 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. My name is Vicki Storich and I'm president of literary managers and dramaturgs in the area. I'm here to welcome you to this keynote event, Speaking of Change, at LMD's 28th annual conference. Now this year, we've invited the members of the general public to join us, to join our delegates here at the keynote event. So we want to welcome everyone who doesn't currently have a lanyard on, and let you know the lanyard people are very kind. And they're happy to talk to you about dramaturgy. All you need to do is ask. We also want to welcome everyone watching at home. We are live streaming this as part of HowlRound. So we wish you all could be with us, but we're glad you're watching at home. I hope you're having a great party watching the keynote. LMDA of course hosts many great regional events and an annual conference in different spots around North America. So if you're interested in finding out more about what LMDA does, check out LMDA.org. We're here in Vancouver, which is a very special city here in Canada, not only for its stunning beauty, but also the strong connection between this area and its many First Nations people. I'm honoured to welcome Deborah Sparrow, who's here to welcome us on behalf of the Musqueam Nation. Deborah? It's an opportunity to thank the host for doing the right thing in the protocol. And we know how important protocol is in the jobs that we do. And many times throughout the history of Vancouver, we have been not so obliging to remember what protocol is in our city. So we would really like to thank them for asking Musqueam First Nations to come and welcome you to our beautiful, beautiful and seated territory. On behalf of my chief, Wayne Sparrow, my council members and my community, but mostly on behalf, as I always love to remind us, my ancestors, I would like to welcome you all here to this working discussion that you will have in the next few days. And a lot of energy in the room as I felt you all move in tonight. And it makes me stop and wonder myself, what other energies in this room? The energies we forget about, and maybe people in your positions, don't forget about that when you're busy doing the work things that you do. As artists and creative people, that is something that we're responsible for. We're responsible for the histories and the stories we tell and how we act them out. And that's one thing that I've always honored about my people is that they have never forgotten who they are. They've never forgotten where they're going. My grandfather lived to be 100 years old and he had quite a sense of humor. He was a storyteller and he used to drive me throughout the city time and time again in the last years of his life and show me where all the important places were, not that every poor place is important, but just those landmarks that I can still take, drives on and show my children and my brown children as I do. And certainly people like yourselves in the future if we can convince the city that there are other things to do in the city other than the ones that are today. And that is to be inclusive of making some of those sites available to all people when they visit our great land because that's why we visit a land. I'd like to welcome you from wherever you came from and know that one day we may come to your city and want to know more about you. And so those are the things that are important, I think, when we are asked to come forward so that you know that this place is a very ancient land. Today, this weekend, we celebrate a great day. I've always been too worried about whether I celebrate or not and mostly I don't because I like to celebrate the 9,000 or 10,000 years I've been here. But I guess we have Aboriginal Day and it's a day of celebration for us as Aboriginals, but I've noticed that when we have most of our celebrations, it's ourselves there. So we're going to welcome all of you and get the word out to when we have National Aboriginal Day in the city, that it's for all of us to come and learn and be educated and share. And I think that's the important word. You know, someone mentioned to me tonight that much of your discussion will be about change. Wow. I want to share a really nice saying with you that I've heard on PBS. My favorite show. When we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change. So that's what's important. It's really not, you know, the way other people perceive us, but it's how we change the way we look at a situation or the bigger picture. So I always like to look at the bigger picture and as a lever and an artist, I figure out how we come to the place on that large picture or in that large textile. So with that said, I would like to again welcome all of you here to Muskin Territory. If you were, if a Squamish was standing here, they'd say a Squamish Territory. If a Slay-a-tooth was standing here, they'd say Slay-a-tooth Territory. So it happens to be Muskin tonight and we really do think, we really do think and believe that this is our territory. So, you know, that's yet to be negotiated over our boundary situations. So in the day there was no boundaries, you know. So now we are learning how to change that and how to change the way we look at things. So with that said, again, I'd like to welcome all of you and hold my hands up to you and behalf of my ancestors and remember that yours are with you today inspiring you. Oh, thank you. Proceedings and invite our hosts, Derek and Pedro up here. There's a few thank yous I want to say. I want to start by thanking our local team to put this whole thing together with LMDA and will be hosting us, making us feel welcome, making everything run smoothly for the next few days. Anyone who's run a conference knows that it's no small feat and the volunteer hours that these folks have put in represent a lot of time, imagination, energy and faith. So I'd like to thank our conference chair, Heidi Taylor and her team. Yeah, let's give it up for them. Rachel Dider is here tonight. Joanna Garfin called David Geary, Didi Kugler, Marvin Kench, Giovanni C, Fenina Wolbert of Biseau and Richard Wolfe, many of whom are in the room today. Let's give them all a round of applause for our conference staff. Anne Sophie Wolnault, Chantelle Vogue and Christina Andriola and thank you to our videographer, Michael Cider, ladies and gentlemen, let's give them a round of applause. It wouldn't be possible without the very generous support of several organizations. I would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts, the City of Vancouver, Playwrights Theatre Centre and Simon Fraser University School for Contemporary Arts and the Faculty of Communications, Art and Technology. All of these organizations contributed funds and in the case of SFU, space for this conference. So I'd like us to take a moment to give them a round of applause. Right up here to get us started, I'd like to invite Owen Underhill, who's the director for the School of Contemporary Arts, to welcome us on behalf of SFU. Owen, come on up. Simon Fraser University, we're delighted that you came here to Vancouver and actually it's the second time that you've come to Vancouver because 11 years ago the LMDA conference was up at SFU on Burgundy and now for three years we've been in this new facility here and it's a real privilege to be in this new building and we are looking forward to becoming a neighbor in this community and working together. We're doing a lot of community engagement and working with a lot of groups and it's been really very good for the School for the Contemporary Arts to be moved downtown here. I would say that dramaturgy is an integral and fundamental part of the research profile of the School for the Contemporary Arts, especially thanks to D.D. Cootler, who has one of my colleagues. In interdisciplinary schools such as ours, dramaturgy is really a fundamental connecting link and it's also been a privilege to host some other workshops involving some of the members here and we hope to do more of that in the future. So finally I hope you have a terrific three or four days here and I'm looking forward to this evening's event. So thank you. Hello, welcome to LMDA's 2013 keynote event, Speaking of Change. We are your hosts tonight. This is Pedro Sravalli. And this is Derek Chang. We are both alumni of the SFU Theater Program back when we were in Burnaby. After graduating in 2010, we formed Horizon Beans Theater. He's the Rice. He's the Beans. And we've been writing, directing, and producing our own work ever since. Well, how we came across dramaturgy was back in 2008 when we first told D.D. Cootler's dramaturgy class. But I think Derek, you could say it started earlier from the first time he has signed us a breakdown. 2005. 2006. Yes, how many did you do? Oh, probably more than 20. Yup. Nice. Speaking of Change brings together five compelling leaders to share short, personal, true stories on a revelatory transformation or adaptation to change in their lives and work. But a major revelatory transformation for Derek and myself started way back in the day when two of us left our homes. Hong Kong. And Chetland. Where? North. We left our families and our friends behind and we dove headfirst into the world of theater. Well, and then about ourselves, let me introduce you to our first speaker of the night, Tara Began. Tara is a Ilacaba and Irish-Canadian playwright. She is currently the artistic director at Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto where they are dedicated to the creating, developing and producing a professional artistic expression of the original experience in Canada. Her debut play, Thy Neighbor's Wife Won a Dora in 2005 and she has since written 19 other works. Tara will be directing Drury and Izzy at WCT, Gateway Persephone N as NTC. Next season she will be directing Native Earth's featured production of the much-acclaimed Colchana, which she and the original creative team created. The work will reveal in the community of Colchana itself, touring the West before returning to the Aki Studio Theater and Brutus Panamericanas. Let's welcome Tara. Bonjour. Anyone else out there? Laura. Hello. Thank you so much for being here. I also would like to thank the first peoples of this beautiful, beautiful area of the Coast Salish, just in particular the Muscovy. That's what we're doing today. And thanks also to Heidi and everyone involved with the L&D for this invitation. It's a real gift when you're asked to assemble your thoughts and present them to people. You have to comb through so many different threads and so many channels of thought and energy and hope and fears and love and dreams and kind of hone it down. And I always feel very blessed when I'm kind of forced to do that. It's terrifying, but it's a real gift. As our lovely host mentioned, I'm Nakavnoch. That nation is actually situated here in British Columbia and the interior. The map behind you, of course, this is from a government site, so of course anything kind of government to get with a grain of salt, but as much as Debra Sparrow mentioned, borders are, you know, they're sort of arbitrary. They need to be drawn now for various reasons. So this is the outline. This is where we are. You can't quite exactly see, well, they have an outline, the place where my people are from. Does anybody know where Merritt is? Yeah, I've got it. So we're just south of Merritt. But really, then Nakavnoch are from we've ranged all the way down into Washington state. And of course, as many of you know, those of you who know anything about First Nations, a lot of the really larger, really strong nations of which they really aren't really spanned into what is now the United States of America. That being no accident in my opinion, because it's a divisive methodology that keeps us from being quite as unified as we could be. Hopefully that continues to change the more we, our elders and our artists question this idea of borders. The first time we came to Vancouver, I was like, I was 15, we've been a little bit younger than that. It was really, really beautiful. And I bought a postcard and I told my dad I was going to live here when I was in my 20s. Out of my 20s, I have not yet lived here. But it's interesting to look back and see what's my relationship to the city, what's my relationship to the downtown core. I certainly have peers and colleagues who've written about East Hastings and the whole downtown east side. Incredibly beautiful and heart-rending works that are situated there. One of the first shows that I saw made of Earth performing its produce was directed by the beautiful intelligent Yvette Nolan. He's like, crouching down and up there right now. She directed Marie Clement's The Unnatural National Women and it was really a moving thing for me to see a British Columbian story right in downtown Toronto where I still didn't really feel at home and to feel a connection to those stories and to see women from all these different nations in this piece. So, that kind of sums up to how I got here but my question becomes how did I get here? So this is about change and I feel it's always important to look at where you've come from, where you thought you were going to go and how you ended up, where you ended up. I don't entirely know but I'm going to take a few guesses at it right now. So here we are, beautiful Turtle Island, massive chunk of land and somehow I'm going to take a few numbers from where my mother was born. Which I don't. I mean I can account for it in that I considered Toronto the theatre centre and because Native Earth was there that's where I went to practice, basically. It was very fortunate for me that I did happen to arrive at Native Earth at a time when I was received with open arms but I'm getting ahead of myself. So the Babenok are from Cold Water as I mentioned. This is a little view of the village. It's quite small. There's population fluctuates around 500 and we used to spend every summer there as kids that was our summer holiday destination and I didn't consider it at all unusual that I was spending summers on an Indian reserve and when you're a child you think the world is only a certain way so I assumed everyone went to a very similar place. Even in Disneyland I figured well it's probably very much like this. I still don't know, haven't gotten to do it there yet. When I first learned about being an Indian, which is how my family talks about it, it was fascinating because it's like you've always been this thing that you've never really known to acknowledge and you don't really know where to situate it but I do recall at the age of about 9 starting to think about how it is actually different. This is not a normal thing and not everybody goes to the reserve and hangs out with big massive cousins and we all call each other cousins because somewhere in the land we're probably related to each other. When I was taught that I was an Indian I said well what kind are we and my mom very often when I ask her about her own personal history she gets uncomfortable and often says why would you want to know that and initially not yet knowing about why she wouldn't want to tell me about it it would upset me because I wanted to know where I'd come from and we'd want to know what her childhood is like, I'd want to know what my great aunties had been through so initially she told me we're Thompson Indians so then I realized that common Innsville, Alberta we had a mall called the David Thompson Center and I'm like hmm could that be the same guy if friggin was there's this river and then a whole people is named after this explorer who discovered as we all know this story from this blah blah blah so a short while later in my later teens I was talking to my cousin Sharon who is a fantastic leader among the whole bunch of people and asked her like hey blah blah Thompson Indians she was like whoa she kind of slumped me down there and so she tried to teach me the word but she might still kind of chuckle at it she heard me try to pronounce it my tongue kind of stumbles on it because I didn't grow up hearing these sounds so how did we do this history many of you know this already but the reason my mom felt so defensive imparting an acknowledge to me is because it was taken from her right when it just started to settle in so my mom was kind of lucky in that she went to residential school when she was six her mom managed to somehow keep her home a little bit longer I guess it's because she actually has an autumn birthday so she started grade one at six my mom was sent with her brother the story we all know she was on the back of a cattle truck and it was driven it's now about an hour away back then the uncle Kahala two hour drive my mom's family didn't have motorized vehicles so if the family got permission to visit the children that would be about a three hour ride in a wagon so the photo that you see here is the Kamloops Indian residential school from about the era that my grandmother attended I was going to dig into it and see how many generations attended there I'm pretty sure it was at least four I didn't want to ask because my family gets saturated with all of my questions so what is this thing the saturation point I've understood for a very long time just from being on reserve that as children and as learners you don't ask, you don't pry you don't seek out the knowledge when people are ready to impart it to you and when they believe that you're ready to receive it they offer it to you that's not how I've been going about things because it was just the process was too slow whenever I write something I write it first when it's a play that arrives I write it first and then I follow up with my family afterwards so one thing that I learned that that's been important to me moving on from becoming a playwright through to really accepting that I always was one is the understanding that as a First Nations person, as an Al Capemah woman arts are interwoven into everything that we do so something like an L&D being invited I was nervous as hell because I thought I just haven't read even half the things that everybody who will be listening will have read and people close to me said you've been invited because you're to bring to the table who you are and what you are so as I started to work through all of my thoughts I started to think okay how can I focus my brain often when I write plays I create a playlist so one of the things that kept running through my head it's a song that I've never really understood or described any kind of meaning to but it seemed to interweave with some of the things that I'm going to tell you about I live in the you live in the valley every morning this is a picture of the countless Indian residential school my mom is not in this picture it's of her era I'm pretty sure the woman the girl down in the left hand corner with her eyes kind of blinking midway blinking it's one of her best friends named Leroy there happened to be five students named Pauline and my mom's grade when she was going to school so they all ended up with these strange nicknames my mom is Archie this is Leroy these beautiful girls smiling none when she don't see too often my mom she's a dancer when she does dishes and whatnot she'll be dancing away doing these sweet little things she joined this club because it was a way of leaving the school when she initially was taken to the school there was two weeks off at Christmas shortly thereafter they were allowed to return home for the summer as well but this was an opportunity to travel around actually leave that environment and as far as I know to principally be among the female staff which reduces the incidents of certain kinds of abuse which is sort of major plus so my mom sort of found her way into art in a strange way there's this great costume I have a photo of my mom in a costume and it's labeled traditional Ukrainian dancers and it's all these again these beautiful girls dressed in this kind of actually Disneyland eski Ukrainian dance costumes and it's actually in a museum at KRS now in the basement I went there shortly after it was turned into a museum my mom drove me it wouldn't come in wouldn't come in the doors but I let her know and she said oh why would they want to do that it's just like my mom so my mom have been an artist if she hadn't gone to KRS quite possibly my grandmother's quite a beautiful craftsperson visual artist this is her work here my mom was permitted to leave residential school when she was in grade 10 you were allowed to do that if you took on a trade my mom went to nursing school the first job that she took was back at the Kamloops and came to residential school and if that's not a testament to the survivor spirit of my bloodlines I don't know what is but she decided to go there and she pledged to stay as long as it took to get every single child in front of the doctor that meant the bus driver had to drive to Kamloops which was always greatly annoying apparently for this bus driver they called Eagle Eye Eagle Eye was notorious for spotting kids who were trying to run away so he was not really popular with anybody can imagine my mom met my father at Indian residential school he was head of boys junior rec admin and they met at a Christmas party and they were engaged two weeks later so apparently they're I also come from a romantic stream my parents like many people in the early 70's moved to Alberta with the boom going on over there there was a lot of employment so there I was I got born in Blackfoot country we were taken often to powows at the University of Lethbridge very seldom outdoors which is peculiar because if you've ever been to southern Alberta the terrain is just breathtaking so there I was in Blackfoot country so I assumed when I was told I was in Indian that I was Blackfoot but not the case but much in the way that T. that Nolan often says that the blood will always tell which I believe is how I become a playwright is I believe also that the soil will always tell growing up in that landscape under that sky and breathing that air and feeling that constant wind I really believe it got into me the very first play that I wrote that actually arrived to me almost whole is set in Lethbridge it's called Drury and Izzy and I dreamt it when I was in Toronto and I was quite desperately homesick my first couple years there and then when I endeavoured to actually write the thing out I was back in Lethbridge again and I hit a wall at about page 40 and then I dreamt basically a moment that just made the rest of the play go so in many ways I believe that to those plays that arrive like that they're a gift and they're bigger than us so it's a strange thing it was a play which tried to push your work on anybody because they're not really mine so it arrived through me and I feel I feel less for that and I hope that I can do well by that I love the best in you best in me though it's not all lovely this is the first play that Native Earth Performing Arts performed of mine and as I said I was fortuitous when I arrived at the company because it was being run by Yvette Nolan and Yvette much like me is oh what did she call it Shamrock and Tomahawk so Irish and and Indigenous basically and Yvette like me was an actor and came through to storytelling as a playwright through that and then has now become a very accomplished director so my hope is that I'm headed on that trajectory too and I've been very much supported by Native Earth in that way so there it was at Native Earth identifying fairly newly as an Indian and now identifying as a playwright so probably the biggest change in my life really there are moments when I write these plays that arrive to me that I don't I feel myself searching for an idea that I can't quite make out I still feel like eventually I'll go back on some of my earlier plays and figure it out once I learn the language I don't speak N'Katmah I have more Anishinaabemowan words than I do in N'Katmah because since I've been identifying and claiming and really walking in my own skin in Anishinaabemowan territory so my hope is that I can fill out my artistry more and move back to British Columbia eventually so things kind of conspired in such a way that I ended up being an artistic director at Native Earth Performing Arts we now have a theater if anybody comes to Toronto in the next couple years please come and visit us while that was an artistic director with a very open door policy just with the office and with our accessibility and we're really working to maintain that we're in Regent Park when I first arrived at Native Earth I was working as a playwright there and also as community liaison and we were in the Distillery District if anybody ever been there it's kind of this dreadful place that as sort of a hub for where the impoverished peoples of early Toronto worked in factories, distilleries that sort of thing and then it kind of filmed just to prepare for a very long time and now I think there are about three different stores where you can buy a sweater for your dog and on any given day you have to walk to work a different way because there's a film being shot somewhere because it looks so darn quaint so we moved to Regent Park which is to put it this way on any given day you can walk through Regent Park and you'll see some kind of a memorial for somebody who's been unjustly shot so it's a different kind of demographic I'm going to get into this more tomorrow and we'll speak about spaces and places but it's been inherent and I think the journey of my change taking on this building and having strange events like funders and ministers come through and being expected to talk to them kind of contingent of this big arts complex it's an honor to be that but it's also very strange to still be paraded out and to have to spend two minutes telling people why they're important only to have them walk on and possibly never can come see any of our work so it has its positives, it has its negatives indeed. A beautiful thing about being in Regent Park is we're right near Council Fire which is an Anishinaabe Service Organization we're also near First Nations School of Toronto it's probably about a 15 minute walk east and we're also right near Anishinaabe Health which is a health clinic that offers traditional and regular medical stuff, healing things we're trying to figure out yet how to really connect with people who've been displaced from Regent Park it's a massive gentrification plan that's been going on there a lot of people were moved out some were brought back, some of the housing was protected so that they could move in, could afford to live there it's tricky to figure out how to to honestly connect with the neighbourhood we are very excited about doing that it's very much a full time job there's work to be done the building that we're in what sort of summed it up for me was the inaugural production in our theatre the Aki Studio Theatre was the hours that were made by Keith Barker this is a piece about our missing and murdered women at the same time across the lobby 51 Division, the nearest police department was having a fashion show so here we are having this thing about missing women who've been underserved by the system and there they are doing some kind of a fashion show which is very deflating so it's a trick it's a challenge but it's a good thing in my 20s when I was supposed to be living in Vancouver I went to Montreal for the first time when I was there I bought a postcard and told myself I would live there in my 40s but it's just around the corner we have a lot of change to adapt to the edit made with performing arts and I'm very interested in in surviving this period which is very much a survival period we took on the period at the end of a grant cycle I just put myself to sleep at the end of a grant cycle where we didn't account for having a space so budgetarily it's been quite the fancy dance we've had to do so I'm interested in staying there seeing it through the change I don't know when this will happen but I feel like the more times I say it in public the more likely I am to do it my goal ultimately is to return to British Columbia and to learn the Macaulay language I can only do that living in merit so that's going to be really hard but I feel like I feel in many ways and I think all of us know this there are many aspects that are lost to you if you don't have the language that your ancestors do I don't have a language even that my mother spoke for the first six years of her life and yet I'm a storyteller so there are holes in me there are holes in what I'm doing and I feel like once I've once I've served as artistic director for the time that feels right I have to then serve my ancestors who've been offering me their stories by going and learning the language I've been a few plays that have come through me that as I've said there have been holes in this one play that I finished quite recently it's called The Ministry of Grace and it's it centers around, it's inspired by the story of my granny Mary Collins she passed when I was five so I don't know her very well but there was a time when she had to go away from home because the grief I believe because of the grief of having her children taken to the school was so great that she couldn't be around when she couldn't see them so she responded to this call for labor in California and ended up down there working cotton fields and very shortly thereafter was recruited to a touring evangelical show she was basically the tame team and she'd come out and people would behold the wonders of Christianity and this Indian would read from the Bible and people would oo and ah from what I can gather it was around that time that this kind of letter that she sent to my mom at residential school didn't get opened anymore my mom would share these letters with me probably about two years ago I think there's something in the fact that there are people outside of her own family who are interested in the stories from the land that she came from that enabled her to open these letters I don't know if that's true or not it's easier to say it to you than it is to her but there's something about reading these letters with my mom and having them just receive them she wasn't moved by it, it wasn't like a thing for her but she read them it enabled me to finish this play about her mom and it enabled me to to finish the script with the words of the character inspired by her mom saying I'm coming home we will appreciate a retreat for women writers she is the founder and director of the toft lakes center in normes fish camp a creative retreat she has served as the resident dramaturge at mixed blood theater as the literary director of the mccarthor theater the director of the new played billamon at act theater in seattle, washington the literary manager dramaturg in the theater and as assistant literary manager She has served as the president and board chair and is a current board member of LNPA and as well she serves on the advisory board at the NNPN and is a member of the new project group of ITI. Please everyone welcome Liz Ingleman. We're watching on the sofa. Get up, move over here, sit down. You've just adapted to change. It's all different now. Hi everybody. You've all heard the joke, I'm sure, the dramaturge joke, the one dramaturge joke. How many dramaturges does it take to screw in a light bulb? The answer of course being, does it have to be a light bulb? That's kind of how I thought. After I was honored to be asked to be one of the key note speakers for Speaking of Change, my inner dramaturge voice piped up and I thought, does it have to be change? Do I have to speak? I'm humbled to speak in front of all of you because you are all experts in change. At a cellular level right now your bodies are in fact changing as I'm talking to you and if you really want to go there biologically, which we do, every seven years if it's true that our cells regenerate completely every seven years then the Liz that is standing up here talking to you right now is a Liz three times removed and hopefully three times improved from the Liz who attended her first dramaturge conference 21 years ago. So I've already changed and you're still changing. Change happens. Change is. The only real change would be if there was no change and that's actually a key note that I would like to go to. Adapting to no change because I see change. I court change. And if you look over my first chapter I guess of my dramaturgy career when I worked in the institutional theater. For the 10 years I worked in institutional theater as you heard in that bio. I worked at four different regional theaters and that span of time and if you do the math on that, which I'm not really good at, it comes out to something like a little bit less than a three year itch at each job. And if you look closer at that pattern I guess what you'd find if you're interested was it kind of goes in a cycle. It would be new and interesting for me at the beginning and I'd watch and I'd learn and I'd observe and then I'd have an idea and I'd want to try it and seed it and watch it grow and so there'd be a new festival or a reading series. And then that became settled in the new norm and as soon as that became the new norm, the itch started and I was ready for the cycle to begin again. So I guess I thought I'd unexamined in a way when I was growing up as a young dramaturglet in the mid-90s that the way to be a dramaturglet literary manager meant working in a regional theater and it seemed to have a kind of unassumed or maybe assumed ladder career path that you would take from an intern to an assistant literary manager or dramaturg to running your own department to maybe going on to a bigger theater, a larger size theater somewhere else. And a few years into this climb I looked out and I was kind of on a top rung of that ladder or maybe it wasn't a ladder, it was more like a step stool or a foot stool or something. Either I had gotten there really quickly or it was just a really small ladder. And there wasn't another title I was looking for, there wasn't a bigger theater that meant better. If there were any rungs left, those rungs just represented change. And it was that cycle again of something new, something fresh, something to seed, something to plant, something that said over then it was time to do it again. So there's a question I asked myself and it's not a joke because there's only one dramaturg joke which I've already shared with you. The question I asked myself is what is a dramaturg not in relationship? I guess the joke answer would be single words yes, it's true I am. But it's a deeper question for me. A dramaturg is almost always in relationship or conversation with something or someone. A play in its meaning, a playwright and her vision, a director in his interpretation, an artistic director in her agenda, a theater in its mission, an audience in their experience, a marketing department in their deadline. But what is a dramaturg really in relationship to self? So a few cared and looked at the next chapter of my life as a dramaturg. When I stepped off the institutional theater ladder and branched out into freelance dramaturgy and served as president of LMDA, I guess I was interested in looking at what was it like when a dramaturg acted out an expression of their own idea of passion and curiosity. So when I was president one of the conferences that we put together was Dramaturg's Generator, which is pre-sox planetary I guess, and I established the Dramaturg driven grant. It was important to me that the dramaturg could be the first one in the room with an idea rather than the last one at the table in the rehearsal room. And I instigated the early career grant for dramaturgs to come to conferences not only to be able to help financially your being here, but also to see what it was like at an early stage in your career to be able to articulate what it was that you wanted from the experience and what you thought you as a dramaturg could bring to that experience. But I realized I hadn't actually turned that on myself. And I presumably all value the role and function of dramaturg here. We wouldn't be here right now, and if you don't think you're here, we'll be talking about that later. But I don't think I really truly understood the deep impact that dramaturg could have until somebody turned to me. And that's what I was, I was leaving my term as president of LMDA and I was wondering what could I do next that was an expression of my interest and vision and curiosity and not just in relationship to an invitation as a freelancer. And a playwright of mine said, you should talk to a friend of mine who's a life coach. Do you know what that is? I thought, oh yeah, life coach. They're like dramaturgs for people. So I talked to this wonderful life coach named Sandy, even if he wasn't a dramaturg for me, and I told her I had a career question. And she said to me right down the six times that you've been blissfully happy in your career. Not just had a really good time doing that, or I'm really proud of that, but blissfully happy. And like a true dramaturg, she reflected back to me what the patterns were, what the connecting threads were, what the motivating principles were behind those different experiences. And she also asked me to notice what, if there were any surprises on the list. So I did the exercise of the constrain and what she said back to me were these six words. She said, community, conversation, creativity, innovation, sun and water. And I thought, bingo, because I was interested in starting an artist retreat in the summer on a lake in Minnesota. Then I looked to see what surprises were on the list that she had asked me to. And there was a big surprise on that list, which was of all the blissfully happy experiences. There was only one that took place in the regional theater rehearsal room. And that was at Florida stage, sun, water. But if you had asked me in the ten years that I was a dramaturg to those four places with my three year edge, if you had asked me, do you love what you do or you're having a good time, I'd say, yes, I love my job. I love what I'm doing. But if I look closer at the pattern, I realize that I was not blissfully happy in the abbey. I was much more happy climbing that tree and talking to playwrights on the beach at the O'Neill or in the sun at the Area Playwrights Festival or ASK Theater Projects, but I was still around. Seven years later, I spent the summers on a lake in Minnesota at an artist retreat called Dauphin Lake Center at Nermswitch Camp. I spent the other eight months of the year at Hedgebrook, which is a retreat for women writers. I spent a lot of time around trees. I'm surrounded by them all the time, and I am so inspired by trees. Their roots are so deep. Their trunks are so strong. Their branches reach up, lift to the sun, and they're beautiful. And I look at all the weather patterns that they endure in a day or in a week or in a month or a year. The windstorms, the thunderstorms, lightning, thunder, calm. And the temperature is below freezing, 40 below, 90 degrees. And those trees don't resist the change. They withstand change. They stand with change, and their trunks and their branches are a living testament to their dance with change. And I thought, even though I've transplanted and uprooted many times in different soils and I haven't found a soil that is called my permanent home yet, I realized that I'm not just Maria climbing a tree. I'm a tree too, and my roots are deep and they're in community, conversation, creativity, sun, and water. And my trunk is strong. It's as a dramaturg. It's curious. It's questioning. It's visioning. It's seeding. It's planting. And my limbs, my branches, have been many, in turn, assistant literary manager, literary manager, dramaturg, director of the new play development, literary director, freelance dramaturg. I think you heard the bio. But all those branches, for me, lift towards sunlight, which for me is joy. And at an open conference, an L&D conference in Banff several years ago, I wrote the words joy on a wall, tapped into the wall, and put about three chairs out on a patio in hopes that it might join me. And at the conference wrap-up, the wonderful Harriet Power, she noticed in the feedback session, she noticed with surprise how many people came to the session on joy and how nobody spoke about joy in relationship to their job or their work. And that made me really sad. Because for me, joy is the sunlight that nourishes and fuels the leaves on the branches, and joy is the rain that nourishes my roots. And without joy, those limbs would fall, my core would be hollow, my roots would be brittle and I would fall. So I just urge you all from my place in the woods on the island in that lake to find your joy, dig deep, uncover your roots, embrace your trunk, dance with change, and be the most magnificent tree you can be. Thank you. Steve Herre is a Norman armor. Norman is an asset to all of this. He is the co-founder of the PUSH Festival an international multidisciplinary festival where he has been the executive director since 2005. He has worked on the commission, creation, production and presentation of both devised work and new writing for the stage, contemporary and classical adaptations, sites specific endeavors, large-scale interdisciplinary events, dance theater collaborations and live remote radio broadcasts. He has also consulted on not-for-profit organization of development, overseen integrated outreach programs and spearheaded public forums on innovation in performing arts. Next year besides his work on the PUSH Festival, he will also be directing the world premiere of Pauline, chamber opera based on the live of Canadian poet Pauline Johnson, scored by Togan Stokes and written by Margaret Adwood at SETI Opera. Thank you for this. Please welcome Norman Pat. No problem. The show I wasn't in, but actually being invited into a conference of an organization you're not a member of is kind of amazing. Sort of like being in the locker room of this kick-ass football team. Baseball team that's on the, you know, 11th win in a row and such. So it's a real honor to be asked to be here. I suppose, you know, I could talk to some degree, you know, when speaking over the phone with Heidi about the question around change. And it seems to be in the air a lot. I was at a conference today about leadership, a one-day conference just around the corner down the street. And it was about change as well and such. And I was asking about how people deal with organizational change and how you get board members on side and staff on side in this and that. And I was talking a bit about the push festival and the beginnings of that and how it was a bit of a fraud situation for me to be up there on a panel talking about it because we didn't have to deal with change. We were starting from scratch. We were starting from the beginning. And that was quite simple in some ways because we could just start from the beginning and kind of crazy and stupid and really hard because you're starting from the beginning. And that was, I guess, 10 years ago. This year is our 10th anniversary. And we started with a very simple idea to train it down to myself and touch it on the theater around trying to create a change in this community, a different situation, a different context for which we were going to create a work, for which we were going to challenge each other, challenge ourselves, challenge the media, the funders, the public at large and to try and create a different situation in which we were making work. And also, too, because we were in Vancouver, we were also wanting to create new connections elsewhere. This is a rain curtain and it's thick. It really is. Man, it's thick. And it's not so much about distance. It's about, I guess, geography and terrain and history and other things. But it is a big distance and a big thing to try and connect this city to other places. So that was a big part of what we were trying to do. We had both come from SFU. So we had big ideas, big notions. People like Owen were my teachers. We were teachers of mine and Katrina's. And we had big notions around what art could be in contemporary society and how it was situated in history in relationship to other practices for me in the arts, but also other questions around economics and social justice and other things. So we wanted, certainly, to kind of make that change over time. And we went from a very simple, tiny little idea called a series in the name called Push that Lainey Slater came up with. It was a marketing brilliant whiz in town and works with the film festival now. And we started with this tiny, tiny little notion and it grew over time. Very, very slowly. From three shows, William Yang from Australia, extraordinary photographer, story teller. One Yellow Rabbit with a show called Dream Machine. And then Reid Versard, a remarkable artist from Montreal who works a lot with Robert LePage, but who's a world career and a world right and such. So it was three shows. And nine years later, last year, we had 20 shows in the main program, a three week club called Club Push co-produced with Theatre Conspiracy and co-curated with Mata Hilley and Tim Carlson. We had, I guess, 34,000 people come which was up from 24,000 people the year before. We had, I guess, over a million media impressions, bots and urns and all that kind of stuff. And we've really kind of, in a lot of ways, come a long way but I still find myself asking right now about the future and I think next year, this 10th anniversary, we're going to open at the Vancouver Playhouse with a gala performance one night only of a company from Berlin. And the Playhouse, of course, has a hugely loaded emotional question about life after the Playhouse Theatre. Company is dead, unfortunately, that demies of it. But I still find myself sort of coming back to around and that change and time and other things, they loop a lot. I mean, I don't think you're ever the same person whether it's three years or seven years or 10 years, but I do think that things loop around a lot. Earlier today, I went for a film audition. I haven't done a film for, since 2005, I stopped this ridiculous thing to try and do while you're trying to build an organization. But I got an email from my agent, sort of my agent, although he's not my agent, really. We took over the company from somebody who was my agent and saying that this casting director was begging me to come in and it was sort of a strange experience because it's like begging me to come in, really, something like that. And I went out and it was a Tim Burton film, so that's kind of, okay, so now I'm kind of sucking up to this idea. And I rush out from this panel and I go to this place and I come in the hallway and there's various people, certain type, but similar type, sitting beside each other and this woman asks me and takes my photo and everything and then asks me for my talent sheet and I look at her like, I don't know what she's talking about, she says the piece of paper, oh, right, right, that thing, you're supposed to fill out and everything. And then I went into the room eventually and she's thinking about some yakuza, of course, I'm sure. And why is this guy kind of being auditioned for this part? And here's Karine Meyers and Karine Meyers is an extraordinary casting director. She's a remarkable person and she is an extraordinary casting director with a huge amount of influence and track record is remarkable. And she gets up out of the couch and walks across to me and hugs me. I mean, what the hell is this? It's like film, right? This is brutal stuff, five minutes in and out and we're talking for at least five minutes about Italy and this and that and various things because we actually have a friendship. We actually like each other and through the years this person has given me probably 70% of my television and film work and when I was running Rumble Productions way back, that actually sustained me. You know, sustained me through a lot, a lot of things and she sustained me. She gave me work that I never even actually auditioned for. She just called up and said, look, you've got the part, come on in and do it. And one time she did a film on her own and she asked me to come in and do it to act in it and I did because she meant something to me, you know, beyond the business of things. And we talk about theater as something that's about people and I still absolutely believe it's about people. Theater for me is not about stories. I understand that idea of stories and my partner is a visual artist. She can't stand the idea of stories. My story, my story, my story. And she's making it so she doesn't have an issue with history and all that but though notion around theater is people's obsession with the idea of story. For me, theater is about events. I was always interested as a director with the idea of events. This notion or point in a piece on a stage in a room where things froze, where things led up to something and you held your breath because you were scared of what was going to happen or what was going to happen afterwards. This idea of theater is being, for me, a witness to the blow of experience. I had a director once here at SFU who talked to me about that idea, the idea of a blow of experience and that as an actor or as a director or as a writer or as a creator on the stage that you were trying to kind of give some kind of space for that idea. And to me, the notion around theater also is this idea of the cost of things. That this theater is this stage that's laboratory to imagine and create some fictionalized representation of another idea, another place, another person or even yourself, me right here, now pretending to be me but to speak about the cost of things and to conjure that up in some way as a kind of visceral body thing that you could sense, you could smell it, you could hear, you could imagine. So two years ago, as you may know, some of you may know, I had an event in my life. I was running the festival at the time, it was the middle of the festival, it was 2012. In the middle of the festival on a Saturday night at Club Push, at intermission, I had a heart attack. I had a full cardiac arrest. I was on the floor for five and a half minutes being given CPR. There's actually somebody, I think it got Christina's here, actually, she was working on Push that night. And that event, for me, was a kind of rude awakening in a way. I'd been a heavy, heavy smoker, I'd smoked for many years. I'd actually given up a year before so it was kind of a true Irish-thoughtish thing. I was not going to get away with it. The artist that night was Mary Margaret O'Harris. Mary Margaret O'Harris, she was remarkable. She'd never played Vancouver. We weren't really responsible for getting out. It was actually Peggy Lee, who is a extraordinary cellist, one of the best in the world, and she had struck up this friendship with Mary Margaret O'Harris and then coaxed her to come out. And she's a very fragile, remarkable human being, but also a very, very particular and fragile person and had coaxed her out to come out and play with various musicians locally. And this group toured around. I mean, we had to bow an eye in other places. They were getting concerts, 40 people and Mary Margaret O'Harris in their living room. I mean, it was kind of very remarkable. Well, they decided after the heart attack and after being whisked away, and Richard Wolf is here, he was there that night as well, that they would continue to play the set. It just seemed right, perhaps, I suppose. And the song that was on the set, the next song to be played was, you know, Mary Margaret O'Harris, kind of one of her signature pieces, it's Body in Trouble. And they played that. The fact of the matter, though, for me, is that there I was in the room with colleagues. I was there with friends. I was there with my workmates. I was there with my soulmates. I was there with the people that I actually really cared about and that I really spent all my time with, that I had actually in many ways dedicated my life to. And the person who actually saved my life is a man, a number of people around me who were saving my life. The person who actually did the CPR on me was a close friend of mine who actually works at this institution. His name is Michael Boucher. He's somebody that night who asked if it was possible that he and his wife could sit beside me and my partner, Lorna, if I wanted to drink. I asked for two prantinis, which he took some umbrage with, but he got them for me. But he was actually sitting there with me when I went down, when I collapsed at the time of intermission. What I didn't know at the time that he was a paramedic, he had actually been one in his 20s in Montreal with a lot of pride and a really good one and had been really good at CPR and knew how to kind of kick it in the first time and how to do it for, well, in my case, five and a half minutes. Until they came and they did the two bumpers and that worked for a little while until we got by the arts club and stopped and do it again. I'm not sure what that had to do with. This is the note that I sent out a week, well, it actually wasn't a week later because stupidly I actually went back to the theater a week later. I was just sort of determined to get back on the bicycle and not to go a year without being there in the middle of the festival. I heard a man, Taylor Mack, I don't know if you know him, a New York artist, with him doing an a cappella version of Heroes by David Bowie, so I heard that night. But this is what I wrote and I posted on a Facebook. I wrote, thank you everyone for your thoughts, notes, flowers, and other acts of love and kindness rather than reach out to all of you individually. I wanted to give you an update and fill you in. Please, no need to respond to this. Basically, I'm good, I'm at home with my loving wife and she, she kidnaped me for calling her my wife, and as my GP said the other day, I'm a lot safer now than I was last Friday the night before the medical incident. In fact, there was only a 10% chance of what happened reoccurring, which is much better odds than those I had for surviving life of filming, i.e. the very same 10%. I had a heart attack, a full cardiac arrest. My cardiac specialist at BGH uses the word insult as in the insult to my car and body. Who said words can never hurt you? In a nutshell, I had a blood clot form in a major artery very close to my heart, my heart seeds up and began acting irregular with no real beat. I had a collapsed unconscious in the intermission between the acts of Mary Margaret O'Hara and Peggy Lee and Claude Bush and performance works in ground volume. A group of individuals, some I know personally some I don't, then proceeded to save my life. I was given CPR for over five and a half minutes. The paramedics upon my arrival put the patterns to me, my heart restarted, I was taken to ambulance to BGH Vancouver General Hospital and along the way I required a defibrillator to engage with this, they stopped the ambulance directly in front of the arts club. Not sure that there is any meaning to be contained. Tell these stories again. Whether unconscious or not I can't remember any of this. All was recounted to me. At Vancouver General Hospital I was given an angioplasty with a stent, angioplasty also known as percutaneous coronary intervention or PCI is a procedure that uses a flexible plastic catheter with a balloon at the end of it to dilate narrowed arteries in the heart. The procedure usually includes the placement of a metal stent to hold the artery open. In this way angioplasty helps to restore blood flow to the heart muscle. A stent is a small mesh tube that is used in treatment of coronary artery blockages. This was done within an hour at my arrival. For the record I have actually good welling veins normally. And my blood pressure is also very healthy. I also stopped smoking a year ago. I was medicated and put in ICU. That's where the really nice people are. The nurses that are, that is. And anybody who has or does encounter the BC Health System hopefully knows that what I'm talking about. I'm astounded at how empathetic the care was, how tender and endearing they are with the wounds such as me. There were lots of friends, many who accompanied me to the trip to BGH. Thank you. Not sure that Lorna would have as she did or that she could have weathered as she did. Thank you. On Sunday the push board of directors and staff under the leadership of Max Wyman and Minna Shendlinger, who is the festival managing director, held an emergency meeting, dipping up my duties, strategizing communications and the like. Could there be any greater proof for the festival's resilience than the sheer speed, calm and professionalism with which board and staff responded. There is succession for him. In fact a succession strategy was put in place this year for the festival. But in the end no matter planning and a forethought makes up for the human quotient and here too I feel remarkably blessed. I love the people I work with and I mean both board and staff. They are my friends, my colleagues, my soulmates as a good working friend in true Welsh manner once equipped. I won't work with anyone I wouldn't wish to have a drink with. There were 35 people around the table on Sunday. I was released from BGH Tuesday at noon. I'm home and recovering. I've been cleared to return to my desk job as my cardiologist referred to it. But I'll do the mature thing and take the next few weeks on. Long term effects not necessarily horrific or debilitating though I may now be driving a six cylinder, I think seven actually rather than an eight cylinder I may have once possessed, only time will tell. I have two other such brushes with mortality. Those have had similar events and will confirm that it can be an overwhelming experience to tears perhaps. I could have been a thousand other places doing a thousand other things. There might not have been a single soul around me at that very moment. And I'd like to think that the most human beings, the most human beings gain comfort from the thought that their lives are adding into something that they are in fact meaningful value and the consequence. Thank you all if I had any childish doubts there they are no longer fortunate, fortunate and subjaved like Walter Houston in the treasure of Sierra Monmouth. You know where Walter Houston learned that Jay, that dance. He learned it from Eugene on the other side of the sea. On behalf of Laura and myself I feel truly blessed. I look forward to seeing you sometime soon in this lifetime. So what's changed? This is just a quick list. I drive aside seven cylinder rather than eight. I eat better. I eat more regularly. I eat breakfast most of the time. I drink less or I mix that up a little bit. Two thousand and one. I do exercise more. I make less of things I might have made up before. Listen I listen Listen Listen. I don't shy away from disagreement. I honor it. I realize more and more that it's never as good as you wish or as bad as you fear. I have a genuine interest in the well-being of the people who are around me. It's as important if not more important than the work being done. And done, I steal this from the woman who wrote the book Leaning Facebook Yeah, done is better than perfect. It's only friggin theater. And lastly it's hold tight the people who you know. Hold them close. Forget that enemy thing. Hold close the people that you know and love. And stay curious about those you don't know. Because you never know where in the future something may bring you together for some meaningful and consequential event. There is a picture that I have actually on my desk that somebody in the office ran into or something. And it's a picture of me and Michael Boucher downstairs in the theater in the week before after an opening. And there's a guy, Fred Lee, in town he does like bossa col and stuff like that. It's pretty wild and wacky character, but he loves to take pictures and everything go opening nights and stuff. Well it had been a bit of a rough sort of opening and I felt guilty actually, because I hadn't given Michael any space to talk about the top and he's a very important partner and I said he was a huge important partner to the festival. And there was this moment where Fred Lee grabbed me and he said, Normie, Normie, I want to get a picture of you I want to get a picture of you, so I could have just gone I'll get a picture of you. And I saw but five or ten feet away it was Michael and I went, Michael, come on, come on, come on, come on. And I grabbed him and I brought him over to be together with him for this picture. And there's this picture of the two of us the week before smiling as if we cared about each other as if we needed each other as if we actually loved each other which we did. Don't forget you never know when you might meet that person. Our next speaker is the director of the Triangle Lab in the San Francisco Bay Area a program that's aimed at changing who participates in theater making and how they participate. She's a founder of the crowd-ended fire theater company and served as its artistic director for ten years she also held a number of arts management and consulting positions for the San Francisco Foundation the Wallace Foundation Cultural Participation Initiative and as the director of development and strategic initiatives for the theater bay area. I'm coming she will be directing a new play by Dan Wolfe for shotgun players in Berkeley called Daylight the Berkeley Stories Project a play exploring what the story of Berkeley is now please welcome Rebecca Novik Thank you so my tree is very short so I'm going to come out here Thank you very much for having me I need to echo what Norm said that you know I've never been to this conference before I'm not a literary manager and I'm only occasional dramaturg so it's a real honor to be here thank you and thank you to everybody else talking about change yeah I had to think a lot about what I wanted to talk about and I was told that I was filling the institutional slot so I think I'm supposed to talk to you and plan to talk to you about what institutional change looks like but when I try to think about talking to you about that tonight I thought well we can't change the field and we can't change our particular institutions without changing ourselves first you know you can change only happens as we've just been hearing kind of one by one so this is the story of how I almost left the theater and decided instead to kind of take what I sometimes describe as one last throw at the institutional theater and see where that takes me so I was the founding artistic director of a small theater company in San Francisco called Crowded Fire which I started in 1997 and it's a theater that does primarily new plays and ten years in everything looked I would say really good on paper we were getting really wonderful playwrights to work with Eric and he's here tonight he's one of the playwrights we got to work with and we were doing really work that we were very proud of we were getting noticed we were in American theater you know I was actually being paid a salary which was a really exciting development and even so I just began to feel more and more hollow about it I began to feel more and more like I didn't understand what the work was for and I always want to be really careful here to say I'm really proud of the fact that the company has continued on and has continued to do really excellent work but for me that kind of process of killing yourself to put on a show that runs for four weeks that 600 people see and you know maybe half of them are other theater artists like I just I just didn't know what it was about I couldn't draw any kind of line between that work and the sort of change that I really wanted to be a part of making in the world so I walked away from it and there I had you know I was the artistic director and I had a salary and the work was growing and I just didn't understand it anymore so I often think about that sort of like a very difficult breakup not because there is bad feeling between me and the company but because it was hard to walk away from that kind of family and that kind of experience and it left me kind of like not wanting to date for a while and I had to really go through a kind of crisis of faith in the theater in kind of what I wanted to do next during this time I wrote an article that apparently a lot of people have read called please don't start a theater company in which I gave people the advice to not just not start a theater company but don't start a theater company and fail to examine the kind of inherent disaster of the way we structure theater companies so you know I really didn't know if I was going to stay in this field and I found myself on the way to a TCG conference that was that year in Los Angeles and I was in the gate at the Oakland airport and it was a Southwest flight so you don't have a signed seats and in the gate I ran into my friend Susie Falk who's the managing director at the California Shakespeare Theatre, or Cal Shakespeare as we call it and as we started talking in the gate because it was Southwest we ended up sitting next to each other all the way to LA and she's telling me about this grant that they got from the Mellon Foundation for all their work and all their support has so much changed and she's excited but frustrated because they've gotten this big grant and it's a grant to set up a partnership between the California Shakespeare Theatre and Intersection for the Arts which is a multidisciplinary organization in San Francisco that does work focused on arts and social justice and all they really know is that they're supposed to work together now and they've had this money and they're sort of in like month eight of the three-year grant and like nothing has really happened yet and Susie's kind of worried that they're like maybe gonna have to give the money back and they just don't know what to do like there's vision but there's no action and so you don't know we're on the plane so I'm like well I don't know do you want some advice this is what I would do if I were you and this becomes one of these kind of serendipitous life moments where I sure enough then several days later get a call can I please come to a meeting at Intersection and I find myself being offered the job of coming on board and figuring out what to do with this money and what to do with this like sort of arranged marriage that they don't quite know what to make of it and I think well okay you know and so here I am almost two years later and I'm the director of what we now call the Triangle Lab which is a joint program shared between those two organizations and it's a program that's dedicated to bringing artists and communities together to try to make change so this has been a really interesting kind of arc for me as we look at what it means to make a lab we call it a lab because we're trying to experiment with how things might change and it's a triangle because we're looking at the role theaters can play and bringing artists and communities together I'd like to often quote the brilliant Diane Ragsdale who often says that doesn't really take 200 administrators to put on a play and I know I think we all kind of basically know the director of that is no but where I think the role of those theaters with sizable staffs where it really does take all those people and all that time is if we really look at deeply connecting our work to the community we live in so what I wanted to share with you today is a little bit more in detail of the story of how you try to change a theater Cal Shakes for those of you that may or may not be familiar with it a midsize which in the Bay Area is like our own $4 million theater that does a summer season of outdoor theater time was that was mostly Shakespeare they expanded after that into Shaw and but more recently and I shouldn't make fun of them because they do wonderful work and more recently they have begun to do new plays and begun to really commit to this idea of what role they can play in their community and so what you know charged with this how do you begin to move a theater from producing plays in the subscription season to really this vision that they've articulated of wanting to be part of making positive change in their community and be a valued and kind of essential part of their community so I could skip to the end and tell you like it's really hard and we barely started and we're nowhere yet but I could share also some things we've discovered along the way of the sort of beginning of this journey that we've been on and I like to talk a lot at my work about the rubber band and I say you know making changes like kind of stretching out a rubber band and the minute you let go it just snaps it snaps back and so we say at the theater we say oh that was one of those rubber bands snapping back moments right that was one of those moments where you let go or you stop paying attention and it's so easy to fall back into the way we always have done things and you know you do what you do you get what you got and so you know when I really started to try to articulate and I have this conversation a lot you know what are the necessary elements for change and I think it's pretty clear that you need vision and Cal Shakespeare and at Intersection we kind of have that in spades we've got Jonathan Musconi our artistic director and Deborah Cullen and the executive director of Intersection two incredibly visionary people sometimes it's too much vision sometimes I see the staff just thinking God what are you talking about you know so we have this vision and then what's become clearer to me over this time working there is that you need also what I would call a disruptive influence and so there's this kind of incredible insight here bringing Intersection into the work as a kind of permanent kind of resident disruptive influence so you've got these kind of the staff this organization with completely different kind of size, mission, values who just are continually kind of asking these questions from the very small to the very large that really continue to shake up business as usual I think you also need resources for real change to happen and we've been lucky enough to have those continue to attract those resources but even with all that in place you know what do you do? What is day one of change making at the institution you know really look like luckily enough I was reading on that same plane right actually really I swear this book called Switch by the Heath Brothers some of you might have read it it's a book about making change stick kind of written for businesses but it's really interesting book and one of the things they talk about in that book is they talk about creating a destination postcard so kind of writing your idea of where you if you set yourself a postcard from the future you know how would it describe your vision and so we began to articulate this kind of shared vision around more people participating in theater making in more different ways so really bringing more people to the table really changing who we thought of as a maker who we thought of as an artist whose voice was in the room and were we even in a room were we on the street are we in the neighborhood are we outside are we in a bar you know where else can we be making theater and how else can we be making theater and who else could we be inviting to make it with us so kind of with that as our destination postcard we began to figure out how to move forward and then right away I realized that when you meet nexus you need allies and so I kind of looked around the theater and it's the midsize and not one of these 200 people leaders there's like 25 people that work there but some of them are more kind of fired up about this and others and so I very carefully kind of put together really it was like a cabal I don't know what I remember what I called it but it was it was like a cabal I had one person for the marketing department not by any means the marketing director and I had one person from the education department and one person for the production staff sort of found somebody who was an ally in each department and we were here that group of us met every week to try to figure out how this change worked in all the places in the organization and then I was very happy I got to retire my cabal because it had like spread more through the organization so that was that was exciting and the next thing we realized is that we better start making some work right away because we've been talking and talking and talking and you know people would understand what we were talking about and then like half an hour later I'd be like what are you talking about but you know and I would say well that sounds like really like good grant language you know and it was working there it wasn't really coming across in another way so so Cal Shakespeare was doing a production of Spunk which is George Seawolff's adaptation of some Zora Dale Hurston stories and we thought like okay let's do a really deep example of what we mean and let's do a really broad example of what we mean so we created this residency up till now Cal Shakespeare's residencies were really pretty much like into your high school and we're going to do ten weeks on the Tempest and at the end of the time and some kids are going to do monologues from the Tempest so this is great, this is awesome work but it didn't really match with what we were talking about which is really about how everybody has a story of it's got something to say of their own and so we said well okay so Zora Dale Hurston was really like an anthropologist an anthropologist of her people's stories and so what if we asked kids to really be anthropologists of their own community so we created a residency curriculum where kids in this middle school in Oakland did photography and interviews and created pieces based on kind of people in their own families and their own communities and then we did a display of that work kind of up at Cal Shakespeare's space so that was kind of our example of kind of going deep and then I thought well you know how do we sort of convey to this audience what it means to be part of the making to really be expressing your creative voice we thought well you know what let's have a dance party on the stage in the show and you know like I was really skeptical about this and I hired this choreographer and I said look it might be like 10 people so I don't know it's kind of an elderly audience it's outside it's like really cold after the show is over and you know that show was so great and it was so exciting there was so much dancing in the show there was so much kind of call and response in the show that they were ready and so we had these dance parties that were like 150 people kind of crammed on the stage we had to hire extra stage managers so that people wouldn't fall off so this is our example right away of like what does it mean if everybody gets to dance and so now I started saying you know every show should start with a potluck and end with everybody dancing on stage and like that's what we mean by a participatory culture in our theater and because we had done that dance party and like the funder put a picture of it on their website it was all exciting you know we were able to really people knew what we meant by that so that was great and then the work to the artists one of the things we want to do right away is just bring a lot more artists to the table you know when you're a regional theater there's like so much kind of curatorial screaming like I don't know have you directed at any other regional theaters and like did you go to Yale and I don't know has this play been produced anywhere else and I was like you know what no no we need to we need to make a space that doesn't feel like that that feels like we're sharing not just the work but sharing the inspiration as well and so we created this project called the artist investigator project because our lab and we like to kind of play with that metaphor and so what would happen we wondered if we if we asked artists to tell us what they wanted to experiment with so we put out this very kind of general call and we said what do you think the performance of the future might look like we're going to give you four thousand dollars in one year and you have to pause it what experiment you do so the place and so we ended up commissioning ten artists to do experiments either in where you might do work or in how you might work with communities definitely and so these are all kind of in process right down I'll just tell you about two of them really quickly one that's about to kind of launch next week is a full balcony this is a video artist named David Slaza who's doing a crowd sourced video version of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet so he put out a call online you could film yourself doing either Romeo's lines or Juliet's lines for the balcony scene and then he's cutting them together so he'll have this sort of five minute video of several hundred people from everywhere doing the balcony scene and then we're playing it on video monitors on your way in to Cal Shakespeare's production of Romeo and Juliet so we're going to have the professional balcony scene and then the crowd sourced balcony scene we're just kind of really interested to see like what that means how that works so more I don't report back on that and then we work with another artist named Ariel Brown who's working with mothers in Oakland who lost a child to violence and she's been working with them her project is called Love Balm for my spirit child and she's worked to collect kind of testimony from these mothers and then they are performing the pieces at the site of the homicide so looking at kind of theater of witness and looking at how witnessing can can change space so those are just two examples of what happened when we asked artists what they thought they might be interested in exploring so after that after we found some allies did some examples right away and then gave it over to the artist what we started seeing next was a little unexpected to me but now I understand it what we saw next was fear like then actually like change had started and then people started to freak out and I thought that was kind of good it kind of meant that we were getting somewhere because fear was starting to surface so that's the next thing that I kind of learned was like okay now we have to make a space for people to be afraid and we have to let them be afraid and then we have to respond so with the staff meeting when we were just like brainstorming about what you know partly I tried to have a participatory culture like at the theater as well and people were brainstorming about some of our next set of activities and this one staff member just burst into tears and I was like you know I had to stop and I said you know what what's happening and she said you know you keep saying everybody's an artist and you know I'm an artist I don't even know if you know I'm an artist because I'm an office manager and I don't get to be an artist here and she was just crying and we had to really stop and ask ourselves like well how do we make room for the creative voices in the organization what does that mean to do that here and not just saying like well the community members are artists too but here actually could you please finish that for sure so that was a really telling moment for me and really something that we're trying to think about and try to you know try to figure out and then recently we just closed a production of Richard Motoya's American Night which is a really extraordinary kind of look at the history of America and we commissioned a visual artist to create the Trigalab is also really bringing artists of other disciplines in kind of collision with theater so we commissioned a visual artist to create an installation that would be along this sort of winding path that you walk on to get to the outdoor amphitheater and so we chose somebody who was like you know provocative and satirical so it's going to be like this is Richard Motoya of Culture Clash so we wanted to kind of like go with the play and so she creates an installation of carnival signs the history of American immigration told through carnival signs so they are we see the draft of them and they are of course you know provocative satirical difficult and scare everybody and so we have this sort of emergency staff meeting and people start lying editing them they start being like well I don't know I don't know about that joke and I'm not sure and you know and so I have this like kind of awful committee process and I'm kind of trying to imagine my like pretty much a drama-churchical meeting with this poor artist where I'm going to have to be like sign three is a little bit not clear to you know so I finally just say you know look here are the two choices we can use them or not use them we invited an artist in we invited in another voice yes or no I think no is fine look we're not ready we're not ready the fear really was like the play was already really really really a stretch for the theater and like do we really want people to like walk up the path and be like pissed off already um so we so and and then this is something that I have to say like I honor so much the man that I work for John Moscone because he was in the middle of directing the play which is for all of you the direct is always a really kind of terrifying moment that kind of like week before tech where everything's a disaster and he said look I can't be brave about anything else this week you decide you decide but he said when Richard Montoya hates them it's gonna be on you so I was like shit you know shit so I said okay I love them I love them let's do them I said okay alright alright remember what I said so we put up the signs and Richard doesn't comment to the first preview he comes to the second preview and I'm not there and I get a text from him and he says can you give me the name of the artist because I want to buy these signs you know after the run of the show so I was pretty excited about that and it was really just a great kind of moment of saying like trust the art trust the art and they ended up being a really kind of important part of the project for us so I think the other thing that we're discovering too is that as you go forward and you get through this fear and you get through this is you start finding these like weird fossils like so a lot is changing in the theater and then there are these things that are like left over from how we used to do things so I have this strange inherited program that we call the community access performances which already you can tell so that's a program where we give free tickets away to community groups so we have a mess very problematic we're working on that but so we're working on this for the last show and you know we realize like the marketing department here's how this program got invented there were tickets that they couldn't sell so they thought like what should we do with this excess inventory let's see if there are any community groups who would like these free tickets so then you find yourself in these terrible phone calls with like this community group that you have no relationship with that you're trying to make a relationship with that you decided it's really important for your theater to have a relationship with and you're like how's Tuesday night how's the second preview how about July 4th you know so we begin to go back to the marketing department and we say well like Saturday nights how come we can't offer them tickets to the nights that you know like people want to come to for money and you know I'm not saying this because the marketing department is the devil in fact the marketing department is on our side here because they are the ones who really understand what it means to increase participation in our art form and so we actually had this great staff meeting where we said oh this used to be a program in the marketing department and it's still constructed like a program in the marketing department what would it mean if we took this program we brought it over here and then the development director said oh why don't I just try to raise money to cover the cost of these tickets and then they don't have to be aligned and the marketing department's budget and it was like oh so we like discover these fossils and then we unpack them and it's like oh right it doesn't it doesn't have to go there so that's kind of a little bit about what some of the tactics are that the change making tactics and how it's going I think the other thing that's really useful that I just want to close with is that so in the Bay Area we have of course our tech industry neighbors and we hear a lot about the cycle of how innovation happens in those companies and so we hear this described a lot if you're not in Bay Area you probably can't recite this along with me but so you prototype something and you bring it to market you get consumer feedback and then you bring it back and you iterate and so we talked a lot in the Bay Area about sorry for my jargon my tech jargon but it's really important because I think they know what they're doing they know what they're doing about the cycle of change they know what they're doing to not try once and then be done and be like okay we had a strategic planning process that lasted nine months and then we set our plan we set our vision we've rewritten our mission and then we're done you know what we're trying to do in the lab is to really look at how you can iterate change how you can try something see what works learn from what didn't work and try it again and I think this is a really big question that we're asking and I think a lot of us in the field you know how can theaters how can our institutions actually be a part of making positive change in our communities how can we become more essential to the people that we live among and the people that we're serving how can we actually be nonprofits who have a mission that is about serving the public benefit how can we really make that good because I think we're beginning to understand more and more that the production of plays sold for very high ticket prices a little cover our very high overhead like that just doesn't answer that question for me anymore and I think there are lots and lots of us for whom that just isn't the answer anymore and so how can we really answer that question I don't know can theater make change I guess the only way I'm going to figure that out is to try and to try in small ways ways that we can allow to fail ways that aren't about like oh my god we went $50,000 under our budget or whatever you know we have small experiments let by artists that we can allow to iterate and we can see what change looks like when we try it again and again so thank you very much for letting me talk to you about Chilean plays this is Carmen Aguirre and Carmen is a Vancouver based theater artist who has worked extensively across North and South America she has written and co-written 20 plays including Chilean Carmen, Trigger The Refugee Hotel and Blue Box she is working on two new plays the Trial of Tina Madotti and Anywhere but Here her work has been nominated for a Dora Award for Jesse Awards and the Semenovitch Prize her memoirs Something Fears Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter is number one national bestseller and one CBC Canada reads 2012 she is currently starting her work on her second book The Mexican Hooker Number One to be published by Random House she is the recipient of the 2002 2002 New Play Center's Best New Play Award the 2011 Union of B.C. Performers Lorena Gale Woman of Distinction Award and Lynn Garrett College's 2012 Outstanding Alumni Award Carmen has over 60 film, TV and stage acting credits as a theater of the oppressed workshop facilitator and stressed into acting department of Vancouver Film School and has directed a dozen plays she is a graduate of the theater training program studio 58 Lynn Garrett College please welcome, Carmen Gale I know you must be like fucking exhausted by this point so I'm just gonna dive right in when I was 18 years old I had the most searing theatrical experience of my life it happened in Lima Peru during the Civil War there it was May 1986 when I had just joined the Chilean resistance that was fighting Pinochet's right wing dictatorship now if you joined the underground outside of Chile like I did you did so in Lima where you would get your orders if you had to take the oath the oath said that I would give my life to the resistance that I agreed to be executed by the resistance if I broke under torture and gave my comrades away and that I would always follow orders no matter what security was of the utmost importance people fell all the time Pinochet's dictatorship was considered one of the most secure in the world in other words the secret police were everywhere and the Peruvian secret police worked with Pinochet as well so one must never ever do anything stupid stupid things included but were not limited to going to the theater it was okay to go to a mainstream performance of St. Mary Poppins the probability of the secret police going to Mary Poppins to look for dissidents was quite low but to attend a performance that could have been considered in any way alternative that was absolutely strictly prohibited the cost, the military the secret police were more likely to show up at an alternative performance and sniff around for possible subversives and if you happen to be there and if they happen to discover who you were you'd be dead if you were lucky most likely you'd be tortured to the point of no return the day after I took the oath while I was walking around downtown Lima sobbing uncontrollably under my mirrored sunglasses due to being gripped by a state of chronic grief and terror my first husband who had also joined the resistance pointed out a scribbled sign on a telephone pole in between my evening and sobbing I managed to read the scribbled half hazard sign it was advertising a play the play was to start after curfew which was in and of itself illegal and hence beyond alternative and the scribbled note said come if you dare so being young and very stupid my first husband and I broke all the rules of the oath we'd taken a mere 24 hours earlier and we dared to go to the play we arrived just before curfew at the allotted location there were a couple of dozen other people there of all ages and mixed social classes we all nodded at each other and then steered at the ground as Lima prepared for curfew last stragglers running home, packed buses speeding down the street the first military helicopters I sobbed quietly the terror never subsiding until the first nations man in bare feet and white pants came out and gestured to enter the building which looked like a school of sorts we followed him in single file with a face of excitement and doom because no one knew whether this was some kind of setup and we were all heading to our tragic basically self-inflicted deaths or whether it really was a play we were taken to a classroom where the chairs had been arranged in a circle we all sat down and the man disappeared as time passed the sounds of curfew became more prominent curfew was mostly just silence for the intermittent sounds of helicopters military vehicles a bomb exploding here and there and the odd shot ringing through the night these sounds became our walk-in music as it were we all grew even more terrified, that was obvious chanting ourselves that we all been stupid enough to take on the dare I wondered if there were secret police members in the audience a fresh stream of tears gushed from my eyes mercilessly, un-revolutionarily all of a sudden a guitar played and a man came in a troubadour of sorts also on bare feet and white pants he sang a beautiful song with no lyrics just haunting sounds he was followed by a woman bare feet, white attire and two other men dressed the same the last one being the man in for the next two non-stop hours these four performers that told us the history of Peru from the time of the Spanish conquest until that very moment in time May 1986 the Civil War they told the story with their bodies no text was spoken sounds emitted from their mouths but not a single word they created image upon image upon image and a soundscape with their voices and breath periodically punctuated by the sounds of curfew the images were of genocide rape slavery starvation and ultimately resistance a celebration of life history of that country from the point of view of the oppressed slash freedom fighters they finished their play by dancing a cumbia as they sang the only text we may be fucked but we're fucking happy more tears flowed for the rest of the night we all stayed in that classroom chatting, sleeping, laughing until curfew was lifted in the morning that play and the circumstances in which I saw it is seared in my brain to this day in that moment in which for all intents and purposes I was having an urges breakdown I was willing to break all the rules and risk it all to have a story told to me and it paid off the play gave me the inspiration to continue contextualized once more why I had chosen to join a movement that sought to liberate my continent from the very oppression depicted in the play and it gave me joy in a great time of terror in a time of great terror it expanded my tiny universe of paranoia and let in the light basically it took me out of myself and reminded me to not take myself so seriously that ultimately the story was much larger than my own personal narrative that I had put myself in a terrifying situation that I had risked it all in order to serve a larger story in which I was a near player and that that was worth doing by the time I came back to Canada to go to theater school in order to learn the skills to tell the stories of my community the Latino community in exile stories that are rarely ever seen on Canadian stages I thought I knew everything there was to know about risk and terror and failure because the revolution we had been fighting for had been lost innocently arrogantly I thought that I would not have to experience risk, terror, and failure again because I thought that the artistry behind good storytelling was about pretending convincingly I had yet to learn that a well-told story is most effective when there is no potential at all that a story moves us to the core when the storyteller unmasks herself and seeks the truth in every moment and that truth seeking is by its very nature risk taking and that risk taking often leads to failure and that all of this can be terrifying and so when I remember those Bima curfew players it dawned on me that the risk they took was twofold, yes they were taking a political risk by performing their play after curfew to an audience that may have included the enemy but they were also taking an emotional risk by opening their hearts to a bunch of strangers that may have included the enemy this dual responsibility was so great that letting us down was not an option they contextualized their story personally socially, politically and historically and thus reminded us that we mattered that our communities mattered and in sharing a piece of art that was engaging in content and form they made themselves vulnerable emotionally and artistically there was no pretending they told their truth, they risked failure as the military seized the night they risked it all by being present in every moment by opening their hearts and minds and that is why we transformed from a paranoid audience of individual stories into a courageous community with a larger story in common I had risked it all to hear a story and the reason why I went off was because those highly skilled storytellers were able to articulate my own defining story conjuring meaning out of raw experience they took us into the dark and transcended the pain they created symbols that the entire room owned reminding us that our stories mattered they let us know they were committed in every sense of the word to social and artistic transformation that was a key point the redefinition of risk and so now whenever I tell a story if I'm not afraid on some level I know I must be doing something wrong I learned to risk vulnerability after developing a hard necessary shell under Pinochet's Chile I learned that the terror of risking vulnerability in front of strangers in order to seek the truth in every moment was equal to the terror I felt in the resistance I learned that many times when we are telling the story on the stage we fail, we get it wrong I learned that the definition of a successful artist is simply someone who insists on doing their work in spite of, or because of the risk, the terror and the failure the public humiliation Pablo Miranes the internationally renowned Cuban singer-songwriter has said that he pities the artist who does not risk himself or his art when I started to learn the art of storytelling I was able to see exactly what he meant those curfew players put themselves on the line in every sense of the word I strive to do the same and to this day nothing moves me more than a piece of art that risks it all thank you so that brings us to the end of our evening here thank you so much I'd like to thank all of our wonderful speakers for sharing their stories and their moments with us I'd like to thank our host here at SFU the LNDA, Deborah Sparrow from the Musqueam Nation and all of our lovely volunteers who put this together and helped me get around to all the ones that will come through this weekend and we would also like to thank Heidi Taylor for giving us this opportunity to we wish you all a good time for the rest of this conference and if you would like to watch the speakers again check out the Howl Sound website or the LNDA website Howl Round also, who will see you at the conference bar which is the poor house on 162 Water Street in Gastham well, that's all for tonight drink out and have a good night I'm just going to do this I was right I'm going to go up to the next side and we would work on this thing watch it I don't put it on I don't do that I'm going to do this watch this watch it you guys go like this you have to do that that's how we work