 to the festivals that are going on out to the nation and to the arts. My name is Frank Henshka, I am from the Seagull Theatre Center, the Bridge Academia Professional Theatre International and American Theatre, but care very much about the impact of the art, the importance, and about socially engaged art. We only have the program, so you will see the lineup of what we are doing here. This goes till 1.00 or 1.30 in this room. The presentation, then we will go for lunch to the Seagull Theatre Center across the hall for working groups. If you're here, I would like to join. Please do sign up for the work with the Seagulls, with the Theatre Without Borders to stay in contact with what we do. If you have a cell phone, let's at the moment take it out, and I'll do the same. And Jack, if it's a speaker on the silent again, thank you all for coming this event is free and open to the public, and I think it's a great honor for us to have Theatre Without Borders with us and all the speakers, and also to you. Thank you for coming. We know how busy you are. There's so much going on in town, and we really appreciate that you take time out of your life to say this is an important moment, this is an important subject, so thank you. And I head over to Jessica, Matthew and David, and here we go. Are we gonna talk into here? Yes, okay, that sounds good. All right, welcome. And we're so happy to have you here. A lot of people will be filtering in our speakers. A lot of them are not here yet, and there it is, Bert-Elevatop will speak about in a moment. It's crazy out there on the subways today, we know. So we wanna welcome you, we're so happy. I'm working off these little things that I wrote, so forgive me, I'm trying to be spontaneous, but I haven't had enough coffee to be truly spontaneous. Theater Without Borders is about using radical international hospitality to make connections across borders with artists worldwide. We are a large group of thoughtful practitioners whose heartfelt purpose is to celebrate humanity through the art of theater, and the act of connection in the spirit of inclusivity and freedom. Now, I'm going to talk about Roberta who's not here yet, sadly, but she will be. Thanks to the hard work of our founder and director, Roberta Levitao, we keep thriving and growing as a 100% volunteer network of artists, and professional artists whose mission and purpose is to work with connectivity and through the art of theater. We depend on the kindness of friends like Frank and Cuny, who we collaborated with last on our Global Mobility Symposium, some of you were here for that. David and I have been four members for many years. As have others in this room, Catrine is one of the colleagues if you're at theater with us. And also we want to thank all the people who are watching from afar, like the co-director, Daniel Banks, and people, all our friends who are watching around the world, thanks to our other dear, dear friends at HellRound, who share our love of global connectivity. Check out the World Theater Map on the HellRound site. Add your name to it and join Theater Without Borders to keep the movement going, and the dream of global, theatrical connectivity alive. I'm Jessica Lidwock, I'm a playwright, actor, director, drama therapist, activist, puppet maker, and scholar. I put all of those tools together in my company, The Heat Collective, which is also one of the organizers of this event. Heat stands for Healing, Education, Activism, and Theater. And in the spirit of courageous generosity, we make art that serves. Through workshops, community events, performances, and theater actions, we've worked to build creative community that uses theater to inspire positive, personal, and social change. You'll hear more about projects later. We're thrilled to join with Theater Without Borders and the Martin Siegel Center to host this day. So I just want to tell you, you're gonna hear lots and lots and lots of people talking, and we're gonna talk, not actually, but with you for a long time. And then you'll get a chance to talk back to and at and with us so that we'll be a discussion at the end and a networking lunch that Matthew will talk about a little bit more. But I just want you to know that the first presentations are gonna be a listening tool that you will then hopefully be inspired to talk about later when we open the discussion up. So I'm gonna turn it over to David. Hi, everybody. So happy to welcome everybody. I just want to, Roberto Levento just walked in. You were mentioned earlier, the people to know who you are, the founder. One of the founders of Theater Without Borders. Welcome. I work with La Mama Experimental Theater Club, La Mama Umbria International, the Barber Group Theater Company here in New York, and companies got creative arts leadership and career coaching for artists, among other things as we all do, where many hats in this field. And one of the things I've been working on lately is the Ellen Stewart International Award, which gives an award for an artist or an arts group that works with young people in social change, in the area of social change. So in this, I was just stunned really by how many nominations came through in this round of the Ellen Stewart Awards from, and seeing the extraordinary work that artists are doing from Armenia to South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, Palestine, Israel, countries and cities large and small, artists are creating theater to fight oppression, to bring truth where it's often blurred, to share a common humanity that overrides our differences of age, race, ability, sexuality, to engage in a conversation that rises above denigration and leads to justice, equality, kindness, and peace. This is our opportunity to push our own practice to the limits, to create an enormous community that decries hate and celebrates free expression of our diva selves. So during this day, I encourage you to take the examples you will see here today, mix in your own thought, perspective, and ideas, channel through your own artistic practice. You, each of you, is a leader for change and we so need your voice right now, but know that there is a sea of support all around you, way to take part, to engage, to listen, and to help. We are each other's support. After the initial section of the morning as you're seeing a program of reports of what people are doing now, the second part is going to be an artistic conversation, a group of artists who are here with us, engaged in theater and resistance, will share their work with us, but also question each other about our common struggles and how we can successfully navigate our challenges. Today, I think it's a lot about learning from each other, getting to know each other, and sharing the best practices that we know. So welcome and enjoy the day. Here is Matthew. Very briefly, I'm Matthew Covey. I'm an immigration attorney and I am the director of Thomas Dot, which is an arts mobility advocacy organization for the last 20 years. We have really honed in on the topic of arts mobility because the basic idea is that communication is at the core of empathy and empathy is at the core of civil society and the arts are uniquely positioned to create communication, especially across borders, but if you can't get the artists across the borders, then you can't have that whole process happen. So we focus on arts mobility, US immigration issues and that kind of thing. So teaming up with these folks and with artists without borders or theater across borders or without borders makes a ton of sense because it all goes across borders. So today, as my colleagues have alluded, there's gonna be sort of an arc of conversation starting by a bunch of case examples of really interesting projects from around the world, theater organizations pushing boundaries, stretching limits, and resisting impact against the powers that are affecting them in their own context. From that, we move to a conversation with a group of artists talking about the challenges that they're facing and the successes that they're having. The third chunk is going to be us three sessions, short sessions where people members of the community who are really invested in specific topics are gonna be kind of doing a really abrupt download of best practices and how they see the project of resistance and the praxis of resistance affecting the work that they do from a full of different specific angles in regards to specific topics. So that's the kind of like unilateral, we're pouring ideas onto you. That then moves to an open conversation which goes on for about 45 minutes, something like that, where we're really wanting people to take all the stuff they've just been hearing and all the stuff they do in their lives and throw it all together and really kind of dive into the issues that we're all struggling with. That leads to the lunch, for any of you who can stay for lunch, where the idea is to break up into groups by your interests and kind of pursue those conversations that we just had as a group individually and in smaller groups so we can kind of go a little bit deeper. That's the arc, hope it works, and hopefully it will remain interesting. We are working on getting the room a little cooler because it's pretty hot in here. So that's in process. Anyway, mostly thank you all for coming and we're really looking forward to what we're all gonna get done today. Okay, Misha, come on down. I was inviting the speakers to come and sit in the front row to save time. You're from the Saviana and Misha needs her name tag when we get a chance. Okay, thank you. So what we're gonna go into next is a series of case studies. Some people will be in the room and some people will be far, far away to save us those precious moments of Skype frustration. We have just asked for videos so we don't have to worry about internet problems. And so it'll go back and forth. David and I will be introducing people and it'll be really quick. This is not deep. This is broad. So we'll be getting little bits, three minutes or so from each organization. And I'm gonna start by inviting Sue Hamilton up on stage. And talking a little bit about the artist rise up movement that Sue and I started the day after the 2016 presidential election. We, Sue is in Los Angeles and I'm here in New York and we've been colleagues for many years and we got on the phone and said, what do we say? And we decided to start a bi-coastal movement or you know, we weren't beginning the movement but we were calling it specifically artist rise up New York and artist rise up LA. We were first on the phone with someone who had a much nastier name for the organization. One word began with F and the second with T. And we were like, no, no, man, we gotta be loving and creative. So we started this artist rise up New York and LA. It originally was in some other cities but I think we've been going strong. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about artist rise up New York then Sue's gonna talk about artist rise up LA and show a video of their work. You're about to hear about how this idea unfolded in two very different ways on two very different coasts. So anything you wanna say about our original idea? It was brilliant. Yeah, it was. Okay, so I'm gonna talk about artist rise up New York and before I do this, anyone artist rise up New York people in the room? Yeah, absolutely. So I think some more are coming, but they're running late. So the way we have manifested is very different from artist rise up LA, which you'll see. Again, I got my little notes. It started at my house and people just came to my house. We had like 30 people coming to the house and people would either scream, cry or talk. Some people wept and said, you talk about breaking up a country, what about breaking up a family? And people were afraid to go home for Thanksgiving because their families had voted a different way than them. So we had this kind of very personal catharsis where people were able to talk. Then we had some people who were really ready to scream. Joan Lipkin, who is not here today, had the idea of having a rage cafe where we just went into a room and threw things at the wall. And because artist rise up New York, which is based on the same philosophy as theater without borders, 100% volunteer, rhizometric, collective volunteerism. And we depend on the kindness of people like Mia and Mama and our friends at the law. We didn't feel it was right to throw things. Yeah, you're welcome, Mia. So we created an evening called The Rising just about a year ago at La Mama that included all of our events, included blessing by Ryan Little Eagle Pierce, who's from the Eagle Project and really acknowledging the land that we're standing on, which is Lanalpe land here in Manhattan. And we also do these installations, okay? And we performed some pieces. We then did, I'm just gonna wrap up, we just did, for Women's History Month, we did Emma Goldman Day and Feminist Flashmob, also at La Mama, then we made puppets for the Science March Endangered Species puppets. We collaborated with the LARC on the Climate Change Theater Action Landing, and then we are having a performance on the 29th, again at La Mama, at Great Jones Studio, called The Divide, which just talks about what's going on now, a year later, a year after the inauguration, theatrically and artistically, and it's completely free and all are welcome. So you can check out our website, otherstoriesatmoveyork.org, and here we see. Okay. Does that have to do with this? Sue has often directed me, so I can stand here. Yeah. Good morning, everyone. It is a true pleasure to be here this morning. Jessica invited me to call in from Los Angeles, and I said, oh, I'd rather show up. So I'm really excited to be here, and one of our producers from Artist Rise Up Los Angeles, Jose, is there behind the camera. So again, thank you so much for having us. So November 9th, 2016, Artist Rise Up Los Angeles and Artist Rise Up New York were born, and it was immediate, it was charged, it was almost effortless, and when Jessica and I came together on the phone, it wasn't, how are we going to do this? The question was, when are we starting? And the answer was now, right? So in Los Angeles, I put out a call on Facebook and said, Lee, please come rise up with us. The Lyric Hyperion Theater in Silver Lake, California, if any of you have been there, it seats about 30 people. We had three times that amount that showed up, so that was invigorating, and it was charged. And the question that I kept hearing was, what can I do? All these actors, directors, producers, writers, everybody coming together to say, what can I do? How can I help? And the answer I had was, well, we have to rise up, and the way we're going to do that is to, A, come together, which we had done, and B, what now are we going to do? So here's what we've done over the past year. We did two big, live, all original shows in response to the election and its results. One big show at the El Portal, 400 seats sold out, covered the LA Times, not to brag, but I was floored. And I was floored that people were just coming out, and they were saying, we need to be here, we need to gather, we need to be together, we need to rise up. The next show was an all comedy, all music night with Trey Crowder and Mona Shake. Many people who were making waves in the community also sold out. And then, because we're always evolving, we did a film festival at the Downtown Independent in Los Angeles just a couple of months ago, and all original films, all politically inspired. I share all of this with you today because we're proud, we're proud of what we're doing, and we are proud to be able to take all of our proceeds and give them to a charity of our choice. So to date, we have given gifts to seven charities, including HRC, ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and Southern Poverty Law Center. We know we have a lot of work to do. We're going into year two. We have a lot of work to do. And our energy is here. It's ready. Nobody is dropping off. People are saying, what can we do? How can we continue to galvanize? So we have a new space. We moved to the Outwater Village Theater Festival in Outwater Village, and we're really excited to keep things going. So again, thank you so much for letting me be here today, for welcoming us. And we wanted to show you a very quick one minute video of a question that we posed to two of our members, to Trey Crowder, the liberal redneck, and Monashake. So we're gonna show you that video now. Thank you again so much. I understand art. I needed to turn my emotions into art. People want to be involved. People want to have their voices heard. They want to feel like their emotions can't go somewhere and they can go somewhere in a positive place. So again, we are taking all of those emotions and we are writing them down. When I hear a friend complain, I say, I get it. I feel the same way. Write it down. Film it. Put it on paper. Send it to me as a PDF. Do something to get your feelings, your emotions, and your art out there. Thank you. That is not what I told you it would be, but wasn't it lovely? Those activism are meant to make. Kind of quickly through lots of face studies. So I first met Isenia Faga at Santa Fe, New Mexico three years ago and was struck by his disarming manner and keen intelligence and brilliant artistry. Over the years, we developed a friendship that consistently inspires me. He's a multimedia artist and global community organizer from Cameroon with a fascinating story of resistance, incarceration, resilience, and deep service to the community. Here's Isenia Faga. I shot this on my iPhone in Santa Fe, so fingers crossed. Hello, my name is Isenia Faga. I am a global community organizer, political cartoonist and an activist, and lately, I am a radio producer. So I came from Cameroon. Cameroon is in West Africa and so some 24 years ago, we started publishing cartoons in the newspaper because in 1990s, over 60% of the population of Cameroon could not read when there was illiterate. So we published this newspaper only by cartoons. All the information was cartoons so people can access education and information. So, and then my government established the censorship law to ban cartoons and information. So we have to fight back that law. So I had to go to prison with some of my friends and then we was in prison and then we were tortured. So I was a locus one. I find myself in Paris for 10 years in exile. So in exile in Paris, because it wasn't a society designed for me, I was very depressed. So to find a way not to be depressed and find a therapy, I find it too harsh. So I started painting myself because I came from the tribal communities where people paint themselves. That's how I find the therapy by painting myself. So I include the music into my performances because when I was in prison, I listened to the music a lot. So I translate sometimes the canvas that I'm painting, I translate the song that I hear onto the canvas so you can actually see the song that you are listening to during the performance. I also paint cartoons very large and then the focus of my work is to inspire, move and also make people take action. This is how I change my art into the power of changing the world. And the reason why I am doing this kick-ass project was the previous project I've done in my life is to implant a radio station in the middle of nowhere in the general, is because people need free information. Until then, only rely on government information, meaning it's brain wash and it's propaganda. So people needed to broadcast a radio station for their own community and buy on their own community. So this radio station is solar powered in 10 languages and that we operate in the middle of the jungle. Concerning starting a crazy project, any idea that you have, no more people don't change the world. Only crazy people change the world, no crazy ideas. So if any of you have crazy ideas, you just have to believe in it and woke up in the morning and just trust that this project is the crazy idea you have and gather your friends to support. This is how I ended up hosting an event in my friend's house, turning the house into studios, to raise funds or raise money in Kickstarter so that I can have this radio happening right now. So we've been broadcasting for the last four months and it's working perfectly. So if you have a want to hear the idea, get on it and I wish you luck. Thank you. ESA wanted to make sure because he didn't give you his website in this quick video and you didn't get to see his beautiful work. So Matthew, where can people find the links to the websites? Thomas.org slash theater and resistance. And you can, yes, and we can put it on the QD website as well so you can really check out ESA's work. It's probably, pardon me. We're going to put it on the QD website. We're going to put it on the QD website so you'll be able to see it there, okay? Do you want the address of the website? So you'll find it, we'll tell you about it. Thanks. Thanks. Diana Milosevic, Artistic Director of Doth Theater in Belgrade, Serbia, started her theater over 25 years ago during the revolution in Yugoslavia, performing with an all-female collective in the streets of Belgrade. Doth Theater is the only professional experimental theater group in Serbia and continues to shed light on the effects of violence and war, treatment of women in society, social justice for all members of the society. I had a great pleasure of spending time with Diana and her company during a full-bright idea in Belgrade and I'm very proud to share with you Diana Milosevic. Hello, wonderful friends from Theater without borders. I hope that your year started very well. Here I am standing at Doth Theater in front of our new wall. It's the wall of the shining bricks and some of you helped us to build our space that is still in becoming but your names are with us every day, so thank you. Theater and Resistance. So this is something that maybe I practiced with my theater for all 26 years and so did we exist. And for me, this is not only the topics we are dealing with because obviously from the very beginning you're dealing with anti-war topics, anti-violence and so on. It is also the way how we try to practice our life in the theater. And when it comes to that, this is the real challenge. How to resist through the, not only as I said, our performances but also how we communicate between ourselves, how we communicate with the world, what do we accept, what do we don't accept and so on and so on. So I think today that the artistic groups and collectors are maybe more important than ever because they are kind of the islands of light and that have a chance to operate within the cracks as my favorite point and the musician Leonard Cohen said, like there is the crack in everything. This is how the light gets in. I think this is where we should exist, like within the cracks of the systems, of society, of cliches and trying to really shine out from there. And Howard Zinn actually said something that really speaks to me and this is that the role of the artist is to be rupture. So that we are basically, we make ruptures. We are trying to make this order in the order that is basically very utilitarian in all our countries today. And this is where I see the main role of the theater and its relation to resistance. We are, yes, yes theater. Yes theater is a theater that I've worked with in Hiperon, West Bank and occupied Palestine. They are a company that is dedicated to communication among youth. A Palestinian NGO established in 2008. Yes theater, yes theater can positively influence the children and youth to create a change in their society. Through its performances inside and outside Palestine, yes theater sheds light on the social problems in Palestinian society. I spent a lot of time there teaching puppet building and theater and drama therapy and was so deeply moved and impressed by their talent, their commitment to resistance and their courage. So here is Yes theater. Good morning from Yes theater, good morning from Palestine. Actually, before that I introduce Yes theater, I would like to tell you about my country, Palestine, which has more than 5,000 years of history. And this is about comparison with a lot of emerging and powerful states. In Yes theater, we are trying to improve the social with the ego of Palestinian children and to empower rights holder to know about that clean their rights. This is not through the youth of drama and theater. We have different techniques, we have different methodologies and we have different interventions as well. During the last 10 years, Yes theater has been able to reach more than 500,000 Palestinians. And what we are trying to do is not to provide the Palestinian people with an emergency or a humanitarian activities. We are trying to support the Palestinian people during their struggle, through providing them with different tools that could help them to cope with the situation and face their challenges. I hope that you can visit us in Palestine and support the Palestinian people. And I wish you a very fruitful conference and I hope that we will get in touch with you soon. That was my comment. We don't have time to show the video of their actual work but again, look up Yes theater, they do amazing work with you throughout Palestine. Thank you. Any move in executive direction of theater to the oppressed New York City is a joker, actor and circus artist. She has facilitated and directed forum and legislative theater workshops and performances in partnership with various communities, including homeless adults and youth, LGBTQ homeless teams, people living with HIV AIDS, recent immigrants and court-involved youth and adults. I've studied theater to the oppressed with Katie and her company and become a huge fan of theirs. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm happy to introduce Katie Rubin. So, theater of the oppressed NYC and theater of the oppressed as a practice, of course comes from Brazil and Gustavo Al and it's all about participation and not just talking. So we're going to, I'm going to resist that structure and we're going to warm up together. So we do warm up before all our plays because we don't believe that there are actors and spectators, we believe that everyone is a spect actor getting ready to take action in our own lives. So I'm going to sing a little song. You're going to sing back to me, the opposite. Okay, it goes like this. Yes, yes, yes. No, no, no. No, no, no. Yes, yes, yes. Yes, no, yes. Yes, no, yes, no. All right, that's good. Up, down, up. Down, down, up, up, down, no. Up, no, yes. The opposite of red is blue, which is sometimes true. So red, blue, red. Blue, blue, down, down, yes, blue. That's great. That's how we believe we need to be in order to make a change, in order to make things different than the way they were before. So theater depressed NYC partners, as David said, with community organizations, city agencies, neighborhood groups, people experiencing oppression based on race, class, gender, sexual orientation. And we build plays, forum theater plays, based on the lived experiences of those communities, so housing works here in New York City, the Alicone Center, Fortune Society, and many other groups, and perform those plays for free, always free, in front of all kinds of New Yorkers and all five boroughs, and then engage in forum theater, where the audience is invited to come up on stage, and we expect actor, take a risk, not just sit and talk, and try out something new to address the problem, and then we analyze those ideas critically, and we were doing that for a few years since 2011, and a lot of the plays were about, you go to the HRA office and you can't get your food stamps, and somebody would come up from the audience and try to say, you know what, I really am hungry, I need my food stamps, and you're dependent on whether the person at the HRA office is in a good mood today. And we were frustrated. This is not resistance the way we need to have it, right? We can't depend for our human rights on whether somebody's in a good mood. And all of us who come to the theater, we all are already buying into this, we wanna make a change, but the changes that we need to see are structural, and how do we make structural change in the theater? So we started to legislative theater, which also my teacher, who's still go out, did when she was a council member in Rio, so I wasn't a council member, we weren't council members, so we had to get the city council, and the city government, and the federal government, and the advocates and the lawyers into our theater. So what we've been doing for the last five years is the same forum theater plays, right? Always created and performed by the people facing the problem, because that's key to effective social change, we believe. And then the forum where we get to creatively challenge and imagine on stage improvised, right? Rehearsal for reality, new ideas, but then taking those new ideas into policy proposals in the theater, that we sort with the help of what we call policy advisors, lawyers, advocates, who've been working with the troupe for months to prepare for that event, and then council members, city government, commissioners of city agencies, coming together to commit to the proposals that the audience have come up with. And through that process, we've also developed post and tree show, advocacy fairs, trainings for audience members, how do we push those ideas forward? And we've had various successes with policy change that come out of our events. So one little example before I wrap up is a couple years ago, council member Carlos Winchakra, chair of the immigration committees, again the chair of the immigration committee as of yesterday, and happens to be a council member who studied theater in college, right? That's a great way to get the council into your shows. And he saw a play by a trans youth troupe, and one of the actors had a story of being a survivor of domestic violence. The cops came to her home, and after an incident of domestic violence, and they asked for her ID, and because she didn't have ID that matched her name and her gender identity, they used that as an excuse to search her home, find syringes for hormones, and accuse her of drug, paraphernalia, and arrest her. So the audience identified that as a problem, as a violation of human rights, and came up with a proposal that the city should have legislation to have IDs that allow young people or anyone to change their gender marker without proof of surgery, doctors knows other things that are barriers. Happened to be that Carlos Winchakra was proposing the municipal ID at that time. He stayed and talked with the actors and audience, and committed to that proposal there in the legislative theater event, and he became part of the legislation. So that's one of the ways that we hope to see you all and show in the future, so thank you so much, Katie. And now we're gonna continue with Theater of the Oppress, but move across the world to India, and to Jonathan Scritti. It's a theater of the oppressed company in Badu, which is just outside of Calcutta in India. Sanjo and Shima are my teachers of Theater of the Oppressed, and they use Theater of the Oppressed in India with as much heart and soul and purpose as Katie does in New York City. Sanjo and Shima live communally with their actors and are part of the fabric of daily life in their own village, and they work in 27 other villages throughout rural West Bengal. And my experience of seeing what happens, what they have created in India is profound, and they go into the villages, they go back to the village with the same story, the same forum play until, which is an interactive form of theater, until the issues in the village are resolved and they don't get as many interventions, and therefore they know the village has gotten what they need to get, and they move on to a new play. They, I remember being on a bus, we came to the end of the road, we got onto a bicycle rickshaws, then we came to the end of the road, and then we walked into what seemed like the complete wilderness, the jungle, and to perform, and I thought, no one's gonna come to this, and out of the countryside, poured 2,000 whole chanting, Jhanasanskriti and Forum Theater, and they came from everywhere to watch this. So, Sanjale and his wife Shima have had a profound effect on their community in India, and it's with a profound honor that we share this short video of Jhanasanskriti. There are two videos. For me, theater is a democratic communication between actors and spectators, it is democratic. And in theater, we can see ourselves in the act of seeing, we can become the spectator of our own actor, and therefore we discover ourselves, we discover our potentials, and we discover our oppressive personality. If we have any oppressive personality in us, that also we can discover. And by discovering this oppressive personality, we can invite positive conflicts between the human being we have inside and the oppressive personality we have inside. The conflict and that conflict produces humanization, so theater can humanize the human beings. It's a communication, it's an inward communication. It can be the spectator of our own actor. And theater is also all about constructional relationship. We construct relationship with our spectators, creating a positive conflict. We have information here in our head that we have got from our experience, and the theater gives us some more information from the stage. Those in the information we receive from the stage, and the information we have in our head, they conflict. And this conflict also produces, creates intellectual growth. And that intellectual growth inspires us to go for an external transformation. So we can transform us internally by discovering ourselves, and we can also feel inspired, transform our reality. So it's all about theater, it's all about rehearsal of total transformation. And my last point is theater is acting, and acting has a dual meaning. We act on the stage as actors, and also we act outside the stage as activists. So theaters should combine the both, acting and acting, so that's all. Is it two minutes? Yeah, two minutes. Religious, but again, please. Chite's Justice, EU, and we'll meet Lillian Feldman, who's the managing director of that organization. I just want to speak very briefly to the history of Theater Without Borders' relationship to the issue of arts rights justice. We, a few years ago, created a relationship with Freedimensional, and in a revolutionary act, we created a button on our website that for artists at risk, that linked to Freedimensional. That went to Roberto Guerrero, who is a TWB member in San Francisco, and myself, one in Spanish, one in English. And with the connection to Sid Joag, Todd Lester, and Mary-Anne de Bleak, we continued that collaboration with Theater Without Borders and Freedimensional. We were invited, I went to the Mellon Foundation, and we created a green paper for artists at risk. And Roberto and I met with Julie at Penn, and you'll hear from later, and Deborah Brown at Brown Global Advocacy. This led to the Heat Collective and Theater Without Borders being invited to become members of Arts Rights Justice, EU. So it's with great pleasure, I introduce you to our friend, Lillian Feldman, at Arts Rights Justice. She's based in Melbourne. Good morning, this is Lillian Feldman, the chair and coordinator of Arts Rights Justice EU. We are an independent working group focusing on human rights violations in arts. Since 2014, Arts Rights Justice is working on the umbrella of culture action in Europe, the political platform of the Arts and Culture in Europe. We are about 30 organizations, associations, networks, and individuals that do this work on a volunteering basis. We are members from Europe mainly, not even the wider Europe, as well as from Africa, South America, USA, and Turkey. Our membership is free, and the focus of our work is to build up knowledge within the sector on rights. We want to make sure that the operators in the arts and culture know their artists' rights, know their creative rights, and are able to understand them and to protect them. Last year, 2017, spring, we embarked on a new four-year project where we look at the arts freedom situation in Europe. The situation here in Europe is shifting quite quickly in some countries where we observe categorical and strategic deformation of the arts, the artists and cultural operators by the public sector, as well as we can see that private groups are claiming a voice and are, which is often a rather destructive voice, targeting artists and the arts in general. Now, our distance on artists' rights violations, we do this through our members. They look around in their working areas, they look at their neighbouring countries. We bring these cases together, we discuss them and we document them, where it makes sense, and we feed them into various U.N. mechanisms to influence policy, writing, and we also work with Culture Action Europe, who is working closely with the European departments and bodies. We also make sure that the knowledge we create in group is widely spread, so we offer workshops to where we look at cases, we look at local situations, we look at law, we look at legislation at the country or municipality that we're invited to go to, so that local operators understand the context, the legal framework that they're working in, and learn to protect their rights in that context. I very much want to encourage you to get in touch with me if you want to know more about our work. We are, as I said, a free membership. We're happy to grow. Please go to the Culture Action Europe website and look out for the section of rights. You'll find there an AOJ logo. Click on that and you will get to see and find a few more descriptions about our work and what's most important, you'll find our contact email. So please do get in touch and have a wonderful day today. Thank you, bye. In 2006, Israeli and Palestinian former combatants, people who had taken an active role in the conflict, laid down their weapons and established combatants for peace. The egalitarian, binational grassroots organization was founded on the belief that the cycle of violence can only be broken when Israelis and Palestinians join forces. Two of the co-founders of Combatants for Peace are Israeli fan Alon and Palestinian Suleiman Petib. There they are. I was four years old when we were attacked on Yom Kippur. I remember us running to the shelter in Tel Aviv. It's very concrete for a child. They want to kill us. And I really didn't understand why do they hate us so much? I was 14 years old. The army that was talking to me was very strong. I don't know how I got to handle the situation. I said to myself, I don't know how I'm going to deal with this. I don't know how I'm going to deal with this. I don't know. I was admitted into the most prestigious units in the Israeli army. I was extremely proud. I knew my father was proud. I don't know how I'm going to deal with this. I don't know how I'm going to deal with this. I don't know how I'm going to deal with this. I was very afraid that there might be a conflict. We find that we actually have something in common that willingness to kill people you don't know. There's someone in the combatants. They refuse to do anything else. If you want to kill people, you need to know how to deal with this. You need to know how to deal with this. You need to know how to deal with this. You need to know how to deal with this. How to deal with this. I don't know how I'm going to deal with this. Last year, combatants for peace was nominated for the Nobel Prize. Just to connect everything up, they also work with theater-opressed tools and techniques in Israel and Palestine. So please, check them out. We're not going to be able to show our second video with them speaking to us, but that work is deeply important. Now I'm going to introduce you Jonathan Muth, who is head of the Fence Network. Any Fence members out there? Yay. Yay, there's some people out there. Fence is an international organization of playwrights and translators. Jonathan is a dear friend. He and I are working on the European production of my play, My Heart is in the East, which is about Jewish and Muslim relations. He's very much about inclusivity, and we are working with something called Friday, Saturday, Sunday in London, which is a building that is Friday at some mosque, Saturday at a synagogue, and Sunday at some church. So it's pretty amazing. So I go to London regularly to work with him. And the last time I was there, he invited me to a very strange event. It was weird. But I'd never seen sort of political theater created in this strange way. So I asked him to make a little video about it. He did not do that. He instead, camera shy, he did an audio and sent us some slides. So we're gonna see how this works. Thank you. This is Jonathan Muth. My name is Jonathan Muth. We're gonna talk to you today about one of the Friends Network's projects, our construct oil, but will be more where for Nigeria. This is a pilot performance project for the Friends in partnership with King's College London, staged in their Natalie Theatre Museum last October as part of their arts humanities festival. The project staged an audio recorded performance and discussion for a live audience of an imagined future scenario. Let me, with the help of a few photographs in the evening, try and paint with a picture of me. Student ambassadors strike up conversations with arriving audience members about art and striking it all rich. Up to the sixth floor we go, in an elevating march to the near future. We're then invited into a traditional steep-raised lecture theater where the downstage presentation area has been converted into a pop-up Guinness bubble. A giant people-now projector screen is shown and filled by an organ Irish artist, Jonathan Armour, of oil, its textures, movement, and so on and so forth. The three-piece Liverpool Query Brothers are playing traditional sounding Irish tunes from the middle of the collection theater. Some of these are in fact related to Bobby Sands. Some people think that organs were such, others were not. Out of the assembling audience and their pop-up, writer, performer and stand-up career, Tyler Flynn, pops up to give a 15-minute model on where she was when she had an Ireland-in-struck role and what struck her about it. This is set to the time for the It's Playful series for the comic. While the audience refills their glasses, we're then ushered through into the Anatomy Museum as we take our formally arranged seats. We encounter three Jonathan Armour art blocks in plexiglass acrylic and on-screen, variously presenting the naked, naked, and atomized in forms akin to the map of Ireland. The body politic, if you will. A radio sound record is explained to the audience that we're to be part of the radio recording and that certain protocols will therefore need to be observed. Author and well-server's producer, Colin Grant, oversees the audio recording for future podcast event. Our host is Dubliner and Dabiri, a black Irish academic from the School of Oriental and Mathematical Studies. We're introduced to our two permanent expert panel members, journalists, Spaniard Hutchins-Wandler, and then our suspenders, which was introduced for the first time as a group of Irish, Scottish, and English playwrights, academics, and activists, which cover one, employment, and community ecology, two, governance, and investment, and three, front of the nation. The events created as a playwright near Royal Balanoti then interviews Chris Maltesake, 30 years at the Creative World Executive and Senior Vice President of South Wales, Colin. So, we're gonna fade this out because I think it's kind of hard to hear and this is an experiment that I think didn't work, but at least you got to get a sense of it. Did you get a sense of what it was? Because in the picture of me, that the woman next to me is saying, she's an English woman who's saying, Jess, Jess, I didn't read the paper. Did Ireland struggle well this morning? My God. You know, she really believed it. So it was one of those war of the world things that people actually thought Ireland struck oil and these experts from both Nigeria and Norway were suggesting what to do. The general outcome of advice was, keep it in the ground. So, thank you. To Palestine, Iman Awu is co-founder of the Ashtar Theater which uses oppressed theater techniques in its international repertoire. Ashtar is a dynamic local Palestinian theater with a progressive global perspective. It aims to promote creativity and commitment for change through a novel combination of specific training and acting programs and services and professional theater performances. Here is Iman Awu. So everybody, I'm glad to be with you today in the conference of the People Without Borders and to address you about theater and resistance. Well, I was hesitant for a long time of what I would say, especially now, that Trump had declared Jerusalem as the capital for Israel. And I was really hurt as a Palestinian, as a Jerusalemite. And I had so much anger inside me and I didn't want to convey this anger to all of you because I know that we as theater makers from around the world and also from the US, we do share the importance of humanity and we do share the love of change and making peace through our art. But certainly resistance for us in Palestine and in particular for me as a theater maker, I see that resistance is part of our daily existence because we all the time face different kinds of atrocities from the occupation that really puts us in a way where we have to safeguard and protect our humanity, our story and the story of our people, as well as we are the protectors of the hope because and especially young people are all the time facing despair and facing anger and facing the oppression which creates reaction and reflection to all the atrocities that they face on their basis. But on the other hand, what we try to do as theater makers, we try to cultivate hope in the mind and in the hearts of our young people and not only young but also our community in general. We do so in making training that tackles the most essential issues in the people's face. We try to focus on our society and the problems that our society face, whether women or children or youth in a variety of domains. And we try to give them the strength within them. We try to open up a space where they would search for their own freedom, the freedom of their voice, the freedom of their choice, the freedom of their ability to make a change in their society. And for us, this is a way of resisting the continuous occupation and continuous oppression that we face. On the other hand, as theater makers, we also use our art and our skills to raise issues on the theater platform, to talk to our audience and to talk to the world in general in order to realize and understand who we are, what our goals, what we do, and what our will is. Now, I know that the international voice is going towards colonialism and materialism, much more than going towards the voice of the current. But our goal as theater makers, as art makers, is to keep the sanity of our society. I see theater as one of the main domains that makes us more human, that help us understand who we are, what we want, and how to reach a collective of better life and better approach to our humanity. In our work, especially in our professional performances, we also try to raise our story and put them forward as facts because one of the most important issues is that the colonial occupation is trying to diminish our story to diminish our presence and to change the history on the ground. And our goal is mainly to protect that history in order to resist the resolving of our presence on our own land. In this case, we also try to be one with the other groups of theater makers. We are partnering with you, you are partnering with us, and I'm sure that we all face the same kind of of loot or of resistance because we believe that we want a better life and we all deserve a better life. And therefore, we share the common dream that we work for. Thank you. So now we're moving to New Mexico from Palestine. The working classroom is a multi-ethnic, intergenerational community of students and professional artists, writers and actors with a conscious commitment to supporting new and diverse voices. They contribute to a more nuanced understanding of American identity, training aspiring artists and actors from historically ignored communities. Macon Gomez, their director, took me on a tour of their facilities this fall and I was impressed by the studios filled with youth making activist art and theater vibrant resistance. So here is the working classroom in Albuquerque. We came up with the title Solid for Next because it takes... Sometimes we talk about the X factor. What is the thing that really determines what a good education is? It's active, it's playful, it's presenting a possibility for solution. Not that we're going to solve everything in one play, but it's presenting possibilities. Hi, this project was that the students would have an opportunity to work with multiple guest artists, not just one person. There's a particular strength that comes from having guest artists from different backgrounds. So with Scott, we have someone who comes from Tectonic Theater Project, which is a very well-established theater program, and he offers theatrical experimentation. With Milta coming from Borderlands Theater, we have this influence from the Southwest and from the hour four now where she's from. Her influence is more movement-based and also who are writing heavy. What I've noticed with the students and their ability to just create and has just increased exponentially, the sophistication of the work that they're making is visible, it's palpable. When you present it to people, they say, well, how much of that was directed and how much of that came from the students, and we can proudly say, this is the students. A cornerstone of working classrooms philosophy is the idea that teachers don't know more than students. We've just been around longer. It's about walking into the room and saying, what did you notice this week? What did you read this week? What's to get with you right now? And so by doing that, we create a more organic opportunity for them to voice their own thoughts and their own vision for the future. I like to think of the Education Project as kind of a map for the future. These students, by doing these interviews and creating research and writing what's important to them, they are writing a play to help find solutions for the future. They are building something together. The real strength of this work is not just the play itself, but what the play represents. It's about not being complacent in your world and being able to stand up for who you are and what you need. We're setting our goal at $10,000. $10,000 will allow us to tour extensively throughout the state, provide free... So I just want to shout out to Michael for doing such a seamless and gorgeous job, lighting the lights. He is very nice. We now have a real live person. In 1979, when I was three, I was in the resident company at La Mama and was shaken by the glorious earthquake that was Ellen Stewart. And I've had the great pleasure of working at La Mama over the past few years in New York and as a teacher at the Director of Symposium in Umbria and have watched Mia. You flourish as a leader of fierce grace. Mia, I remember when we did an action with the Belarus Free Theater where we got into body bags in a near city hall. Mia was the first in a body bag. Some artists were cheating and brought their cell phones in with them, but Mia went in there bravely and stayed in that body bag till the very end of the demonstration. I've also watched her in Umbria dealing with VIP actors with large egos and large bodies of work and at the same time hanging laundry on the line for the participants of workshops. I have seen her dressed to kill leading a gala event and I think she's a brilliant, incomparable mama, both to us all and to her daughter, you know. She's a brilliant actress, a wonderful artistic director, a great friend and a fierce and gorgeous holder of the light, of Ellen's light and of the light to come. And now David's going to say something. One gets a little feral introduction. Tomorrow on the 13th is the memorial of the passing of Ellen Stewart. And I think that the community of artists that were impacted by LaMama and by Ellen are honored that the legacy of Ellen Stewart is being carried on by Mia Yu and continuing to provide experimental artists a home. She expanded on the work, embracing new technologies and providing access to artists from around the world whose stories don't get heard. Ladies and gentlemen, we are very pleased to introduce Mia Yu. I won't get emotional here. And also, Frank, I don't know why, but every time I'm here, I get emotional. And just recently, Akama Fez just told me about the last time I was here and how I teared up and made him tear up. Let's see, I didn't have much sleep last night. It was a hard night. I'm imagining for a lot of us in this room. So if I do get emotional, that might have a little something, you know, something left. The voice is coming from as many places as possible at the table. And then we rely on these artists to drive the direction of where we're going, the dialogues that we have, the work that we present, the issues that we bring up and confront, the way we think about art and its purpose in society, the way we engage with our local and global communities. We believe that through this diversity of backgrounds and perspectives, new directions in art making, and ultimately, ways of looking at the world can open up. And this happened from the beginnings of Lamama, which was founded in 1961 in a basement on East Ninth Street by Ellen Stewart, a visionary who saw a need for space for artists in the margins. These artists she were encountering were exploring theater making and writing that was non-traditional, non-commercial, unconventional, and this began the off-off Broadway movement. And you can imagine what these artists were thinking about as the women's civil rights, anti-war, gay rights movements were all exploded. So Lamama puts its trust in the artists and we jump off that cliff with them. That relationship is essential to what we do and who we are. So I think here we could go on about sort of how art can transform and be a vehicle to bring people and communities together but I feel like most of the room already believes that. So I would love to talk about something that has been pulling at me recently and maybe in a more rigorous way. Sitting in the theater as I watch all this incredible work that these artists are doing I struggle with this idea that the work is happening in our theaters that this work that is happening in our theaters is preaching to the choir to be already converted. And this is still important for its inspiration, for strength, for hope but how do we get beyond the four walls of these theaters which feels so freaking fucking necessary in the times that we are living. So Lamama has historically gone abroad the companies have toured and nothing, nothing, nothing will replace that experience of being physically in the room together. But now there are many ways that we can make these connections. How can we engage artists, audiences and communities in a time when interactivity is so much a part of how we interact with the world. This fourth industrial revolution that is of new digital technologies which has probably been a reason why part of the reason of why we're here today and the situation that we're in is changing this interaction and art and artists can help us navigate this transition as they have in the past. In 2009, Lamama and the Seoul Institute of the Arts founded Culture Hub. In the interest of time, I will give you a few examples of what we have been doing. We have had our Lamama kids workshops and storytelling and chanting with kids in our neighborhood connecting and sharing with kids in Alaska at the Alaska Native Heritage Center through video conferencing technology. We are live streaming our shows and having global talk backs with folks online afterwards. We have performances that have occurred with audiences in both simultaneously in Manchester and in New York City. We have brought artists together to talk about contemporary art practices from Iran. Artists would have difficulty coming into this country. After the earthquake, we connected to artists in Haiti who were running their computers off of a generator. But these interactions must go deeper. And more of this content and their advice first of the content coming from the other side can be shared in new ways. These are the questions that we are grappling with. And I believe we must continue and be more progressed in this experimentation and exploration. I'm just going to show you a little clip of some of the work and show you what was happening. This is in Berlin, with Youth in Berlin. This is that Manchester simultaneous production that happened. This is our... Oh, no, this is with Ashe in New Orleans. A dance workshop that happened with folks in Cartagena, Colombia. Another simultaneous performance with folks in New York City and Seoul. So in a way, you know, what Ellen was doing in a narrow time was just taking that. So the explorations and the experimentations have to continue and we, you know, with our partners and hopefully more partners, maybe some of you in this room today we will continue that work. We have to. Thank you. Honesty is blindness. We are at our last speaker. Thank you for hanging in there to hear all these amazing voices. Derek Oltman is the founding director of the local performance and politics. The professor of theater and performance, a professor of theater and performance studies at Georgetown University, the vice president of ITI, the International Theater Institute, and director of ITI UNESCO Network for Higher Education in the Performing Arts. He is also one of the warmest and most inclusive practitioners I know. He blends generosity and intelligence to move mountains. I was lucky enough to be present at the ITI World Conference in Segovia last summer to witness the marvelous work he curated with international use. Please welcome Derek Oltman. All too generous introduction. I'm aware that time is short so I will talk a little bit fast but I want to just extend kind of personal huge thanks to everybody responsible for this kind of beautiful hope filled gathering particularly the dear friends from Theater Without Borders and here at the Sego Center I'm really honored to be part of it and properly humbled to be following Mia in the spirit of what she left us with. Just briefly the lab is based at Georgetown in Washington, D.C. where I teach. My co-founding director is Ambassador Cynthia Schneider and I'm a theater maker. She's not, so we're an interesting complicated dynamic duo and our mission is to harness the power of performance to humanize global politics something that as I look around this room I feel like is something that virtually every person in this room is already doing. We're based in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown which I think is worth mentioning because we're a bit unusual as an arts initiative situated within a leading school of international relations. I'm a theater professor as Jessica mentioned but it gives us a kind of access and proximity to leading policy makers think tanks, embassies and we're working creating courses and curriculum at this intersection. It's of course a very interesting, compelling time to be in Washington in this time and place trying to do this work. We have colleagues who are recent cabinet members not cabinet makers. That's a different department. We're invested in the future of cabinet making and so past, present and future State Department folks etc. and I think it's, we don't take for granted that Georgetown School of Foreign Service has put art, empathy, narrative at the core of what it's doing alongside security studies and the kind of pieces on a chess board approach and we're, and our students especially and the sort of ripples that's creating are, I think have been very, it's just been an inspiring place to try to do that work. We, the lab develops, creates, produces and presents new work in collaboration with an expansive global network of artists around issues such as migration and refugee issues and immigration, climate human trafficking, privacy the legacy of slavery which as many of you know has been a big thing on Georgetown's campus with the discovery of the sale of 272 slaves in 1838 that kept the campus afloat so we've been working with the descendant community around the complex issues that that raises. We did a two-year festival around Muslim voices and Islamophobia but I think we see ourselves above all and this is why this room feels so powerful to me as about existing to strengthen existing networks and to foster relationship building from a particular place we sit to amplify a lot of the amazing work that so many others are already doing and we have a fellows program funded by Mellon with 10 path-breaking artists working at these intersections from Syria, Palestine, Cambodia Zimbabwe, Colombia we have a think tank of colleagues working around the world in this area and we host convenings and conversations recently won with Belarus free theater and artists from Syria and Iran and other places around artists rights issues, freedom of expression issues, particularly in context of increased repression very much kin with what many of my predecessors have mentioned already so knowing that we're at time I just want to quickly also mention that there are many of you know of a TCG theater communications group, dear colleagues Teresa on the global theater initiative which exists to strengthen, nurture and promote global citizenship in professional and educational theater fields and as part of that we are the US center of ITI and I would just say about ITI it is if you don't know ITI we are working really hard to make it it's getting younger and more vibrant and more inclusive so much because 10 years of leadership that Amelia has provided creating that space and so we're really looking to engage more people through this network which Jessica mentioned for higher education and in other ways and so the last thing I'll leave you with is that I think when we founded the lab we assumed that the artists would really get it and that folks in other sectors would limp along and we would shizzle away at those sectors and in fact the momentum that we've achieved to the degree we have I would say largely the inverse has been true that what has happened is that it's the folks in other sectors in the policy world who are looking to the skills that we as theater people bring to be at the table to help engage issues they feel are broken in their worlds and sometimes it's the theater folks in the theater communities who are struggling to figure out the ways to move through those doors so my greatest hope for a gathering like this is that the new partnerships and relationships that we're building can help us move through those doors together so thanks for the opportunity to listen I just want to thank you guys David's going to introduce the next section but I just want to thank you for so much listening so much active listening and again we're going to move through two more sections and then you'll get a chance to talk so thanks for hanging in there thank you there was there was one other group that had wanted to present in this first section which we didn't have time to do I wanted to bring their names into the room that is Bernardo Reine Reinebe Sandoval who are from Colombia whose work is involved with refugees they did an extraordinary piece in Italy with refugees coming across the Mediterranean and landing in La Medusa so we don't have time to hear from them but I wanted to bring that to your attention now we're going to move into a conversation among artists that like to invite Saviana Mia, Katrin Martha and Jessica to the stage everybody else take a big stretch stand up stretch yourself for a second it's been sitting for a while now so we're going to just get everybody up on the stage and jump right in we're not really taking a major break here if you need to run out go to the bathroom get a cup of coffee but please we're going to press right on you have a lot of more interesting including additional interesting people to hear from and I know you all want to talk to each other and it's always great to have breaks to do that but that will be coming soon for now we'd like to continue and have this artist conversation with the next session thank you for being here we're interested today to hear about your artistic work and the particularly success story where you can point to how your art has affected you and your collaborators and audiences and the challenges you're facing and have faced and what strategies you use to get past them now with this amazing group of artists I could spend the entire time all afternoon actually bringing what all they have accomplished in their exemplary work but I won't do that I encourage you to look more deeply into their work when you get home but for now I'll just touch the surface with a brief introduction so audiences know who will have the good fortune to hear today all the way at the far end Salgana Sanescu is an award-winning playwright poet and activist who created the organization Immigrant Artists and Scholars in New York she's from Romania and her plays have been published by the Romanian I won't go through all the accolades next to her is Katrin Fiu an award-winning playwright who has been writing about human rights and social justice for over 20 years a committed activist she is one of the co-founders of Theater Without Borders in the middle is Jessica Lehuac who you have met already an international theater practitioner drama therapist and a leader in the field who has engaged theater she's an award-winning playwright equity actor, innovative educator director and puppet builder next we have Martha Redbone is one of the world's most vital voices in the American roots music in addition to her acclaim as an artist vocalist, songwriter her activism includes advocacy for Native and African American youth AIDS awareness women and girls empowerment and as a voice for Indigenous peoples directly to my left is Nia Astro witherspoon she's a multi-disciplinary artist investigating the metaphysics of black liberation, desire and diaspora she was primarily in the mediums of theater performance, vocal and sound composition and creative scholarship again just a brief introduction there's so much more to say but I want to let them talk so please help me welcome everybody here so this is a question for everyone maybe we could just take it one at a time but I would love for you to tell us about a particular project or instance that you can point to that you would consider a success in your work towards resistance, what were you trying to achieve and how did you go about it Saviana do you want to start everybody please use the microphones because of the live stream they need to have the mics can you just press the button can you hear me so first briefly introduce myself I grew up during the totalitarian regime of Ceausescu in Romania I was in the streets of the revolution in 1989 and I think that my life in Romania and what happened after the revolution of course influenced my work as a theater maker and playwright of course during the totalitarian regime theater and writing generally was a form of resistance as we were reading our poems in underground spaces and you know facing censorship and even the possibility of being arrested then after fighting with my colleagues college students in the streets of the revolution I started to work as a journalist in the newly created free press so in a way all my art and I consider myself an activist as a writer and the theater maker responds to the issues around me when I was in Romania I was writing plays and creating performances responding and raising awareness to what was happening in the country after the revolution the corruption and other issues over there in Eastern Europe and since I came to the country in 2001 two weeks before 9-11 of course my perspective changed but I'm still pretty much concerned about the fight of the individual against the system and how can we respond as individuals and as communities to what rules and unfair rules are imposed by the system so most of my plays here in America my plays in English are about immigrants are about outcasts are about newcomers about marginers about the oppressed about the different about the others and how people can be other as being different as being not the mainstream type of a person so maybe I'll ask you to talk about only one project I think my play has been quite successful in a more commercial way while I think my work generally is more avant-garde and more experimental I do feel that unfortunately in order to be heard by more people here in the US you do have to penetrate the system as a playwright which is produced in larger venues so more people can hear them and see them and talk about them so areas with extraordinary skills was presented in multiple theatres in the US here in New York at Women's Project was translated in Spanish and presented in Mexico City at Teatro La Capia where it ran for two years in repertory in Romania and at these issues of aliens as undocumented immigrants or documented immigrants of course are still very much present as I was listening this morning on NPR what President Trump said about some countries and how they would rather have immigrants from Norway than from other countries well fortunately we cannot all be from Norway so I'm gonna say that and maybe my other success stories my playworks in West about the Romanian who came to the US it's not fully autobiographical but it is about being haunted by the ghost of the past by dictator Chaușescu and his wife who appear as vampires as full-imperial vampires because you know as George Bernard Scho if you are to tell people the truth you better make them laugh otherwise they'll kill you so my plays you know can try to be a little funny so people can get the message of sugar I guess and these playworks in West as I'm leaving tomorrow for Washington DC is being produced in the Women's Voices Theater Festival in DC starting next week great and we'll talk a little about this challenge that you raised about it's particularly getting the voices out there and heard by more people I think that's a common challenge for a lot of us I'd like to move the conversation over here now Nia I would wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your response to this question hi everyone good afternoon or morning if the case may be up and up for a long time okay sure a success I will answer the question really I'll try to be as precise as possible because I think I'd like to use this production that I'm going to talk about as kind of a case study throughout the because it has the successes and the challenges I think embedded in both so the project is called the Messiah Complex and it was commissioned by bricklab premiere it was the first in the bricklab premiere program so it's a premiering venue bricklab if you know is a more of a residency where work is in development and so this was the kind of inaugural project where it tried to premiere a large work the piece really looks at the relationship between being sacred and honored and held up in the community as well as being state voted and persecuted simultaneously within the same body and the Messiah that in my vision of this piece is a black trans man and the play who as a teenager trying to save his own passing murders a black trans woman on the train on the subway and so the project really is looking at this deep level of internalized violence the deepest level of internalized violence and in this kind of process my goal was to produce this work with a predominantly black queer trans and gender non-conforming cast and creative team which is really really hard to do and going into the challenges what was successful about this I know I know it's like it's a complicated thing but no I think that what was what's complicated about this is that just briefly black queer trans and gender non-conforming folks are not people who are encouraged for whom theater seems a possibility right and so finding people from okCupid to really having to be creative about and that shout out to a director that I worked with for that idea it was dope but really having to understand that thinking about what does it mean to go outside of the four walls as was stated earlier what does it mean to bring community and theater together in a way that doesn't assume that that there are roads already set up for that so what does it mean to kind of make those roads so the project was successful in that we got a group of absolutely incredible performers and also that we got a group of an incredible creative team that was directed by Charlotte Brathwaite and we had Justin Hicks as a sound designer and Asher Whitson as the choreographer it was drama turks by Sheri Moraga who was my graduate school playwriting mentor and so really like the confluence of absolutely astounding creative energy in the space and then what that did and the process that we were able to create in the room because of the level of belief in the vision in the ritual of the piece the belief in the absolute necessity of our voices in the world and also the really deep urgency we all felt as endangered bodies and endangered beings and the way in which that informed our everyday really and then like the uphill battle with Rick I love Rick Rick was an amazing producing organization but also like yes people will come I swear I know people will come right and having to have that conversation and then have I sold out run and that was extended but all like that was the success the success was that we did it we gathered ourselves and we gathered our people and they came and the challenge and the failure was that that was five nights of glory right but that and we got to do it all over again for the piece to be seen again and so I think that and also to like and I'll close here because I've been going a minute but but also to thinking that thinking about what it means for a theater to centralize black queer trans and gender non-conforming bodies and the ways in which that challenged the existing space so like how does that mean we enter and exit the first time that Rick ever had to change their bathroom policy and sign it all of the ways in which our very presence in the space changes the space changes the requirements of the space we had a certain policy about how people were to enter and exit the room we had black queer healer amazing Julia from doing healing and intermission right like what is because we knew that we were triggering tons of trauma for already traumatized people so like really what does it mean we had make the road and Audrey Lord and all sorts of folks sending youth so and we worked really well with Bricks community engagement folks to do so so really thinking about the success it was the case study and a collaboration with a producing organization that I believe is major in making some of those shifts and all the work that and what it opened up was all of the rest that would need to happen like what are the structural shifts that wouldn't make that so hard which is the question I was left with and I think we'll go into that a little deeper as we continue the conversation I'll hear from each person first and then we'll have some cross conversation Katrina would you take it crack at the end it's really wonderful to be here and I just want to start by saying having been one of the people that co-founded theater without borders with Roberta and Eric after 9-11 I'm filled with great great hope really to look out at this audience especially after the sort of constant onslaught that continues to beseech us so it's just very very moving to be here and I thank you for having me I want to say that I'm just mostly here to share information and to brainstorm with people on how they might want to think about projects I am a freelance playwright and my most recent play was at the mall I had the honor of having my last three plays there and my most recent play is about women in mass incarceration in the United States you may know that the United States incarcerates more women than any other country in the world pretty much and that play, What is Free Meet, was commissioned by Norris Playhouse and will be produced in July of 2018 at John Jay College where I started working on the play with a woman who teaches there Amy Green and we co-taught the class of their called Drama in Mass Incarceration and pursued a lot of readings and working with the students there starting in 2016 then I went on to work with an amazing organization that Vivian Nixon runs called Community and Fellowship which is in New York sorry College and Community Fellowship in New York and then recently we did a reading of the play at Vassar where I teach and the drama department chair Shona Tucker played the lead and we had students play all the other parts and I'm sort of in the process right now gathering a group of students from a bunch of different places to participate in this project so one of the challenges that I've come up against that I wanted to talk about is with a beloved organization Culture Hub I've been trying desperately to think of how such a play could be live streamed and we run up every time against the issue of actors equity and it's just like such a Byzantine and sort of Sicilian problem because like each time you talk to one group they're like oh no no they changed the rules it's okay now and then you go to another group and they're like oh no no so it's really when you look at Europe and the way that they've been able to get their stuff on film and I know this is very simplistic to say but in any event that has been a challenge and I wanted to bring that up thank you I think that's one of the situations where I work for the stage director's union for a while and understanding a little bit of how those unions operate that when a community like the community of people in this room were to go to equity and say these are the issues that we really want you to address they'll start to listen I think there's strength in numbers and I think that's one thing that a meeting like this can generate is some action that's very specific that can really make a change I know they listen but anyway Martha, thank you Martha, would you like to hear the comments? Thank you, good morning everyone I think there's so many different projects and things that revolve and involve them and each of them touched me strongly I would try to think of the most profound moment being an artist and an indigenous and African-American artist we kind of fall between the cracks and being raised by the Eastern Woodlands mother in Crown Heights, Brooklyn you do fall between the cracks as a teenager in New York City I always felt invisible just simply because when you're in Brooklyn you get to choose two groups of people of color to belong to you know, Dominican or Latina or Caribbean and so when you are from Harlan County, Kentucky you don't know where you fit in on the wider as time went on I was asked to be on the advisory board about the Man Up campaign which was founded by Jimmy Briggs and a global youth movement to eradicate gender-based violence and Jimmy wrote an article and he was covering information about crimes against Native American women in Indian territories and we both felt strongly that in recruiting this global youth movement we had young people from the ages of 18 through 27 from 50 countries and we both felt that with regards to the USA delegation we felt that they should be separate North American indigenous delegation because the needs of tribes and all of us in Indian country are very different from the United States and so we ended up, you know, doing the call to action and I went on Native American calling radio show which is one of the, which is the largest radio, talk radio shows in Indian country and we ended up recruiting we made two indigenous delegations from seven different tribes and they were all creative people all had their own ways of communicating and sharing their stories of gender-based violence in their communities and some used drama therapy when a person was a counselor in a domestic violence center just in Milwaukee we ended up having our first youth summit in Johannesburg and as all of the delegations we managed to raise enough funding to bring 25 delegations over to Johannesburg so we hosted the first summit and as all of the groups of students stood up to introduce their delegations and we're all cheering and everything then my babies came stood up and said, you know, we represent you know, the North American indigenous delegation and everyone's clapping and then the delegation from Uganda stood up for a second time across the theater and they said we already introduced ourselves but we wanted to say welcome to the North American indigenous delegation we thought you were dead so I wasn't the only person who felt that we were invisible and so this is something that I've dealt with my entire life and I feel and I still feel that indigenous people in America and in Canada and all over the world we are invisible we need a voice, we are far from invisible people don't recognize us today as indigenous people because of all of the, you know, the kind of ills of colonization and phenotypes that we're all addicted to we are very much alive still have our cultures our attorneys, artists there are 50,000 indigenous people in New York City and people don't know that either so I feel that that was a huge accomplishment and something that started helping give young people their voices as well to talk about who we are and thanks to the media now at least we all know that standing rock exists and there are some indigenous people still around so that's the beginning okay so I think this question again comes up about visibility and about people who are not as I mean I was saying the converted people who already know, getting to know what's going on around them that they're not aware of Jessica please share some of your many successes at least one for now I successfully turned down the microphone I wanted to talk a little bit about the fear project but before I was making all these signs to Saviana which obviously weren't clear because I wanted her to mention the dream ads because and you mentioned Shiori didn't you just mention Shiori you did it I'm sorry I heard that I heard that somewhere but Shiori and Saviana and I and Andrea Tom and Mia and Shum wrote together a project about undocumented youth so it goes right to what you were talking about go ahead go ahead because I think I just is that okay David I just think that this is an important moment to talk about this because we wrote the play because DACA was alive that we didn't need to perform the play anymore and now we need to perform the play again so artists rise up the divide on the 29th of the Lama we are going to do re-dream ads which is the only other thing I want to say before Saviana speaks is that for me success is when people come together collectively like this yes we are preaching to the choir today but I think the choir needs energizing and inspiration and nurturing as well so we can keep going back out into the world as Mia challenged us to do so this was a successful experience of co-writing a play with five women and five ethnicities and five different subjects related to the dream act do you want to say something? I want to say something but I rather talk more about your many beautiful plays but yes this I think is such an important and timely project a dream act was based on interviews with dream act eligible youth back in 2012 so with the five women playwrights interviewed various high school and college undocumented immigrant youth and then created together this play we did many readings and panels always including immigration lawyer and a dreamer who had the courage to join us and we always had at least one and unfortunately now it's again the time for dream acts and Jessica and her theater company will put on another stage reading soon yes so that's one success story because we managed to do it together the project I wanted to talk about is called the FEAR project and it's something I've been involved with now for a couple of years and continue to look for opportunities to share it it came I was working in the Czech Republic I work a lot overseas I work more overseas than I do in the United States I work a lot in Palestine I work with the Freedom Theater I introduced you to earlier I have continued I'm both and David actually we've all been to Iraq and working there and I work in Egypt I work in Lebanon and I work in in the EU and especially been working quite a bit in the Czech Republic and when I was in the Czech Republic I was amazed at all of the warmth of the people but this racism for Roma for the Gypsy population as well as this terror of Muslim refugees when there aren't any so it's terror of the unknown and the unseen and I was working with a colleague and I said why is there so much hate and he said well I'm the basement no I'm not going to do an accent but he said in the basement of the hate you will always find the fear and it struck me that people are afraid so I've now done this project in the Czech Republic I was financed by the the US State Department but prior to the recent shift in the leaders Obama passed this arts envoy I went for many many weeks all over the Czech Republic and worked with various populations with this project we've done it with Artist Rise Up we've done it at both La Mama and Dix in Place I've done it in Milwaukee I've done it in India and Calcutta and David even used the questions with some students and youth in Obraya last summer so it is something that I think is we go I get some collaborators wherever I am and I ask them to interview as many people as they can with as much diversity, age diversity ethnicity gender sexual orientation everything and we get as many interviews some little children some older people and we ask 13 questions and the questions are timed in a very specific way so it's like a research project all the interviews come to me and I put them into a choral poem so it's all verbatim text but I make choices about you know repetition, inclusion, exclusion when all the women will speak, when all the men will speak when it's one voice when it's all voices and I come back to my collaborators we read this out loud and then I read through discussions with the performers and the community who's done the interviews we brainstorm and improv and work on a play and the play always has three parts one is the choral interviews the other is what always happens to come out of these brainstorming sessions which is a family scene and then monologues and supplemental scenes based on the situation so in India the supplemental scenes had to do with violence, gender violence in public transportation in the Czech Republic because of this fear of refugees we actually staged a refugee family crossing the water and the beating of a gypsy woman as supplemental scenes but the format was always the same and then the most important part of the experience for the audience is that the actors come in to the house when the audience is seated or even out in the lobby and with the yellow paper, the yellow paper is important they ask the same 13 questions to the audience and then they're embedded into the performance so when the yellow papers come out the audience kind of leaves forward knowing that their answers are going to be there and so it's a piece of art but it is also a therapeutic process and then right after the play is over we don't even take a bow we sit down and have a discussion with the audience not about the play but about the 13 questions and the 13 questions are what are you afraid of who are you afraid of where are you most afraid what is your reaction to fear how do you conquer fear what is the enemy who is the enemy where is the enemy how do you react to hate what is home who is the stranger and how do you feel about your country right now and with those questions we create both a piece and an experience for the artists, the interviewees and the audiences great thanks I think at this point you have more of a conversation amongst us if you have questions for each other but I guess the thing that was intriguing to me about what everybody was talking about was the sort of two challenge two big challenges that I've heard was first of all the sort of internal challenge of the artist to understand what it is they want to bring forth and how to do that and not only for themselves but for a company or other artists that they're engaged with and then this idea of who's the audience who's listening to this who's experiencing this piece of art and how do we shift so that we can expand the audience and change the audience not speak to just the same people so I don't know if anybody has any thoughts I think this is a time where we can just share ideas and learn from each other and you have those or other challenges that you want to bring up I'd like to say something because it just covered that collaboration and I feel the same although of course I was I'm still writing my plays but actually for the last five years I wasn't able to write a new play in mind I was more involved in projects and device theater projects that were responding to the needs of a community I was involved with and as an educator as a college, as a professor of playwriting and contemporary theater I felt I need to respond to those issues I created a device theater piece with my students on micro operations on student campuses starring Gerald Jerome Paul so wrote spoken words for us he's one of the actors in Moonlight the Oscar winning movie so this kind of work felt more fulfilling I feel that somehow our role as playwrights and artists at this time is to go beyond our own individual needs of creating something and it's hard because of course you want to do your own thing but at this point for me it's more important to collaborate with other playwrights to create projects like Dream Act based on interviews with Dream Act which were used to create projects on micro oppressions on veterans coming back from different wars I feel it's such an important moment here in the US and I'm sorry that it's so similar to the totalitarian regime in Romania somehow for me I wish I couldn't see those similarities but I feel there is again for me as an artist there is a need to respond as an artist and to find new projects that represent the community and the artists fight with the system that I think that we as artists again need to be subverting the system, challenging the system interrogating the system and raising the important questions of the moment so do you think that and as the rest of you do you think that at this particular time that sort of activism side of art is what's driving you or is it something else to do you feel like there's more energy around doing something that's more of a political or it's the only thing driving me now that's what I said I think that I feel like with Martha listening to your music you've got to hear this woman sing you will but that transcends so much for me in a way that sometimes theater doesn't that music reaches across things and I'm just grateful to you for having your voice and I think we also need humor to transcend this Katrina and I for a long time worked with an agent that was a Chihuahua and we kept that going for a long time because it's hard it's hard out there and we had to really work with this Chihuahua in an appropriate way as karaoke singers which we started keeping our sense of social justice karaoke represented by Chihuahua and then we fired the Chihuahua and got a parrot but I think that we have to come together and bully each other and laugh a little bit I feel that with regard to activism sometimes maybe it's just me and maybe my friends but I always feel that people of color are born activists we're in a colonized society we're in the USA and the current administration is a reflection of everything that we are against just by this there have been laws put in place for centuries just because they don't see us as human so we have a lot of retraining to do they see that our ways are savage we were property and labor and imprisoned on many different levels so when you think about where we are today in 2018 even as a woman as well, property same thing I think that we have no choice I think that there have been many people who have been able to assimilate and kind of pass through those laws and there's the business of that business of whiteness and that kind of thing but what has happened is this has what's been going on with this current administration has been a real wake up call to how complacent people who have been passing have gotten everybody thought they were in and then all of a sudden it was like hold on this is everything that we're against and then holiday with relatives have highlighted a lot of stuff in these families they haven't highlighted it in my family because we're broken black and so but it's really an interesting time and the women that I've known who are who are not women of color who are white women and men who do not believe in this this is really important that they they are saying wait a minute we are not like this A-hole who's in charge of this country we have nothing like that and we have to get together and make that known and so for the first time in a really really long time I feel a solidarity that I had never felt before and I thought my parents marched for all this stuff you know gone past that and they created this beautiful world for us to be you know artists and here we are right back in fighting again but I'm ready for it we've been fighting for 500 years so this is nothing for us I just wanted to piggyback on this thing that I had heard about with the new Jim Crow Michelle Alexander's book not being allowed in prisons and I know Pan is going to speak is someone from Pan going to speak because I know Pan has been involved in that issue and it just seems like another insanity yeah I just wanted to follow up on what's been said in particular by you Martha and think about you know yes as people of color we've always been activists and also that we are the living survivors of genocide and that places us in a very particular zone where that spectrum of what it means to be activists varies from the young man at the school where I'm in residence Bormhill School for International Studies and Brooklyn shoutouts who walks around with his Bluetooth headphones like in the hallways wailing like what he's doing is not he's not like rapping along he's like wailing and even with the proliferation of what some disparagingly call mumble rap I don't know if anyone in this room is involved in that conversation but there's been this kind of mourning of the death of like rap as rap where you can actually hear the differences in the words like between words like mumble rap is you know that it's all this one and I say too it's all this one kind of wail which is interesting because you're talking about sound and the way that sound is the thing that is piercing through this time and so like to all the hip hop purists that hate me now I just I think that there are these really beautiful and fascinating aesthetic interventions that are themselves resistant and also it's our job as artists to help focus drive and organize those in a way that they can be more widely understood and put to use towards our liberation but yeah I think I don't know I always I've always felt the drive the activist drive and so my own creative work has been slower because I'm constantly both making work and making space for my people to make work and that's hard so I'm also I wear a bunch of hats another hat I wear is I'm an assistant professor in the program of theater performance of the Americas it's a PhD program at Arizona State University I'm in residence this year at New York Theater Workshop as a 2050 fellow at Goren Hill School for International Studies doing work with restorative justice and theater in Brooklyn and you know I don't really sleep a lot I think that I'm making a work building a work and the work feels very very important to me and I'm not like ready to give that up and I'm also like all night like writing grants to get space for more of us to do more things so it's like this I believe in abundance and society believes in deficit and it feels like sometimes you're a hamster on a wheel and so I'm really excited for the conversation today just to be in the room and to feel feel preached to but also to to kind of demand and request and ask that as people invested in theater and resistance that we really think seriously about the democratization of leadership in our theater world such that the really deep support of artists from underrepresented backgrounds and what I mean by deep support is that there's a lot of stuff for emerging artists and then after that it kind of drops off once you've done some things you know I think also I mean I think my mom is an incredible model but like so much more of that performance in the borderlands is also an amazing model at ASU we have an incredible cultural institution but you guys can look at them they're going to talk about it but really good work coming out of there as well but yeah I think more ways to make relationships and funding around that and I think and my hope too is that with the fact that now kind of like everybody isn't on the conversation of how fucked up patriarchy is my supremacy like now that everybody's like now that we're all like on the same page that maybe the money can follow that like the resources right can follow that knowledge I think that's a super big shift that we are in the like that has the potential of happening in this particular social historical moment and that's exciting to me and to be in community and deeper community in a way that I think as a country haven't had and as a result as a world because as a country you guys right has been fucking up community for that long so as a country and as like an international community there's a lot more potential I just want to ask if you feel like you mentioned this positive aspect of this horrible political environment is that artists are coming together do you feel that this is for anyone but do you feel that you that you feel emergency now or more of an urgency or less of an urgency to get the word out and I feel I think it depends on the day yeah I think sometimes I feel more like pulling the covers over my head than ever and especially doing such close work with you if as many of us know can be so heartbreaking and overwhelming and I also feel that I feel the paradox of the sense of urgency unfortunately this is a very little time I'm just going by it so quickly I think thank you for like speaking to everybody and letting people know what they can do or what you encourage them to do and I wonder if everybody can take just a moment to what would you like to say to people in this room or some of the leaders, artists, activists people that are doing the work and other people are trying to figure out how to do the work how to get into it what final thing might you want to say to everybody at this point just to whatever you want to say I didn't like what that first guy said I can't remember his name that you need to be a little crazy to do something that's relevant and subversive and genetic but yes try to discover or nurture that positive craziness in yourself and others and do things that challenge the system I would say and challenge the people to think in a different way maybe than they are used to I mean I find it very useful to brainstorm with people that I know and just talk to people about what they're doing and how they have done what they achieved so I'm hoping that we can do more of that when we have the discussions yeah we will I promise yes I wanted to say even though you know we talked about you know the things that we the disgusting things that have been going on in our government but for me you know when times are really awful it's a good time for art and I believe I feel very hopeful and I believe that strongly believe that all we're really doing is reassembling our own power and recognizing what's been there for us to go for and so I think mobilizing as we are globally is the way forward and it's happening it's already happening it's already in place and we just have to not be kind of knocked back by the idiocy and the pettiness of what's happening in the media and this fear mongering and things that they're kind of throwing at us and we just keep our eyes on the prize and get this right and that's what we're doing you know and so I feel really good about what's to come all good things to come thank you so much Jess well I just want to go back to Issa at the beginning because Issa is often an example to me and often we David and I when we teach workshops in peace building and performance we use this exercise called big ass idea and we ask people to come up with a big ass idea or changing the world with art that could not happen probably but we're going to do it and I've had amazing people come up with amazing things that aren't censored by financial worries or political correctness just I want to have a room that you walk into and you only know one language and when you walk out you know all the languages and we think oh that's impossible and then we initiate a kind of Amish farm raising and figure out how we can move that crazy idea a little closer and we got the idea from Issa who built a radio tower in the middle of the jungle which is now transmitting which we raised $21,000 for on Kickstarter and now is creating we're starting a radio theater taboo but that was a crazy big ass idea and we should be inspired by that unfortunately we have to close this conversation in this format for right now but I hope that you all take an opportunity to continue the conversation I think there's a lot more to be mined from everything that's been said and we'd love to hear of course what you all have to say as well which we'll get to in the next section so please join me in thanking all these wonderful people the sonography here you guys are all really patient to do a lot of listening if you want to stand up briefly stretch this right back down so our thought there's a lot of big ideas going on that have been broadcast here the next 45 minutes we're going to do three short sessions where colleagues that we all have worked with are going to address specific topics that are of major concern to society at large we're going to have a session on diversity a session on arts rights and mobility a session on climate change and sustainability so the idea with each of these is a couple of people are going to come up where I have a really deep knowledge and I've worked intensely with these fields to kind of do a rough download of the thoughts that make up those conversations right now I've asked them all to think if you've had 15 minutes to give an arts organization or a theater group advice about how to be more sustainable how to address issues of climate change or I'm a theater group I'm concerned about how we're related to the topic of diversity in my community how do we address that the point of these next brief sessions is to kind of give you some an elevator pitch about how to address these topics so the first I'd like to ask them to come up to the stage Nisha Sanjian I'm sorry that's it that's the one I've really practiced this so long before and it just totally didn't work and Amelia this is also tough and you're going to be like that's it I'll give you to come up and we've got about 20 minutes to dive into the topic of diversity Amelia is the director of the theater communications group artist of international programs she oversees TCG's grant programs, international programs and special projects including beyond Orientalism a national initiative to address the use of yellow face brown face and white washing Nisha is the director of the drama therapy therapy program at NYU in this position she teaches an introductory course in drama therapy theater aesthetic and therapeutic theater arts-based research with a focus on body and performance research and advanced research methods because I want to be able to look at my notes my cheat sheets here so good morning you all thank you for being here and thanks to everybody that worked on this here at the seagull center folks at theater without borders really great to be in the room with you all and I know that Mia earlier evoked the name of Ellen, Ellen Stewart and I wanted to just bring a couple of other names in the room because I think I believe in the spiritual plane and I think these folks are with us here today so Ellen Stewart Martha Quinier is instrumental in really moving international work forward and someone who influenced me greatly Grace Lee Boggs who is a Chinese-American activist feminist, writer and mentor and so I was so blessed to have had them all in my life I'm not an expert but I want to share some learnings from working in this field for 130 years in performing arts and from lived experience as a person of color woman of color it's a great room of activists I think there are a lot of you all pretty much everybody here thinks about this a lot as if I do and I'm hoping that there may be some bits and bobs some little thoughts that may be new to you or that you want to dig deeper I explored it then right on I actually know a little bit about you it would help me just as I maybe shift and shape where I'm going to talk about it a little bit so I want to ask a series of prompts and if you're able I would love you to respond by raising your hand and I ask that you only raise your hand to one of the answers in the prompts so you have to make some choices and I think what's also interesting is we're not really sitting in a circle but in addition to your response to the question to see the responses of others in the world so does that make sense very straightforward so practice round I usually arrive early late or just on time early impressive late as white a person of color mixed race white mixed race as male female non-binary male female as a theater maker producer presenter theater maker producer not so many I thought there would be more in the US yes no I thought there would be more from out of country English is my primary language yes no yes no practice the religion faith that I was born into yes no interesting I live in the country where I was born yes no on the continuum of fluency around equity diversity and inclusion early stages deep in the work early stages deep in the work emotional conversations about race come up in my theater work I feel vulnerable prepared overwhelmed vulnerable, overwhelmed that is good your theater's executive leadership is a woman and or a person of color yes no your theater organization's executive leadership is a woman and or a person of color yes no theater's board is 51% women and or people of color our theater's board is 51% women and or theater's color yes no as the most palace theorist yes no yes no and just me identifying as a critical race theorist it's not that now you can go to theater programs and actually get degrees of these things which is like incredible but I actually just a short bit about I came out of 19 November 6 1969 was the student strike at San Francisco State University that launched the school of ethnic studies and a lot of student activism during that time and so I'm very much a product of that so that's my perspective so given all that and the hand raising great that you played along thank you so much I actually don't want to talk about diversity I don't it's not enough since the 80s diversity programs have been funded have been implemented and have failed and I believe largely because they haven't addressed the crucial issue of systemic structural racism in this country racism is defined as the systematic and intentional oppression of a group of people from the ruling class and its agents only those with the most power can be racist racism shows up in so many structures education health, finance, housing not-for-profit organizations voting, unions was mentioned earlier some of you may be familiar with the civil rights advocate and scholar thinker Kimberly Crenshaw anybody read her word Kimberly Crenshaw all right if you haven't read her I'm credited with developing intersectional theory the study of how overlapping or intersecting social identities relate to structures and systems of oppression or discrimination in addition to race, ethnicity other identities include gender sexual orientation class, religion ability, disability age, citizenship immigration status language, education and some others right and while there's oppression specifically connected to these other identities I believe the true liberation will never come until there is racial equity those with the most power in this country are US-born, native English speaking cisgender white Christian males between 45 to 65 years old without neuro or physical disabilities right I'm US-born native English speaking cisgender, confirmed Catholic but lapsed college educated between 45 and 65 you can do the math but I'm Filipino and I have mobility issues so I'm very privileged but I'm not the most powerful in fact actually Filipinos a lot of you may not know this that Filipinos came here originally as slaves on Spanish armadas and landed in New Orleans were lynched and rioted against in California and I'm not at all saying that we were as oppressed as the black community in slavery but I just bring that up to show that the spread of racism in this country and how effective many many communities so where did the idea of race come from right? race is based actually on false science it was rooted in Europe during the Middle Ages when the known world was only Europe, Africa and the Near East so thus the invention of Caucasian, Mongoloid Negroid Austerloid which is the fourth race came later actually my people Filipino were Austerloid I will politically identify as an Asian American but in my DNA if we're looking specifically at race I am Austerloid my DNA is Austerloid in the 17 and 1800s Swedish, Dutch and German scientists used skin hair jaw with front to low skin color and even actually body lice to determine race so today's scientists consider this a false science in fact actually the UN stopped using race as an identifier in the 1950s and instead use more than 5000 plus ethnic groupings as identifiers more accurate but race as a social construct continues to impact our everyday lives since 2002 more than two million people have logged into Project Implicit it's a website run by Harvard University has anyone here in the room done the it's a great test if you haven't go to that it's just eye-opening so this implicit association test it's a rapid response task which measures how easily you compare items from different categories this test for implicit bias rather than conscious racism a version of the test presents white or black faces and and positive or negative words so if you're taking the test your task is to really quickly sort through faces as either african-american or european-american while at the same time you're sorting a variety of words happy, sad, agony joy and you're sorting those words as either good or bad now the results show that people were much faster in sorting when black faces were paired with bad words and faster in sorting when black faces were paired with good words and when the results were mapped they showed that white people in every US state was biased against blacks everywhere from north to south Maine to California, liberals to conservatives men to women, young to old so we have a lot of work to do I've seen many situations where an arts organization hires a person of color or two in a lower-run position and then the organization rests there have been recent studies of staff in arts organizations where there were very high numbers of people of color in museums, on museum staffs but when you drill deeper those positions are security guards and receptionists not leadership there are people of color on theater staff but still the number of artistic directors of color at lord theaters and legal resident theaters are usually low 4 out of 72 women dominate the smaller theaters as artistic leaders but far fewer lead mid and larger budget-sized theaters and many theaters consider their boards diverse but a recent TCG survey showed that boards are still 89% white male so theaters are congratulating themselves on diversity in programming but the decision makers are not the majority the term minority is inaccurate 85% of the global population are people of color a good friend of mine is lobbying to start using people of the global majority rather than people of color so I know that the time sign thing is getting flashed so I'm going to leave you with just a couple of things I'm going to skip to the end I'm out with you for the rest of it the juicy conversation I'm actually going to talk to Norwegian artist I think it's going to be a really interesting conversation it's about moving forward so invest time and resources anti-racism training not just equity diversity inclusion training but anti-racism training for you and your organization hire women and people of color in decision making positions and increase the number of women and people of color in your board practice equitable partnerships if you're working with community organizations make sure that everyone has the same opportunity and the same financial resources conduct a racial equity audit of your organization your company to see how intention aligns up with actual practice learn the history of local communities of color relationships with their leaders use inclusive and welcoming language in your external communications there's a lot of change within the funding community and I'm also a rebrander so if you want to have that conversation you can email me separately so change takes work clearly, right? I want to leave you with some questions to explore in your discussions that you're going to have in a little bit so what is more important or action? as a theater maker my priority is safety or action works best when they unite or disrupt the end result of empathy must be acceptance or activism so think about what you want to change tell someone and publicly inform them thanks so very much whatever means to be said after me I apologize for my voice if I come in and out still getting over whatever seems to be going around so we were planning how to approach the conversation today and I was thinking about how I might speak about diversity equity inclusion and dignity anti-oppression within the context of higher education where we typically will look at these issues to the lens of recruitment and attention content and casting whose stories which bodies are being privileged but instead I think I'm going to take you inside the process of inclusivity the process of cultivating and creating psychological and social bravery a sense of dignity and inclusion inside the process of theater making itself in through a focus on our series at NYU again thinking about how we leverage the spaces and the resources we have in higher education I'm going to focus in on a project that we've been doing in 2011 in the drama therapy department and drama therapy has been referenced a few times in this conversation I teach on theater and health and when we think about drama therapy we're thinking about how does improvisation and performance facilitate psychological and social health across the spectrum so inside this series which has been going on since 2011 I'm checking in with my colleague and I'm here with Marcia you're in the front row one of the first things that we're doing of course is we're engaging with communities again with that ethos of shared authority of cultivating true and equitable partnerships bringing them into a space or going out into their space for example just recently working with the Hebrew residents with older adults working in their spaces and also in our NYU spaces to look at the kinds of stories that they want to tell but before we even get to making stories and creating work together we're using improvisation playing a full range of different kinds of techniques socio-drama, developmental transformations theater, the oppressed to address the emotional terrain of oppression the emotional terrain of suffering the emotional terrain of white supremacy so we're looking at how do we wake up from this anesthetized space that we're in to address the fear and the anxiety the scars of neglect the distress, the nightmares that remain in our bodies as a result of the experiences that we've lived and many of you who do device theater and work with groups in your classrooms and community know that in the beginning you are cultivating on some, you are creating a sense of inclusivity a society in and of itself where people can find their voice feel freed up to tell their stories and then the next phase comes along where people are stitching together a narrative it's more of a cognitive process where you're taking what's arisen from the body and moving it into a story language again my assumption here and in the work that we do we're working with people who are living the stories themselves Katie had spoken to this earlier so we do work with professional playwrights as well to help shape stories and give them a strong aesthetic structure but this phase involves taking all of that residue the remains that arise out of the playmaking process the play itself and moving it into a story language and then finally so how do we take private experiences experiences of shame and stigma and move them into public space how do we prepare groups to do that so of course working with groups that are not used to doing this this will obviously involve a lot of risk and repetition to be able to prepare themselves to bring their stories to an audience the questions that we negotiate at that stage of the work is which audience in drama therapy we tend to focus on the closest audiences we think about your brothers and your sisters your cousins your family members the communities in which you live often those are the riskiest audiences to present our stories to and those are often the first audiences that we start in our work before opening it up to a public or public audience so I've got a time marker here I think I'll just wrap it up by saying that those are some of the ways that we go about cultivating psychological and social bravery which I think is that space between safety and activism I don't remember quite the binary that Amelia proposed but I'll end there thank you again moving right along quickly here we'd like to turn our attention from diversity to climate sustainability I'd like to invite Julia Levine and Chantal Villateau to this state Julia is a playwright, a creative collaborator and she's a working team of here using team of the International Human Rights Arts Festival organizing team for Climate Change Theatre Action and writes a blog called Artists and Climate Change Chantal is a playwright and a translator whose work explores the intersection of science, policy, art and climate change she is the artistic director of the Arctic Circle and the founder of the blog and international network Artists and Climate Change and is the co-founder of Climate Change Theatre Action the to have the climate change included in this gathering it's in my experience when we talk about the arts and climate change it's something that's very marginalized and that we there's all the big things we do in the theatre and in the climate change it's to the side so I'm happy to be part of this how can theatre be part of a global solution to climate change in order to answer this question I'm going to define climate change as a set of unsustainable systems economic, political, environmental and cultural that harm other creatures and undermine our ability to survive as a species so I want to make it clear that we're not talking just about nature and it's not about hugging trees although if you've never hugged a tree I would highly suggest you try sometimes they hug you back but I'm talking about a very holistic view of the systems that we have and I'm putting everybody in the same boat so how can theatre be part of a global solution to climate change? I think we have to look at two things the first one is content what do we have in our plays and our shows and what we're putting on stage what are the stories we're telling how big are the stories and who is at the center of these stories who's at the center of something I think everybody has a talk addressed in one way or another this far in this conference but how how big are all stories we are used to thinking in very small timelines in the length of a human life or sometimes a few generations but we don't think in terms of deep time so what would that mean if we tried to shift our thinking in the way we write our plays like what would it mean to put deep time on stage what would that look like also what does complexity and interconnectedness look like on stage these are two defining elements of climate change that we hear over and over again it's a really complex problem that's global and it's all the more complex because we're all interconnected now we can't separate we can't separate an environment from another we have to think about all these things together and finally how can we shift from reacting to imagining a lot of the theater is reactive we're responding to what's going on ahead of us and that's certainly valid and necessary but can we take another step and start imagining what can come next when we read the artist the creative people start to paint the picture for the people who are the politicians for the business people who are creating all the new technologies like what can we put forward the type of worlds we want to live in that may help people who actually made that world happen have a better idea of where to go and also in addition to what's in the stories in our stories how do we tell those stories climate change goes hand in hand with imperialism abuses of power racism and discrimination so how does the construction of a story reflect a world view and are we regardless of what we're saying in the play the way we're saying it is it consistent with what we want to create are the building blocks that we're using still relevant is the way we tell stories sustainable and I mean that as much as who and what we're putting on stage who is getting paid who is making the decisions what are the power structures I play in a production and I'm going to pass it on to Julia but I want to say in New York City there are some very good companies that are doing work at that intersection and those include and some of you may know them already Superhero Clubhouse upstream artist collective there in Brooklyn and the anthropologists Thank you, thanks Chantal for really breezing through what is the tip of the iceberg I look forward to continuing conversations throughout the day so I'm going to talk about a specific initiative that Chantal and some others in this room co-founded called Climate Change Theater Action and it's a worldwide series of readings and performances about climate change presented by NLE to coincide with the UN Conference of the Parties so the last climate change theater action happened this past fall 2017 and the plays come from a commission Chantal Commission's 50 playwrights from all over the world to write a 5 minute play about a climate topic and for 2017 the guiding question or prompt for these playwrights was how can we turn the challenges of climate change into opportunities and so this year from those plays that we saw that were opportunities for playwrights to take risks because it's within a 5 minute time and it's not up to the playwrights to find producers and collaborators that's what comes in the next step so these plays the collection of 50 are available online and Chantal and I and our collaborators reached out to universities individuals, theater companies other types of organizations to create an event one night or a series of events that use at least one of these 50 plays and this year especially we focused and encouraged the collaborators to include at least one action with their events so that could range from raising money writing legislators or public demonstrations and you can find more on the website climatechangetheoraction.com there's a whole diversity of images that came from this year's action and from the feedback of our participants and collaborators and the playwrights we came across the ideas from what climate change theater action can do which touched on a lot of what we've been covering today and that have come up in that this initiative is participatory it involves the playwrights from that initial seed of the play through to audiences and conversations and speakers from local organizations so it really is concentric the circles that this initiative can spill out into it crosses disciplines one example we had from Arizona State University was that their theater department selected plays three plays and carried each group of scientists an expert on those issues that each of the plays were covering it builds local and global communities so that these events in that they happen right where the collaborators are but also we're connected online through our networks people feel part of a larger whole for people who are doing events in communities where climate change is not part of the discourse this was affirming to say that here's an individual out of college in Montana comes from a community that is impacted by climate change but doesn't have an outlet to talk about it climate change via action helps to amplify those conversations and also provides point of entry so breaking down this large topic and issue of climate change through the plays plays are so diverse in that they're from countries all over the world so there's really something for everyone to tap into to think okay I'm interested in evolution and where people come from so their Chantel's play Homosapiens touches on that topic under the climate change umbrella and also point of entry in that climate change theater action is a model that sets up resources and tools for people to use and build their own event like a choose your own adventure and also ultimately I think for me what is really amazing and inspiring coming from all these events that we've seen from the seven weeks of the action is the hope that is generated and the momentum so that yes the initiative coincides with conference of the parties that was huge in 2015 when the initiative was inaugural but now where we're at in 2017 looking into 2019 when the next action will happen how can we link the momentum that was sparked from one event in one place and have a hub to support a movie future conversation of civil action and community discussions that come from the communities that are going to be most affected by climate change sustainability which is also really important but not my expertise so I encourage you if you're interested in sustainability sort of behind the scene to look at organizations like Broadway, Green and My Hands which is doing excellent work Materials for the Arts in New York online you can find the Green Theatre Toolkit which was created by Maudelle Nautifant and Julie's Bicycle in the UK is also doing some really great work to green the arts center thank you also this Sprint of Marathons or Marathon of Sprints I guess the last deep dive such as it is I'd like to invite Julie from Penn to come and join me and we're going to spend a couple minutes talking about arts rights and Marathon when we spoke about when we're talking about this initially there we go we try to figure out because these are topics that have to do with the supporting systems for the arts just for theater but across the discipline and our initial thought was to kind of break it down into three different types of activism that we see and think about there's that work that you do which we call Keep Art in which is basically the idea of trying to find ways that supporting organizations like Penn or like Thomas Dock can do to try to keep the status quo make sure that the powers that be don't stop us from what we're doing all along then there's the notion of resisting from within pushing back against working within the system to make changes advocacy work Penn obviously does a lot of that kind of work in Thomas Dock as well working within the systems of power try to change it from inside and of course the last one which is what's been largely talked about today but that's the notion of resistance and protesting so as we think about the work that Penn does and the Thomas Dock does as well we're thinking about those three broad topics and we're also thinking about how they affect what goes on in the US but also how the knock-out effects of what we do in the US affects the rest of the world Do you want to jump in here? Thank you Thank you Jessica for inviting me and thank you for all this inspiring comments and ideas you have shared so far this morning so just to give you an idea in 2015 there were more than a thousand attacks on artists it doubled the number in 2015 so clearly art and artists are under attacks around the world the project I'm leading for Penn America is a global platform we have heard this work several times today a very collaborative platform to help and ensure that artists can live and can work everywhere without fear so keep art in is really at the core of this project is really to bring all the resources at the theater without water a big network where we provide one website all the resources for the artists what should I do I am in Burundi and I'm kicked out of my house the police is following me so we provide connection because projects name artists connection we are connected and we try as much as we can to connect artists who are in dire need with the organization that can support them so when we start planning this talk with Matt let's look at the US and the world and I have to tell you really honestly I started this project a year ago and really learned publicly three months ago I was not planning to work on US semester issue and it's um I had to say we were thinking that okay censorship exists in the US we have our problem but compared to other regime we were kind of not looking at domestic issue and I can see that you all notice how then America kind of sent the election to really like US advocacy and I mean we are keeping up my goals you know since like a year this year feel like 10 years and we can see the effect of this type of collaboration so what we seek to keep our thing is really to collaborate artists need a platform artists that just need to continue to create the all the descriptive voices we were talking about description and engaging and I think descriptive is their voice for the artist and why they are artists so continue with that your a number of years ago I was in conversation with some of the folks at the National Endowment for the Arts and they're really frustrated this is in the last regime they're really frustrated because they're putting a lot of money into artistic performances supporting presenters who are bringing artistic performances internationally tax ceremony going to this work and then of course homeland security making sure that those artists never actually entered the US the NEA thought this was kind of frustrating and we worked together to start a project called Thomas.veil which is a pro bono legal assistance hotline all of you should already know about this if you don't it's a hotline email and telephone where you can call if your artist needs an issue problem and get 24 hour legal assistance for free that's the thing that's out there we bring it up now not because it is something to talk about but it's a the confidence of in this case the legal community and the arts community which is the kind of thing that is the institutional support that I think as we gear toward increasingly activist artistic praxis figuring out how to create those coalitions with other professions where we need those kinds of institutional support which is really critical that's the other thing which was really important to me about this project is the fact that it's funded by the NEA which doesn't mean that much to people in the US maybe we either say well with their 40 bucks they've got to spend but I think outside the US it means a lot to people wait a minute the US government is helping people figure out how to get through this mess that the US government created because it creates the image that this isn't a monolithic horrible place there's actually a lot of complexity to what's going on here as I think it is also worth noting that this project that we are just looking at is funded by the Menon Foundation where we know that Menon has been a wonderful founder for large art institutions and we could see also a shift that we need to go on arts rights and protect artists making not only the presenter but the one who are making the work and I think the other thing that both of our organizations have been very involved with is the idea of advocacy within the system one thing that Thomas started working a lot with is again working within the legal community to evaluate and review all the laws that are impacting artists' views of issues and we've just published a 50 page paper which is staggeringly boring to read but it's a deep side it's a hard one it's a really detailed evaluation of where all the problems come in because people can't defeat it but there's actually a very specific 50 very specific administrative things that go wrong and this is something that can come out of the arts community because you're not going to know where they came from but it's something that again these collaboration companies can create in this case a platform of change which when we go to Homeland Security the State Department say we need to fix these things for the artists they yawn first and kind of wander away and this when we can fix these we don't need progress to do it we just do this administratively and again through these kinds of coalitions the advocacy that we're working on is actually starting to show some positive effects and I think the same can be said for people to see what they're going to do yeah I think Pen America as you all know lies in the intersection of literature and freedom of expression so Pen really seeks to activate the publishing world and the writers when we try to do the same activation with the art world which is not as easy as it could perhaps be one of the things that immediately I got into I would say the read sorry which is not that well to do is the immigration and I think we met immediately in January so it was January 27 last year we got a number of artists stuck on the border exhibition couldn't happen so we wrote an open letter we had an open letter with writers and artists we filed Anna Mekos last September really with other organizations that NTSC and many other to really kind of challenge the system within the system and there are a lot to do we are I think as I'm speaking releasing a statement about the books banned in prison we did statements about the once and more art there's like it's kind of a nonsense where we were living how we can protest we can challenge the system also in the international level I think it's worthwhile to think that the artist wants to create a community of artists you are a community you are being supportive of other artists who have been in danger you have to continue they need your support they need to know that you are one of the things we are we are creating is a toolkit for artists at risk to explain how to navigate the threat how to build the safety net and also of course even if it may seem like a bit naive I strongly believe still in international organizations and I think the only way to make a very big change on the ground with the policy makers UNESCO all those mechanisms they know that artistic freedom they know that we are there and loud and we can move borders we can move barriers we can build broke walls that's our challenge I think in the interest of time I was going to talk a bit about some of the activists protesting the events that we've been involved in and you've been involved in I think there's been a lot of talk about today some amazing projects that are that are voicing dissent and I don't think I need to be able to get mine I would just say one one thing about that that we want you to you know I'm sorry it's the art action day so I don't know if you're aware but we fed the federation which is a group formed by and many other artists to really respond to what happened last year after the election one of the things I don't know if you remember the art world and the art community have been you know has to close the door right after our inauguration and I think it was a terrible idea and a lot of people had the same thought and so this Saturday, Sunday all over the city look at the federation website they are events all over the city and all over the country to show that our dynamism our energy our protest we are doing reading in front of the library the public library on 42 so please come to join us at 5.30 and we will have an amazing lineup of readers to protest sprint through all of this a lot of amazing ideas a lot of really inspiring I'd like to invite Brent back to the stage to talk a little bit about the question of what happens next then the lawn awaited for open discussion what happened where you can actually start talking so that will be it again, thank you all for coming, thank you for Matthew also for preparing so well for the conference and groups that just spoke we'll have a great session I'm soon I still would like to acknowledge Roberto Livitor who collaborated earlier before and in the spirit of Ty Jones I would like to acknowledge the Lenape people of Conmusland and we pay respect to the Lenape people and ancestors past, present and futures then again I'm just trying to understand that our lecture on this day is really very important to us it is an important moment that we all experience and the big question is then what do we do we do live in very dangerous times all of us who are in the theater will have to do something and we have to do that now everyone all of us here in the room and outside we have to do our city beauty next generation will ask us what do you do what did you do and I'm from Germany and I think you know I have some idea what I'm talking about is this a really, it is a moment the favorite fashion industry journalists and sport communities are already speaking out loudly but what should we the theater people do and really what would work and what would make a real difference all of us in the theater I feel already do more than the fair share to speak the truth fight for social justice for fairness and for less suffering in the world it often feels that other voices are drowned and warped by cable TV internet and Twitter today we heard so many great encouraging voices especially from around the world and this is also why I think it's a great idea for theater people to look at voices from around the world so we learn from them and not just try to teach people help them to develop their work it's actually a time where we have to look at what works for that people done and also in this country as I said for hundreds and over years and now we need to learn they are great examples and really I think we do have a two act if one day we are on trial Haenem Volavan said that we can say we tried something and we can plead not guilty but we really, really, really have to try something into that theater is changing and it was Gertrude Brecht who said that new times need new forms of theater in Greek theaters the tragedy suggested that the gods have our lives in their hands and that fate is determined and cannot be changed Shakespeare in playwrights of the Enlightenment showed that us humans that we can and should think and act for ourselves that we can defy gods and kings and that humans can take face in their hands and we have great belief that showing audience as epic stories, plays and ideas with realism on stage could help to change the minds of the audience so finally people act as enlightened citizens of the world but until now perhaps this is a shift and I think this is something what we can do perhaps now until now theater was in the hand of the exports the New York Art and Guard here in this very town we were the very very first to point out that perhaps there is no more center or shouldn't be no more center there is a freedom of movement and the liberation from authority of voices the great New York art movement of the Judson Church people like John Cage believe that everyone is and can be an artist and now I think we do live in a time where theater artists have to take a step back in Saviyama I think also mentioned that perhaps artists should no longer be as masters in control theater artists I think and we think at the CETO should be creators of experiences, atmospheres and encounters in their socially engaged art and in this time that we also socially engage in politics again it's time for theater I think to engage again in politics and to take a step and it's time to make sense and help the people who understand the world in a definite meaning so we know where we come from where we are companies like Romani Protocol actually put audiences in the very very center of their work something new that comes up in the history of theater and I think it's something reflects the time and something new and something important it is no longer the total vision of the actor the playwright or the director it's normally and the audiences are passive spectators and the same should be and that's why theater has always reflected society and change like we should not be passive as audience members we should also know we should put audience members in the center of this and encourage them to participate you do ask you know what does it have to do to ask how can we do that it all sounds like good ideas but how can that form of theater help to change the countries and here some thoughts from the Segal Center where we think that could work and we really do need to ask audiences to no longer just consume but to be participation participatory to participate in the democracy this is part of their civic duty but we in this theater in the way we produce work and present work or we do have to reflect that we also have I feel also to change we maybe have to become more cultural producers and we suggest perhaps as a very practical suggestion to join movements like in France where every week on every Thursday between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. people meet in public spaces people bring their own drinks and food and they talk with friends and strangers they listen to music and this is something very simple but it is very very powerful and we could declare that's gathering those performances and they need to of course to be investigated however small they are and this is something where people talk to each other and people actually decide what they want to talk about it's not the artists who told them what to do I do think this would make a real difference and we have seen with the Occupy Movement what happened and people get together I don't advocate for that but I think in places like this there is a central part we should get together and talk and invite people in New York I think it should be a national movement it should be everywhere and every town and every state and it can remedy protocol invented something ingenious I think as leader artists they created a project called 100% and they ask 100 people by race, gender, ethnicity to represent the town they live in so people actually see who lives in the town and they only get asked the very first participant and they ask the first person to get the second person the second person, the third and so on and it was not in control but it is something that went on its own and I think we could do that too and I think right here in this room or people who live streamed we get one representative from each state they could find one representative from each city in each city they could find someone in a borough and someone in the neighborhood and they say yeah let's get together and every Thursday we start and have talks in public spaces that belong to us the people and for the people of this country so it is a form of public theater very simple theater and not something we trained for and didn't do any training in our theater schools but I think we have perhaps to get back to basics and as we saw in one of the videos earlier in Africa I think was where they sit together in the circle and perform in front of each other on the law maybe it is something we have to do again to restart our influence I think there should be then coming out of this cultural project in all neighborhoods and these cultural producers if we identify people or people join they can produce events in public spaces in parks and living rooms in parking lots or wherever there could be screenings, readings, play readings performances followed by discussion done by these cultural producers themes could be diversity, climate change social justice, freedom to write education, sexual harassment and so on and a group of people maybe ask here in the room or theaters or photos or changing could give out for each month or week a suggestion what should be done and many existing local movements could find I think a place and a voice under this national umbrella and can also be inspired and as Lamama said maybe culture there could be life strength and people could see what someone does in the same time zone or before or later I don't know anything but I think it is one of the things that could really make a difference the third thing is really it sounds also simple but it is getting out the vote I think these cultural producers or people our audience is to vote and ask everyone bring one more person to vote someone who doesn't vote or doesn't really care we learn the hard way what happened right now is after all participation I think we have to work as theater artists perhaps a little bit less as Savyana said about our plays and our lighting and our play structures and experiments but I think it's a time when we have to think about this so we really say if such meetings happen vote and get one more person and it's simple simple simple numbers if everybody will find one more person to vote no spin room in the co-prouders money they will not match that because it's something real and it's participation and we as a theater community perhaps are the only community that could make something like this happen believably and that it's unorganized in a ground level in a way that is not with an authoritative voice or someone who is perhaps a whole agenda behind and everybody who cannot vote like me a foreigner I'm a German who went to prison and did the time and cannot vote these people we say find someone who votes for you and I think this will be a very big contribution it's a very simple one I have no idea what I should do I'm overwhelmed to say get one person you vote and get one more person to vote for you but I feel very strongly we as theater artists of a new millennium we have to to create such a public discourse first in public spaces in parks parking lots and in the living rooms we have to see people not just as voters or someone to talk to we have to see them as emancipated spectators not passive audiences and I think that will help or understand that also they might be active participants in what we call democracy and nothing else does work we have known that in the history of time dictatorships monarchies our military rules are devastating and the only thing that does work imagining as a democracy and we have to fight for it to our surprise as a friend said we really really have to lastly we would like to suggest a demonstration on Mother's Day in every city in New York in America maybe we could start in New York perhaps the women who created the Martian Washington could come and help us to organize and vote here in the city but I do know people who can enjoy and I would like to ask Peter Schumann from the Bretton Puppet Theater to create a manual online how to create a study of what is a large puppet and we watch behind it these books and rooms to clean up and to learn and to show and we are here the streets belong to us and it's time for a change and the vision of the study of liberty a woman an immigrant poem that comes with it is the mythical image should not be given up even so it has been called for by I think the Trump administration to remove it we will take that poem series and anybody who participates in these demonstrations in case we get the time we can say please do vote get one more person to vote and this is a change that they can do we do live I think in very dangerous times and the last time so many people were on the streets and the president got elected was when Abraham Lincoln was elected and like in his case America was drifting apart and he did not accept a divided country he asked volunteers to fight and these I think Lincoln's words he said I appeal to all local citizens for favor and to favor facilitate and to aid efforts to maintain the honor the integrity and the existence of our national union and the perpetuity of popular government and to redress wrongs already long enough and do it hundreds of thousands of people as we all know left their jobs their day jobs and signed up to fight for just in united America I mean we are not Abraham Lincoln and we are not in a civil war we are not asking you to give up our artists the day jobs for others enjoying violent fight on the contrary I think for other people we are on the side of life and peace but in the moment I feel this country we got the sense today it is a moment of clear and present danger and I believe we could sign up a large a network and perhaps we could start here in New York to see if the idea works and this meeting is a gathering in the public space where we just exchange ideas to create public discourse and public spaces, public programs and neighborhoods in every little town across America to organize a march and demonstration on Mother's Day that could be some things we could do or other ideas and it might not work out but again we are on trial one day in the sense of Kafka we can say we are not guilty we tried something and we did it seriously and we didn't have to put our lives on the line as people did with Abraham Lincoln called for them to to help the country and I think we all in the theater have to change our work if what we do would be working most probably wouldn't be in this situation so something also what we do doesn't reach our audiences we also have to change we are new times and we need new times they do need new theaters and everything else can exist parallel like in museums where we have parents of centuries next to each other we now have to perhaps really listen to something you and I would like you all to join us or talk to us if they are thunderous we think that's a good idea let us know I really do think to the time to act now in case this might help also to change your election I hope also politicians will look at the role part plays and if we don't do it who else will really do that it's a real question who else is out there who has the time the interest and also the love for the country and for the ideas of the enlightenment and the liberty I think it is artists have always been artists of the centuries and I think that's why I think this meeting is so important we have to find a way to do something thank you all okay now you get to talk Tracy Irwin make sure the lights on okay so we now have some time and Matthew you'll keep me on track of when we need to to end yes Matthew you're here and we're running a little behind but I'm hoping we can stay as long as we can to have this conversations to me this is the most important part of the day as soon as we finish this conversation you're going to be guided to lunch and you will be able to have more community conversations amongst you at different tables so what I want to do is just briefly reflect on what we've heard today we've heard a lot so I'm going to just remember the first section and then ask you to just shout out reflections about it but because of how around and live streaming we need to run mics to you so anything that you have to say about this section just so we remember it we had the artist rise up movement in New York in LA Isaña Fago from Cameroon Deanna Milosevic from Serbia we had yes theater we had Katie Rubin from theater of the oppressed New York we had arts rights and we have Jonathan Skriti arts rights justice combatants for peace Jonathan met and his at the fence Iman Aoun from Ashtar theater in Gaza Megan Gomez from the working class Mia from La Mama and Derek Goldman from the lab for global performance in politics so just from that section where we were tossing videos up and having these very brief and intense presentations does anybody have any reflections or thoughts or reactions to that what I'm going to do is go through each section have some reflections and then open it up to a general conversation with a question to you but I just want to kind of stir our memories of yes can you can you just speak in a way could we not be so directed and just have people speak and ask what they what's on their minds it's a little too much talking from the front okay I just wanted to to see if to shape the conversation in terms of remembering what we talked about so if people would rather not do that then I'm going to just remember remind us because we've had so much and that was my impulse was just to hear things from people about that we then had the artist conversation and the presentations on diversity climate and arts rights mobility and then I was also asked to direct a conversation I don't need to be woman-splaining but I was asked to direct this into a focus conversation so the conversation then if we don't want to reflect on those specific sections then let's really look at what Frank said too you can talk about whatever you want but one of those questions that we really want to look at is what are you thinking what are you thinking what do you want to do so we have someone in the back there Hi I'm Annie Himberger from Engarde Arts and Jessica and I were on the streets in the 70s with Anne Boebert I've known her a very long time being a performance artist outside it's amazing how things come around but I produced a show called Bass Track Live about the impact of war on the military and their families we went to 40 cities around the country I think there's like the Martin Luther King point of view and there's the Malcolm X point of view I'm somebody who believes in bringing people together to encourage different philosophies and points of view to really look at the humanity that binds us all we're now going to Fort Hood Military Base in Kalia, Texas with this show and all of the nature is so wonderful but I think theater is not even on the radar of so many people and the veteran who was at the center of the show when he came and saw the show he said I didn't even know what you were talking about I thought you were making a film and so I think that there's another even larger conversation which is that before we can even encourage people to listen to us, theaters and the consciousness of so many people especially in other parts of the country and the world so January 29th we're going to Fort Hood in Kalia, Texas to literally perform for the military because it's about the fact that the military can't reach active duty servicemen and women who are suffering from PTSD and then blow their brains out and so they're looking to the arts to affect change which could affect all of us as they're going to do six months of research before these performances and after these performances to judge the advocacy of the arts for social change and that could really affect us all so I'm all for taking buses, taking cars and getting out there to really be up front and in the same room with people who already agree with us. Thank you Annie. Annie's been a great producer of site specific theater so this is taking site specific theater to the next level so thank you for doing that. Anyone else want to share what your big ass idea is or anything else that you want to say? Well I don't know if it's a big ass idea but I'll share it. My name is Mara Sanchez and I've worked both in corporate and I'm an artist and I write and I do any kind of thing that I can. A lot of it has been in activism but there's a resource that I was thinking about and that is that corporate America has a hell of a lot of money and I've sort of warmed my way in there to teach theater as communication you know getting the executives to talk real talk instead of this corporate ease crap that's going on and the reason why I'm bringing that up is because corporations run what we see, what we buy how we think about television and all that and all this behind the scenes censorship so I think it's an area if we go into the HR and approach it as workshops to humanize the language that goes on in corporations it's a way of us going in there and also start tapping into you know they're not thinking that we're so dangerous because as actors we are dangerous we have a voice so there's money there to be used if we go in there with the right proposals and I'm not saying to manipulate but yes manipulate okay the workshop so that there's more of a human voice going on not only corporate America but in the world in itself and that would affect change into what we see and at least have a finger into those billions of dollars that are going into the brainwashing that's going into what we see and experience not only us but especially the young kids that are so mesmerized and ADDed by all this texting and stuff I mean come on you could look around the world and see that we don't have conversations you could be sitting right here and say hey how you doing and then the next person is answering back or you're sitting in a restaurant there's a couple there texting each other we have a place in the world and we have to use our voices okay and the way to get in is I think we've got to get back into corporate America there's the money beautiful there's a big ass idea anyone else want to share what you're up to and what you're doing yeah I love sharing I'm Love Shaw I'm the actor and drama therapist director of Caribbean America good to hear me okay Caribbean America director we recently were working on a project with actors in South Africa and the problem we faced was while we were able to do the show there we couldn't fully do the show here because of the visa situation so I'm trying to find what kind of resources are being made available that you know globally we could tap into the civil look you know actors need to move around and to prevent the US government from you know holding up visas I guess some of your panelists could respond to that thank you this is great and I just want to say whoever wants to speak next is thinking about what you want to say I think the important thing is to connect with each other so when we go upstairs for lunch please get the numbers and emails for the people that have spoken if you want to build on this idea of corporate work or the wonderful work that Dan was talking about or the work that we just heard about someone else have a yes right here Dan Hi I'm Dan Friedman artistic director of the Castillo Theater I just want to build on what Frank was saying and also the women who talked about working in corporate America because I think we are at a point in the history of the world in the history of theater where we need to break out of the institutional constraints of the theater and bring performance more and more into daily life and it's happening all over the world and so the kind of thing that we are talking about Frank I am a co-container of a conference that happens every two years called Performing the World and it's happening this September and it brings people who are using performance as a way of building community of trying out political and social ideas of healing from literally the last the last time we did it in 2016 there were 400 people from 32 countries and 20 states and they were not mostly they were not theater people they were community organizers they were medical doctors they were therapists they were organizational consultants people who are using performance to give people a chance to try something new and break out of the box so I just want to invite you all to come to that and also let you know that we are not organizing this this kind of movement out of just doing plays to bring in performance as a tool for social change is happening all over what is the date also can you tell us the dates of it I can and I have some flyers for lunch it's called Performing the World and it's September 21st and 23rd and it's here in New York we hold the actual conference at our Performing Arts Center on 42nd Street between 10th and 11th it's a lot of fun thank you Will I just wanted to help connect us to our past and to get us to act and we'll be forward this is the International Center it was two large numbers and it was the president in 1973 in the middle of the Cold War he says isn't it therefore a cowardly and defeatist attitude in times of political tension and indeed a danger in the world to say we can't change anything now we must wait until better times come to me our obvious position must be my god we are in danger what can we do to reinforce our network and create a people who want to construct and not destroy then Philip Arnold from Baltimore some of you may know me people say not for profits like theater the trust or mutual understanding or the international theater or any of your organizations are the soft diplomacy but I don't agree I think we are core diplomacy if you can get people in a room together they change and that is horrible thanks a little that's great and yeah we both shout out to so many people who aren't here with us today we have one here then we have one back there as well so maybe Tracy can give him so first we'll go here hi Nancy Cohen I'm a writer and filmmaker and this is a great opportunity for me to exploit you Frank because I try to exploit myself and I'm not very good at it every year or so I try an old film I made on Abbey Hoffman and this year I did it again right after the election and then Art Gallery I lived the way in Art Gallery and we set it up almost as if there were a campaign and it was there that I launched Gentle Thursday with a sign up list and everybody loved the film everybody said they were going to get involved with me but they didn't contact me Gentle Thursday was started by a broadcasting group when I went to college it was a day chosen once a month where everybody would sit on the lawn of course there was a lot of pot so there was a lot of fun but they would talk to each other and share ideas and when I went back to Pennsylvania the same program had gone on for years after maybe 20 so keeping with this idea to set it up virally and internationally and globally so that people are it's like MLK day it's just in your head there can be art, there can be so many things but it needs an organization behind it I'm not that person it's a good idea if you could help or anybody here could help we'd all be grateful another big ass idea upstairs I'm an actor when they let me and a press agent when they don't which means I'm a press agent all the time these days I love all the discussion about bringing theater into new forms and new times to man, new kinds of theater and the drift is more into ensemble creation but if we only put our energies into that we will abandon a big chunk of theater that's more traditional storytelling nevertheless we have a creative problem because topics like sustainability and interconnectedness are very difficult to put in a play so I want to appeal to everybody let's give our attention to having elevating the art of playwriting through whatever we can do in our training programs in our festivals help people approach these difficult topics with the conventional play and I was making notes here and I thought I have a client that does festivals and they could set up a festival it's all right one ass about sustainability and we could see what comes out of course we have to fish for the techniques but we should start fishing in that direction yeah it's great and climate change theater action did that one right there and I think that also again upstairs is a great place to make these connections to build these ongoing actions I also I just want to quickly give thanks to Karadad's fit she's not here today but I think sort of was one of the pioneers of the idea of theater action theatrical production that also accompanies political action and she's done some wonderful things including after Orlando and some various works that are specific to action so I think that's that's a really great idea so back there and then right here yeah so here and then hi my name is Neha and I like everything about this event I was telling me I was telling how much I love all the storytelling and everything and everything you guys think was amazing inspiring and a gentleman out there from Germany it was very inspiring that we can tell our friends and we can discuss about ideas, new plays and that's what make us fall in love with it is the storytelling is so big there's so many people and there's so many stories to tell and if you don't know what's going to do it so just jump and do it so thank you for this event thank you so much over here we've got one back there and one here yes go ahead is this working? it is my name is Dan Kench for the last 20 years I've been creating one person shows on subjects of troublemakers and how to change the world I'm currently touring a play called how to stop the empire while keeping your day job what I've been doing is taking them to fringe festivals but I think people here who are activists who consider themselves playwrights should seriously consider writing one person shows that can be done in a church basement and if you need help with that it's easy to find on the web thank you so we have someone right here Emily, can you give and then we have one right back there can you raise your hand, thank you my name is Arlene Geiger I'm the coordinator of the Upper West Side Move On Indivisible Action Group we've been doing a lot of a lot of actions not demonstrations that too but that's not the most important thing it's really phone calling letter writing and the reason I took the microphone again is street theater in the past engaged in a number of different street theater productions and I think we really need to bring that back and we need to do it in a way where we go to the purple districts we don't disrupt and antagonize but we explore everyone's take on particular topics and we do it in a loving way and using puppets, street theater, bold the kind of stuff that street theater utilizes but I think we have to get out and do that not just do productions where we're all talking to the same people and getting it all more riled up because right now that's the last thing we need thank you and back there, yes I have no affiliation with the theater besides being a pretty faithful audience member as I am here today a big ass idea pressure Norway to issue dual citizenship to DACA and to Haitians and to El Salvadoris you can do this with your international groups and do it in all kinds of ways let them include where we don't wonderful we've got 10 minutes left pardon me hello I'm very happy that I found time to come here it's wonderful listening to everybody listening to the director of the seagull center that's very inspiring my name is Alicia Kaplan I'm the founder and producing artistic director of the Misarte we have been doing for the past 20 years playwriting and productions and theatrical festivals in East Hartle I am also honored to have been in the productions of the Puerto Rican traveling theater which did street theater under media Colombia it's a wonderful experience to be going to the community and in this case we went to the poor communities who opened their arms I think it would be wonderful to bring that back Miriam is no longer with us the Puerto Rican traveling theater has gotten together with Pregones they have a different thing they're doing and I look forward to lunch not just for eating but but to be able to coordinate to see if I can find people that we could work with because Studies Arte is right now on hiatus because we weren't able to achieve any funding to continue with our program but thank you so much thank you thank you so much we have someone down here I'm Claire Partridge and I'm a junior in high school so it's little intimidating to be talking in front of you all but I started taking theater in school last year and I really enjoyed I love improv and I would say one thing that kind of got me into it was in ninth grade in an English class we had to we had an assignment or working in groups of four and we were taking a news article and making a play out of it and I really loved that activity and kind of my dream is to have theater be introduced into more schools like elementary middle high school and I would just love to see that and get kids involved and like knock into their creativity and just I think it would really be awesome to see that growing over schools I feel really fortunate to have a theater program in my school I know it's it's really nice and like not every school has it but I would love to see more schools getting it and even just like put into the regular curriculum like how I did the project of my English class it would just be great to see let's yeah in regards to taking into the streets and in regards to breaking out of the institutions of theater I would encourage people I know that this is happening a lot but certainly to a certain extent the internet is the streets if you're a theater company you don't have a YouTube channel if you're not thinking about podcasts you're not reaching a lot of people that are out there certainly anybody under the age of 25 and there's an enormous amount of potential to that also don't be afraid to cross into other fields a lot more people go to clubs go to dance clubs and rock concerts than they go to theater and you can infiltrate that there's a lot to be done with comedy that can go at Brooklyn Bowl you can reach really big audiences that way and that's another way to sort of fifth column this so it's just a problem okay we have just time for a couple we have one there and one there and then I promise that when we go upstairs and we're gonna have lead you upstairs we're gonna have time for a lot more discussion and soup Hi my name is Eliana this is people talking about crossing different fields I'm a music composition and audio engineering student interested in going into film school and audio poster direction but I also have an interest in theater and all of a sudden made me think about how we can bring resistance not only to plays but also to the musical audience to put theater and combine music that resists certain things in kind of society with plays that resists certain things in our society so I just wanted to throw that out with that it's made me think today Thank you Is this on? Yes it is My name is Aigrit I'm a French actor I moved here three years ago and in the wake of the recent election I got really inspired to just reach out to the community of actors that I usually around which is immigrant actors and then Meryl Streep Golden Globe speech happened and she had that phrase that really resonated with me which was what is Hollywood anyway just a bunch of people from different places and it actually became the motto of my podcast which is called Aksiders where I interview immigrant actors based in New York international actors coming from all over the globe Egypt, Ukraine, Lebanon Italy, Japan people who have incredible storytelling as well to share with the world stories about dedication struggle, determination dreams, hopes, what America represents for them and why they decided to come here in spite of everything visa and all the things and so my thing now is to move this to a bigger platform I've been looking for more funding the response has been incredible I'm doing this on my own but people are reaching out it's been incredibly rewarding on a personal human level and now I'd like to move on to international directors young immigrant directors so if any of you Well thank you so much I've actually heard your podcast it's fabulous and we'll talk more about this upstairs I'd actually like to invite Martha Redbone back up here to kind of close us out and as she's coming up we're going to sing together a little bit and then Erwin's going to help us transition to the next phase which is lunch which will have no leadership so he's not talked at anymore but I just wanted to acknowledge my colleagues Matthew Matthew Frank I wanted to acknowledge this team Roberta and Frank had this conversation about doing this and Roberta sent the word out to everyone and Frank I mean Matthew and David and I said yeah we'll do it and so we've been working very very hard to inviting all these wonderful people and I'm really so so grateful that it happened and that you're all here so thank you so much for making this big ass idea of reality so we're going to sing and we're going to share our cheat sheets we're going to sing a song that was written by Dr. Bernice Johnson-Reagan the founder of Sweden and Iraq and so we all are going to sing this chorus together okay so you can repeat after me and then go through like a practice run we who believe in freedom can okay so now we're going to put it all together we who okay so now we're going to have a rhythm right we're going to lead you upstairs and explain lunch I'm sorry to cross the lobby for you guys