibilities to our fellow citizens we've all used that word entitlements that's crazy to me yeah you want to come back to what you were saying oh Susan you wanted to say something sorry I did and it goes back to the survival and the gift giving and arts organizations and one of my observations and it's over and over again has to do with boards and board leadership and and I'm so struck by how many organizations that are struggling really don't have the right boards they're not the boards that are equal to their mission they're not the boards that are equal to the artistic aspirations they're not the boards that are necessarily going to make sure that all employees have health insurance or money for retirement for me that's basic survival it's a right and but I don't think it's the sacrifice of what's at the heart and soul of the artistic vision of an organization it's another kind of community building it's finding the right community members to work with and the job of an artist is to make art and so why can't there be other people to do the other things and it's not always easy but it's again finding those relationships that you have to find within the community of Asheville there are people out there who are mad about theater or mad about dance they're not dancers and they're not actors and they're not directors and they want to be part of that life and they want that life in their communities because that's what makes the community vital so I just like to put that out there and that is for me it's half survival and it's half gift giving or maybe it's 60-40 but I think yeah I can't you're hiring on all of our this is a I'll put this out there I don't know if I can put this all together but so Anne you were talking about the confusion between let's say the market and the gift the economies, the realms and the question of language becomes a place for those who where there's confusion created I think and a second where these realms of work meet poetry is the short circuiting of language which is to bring it back to the ownership the power of its original intent let's say as a gift from another place so we are at the one hand sort of born into some language that doesn't serve us but the same time before all that there was there is an inherent power of language which illuminates beyond our what we already know so our work in a way requires us the artistic work requires some sort of dance with the unknown that enables us to find the metaphor or find the poetry which short circuits the language again that is a path towards artistic autonomy now that autonomy which let's call it that research let's call it I can't remember which of those we will call the capital W so for Quixote the capital W work is going down into the caves of Montesinos to speak with that source that unknown and then the little W work is let's say the work of Sancho Ponzo which would be holding the rope or having a rope for that matter there are resources at hand that I think many people in this room at least if not all have encountered that connect the little W work the big W work in a way that's harmonious let's say not dissonance or creating confusion I think those resources are not the resource they include the resources of the market but they also they're resources that live more strongly in the gift what are those resources what do you tell young emerging artists that's like how do you how do you have training in your life and also have food if training is the descent in the caves of Montesinos let's call it training but we all know what that means right if training is that realm where you're learning to learn anew and you're encountering the unknown what are the resources I would say resources are a group I can't do it alone I think courage which maybe comes from the green obviously creativity but I mean what are the resources maybe even the more concrete ones how have people approached the marriage of capital W a little W I do think that relates to language I do think that work ends up coming back and exploding language as it explodes forms I've seen in looking in talking to the people who have been sort of the minor focus today that there is an explosion of form in all of the work that you do I just say that we were ridiculed maybe I told that that's the wrong thing to do over and over again but we had a philosophy from the beginning of our company that free is a radical act and that if we had or ever run into resources that it doesn't matter how far we grow as a company in the context of our community if we don't share the resources that we have within our community that it won't matter what we are or what we ever become or what we accomplish and we try to and that grew out of the work of John O'Neill and the Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater and his mentorship and all of the people around us who are looking at us and saying grow as you may and succeed as you may but just remember you're only as big as the next person around you and I feel like that's one thing that I think about often is how do we share the resources that we have in the most radical ways because even in a little bitty community like New Orleans I find ourselves more and more infighting you know in a very tiny community around a very limited pool of resources so one principle led to you having more of the conditions to do your artistic work because it led to us to stop thinking about for example getting a space on our own right so now we collectively run a space which might I say is a nightmare but the nightmare has us on a floor for the first time in 10 years that we can go to every day you know it's like that we never had that a year ago so like we can practice in a different way so I feel like it's the first instinct to all these things everybody's been saying about individualism and language and capitalist based sort of models was to try to seek on our own you know instead of seeking together and every time I don't think this field supports dynamic leaders individuals this field supports those people it does not support collective action because that impetus is dangerous for those type of structures that support our work and so where we can when we can succeed at doing that it doesn't it hasn't led to all the success in the world but it's led to some fire and it's led to a feeling of aliveness that's good you know I would like to say that I think that has changed or at least it's started to change because when I was in Boston and I tried to make theater meeting of all the theaters in Massachusetts and it was so aggressive and bitter and people were so competitive and mean some of I met Jennifer and John at that meeting it was a long time ago but and they're still here but today like in this room for instance there's a lot of people or really different types of people that would have 10 years ago been competitive or aggressive or not listening to each other and I feel like there's a whole shift maybe because of how awful the world is that there's a lot of collective activity there is in communities there is in theater there's a lot of collaboration that there didn't used to be I think jealousies have turned into actually trying to find different ways to me there's a lot of hope in very small numbers but it's always been small numbers of people that are actually working this is really the case should talk about this more but this question of the W it feels to me like where they need is a whole value and how we determine what constitutes value in late capitalism it's pretty obvious where those two things meet but I think the purpose of a kind of conversation like this is how do we redefine that we've been doing this in a way this exploration of currency for the arts to redefine how we value each other and what we bring to the table and in the exploration of that we collect all these statements from people who are just saying what they have to offer and it's really overwhelming to like you go we have a lot of resources and we haven't figured out how to take those resources and connect the big W and the small W and I think that's our our 20th century challenge and also in regard to emerging in young artists to redefine the trajectory because I think a lot of young artists think that the little W leads to the big W and it's not always that corridor it's not always oh I train, train, train and go to class and then I get the big job and look at me that trajectory is totally obscure these days that doesn't matter we have collegiate programs where students are jumping out and making their own companies and flooding the market and not sharing resources and not understanding that they're biting the hand that's feeding them by not knocking on their neighbor's door and say oh you teach yoga and I'll give you some of my cereal like it's that kind of cooperative communion and I think there was a really beautiful generation of artists who really communed and were trying to build a community because they were really communing with each other on a really deep deep level that really was palpable and that's what made a lot of us want to do it and these days we're really trying to structure and destructure things out in a way that my level of survival in academia perpetuates but also there has to be some level of that gift and that resource that we can intertwine to figure out the work is the work whether we think it's big or little and how do we work on community building when people talk community building what does that mean and there's a difference between consultation between collective and a lot of the times if you have a space and I feel the same way we have a space in New York City and it's a collective space and it's community collective space and it can be a nightmare because tribal nations are very opinionated people they're peoples we're very hard headed we come in we talk you could be in a meeting and it's done up and it started at 6 everyone has to make that point across so it can't but at the same time you see community pull through for one another when there's no resource because when it comes down to oh this space might close what can we do now and everyone says well that's politics no that's how you sustain survival in a community you have to really go back to that organic grain and bring children together it's like you help me out and that's how a community has survived so I think it's not collect I think we say well we want to be in control of the collective okay there has to be leadership yes there has to be leadership and I think a lot of times in native communities we're taught everyone has a role everybody has a role there are people fundraised there are midwives diplomats there are artists everyone has these roles in the structure of this community and I don't think we're the only people to do that I think it is something that we have forgotten over the years because if we are going if let's talk about environment for a second if the environment fails we're not going to be alone no one's going to survive so if we want to continue working as artists and continue working with our process we have to use our collective community which is the collective resource I mean that's even sometimes going down to somebody who went to the same college as you and you've read the newspaper all day and inherited money so you call them up hey I'm doing this project you know and someone says well that's begging no it's not this is somebody who was a friend of yours and I think that continues how do you do fundraisers what do you do do you do a spaghetti dinner maybe we have to think a little bigger than that you know where are the with my community where are the native artists who have made it you know the big deal now is Johnny death they give people money now because he did the horrendous movie and everybody's wondering you know so I think that collectively that's the only way to survive with our theater companies and I guess the lack of the better word in nonprofit you know and the process yeah thank you I was stuck on the W the little W and the big W and the notion of the value in between and I think an amazing graphic like I have been looking for that for a long time what joins the little W and the big W value and then you think well money which comes up every once in a while what Carl Marx said about Carl Marx he said about money is that it's an equivalency that's what it is and this is profound to think what equivalency is in other words this experience here is worth what how much money that's the equivalency my relationship with work my work in your play is worth what it's this equivalency so an equivalency like money that's why we get so obsessed with it because it's he can't fulfill that ever you're always wanting more so there's no satisfaction in that equivalency you always want which is why people always want more money it's inevitable but if you say so if you say which is why I think that most Broadway shows are problematic because the value in the middle of the little W is money but if you say it's something else although I have to say when my company first came together the actors got together and they said what does it mean to be a city company member they immediately said training in other words it comes down to that they trained together and at the same time one of the first things I said in sitting the company together I said the number one value is that we pay the actors well and so often we say when we start a company we say I'm going to pay everybody else well and when we're in got our footing then we pay the actors and I thought I would like a company of really mature people who can have family and so because of that choice of saying they have to earn a good living we lost a lot of work in the beginning 20 years ago people will say you want to do this how much you pay okay it's not enough it has to be a minimum of $800 a week and that doesn't mean we always got it sometimes the actors would say you know what we want to go to Lisey they haven't got any money we're going we'll do it for free and it doesn't actually make things matter but that's also a value it's not the value of money it's the value of valuing their time and not putting that to the layer so it's not about ignoring money but I just find that graphic of the big W and the V I guess in between I find it completely useful and it's just good right I think the holism is sort of what the aim is I mean I think that's one of the main targets or one of the main values I know for me I came to Double Edge at a time when it was in a major transition and also at one point Stacey even said to me listen we're probably going to have to close this and I had been here for two years at that point and sort of saw that as an opportunity to have a break and the other people were like we will stand by you and I remember I said to Stacey whatever do you have to do Stacey's still mad about that but it's like you know bamboo but the same token at one point Carlos sat down with me and was like listen you're an apprentice you're not going to you're not going to get paid I mean Hector what are you going to do and it just like it ended up being in our emote production there's no money and then you're faced with that choice about well you know training and let's say the research has this value this sort of super value that feels like it takes me to my power so how does that fit into the other realm I know that's what the obsession of how around is I know that the Latino theater commons it's another area of work yeah that's not paid work but it's rewarding work and you know I told someone the other day I said you know I don't I think of myself as an entrepreneur but what we mixed and I just read a book not too long ago by Chris Rapp called Invisible Capital and it really transformed and helped me think about my entrepreneurship not including necessarily to capitalism and being about for money but filling needs right where is their need to fill and you know the LTC work is we're all all of us that are putting in the work are filling a particular need you know for a particular moment right and that's made to the fix for you know another person to play with the language a little bit you know around a particular piece of art right I mean speaking out of term perhaps but I think ultimately like a community has that same fix the non quote-unquote like the non artists I think have that same that same need that same desire for what we experience in training or what we experience in the process in that way like the community becomes an extension of the ensemble and I do think it's profitable I mean I would argue that I think this brings up another point in time back to the language of this whole new field of social entrepreneurship and how it's kind of what artists have been doing for ever and that is to this two-sided it's doing good well there are books written about it making good but the idea is that this term social entrepreneurship can be wrapped around a business model that makes people feel like they're doing something sustainable for other communities which is still been a them-us relationship but it's also what artists have been doing in terms of investing in their own communities not just outside of themselves but as artists in general and making it an entrepreneurial at for sustainability so I think it's another way that this language is being re-envisioned or re-imagined that's excluding the artists another part I have to that question would be that if you're talking a lot about language with the money side of things but also part of what most of the people here do and I've been unfortunately here the first half but it's really art for an audience and we're talking a lot about the language for money but what about getting your art known especially what you were talking about with a project that you're trying to involve the community in how are you doing the service to your art by not changing the language to reach broader I would say a broader community I've been here with the whole time but I remember we were talking about some years that we've really been in the community and I do remember the change and I'm wondering how the language language can, yes does it as we were talking about it doesn't do service because how can you make language fit what you're doing but I'm wondering how language not using it is also a service maybe I think that's a good point because and it's actually quite concrete in a way because each of us could empower or enlist our communities to invent language with us we had a community meeting sort of envisioning what could be the farm in 15 or 20 years with an actual farmer our neighbors and one of the people who was here said that she always thought that this was a center for idealism and that was not part of the language that I was using and I think I think it's interesting to put that task of language through building in the community and then share it I think we might be getting to the end of this but I wanted just to see if there's any last things Morgan or Carlos Mark I have a question if there's a big W and a little W is there a big B and a little for all of us yes I started to see the diagram and then I didn't know you know I think there's just a B and I don't think it's big or little and I think I actually I learned this from that film that was made about D'Artagnitza here and I remember we was actually showing it in New York it was 150 years ago not so shocked looking in the mirror and he it showed how D'Artagnitza went out with their carts and horses and went into villages and they would say to the villages this is before the fall of Communism I would say to the villages if we perform for you we will perform for you in exchange for the fact that you may perform for us and so D'Artagnitza they used to in this film perform and then they turned to the audience okay it's your turn and Chiquita Gregory first homes in on a couple of elderly ladies who are sitting there trying to remember nursery rhymes because they wanted to sing the nursery rhymes and Staevsky stops the film and pointed at the two ladies and said this is the reason we do everything we do is for this little moment to happen and I thought what's so great about that is that answers the question do we put the garbage back to the right in the morning when we take it out it answers from that we need that every decision small or big administrative artistic whatever it's all made based on that incredibly precise moment which is why I think there shouldn't be a big deal of things I think that that would make it a hierarchy that's not useful so value is what it is at that moment as it's being defined based upon the needs of the big W and the little W yeah I think it's just a little that's probably a little weak it's a little weak I think I don't know I don't know I don't know what it is you do know I'm thinking of the beat just turning like a clock and it depends on where it is or what access it's on and how you determine value because it's all about the work you're doing in the moment and you do know I don't know and it relates to what you were saying about the Hawaiian way of using the words like value for you what was it before what is for me here what is for anybody and because again I'm thinking about living in this kind of like umbrella English dominated world which is kind of like the Latin the new version of the Roman Empire so people speak English in Buenos Aires you know in Louisiana people speak English but they don't speak them necessarily and I think value is when you start speaking what you said about art and that's probably what we are here or I feel that I'm called to do I'm trying to bring myself and bring some people into being themselves as well I'm tempted to throw in we were talking about kind of the am I right? I was going to get water when I heard this, we were talking about value as equivalency money is equivalency and I'm a child of my mother but politically in a lot of ways I'm a child of the Zapatistas in terms of there's constantly a quote or something in my head there's constantly a frame that goes there and one of those quotes that goes through my mind in this moment which I think relates to value which often times it's a question of is this more valuable than that there's almost immediately a jump to a hierarchy and there's this Zapatista quote that I'm sure is older than that political organization which says we are equal because we are different and so in that kind of puzzle there's this kind of question of the very thing that makes us equivalent is actually our difference so I think that has something to give to this question of value how we produce it great thank you everybody we'll take a break now have some lunch we won't be having what's the story now the seven attendants will be out in the 10th building it's a