 I'm going to get started because we have so much to talk about and one of my priorities this morning is to leave time for your questions at the end. I have written a prepared introduction and then I'm going to launch into sort of my standard presentation. Bear with us while we open up our PowerPoint presentation. We had a few technical hinkies but Kate Payett Eckert here is reliable. Yes it is. No it's also yes it's here too but it is also on the on the drive. I'll let you work on that. Thank you for being here. Thank you for coming. Being here today is the realization of a dream I had for this project for quite some time. So I must thank Hannah Fenlon, Devin Berkshire and everyone at TCG for inviting me to share with you the work of Not in Our House and the Chicago Theater Standards. Getting the call out of the blue was not something I expected inviting me to be here but perhaps the universe was working that day and thank you also to Nissy Aya for getting me here. I also want to thank my Chicago Theater community for doing this hard work. I may be the one standing here but this document was written and then piloted by dozens and then hundreds of administrators, artistic directors, managing directors, directors, stage managers, fight choreographers, designers, playwrights, clowns and yes actors. They represent theaters with a broad spectrum of budget, artistic mission, leadership structures in spaces both traditional and those exploring what theater spaces can be and erasing the walls between production and audience. The individuals who interacted with the document, challenged it, critiqued it, improved it, is inclusive of many races, genders, orientations, education backgrounds and economic opportunities. Lastly, I want to thank the theaters across the nation who have adopted, adapted, read or discussed this work and in taking on the difficult work of applying our collective intentions to do better, turning into action because the only way to address a systemic problem is with a systemic plan of solution. More on that later. I am here as your colleague, not as a regulator, a cop, a shamer or an authority. I'm simply here to share the work that we have done in Chicago and for reasons connected to our collective intention, anguish, rage. But most of all I want to recognize the courage of those who spoke out in Chicago and now spaces all over the country. Our humble document has found its way into theater spaces across the U.S. and beyond. Without their courage, none of this would have happened. I was a note taker in yesterday's town hall and one commenter reminded me of an intention that we and not in our house had early on. Those who spoke out had been abused, manipulated, traumatized and more. We wanted to leave the often perceived responsibility of those on the receiving end of abuse of doing the work to fix it. And at the risk of boasting, I'm proud of us for doing that. Joining me here today is Kate Piat Eckert, a stage manager by training and the executive director of one of Chicago's most beloved non-union theaters, Steep Theater. She has been an important contributor to this process both for her understanding of the needs of the producer and her personal commitment to social justice. After my presentation, we'll open up for Q&A. Many of your questions might be better answered by Kate, who may answer thorny implementation issues. Also joining us here today are colleagues from Chicago who have been a part of the writing and implementation process in Chicago. If you could just wave your hands or those of you, okay. Hi, Gus. Thank you for being here. Gus Mineri from Jackalope Theater, another beloved Chicago storefront theater, has been dedicated to this process and might help with some questions as well. May I ask, so I know where we are at together, may I see a show of hands of those who might be using the document but are not necessarily connected to the process in any way? A couple of you and a little bit of this, that's great. Thank you. And may I see a show of hands of people who have simply read the document? Many of you, thank you for doing that. And lastly, so I have a good gauge in my mind, who in here is here for an introduction who's absolutely new to the process? Great. Thank you for your curiosity and your willingness to be here today. The history of not in our house and the Chicago Theater Standards is as organic and scrappy as Chicago Theater itself. I am an actor. I've been an actor in Chicago for 30 years. I'm a Chicago native, Chicago trained. And so the Chicago environment is both one I know very well and the one I know best. I respect that your environments might be different. But I think today is finding the nexus points about how our environment and our work might serve you and help you, which is really all we're here to do. We're not here to coerce or finger point or us and them or even sell. We're here to share. And if that is helpful to you personally or your organization, we've done our job. Now I'm going to try. Oh, look, it's there. Kate pirate Eckert is magic. So a little bit about the history of not in our house in the Chicago Theater Standards. So in January of 2015, I was doing good people at Milwaukee Rep. And it was super cold in Milwaukee in January of 2015. So I was spending a lot of time in my hotel room scrolling Facebook. And one day this person that I kind of knew but I Facebook knew or I didn't really know know her put this post out on Facebook that stopped me in my tracks. It stopped my breath. It stopped everything. Laurie Myers is a respected actor in Chicago and she was doing a show and she's a sort of in my age range. And so she has adult actors playing her children, right? In a lot of shows now she's come to that part of her artistic life. And the fourth young woman came to her and told her a story of abuse at the hands of the same individual at the same theater. And she blew her top and she had a Facebook moment. She didn't name names. She didn't you know do any of that. But she simply said all of us have known and I'm paraphrasing all of us have known about this for as long as I can remember. This is the fourth person that's come to me. When are we as a community going to put our foot down and do something about it? And she impulsively created this hashtag not in our house. Within an hour, there were hundreds of responses. And everybody knew everybody who chimed in. I know, I know. It was like the me to moment. Remember that day? I know. I know who you're talking about. I know it. I know it. I know it. I know it. And all of us had this collective rage, anguish and shame. Because we but we also knew that you know, a theater is business. You can't walk into a theater and shut it down as an individual everyone also felt helpless and hopeless and not understanding what to do. But we knew the time was up. Something was going to happen. We didn't know what but because of Laurie's post, the earth had just shifted. Within a week, I was sitting back in Chicago, the show had closed, I was back in Chicago, sitting at a restaurant having falafel with about five other people saying what now the toothpaste is out of the tube. Those of us at the table, we each took a little job because we plan to have sort of a private town hall and it was private because people were physically afraid of this individual. They didn't want him, frankly, showing up with a gun. So we kept it secret. We'd cops outside. We had a and the panel consisted of someone who had looked into the codes of actors equity, somebody who had researched, we had a cop there from the Special Victims Unit. I really didn't even know that that was something that lived outside of law and order. I was like, there's a real and they really call it that. I was like, okay, so and this, this cop knew all about this guy. They're like, Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, we know about this guy. And so he was sort of helping people understand what to do and what this is. We had different people researching different things. And I was asked to research employment law. I'm an actor like clearly I'm not an expert in employment law. But we had to do something. And I said, if not me who so I happened to have a friend who is a top flight EEOC attorney at the law firm of Freeborn and Peters in Chicago of a very well respected law firm. And he gave us pro bono time and he still does. And they did research, their paralegals did research, it was a little bit thorny, but they came back and gave us the verdict, which was in spaces that many of us work in as actors, particularly non union spaces, particularly spaces below a certain budget level, below a certain amount of employees. EEOC law doesn't apply. Because if you don't work a certain amount of hours a week, if you don't make a certain amount per hour per week, or if your institution has fewer than 13 employees, you may not be quantified by the state that you are in as an employee or an employee or so the EEOC laws. Those are the laws that cover sexual harassment, racial discrimination, right? Disability law. These don't apply to the non employers or non employees. Those people are perceived as volunteers, participants, right? We know who work in this profession. The last thing we think of ourselves at the emerging parts of our careers are volunteers, or, you know, in some kind of clubhouse, we are serious about the craft from the moment we begin it, and hope that we will have a career that lasts for the rest of our lifetimes, right? That's the dream. So I said this to this room of my colleagues and friends, most of you know, in Chicago, everybody kind of knows each other, but the room was just a gate and a gas and enraged again. So I felt that kind of like, oh, I need to do something. I need to say the right thing. I have a little bit of a hero complex. So I splurted out without a plan or credential. What would you think about writing your own code of conduct? And the room went wild. And I said, again, without plan or understanding what I was saying, okay, I'll help you do that. And I really was like, oh, boy, I just stepped in it. I have no idea what I'm about to do or what this means. And I have no training in this and I don't know what I'm doing. But what I do know is that I have been in this craft for 30 years. I have been in four different theater companies. I have worked at every budget level. I have done musical theater, physical theater, regular theater, dangerous theater. I have been on the receiving end of harassment. And I have witnessed it from every angle. So I'm not actually clueless, right? And I have a dedication to my community. And I will both. So I have a good, I believe, inner compass. And again, I said, if not me who? But by the end of that night, what I had the most valuable thing that I had was a yellow pad with the names of 10 theaters that wanted to be a part of it. We got donated space from the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago who let us use their large, beautiful rehearsal space as many times as we wanted to, to sit around a table and debate the ideas out. And so I had to make some super duper quick decisions, like what is the best foot to start off from? And I made a few decisions. One was I wanted a lot of different disciplines around the table because I wanted a healthy debate. We had to have the producer interest and the actor interest. So what we had around the table were artistic directors, managing directors, stage managers, designers, fight choreographers, clowns, actors from different budget levels. We had Joe Drummond. I don't know if you all know who Joe Drummond is. He's famous in Chicago as having been the stage manager of the Goodman Theater for 40 years and recently retired. I knew if it didn't get past Joe, it wasn't getting in the document. I knew if a managing director said, my board is never going to approve that. If an artistic director said, I'm never going to be able to implement that. If a stage manager said, do you realize the burden that's going to put on my process? I wanted that kind of healthy conflict in the room. And we sat around those tables for a year. We wrote, we did sort of workshoppy things and we moved around the room and there were lots of post-its. And people went home and they talked to their people in their companies and they brought back contributions. There were contributions from outside of the little process. We had pre-written contributions from DePaul Theater School because they had faced some issues and they shared their work with us. We received the good work of the neo-futurists in Chicago, which has a 30-year history. They had faced problems. They had done some work. They shared their work with us and also Bilal Dardai, their artistic director at the time, was a key part of the writing process of the document. He shared his work with us. The attorneys shared their work with us. Editors shared their work with us. So we wrote for a year. Then it went through the lawyer machine. And we had two different kinds of lawyers vet the document. One who was pro-producer and one who was pro-employee. So the pro-employee lawyer was like, you have to set everything up for the employee or volunteer or whatever to be able to get justice. And the pro-producer attorney would say, if you presented this to any board in Chicago, they wouldn't do it. So we would go back and then we would go back and then we would go back and we would write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. And then we said, okay, it's ready. We can trust it to not break theaters. And so then we started a pilot program. And by that point, there were many more theaters in Chicago that sort of wanted to start experimenting with the document. It was always online, free share. We wanted transparency. But I also didn't want to create litigious environments in theaters. And I was concerned that our mistakes, our naivete, our good intentions, but perhaps bad tactics, might poorly visit on the spaces we were seeking to serve. So we tried to take the time and there were disclosures on the website saying, it's not done, please wait. That kind of thing. And then the theaters who piloted the document took it home. There were things, we asked that every person at every level of the organization agreed to sign on. That was a big one. Because if it's one person, the thing might sit in a drawer and only be pulled out if and when there's a problem. That everyone had to be aware and consent of the systemic change we were proposing a company get involved in. Right? Full consent. We did that for a year and a half. And that changed the document. The document was completely rewritten, keeping all of the values everybody had contributed thus far. We engendered the document. We added a diversity and inclusion section. We added sections that we had left out. We took things out that were overreach. We clarified the language. We made it more accessible to read and understand. And so what we ended up with was online now what is considered complete but you know everything evolves. Is a 32 page, wholly free, completely voluntary, not even copy written free shared document that you can go and read, adopt, adapt, or be inspired by to go through a similar process in your community. That's what it's there for. I say in every room because I want you to carry this away with you today that this process is purely to help. It is not to us and them. It is not to try to identify who the good theaters are and the bad theaters are. That's why there's no club. There's no medallion. There's no fee. There's no I am here as an or a coordinator but I am not here as anybody's regulator or anybody's boss. So and I do mean that purely. My intention is to try to open up what's inside the document and try to make it as easy for you to read it understand it and use it as possible. So what is the document? As I said, wholly free, absolutely voluntary online. You can pull it up right now if you want. Not in our house.org and from within that underdeveloped website you can find the Chicago Theater Standards. It's a tool like all the other tools we have in our toolbox as artists and administrators for self regulation. You know actors equity is fabulous. I've been a member since 1996. I'm a proud member but they usually get involved after a problem happens. The law is great if something criminal happens right? That law is in action everywhere but they're not around to prevent things from happening. They don't know our business. They don't know our culture. They don't understand the gray areas. They don't understand how what we want to be profane and respectful at the same time. We want to be sexy and do dangerous work but respect the bodies of the players that are putting their bodies and their souls and their artistry and their finances on the line. And a lot of people outside our business may not understand the the head of a pin we need to land on to get that right. The document is collected wisdom. Anybody my colleagues you people here today anybody watching on HowlRound. Hi HowlRound. My hope is that you would read the document and you would say I know this. We already do this because a lot of the stuff in the document is collected wisdom. It's curated. It's the best ideas that are often already in use. And then we said where are the gaps? What can we add and how can we be informed by what we already do well. I want to put a pin in that. Can you mentally put a pin in that for me? I'll come back to that. What is it not? It's not a legal contract. Nobody signs it. It's a cultural agreement. It's systemic change. We have all these kinds of practices in our business already that we just sort of do without thinking about it. We don't question it. We know that if we want to be a good player here are the things we do. It's not a membership. It's not a regulatory board. I'm never going to come into your space and tell you you're doing it wrong. And if you ever go into anybody else's space and tell them they're doing it wrong you're not doing it right. A certification or a prescription. The document is actually this is something that came later. Rick Gilbert is a violence designer and he was in the process from the very beginning but about three quarters of the way through the pilot he sort of said I think we're getting all this wrong. He's a professor. He's a teacher. He's very professorial and process oriented in his thinking. He said what we have to do is what we already do as artists. We look at an artistic problem. You know the difference between a problem and an artistic problem or a design problem. Say here's a blank stage. The problem is how do we make it look like a beach. That's an artistic problem. Right. And you solve it with creative solutions. So what we turn the document on its head with was how do we not prescribe what to do. But how do we make a series of creative problems and offer a curated list of possible solutions. So we're handing it back to the spaces to say here's a bunch of stuff you can do but you can also invent your own solutions. Right. And it would be terribly arrogant and irresponsible of me to say I'm the only one who knows how to get this right or we got it right and it's never going to be right in any other way. There has been some it's evolved. You know that this is sort of new. Right. It's only since 2015. So there have been changes and evolutions if you read the document at the beginning of the process. It's very different now. At the beginning there was the thought that it was only for non-union theaters because they didn't have the money to do some kind of process like this or hire consultants or have HR firms or etc etc etc etc. They're also represent an emerging part of our business. Right. It's people with the least experience sometimes and they're forming their their their work practice. They're forming. They're developing how they're treating each other in the work as they get used to it. And Chicago has a very like rough and tumble. We do raw work. We you know we like violence on our all this stuff. But sometimes the the bodies in that work have not been protected. And so non-union theaters seem to be the best way to make the change that will come through future generations. And raise people raise people in the business with good work practice. And also when I've talked to the the sort of youngest artists and perhaps the most targeted people for abuse they said the same thing over and over and over again. They said I just thought that's how it went. Which is awful right. You know I just thought when I was standing waiting to make my entrance some guy was going to come along and grab my boob and that's just like how it goes. That's a personal account. And then or they would say I didn't know who to talk to. Or I was afraid. Right. So I wanted the document to always be focused on solving those two problems. The I thought that's how it went. That's why the document is online. Because if you are an emerging artist whether you're seventeen or eighty. You can go online and read the document say oh this is how it should go. This is how it can go. So when you experience how it shouldn't go. You've got some information backing you up. And all of these now over a hundred theaters across the country saying yeah that's not the way it's supposed to go. So there's power in numbers. That's why it's called the standards. But eighty eight theaters. You know in Chicago we have the cat system the Chicago area theaters contract. So we have theaters of many many budget levels who are unionized. And they may only use one contract per show or things like that. So they a lot of those smaller theaters started coming to me and saying I want to be a part of this process I think this is useful. It's answering some things some things for us that we don't have it's serving the purpose for us can can we do it. And I said oh yes of course. And the intention always was that. The document would elegantly serve alongside the A.E.A. code. And where there are redundancies it should be understood that. You know you do it once. That that's simply the overlap that is going to happen you get that right. Also in A.E.A. space is something that I have heard is that because the largest power differentials. Are at the largest highest budget levels. There's an even more important possibly important need for making sure there are communication pathways so that the people with the most power are either A held accountable or B are hearing what's going on in their theaters that they would want to know about sometimes the people at the highest levels of an organization care very much. But the information never even gets to them. And so we wanted to find a solution for that so it really doesn't matter what the budget level is with the union situation is with the history is it is our hope that our work can serve regardless of the institution. And this is a really big priority of mine. And I hope it's a big priority of yours that in this time of me to in this time of collective anguish rage and call to action. We need to see the opportunity particularly at emerging theaters or emerging artists that it is our opportunity and I will go so far as to say our collective responsibility to mentor people into good work practice. Because I was 21. I was in kissing scenes. I was attracted to my partner. I was confused. A stage kiss became a real kiss. I didn't know what was happening. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know if the person kissing me was attracted to me or where we're going to get married or you know like these confusions are real. And not every school is good at teaching it. And not you know and we it's it's like we are as oogie as our parents were about talking to us about sex. So when a person makes a mistake with staging if they color outside the lines of of choreography say. For us to say out the predator. I do not think is progress. We don't want to throw out the people who are on the receiving end of abuse because that is really what happens. People are abused right out of the profession and we never learn how valuable they would have been to us. It's also true and possible. In this moment that people will be outed right out of the business particularly you know and sometimes be confused and need mentoring. We mentor them on everything else. We mentor them if they're late. We mentor them if they're not memorizing their lines. We mentor them if they are sort of being fake in their work. You know we mentor them on all kinds of things. We understand. We say it all the time. Oh they're young they don't get it yet. Help them. Help them. They have talent. Help them. Help them. And we need to include this in all the ways we mentor our emerging artists and our emerging institutions. In my humble opinion. So the elements of the document and the priorities of the document are very much rooted in a priority to mentor. So we've tried to create communication pathways that go from the bottom of the power structure to the top. And go chronologically from season selection all the way through strike. And the communication pathways that are trying to be opened are between players between production members between administration. Right so everyone takes a part. This is not a document just for production it's a document for organizations. I want to speak just for a second to actually I think it's another slide. So hold on a second. When is it harassment. A lot of people ask me this question. I don't know when it's harassment. When is it confusion. How do I know. And we're all kind of collectively learning in these last few years and some of you in this room might actually be farther along than even I am on this question. How can we navigate the great areas. Well in the document there is the suggestion of rockering consent. For scenes with sexual content intimate content. That there is choreography and documentation around scenes with intimate content. That seems to prevent and demystify the great areas and I and I'd like to take a second to just point out that this is stuff we already do really well. It's called fight choreography. When we do on on stage violence. Every I would bet you I don't care what you do in the theater you all know how that's supposed to go. An expert a credentialed expert is brought in who knows how to work with weapons and fisticuffs and you know all kinds of things and and the violence designer fight choreographer whatever you call them in your face comes in they check with everybody to look in their eyes to see who's hung over who's dehydrated. They ask who's got what kind of training they look at the resumes. And then they give they don't care how many times you've heard it the safety talk. They tell you what you may and may not do with the weapons. They tell you where they go who's in charge. They teach everybody the things they don't know how to do. They hold everybody to account within inches of their choreography and any actor worth respect will sell themselves on their ability to be precise and repeat that choreography. So if you can do it for a fight you can do it for a kiss. You can do it for a rape on stage. There's no reason you can't be precise with fight choreography and intimate choreography but but if I go through all of the protocols for fight choreography including fight calls including a sheet where you say something went wrong including the stage manager being involved including calling the designer back in if a problem happens. If I take out the words fight choreography and I put in the words intimate content or sexual content what of all that happens. You all know the answer how it goes down in your space. Many of us have been in situations where none of that happened. And when I first started this process I started asking like stage managers and people like I was trying to do some research get some information I talked to stage managers and I would say what do you do like what do you always do with sexual content that makes it work. And more times than not more times than I wanted to hear I would hear oh I don't get in the middle of that that's why I'm a stage manager I'm not comfortable with any of that. And that seemed to me like a deficit. Like an opportunity to use what we know in fight choreography and we're all comfortable with we don't get it and apply it to sexual content. Now the document is not prescriptive. So we don't say you must hire an intimacy designer from this company and this we don't that's not what the document does. The document says you should treat sexual choreography with the same level of risk that you treat fight choreography. We trust that you will interpret that with all of the options available to you in this professional and cultural moment. So that a theater at the lowest budget level if they can't afford an intimacy designer. What they can do is make sure consent is brokered because that's free. And you can read how to do it online. They can the stage manager can document the moves, commensurate with the detail they would with fight choreography because they already know how to do that. They can have a communication pathway who to talk to when something goes wrong. They can communicate that it is their opportunity to speak to someone if the choreography is not upheld. We do what we already know how to do. And everybody should be given the opportunity to be informed if they've crossed a line and given the opportunity to apologize, to amend right and move on. And if the behavior persists it's harassment. So if you and I are in a I don't know we're talking whatever and where you buy me a drink because you liked this talk and I'm not going to say that's a bad thing. And then somewhere in that conversation, you put your hand on my butt and I say that's a boundary violation. If that's my telling you my boundary. And what you did isn't cool, right? We already know that. But I gave you a boundary violation. If you choose to ignore it, that's harassment. The second time it's harassment. And I think it's a lot simpler than we try to make it. But we must all get very good and get better and take it on as our responsibility, in my opinion, to set boundaries with others, to get good at giving them. But we must also start to get better at how we receive them. Again, it's not the person on the receiving end of the harassment abuse boundary violation, right? That should be solely responsible for amending or preventing the situation. Because a lot of these problems persist because we haven't been very good at receiving others boundaries. Oh, that's just him. Oh, don't worry about it. The show is done in two weeks. Just move on. We're not going to hire him again. Just know, right? Just don't say anything. Because that'll just upset everybody. So we haven't been really good at it. And we all now have the opportunity to get better. Oh, my sister gave me this phrase because she was in HR for 25 years. And she said she would teach employees this phrase, that thing you did fill in that blank, right? Whatever the thing was, that thing you did is not okay with me, which is different than saying you're impersonalizing and calling names and making character assassinations and blah, blah, blah. That name that name the action that thing you did, when you touched, you know, when you massaged me, that's not okay with me. When you called me and when you sexted me, that's not okay with me. When you blank, when you blank, when you blank, that's not okay with me. So you get specific and you own your boundary. And then it is their job to receive it. So what about the baddies? What about the predators? What about, you know, the people that we all kind of want out? This is my belief. If you provide which the document seeks to do, education, prevention, communication pathways, documentation and safe reporting, maybe it wouldn't take 20 years to identify a predator. Or maybe if emerging artists know what is and is not okay or knows who to talk to, maybe somebody won't snake around a community for 20 years before a community says no more. Maybe an artist won't work a second time at a theater. Maybe an artist will get the courage up to call up Thunder and say, I was sexually assaulted at the theater, you give so much money to. This is after, you know, giving a theater every opportunity to make things right. That's a big theme, right? I think we're all kind of getting this at this conference, that we have a systemic problem and it requires a systemic solution. Which is why the document is designed for everybody to take part, the ensemble, the staff, the board, it's not to be put in a drawer and forgotten. It's a process guide that lives every day in your organization. It's present at every step of production, pre-production, post-production. The idea is that anybody that you hire understands you use this document and they should read it and know therefore what their rights and responsibilities are. And maybe a predator will read it and think, I don't want to work there. That'll be no fun. And so you fulfill the promise of not in our house. You want to do that? Don't do it here. The structure. The document itself is 32 pages. It has an introduction, a table of contents. It has 10 to 12 standards that go chronologically through how we work. So there is a standard for auditions. There's a standard for rehearsal. There's a standard for sexual content and nudity. There's a section for during the run. There's a set, you know, right? And it sort of goes like that. And then there's an addendum at the end that provides examples of things an emerging theater might not have. They don't have to use the one in the document but there's one if they need it that they can avail themselves of like an agreement. A lot of problems that I see are coming out of spaces that never used agreements. And so participants didn't even actually know where rehearsal was going to be, if they were going to have an understudy, if they were going to get paid, if extension was a possibility, if they were going to have to bring their own clothes or if they were going to have to be naked on stage. Kind of fundamental. But we're trying to provide some fundamental solutions. Now this each standard also has a structure that repeats through the standards. There's the basic which is sort of like what is free to do? We had a priority that this would not be a budget buster, that it wouldn't suddenly add $1,000 to a theater that has a $2,000 budget for a season, right? Which is how a lot of theaters in Chicago start. So what's free? What's the least you can do? Broker and consent is free. Communication is free. The document is online. I advise people you don't have to print it out. Just tell people where to go. Put it in a link in an email. Tell them to read it. It shouldn't cost you anything. Now, there's a lot of things in the document that some theaters won't be able to afford. What if it does cost you money? What if you can't supply the other thing? In that case, you should tell people. We're going to be rehearsing outside. There is no portable water bringing your own. Portable. Portable. You know what I'm saying. So when you cannot give people what they might expect, like pay, you should tell them. If you expect them to be a part of culturally charged material that might not be written yet, you should tell them. If you hire a person from a particular cultural group and you expect to use their cultural personhood in devised work, you should tell them. Disclosure, disclosure, disclosure, disclosure, disclosure. Take it further. This is when we put items in the document that might cost money. But as a company gets a better budget, et cetera, et cetera, here are some things they might do. For example, if you do a lot of physical theater, like in Chicago, Looking Glass does, or Plastocene, an old company of mine used to do, that as soon as you get money, you should be rehearsing on a sprung floor, because that is what will keep those bodies safe for decades to come. So that's, take it further. Implementation notes. This is something that was generated through the pilot, where theaters that were piloting the document would say, hey, we figured out how to do this well. Do you want to put that in the document? Like, how can the document actually help you get it right? Because there are nuances. Like, how do you make sure the document is not used to divide in production? How do you make sure there isn't white nighting? How do you make sure that every production isn't like, let's play Find the Predator, where in every production people who have good intentions, rooted in social justice, are trying to find out who the bad guy is in every production. You might call that witch hunting, you might call that pitchforking. These things are possible, but that is not the intention of the document. But in the implementation notes, it talks about how to talk about this on the first day, to get off on the right foot, to talk about the priority, sort of like, that's why I like to come to places and talk about it, so that there is less confusion about what this is and what it's not. And if you were to adopt the document, or adapt the document, or create your own process, those are things you want to think about. How do you pave the way for this to help and not further harm? Which we can often do in our good intentions that are sometimes fueled with bad strategy. So, if the document intends to build a stronger safety net, some of those ropes of the net go from season selection through strike. The other ropes go from the top of the organization all the way down to the bottom. And those crossing each other is the stronger safety net. I want to talk about that for a second. The document suggests the person with the most power should stand in front of their company on day one and say, even if it's me, I want you to report. As we have seen in a lot of spaces in the last couple of years, it is the person at the top of the power structure or somewhere in the top of the power structure who is the harasser, abuser, etc. And that brings me to the moment to say like, if a company likes abusive environment, they don't want to use this document. It won't help them continue their abusive practices. It will make it a lot harder. And I'm just going to let that sit there. Because the power is if you have emerging artists being steeped in how to get this right. If you have a lot of allied theaters using the document to get it right, think about how many people go in and out of organizations every season all over the country. People know now, not just what is okay and what is not okay, but they also know how to get it right. They're given they're being not just not in our house in Chicago Theater Standards, but our cultural moment right now has all kinds of opportunities to get it right. So those who don't want to get it right, there are a few slides back. And perhaps individuals will choose to invest their creative talents elsewhere. But I do want to say that in in the spirit that there is not one way to do this. And this document doesn't seek perfection, but it seeks help to help and to provide something where maybe there wasn't before. That doesn't mean that this is the only way to get it right. Your organization might need something different. It's really the organizations that choose to do nothing that I'm talking about. Not the companies like don't choose this or don't call it this. There's theaters all over the country that there's like the Portland Theater Standards now and the Boston Theater Standards and the Dallas Theater Standards. And they're using a document but they're also making it more of their community. And that's okay. What can you do? You can adopt it in your theater right now. If you would like to do that, my name is Laura T. Fisher. You can find me on Facebook. You can message me and I will help you do that. If you want my help. You can adapt the document to suit your and I say a little like if you adapt the document but you take out all the elements about protecting people from abuse that's you know that's what I mean by a little. You can advocate. You can start a process in your community that builds your own document from scratch because the process was valuable for all of the people who were involved in it. But I would suggest simply what somebody suggested in Dallas. I'm stealing that. I wish I had the name to give attribution but I don't remember. They did table work on the document. They tested every sentence, every punctuation. They put it through the test that we already know how to do. Right. And so they were able to learn from their own expertise. How to do it. How to do it right. If they wanted to tweak something. What wasn't of service in their organization or community. And how would they start from there. Thank you before I hold that just for a sec. What I'm going to do now is ask Kate Pyekker to join me. And Gus, do you want to come up there? That way how around can see you. So Kate and Gus are each with theaters. Gus is the artistic director of Jackalope theater which produces a lot of Eichholter's work and is doing an Eichholter play right now and he is one of the award finalists at the conference this year. So we're sort of like Chicago proud all around. I saw his picture. He's everywhere. He's everywhere. You know and and steep theater is a beloved Chicago storefront theater and Kate is one of the rising stars of theater leadership in Chicago. And so it's incredible to have them with me here today to answer. You can ask me questions but you can also ask them because I'm not with the theater. I'm not implementing this document anywhere. I organized the process but they are the experts for implementation and how to get it right. So that having been said sir you had a question right off the bat. So before we go into questions I just wanted to give a really tactical example that I think can help frame for folks trying to imagine what implementing a document into an actual theater making space looks like. So I am a stage manager by training as Laura said my mom is a director. I've been stage managing since birth and I have always been backstage and then we were I became an administrator and an executive director and we were sitting around the table writing this document and someone said that theater management should never be backstage after half hour call and I was like yes of course that's a really prime time for people to engage in appropriate activity and then I was like oh that's me like I shouldn't be backstage after half hour call but we store the toilet paper backstage and sometimes I have to put toilet paper in the bathroom after half hour call. Oh I can just find somewhere else to store the toilet paper. And this never would have occurred to me I'd been working there for years our theater is only 1500 square feet including office space and backstage and all of the spaces. So toilet paper storage is at a premium but it is worth finding another place to store toilet paper so that I as someone who holds power am not in a private place where artists are preparing for their work and I hadn't seen myself as someone who holds power because I see myself as someone who wears a tool belt and sits in the corner even though I haven't done that in seven years. But it the intentionality and the thought process behind sort of thinking through all of the ways that power and power differentials and logistics impact the safety and the perceived safety in our spaces has been really really powerful and effective for me as a human and as a professional but also for our theater company which as Laura said when we started implementing the document we were already doing 97% of the things in the document but having some really thoughtful intentionality behind that work has been really really helpful. So just sort of to frame what it looks like it can be really really tiny things or it can be bigger things depending on where your organization is but it's really about thoughtful intentionality and having a framework about questioning assumptions about where people should be and what they should be doing. So now questions. Thank you. Oh, I have a mic. So the question is how at the beginning of the process how did we engage leaders? How did we engage designers? How did we engage people at that point that wanted to be a part of this process? Did I characterize that? How did I get them to even know the process was happening? It was super organic and I was just responding to impulse. Like I said I wanted to only work with people who wanted to do it. So I didn't try to convince or coerce or shame, right? That night I had 10 and I thought that's about all I can handle anyway because I don't even know what I'm doing and maybe it will grow from there. I hoped that would happen and because the 130 people who were in that little theater on that secret meeting night I guess I got lucky that they represented many different disciplines in that room. But also as theaters got more involved and we started to kind of get a little bit of understanding I did start to invite certain individuals like at the very beginning there wasn't a fight choreographer involved and I thought I need that voice at the table. I invited Joe Drummond because I worship him and I thought I wanted him at the table if he wanted to come. But there was no sort of big call to arms. I have a Facebook page it doesn't... There's a private it used to be called Code of Conduct Chicago Code of Conduct it's for people who use the document but there's not a... It's been really super organic and people wanted to do it. That's all I can say. And we made some good choices to say who should be at this table that is not. The other thing that happened was through the pilot process which was about a year and a half so for many of us that's four or six or eight productions worth of time we got to include and have conversations with everyone in our production teams and that's multiple people. So I think I had three or four different production managers who I worked with during that time. So like working through the document with them and I think two or three different stage managers and a whole cadre of designers and actors and so getting feedback from all of the individual people doing the actual work let us bring so many of our voices into the process through the pilot period. So there were what 15 companies or so that were piloting it. And 22. There we go. I can't add and sort of through them hundreds of artists and production folks and administrators were touched by the document and gave feedback. So that really helped us broaden up the pool of input. Yes sir. It seems like the reporting so you don't have to repeat. Hi. The reporting of violations to the stage manager seems to put a fair onus on stage managers and I'm curious there must be advocacy for a level of training that is not maybe inherent in many theaters. I was just wondering if you could address that a little bit. You want to talk about that because yeah. One part of the document is what we call the complaint path that I failed to mention. But it's a but it for for Jackalope that is one of the most important pieces of it. It's what we introduce on the first day of rehearsal and the complaint path is the path that one would take if they were to have a complaint and the first stop while the first stop is technically hopefully you can resolve this between you and the person. This is under the assumption that maybe this isn't harassment this may be a personal conflict. The second part is the stage manager correct me if I miss a step here and then it goes artistic director managing director and up and up to the point where you say we say well you should be calling the authorities because at a certain point you do want to stop people from breaking the law especially if it's a serious violation but that but in that sense we also say to that stage manager if you don't feel comfortable with this you can bring it on. Am I am I getting that incorrect? Absolutely. There's also a role in this process that I think was the one thing that was the newest to us is what we call a non equity deputy or the Ned and the Ned is not really like an equity deputy and that they're not the cop in the room reporting back to the parents or whatever that metaphor is but what they are is a liaison between the standards and their fellow participants and so if someone has a question about who they should talk to or is this okay or what should I do the Ned can be a really great resource but I think what I love about and we called our concern resolution path what I love about it is it's not a linear process at each stage there are a whole bunch of folks who you can talk to who can help resolve whatever your issue is so after the hey that crossed my boundary I prefer you not do that if that doesn't work then you have your Ned and your stage manager maybe your assistant director and that's gonna be different for each process and each theater so we revise it every time we start a production and hand it out and at steep we're a very flat you know not in hierarchical organization so it was easy for us to implement although I understand this can be hard for others but we have members of our board who are our sort of official people on our concern resolution path and they're also at first rehearsal and they introduce themselves you have names and faces and phone numbers and email addresses and try to keep those communications really open and accessible and with that and we've sort of talked about this a lot when you start asking people to bring issues to you then people bring issues to you and you need to figure out how to resolve them so over the last two years we've all gotten a lot better I think at working through this and we've sought out resources for conflict resolution and communication strategies and some of those are in the addendum to the document but there are vast numbers more in print and online and so to your point about stage managers equipping them with new tools for this kind of work is really valuable and but it is far beyond the stage manager as it goes to people in the cast and people in the administrative team and people in the board now being asked to do work that they might not have done otherwise but is really valuable work to be doing in the implementation notes there is the suggestion that somebody in the organization should take it upon themselves to develop some conflict resolution skills there's a book I like to recommend I think it's a good start it's certainly not the only text by any means but it's simply called non-violent communication this book has been in use for decades and decades it's used all over the world both in tribal conflicts and corporate situations it is a beloved text it's easy to read and it's a four step process to walk through any conflict in Chicago we have the League of Chicago theaters and Deb Klopp the leader of that organization offers something annually where she brings in a conflict negotiator to teach anybody who wants to come to that for free how to work at their conflict negotiation skills so I would encourage you to look to your support organizations in your communities to say hey this is something that we need if you don't feel your organization is ready or good at that seek the people who already want to help you get this right to offer you that kind of skill building opportunity hey I'm Zach I work at Actors Theater of Louisville and as a larger theater you know I work in the producing department I'm responsible for hiring our fight choreographers writing equity contracts things like that something that I'm really intrigued by is this idea of an intimacy choreographer which I have never heard of before but I would love to hear about what are the kinds of people that do that like what are the credentials for that where do we find them it just seems like something that we would be very interested in learning more about it's super new I mean do you want to talk to that guy? yeah we work with him a lot I think you do too yeah that was it I mean it's sort of a brand new thing for us too but it has been I mean it's been really really fantastic there are newer classes and certifications being issued right now but it is something and just like just like and I'm sorry I use the term complain path which is not what we call it anymore but when you we're the pilot theater so sometimes I still call a code of conduct and everything I'm trying to get with the new language too but but it just adds another layer of safety and and it really just makes the work better all around but it is something folks are trained they have a really smart gentle organic approach just it's very similar to phychoreography in that same kind of way where it walks people through these moments allows them to feel comfortable there's a lot of discussion and I can say also that as a director as someone who directs plays it has been really fantastic because I when you're in that position of power it can feel very uncomfortable I have a lot of anxiety attached to not wanting to be presumptuous or overstep my bounds and so being able to say okay with this element of it I can entrust to someone um it has been a real just a huge help we are big fans big fans and I think you will see it become the norm within the theater here's one resource I don't endorse this I've never worked with them but these are some people on the forefront who are of service who are available to you we're also finding in Chicago a lot of our fight designers are also entering the sphere of intimacy design and so sometimes it can be the same designer doing both elements of a production sometimes they'll be different ones but it's a lot of the same methodology with a different set of language and action around it and we're seeing new people entering this field all the time and I think too much like with fight choreographers although there are certification programs you don't have to be certified to be a qualified and excellent fight choreographer and so as intimacy choreography is a pretty new field there may or may not be certified folks in your area and certification has sort of sometimes has merit sometimes it doesn't but having another voice whose whole job it is to do this project in and of itself really helps to dismantle the power dynamics and promote a safer environment and for in for spaces that can't afford it or are what live in a place where you can't get somebody to come in and do it or all you know all that kind of stuff I would go back to this idea that it should mirror the level of safety protocol that we use for fight choreography and there are fight fight choreographers who are qualified to do that there are directors that are qualified to do that stage managers that are qualified to do that but someone in the production should be assigned a leadership role around intimacy choreography to keep it safe uh... and to do what i like to call the best work in the best because this thing has got to be a win win win win for everybody including the audience so if the work is sterilized but you know if we take everything out of the work in the interest of making it safe we haven't won we haven't done our jobs so I just want to say that as we wrap up maybe one more question hi i'm Mindy from MacArthur theater in Princeton I really wanted to take a moment to say thank you your willingness to be open with this process and to share it with the community as a whole is incredible and i think we're all going to want to move to Chicago because that level of community is just incredible um... thank you my question was about ground rules when you were developing the standards you know you've got a lot of different voices around that table and I really appreciate kind of the vetting process but did you have what were the ground rules that you set for yourselves I had uh... priorities like know us in theming I said it every meeting it's probably boring to those who have heard me talk over and over but it was do not go out into the community and ask people why they're not doing this and you know that is not progress uh... that was probably my biggest rule also all ideas were welcome but they all had to satisfy our intention to be a win win-win win for producer when for director when for actor when for designer for board members and for audience you know that is what I mean when I say landing on the head of a pen uh... that a lot of ideas were eliminated because they couldn't fulfill all of those credentials and and and if you to have anything to add to that I would say and I say this is a pilot program who was watching Laura and Kate and Laurie develop this and everything but in addition to that win-win-win it was everyone straight across the board safe safe safe safe safe and it was that feeling of safety uh... and that when our artists and our designers and our administrators and our leaders and everyone feels safe within this environment it's when we do our best work uh... and that to me was that part of development process as well was making sure that everyone felt safe offering uh... advice in these contexts implementing advice uh... all of these feeling safe to speak out in the room uh... and I think that sometimes there is a tendency to view safety as uh... a risk to being able to take risks and I think we've sort of seen the exact opposite of that is that when we are at our most uh... safe we are able to take the biggest risks artistically that's it I think we are just over time so should probably wrap up but thank you all so much for being here