So hello, and welcome to the elect me supreme overload of the universe campaign trip I Wish to thank all of you for volunteering for my campaign and I know you're probably wondering what you can possibly do to get me Elected, so I'm here to show you how Okay, first of all you need a little background on us elections When you think about voting you think it should be as simple as votes candidate equals votes candidate plus one This is what voting in the u.s. Really looks like We are an amazingly Decentralized system we have federal laws that apply But the federal laws are mainly for to guarantee certain things like access to the polls and anonymity Then we have state laws that apply 50 different sets of them as a matter of fact in each state Whoever's in charge of the election may be a different person some states as a secretary of state some states as a lieutenant governor Some states it's some appointed election official and all of the laws are different But elections aren't held at the state level They're held at the county level and there are over 3,000 counties in the u.s. So it's the county election officials who determine which vendor they're going to buy the equipment from How they're going to set up this equipment? What the ballot design is pretty much going to look like some of that is statewide but but Ballots differ They they're the ones that register the voters. They're the ones that set up this horrifically complex database and of course, there's like plus 3,000 of them But you see elections aren't held at the county level either It's the precincts where you go to vote and every single precinct in the u.s. Is different because my dog catcher isn't the same as yours and our school board members are not the same as yours and my Referendums aren't the same as yours so a u.s. Ballot can have as many as 11 pages of of You know single lines or paragraphs that you have to read and vote and it's extremely confusing so I Want to I Want you to think about voting in the u.s. Instead of as just picking a candidate and incrementing their votes by one as this huge heterogeneous Highly loosely configured distributed system and it has all of the problems that any distributed system have Now I mentioned that there are different state laws and they're different federal laws They do occasionally conflict and my favorite example is the state of Pennsylvania Pennsylvania is one of the 39 states that require that if you're voting on an electronic voting machine one of those dres That they must have a paper trail This is a good thing. We want there to be a paper record of the vote that you see on the screen The problem is that the way that paper trails are implemented. They have time stamps barcodes They may have Voter information on them so they violate federal law in that they they they make it possible to match They also have serial numbers so they make it possible to match a vote to a vote to the person who actually cast the vote And that's against federal law So Pennsylvania in their wisdom in order to keep these letter of both laws But the spirit of neither Decided that for every person who votes on an electronic voting machine in their state They must have a voter verified paper audit trail, but they can't use it and then of course there's this Okay for it for a t-shirt who can tell me what Hava stands for and what it did Okay, what does it do? Sure that one's brilliant So it was inflicted on us after the Florida 2000 fiasco So What it did is it was a funded mandate and funded mandates in the US are very rare It set aside a huge amount of money for these states to give to their counties to upgrade their voting systems Immediately they had a time-limited when they had to spend it and so of course they all went to the people who were advertising and And they bought mostly touch screens and some optical scan systems And that's pretty much why we're in the mess that we're in So who are we and why should you be listening to me? My name is Sandy Clark and I'm a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania studying under Matt blaze Who's pretty well known in the hacker community We were hired along with Patrick McDaniels people at Pennsylvania State University and Giovanni Venus people He's here actually at the con They're from UC Santa Barbara, but they have a private pen testing company and they did all of our red teaming We were hired by Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner To do a complete in-depth analysis of all of the Ohio voting machines Now in the US there are four major vendors of voting machines, and they are in order of market share election software and systems Premier which is the company formally known as d-bold because of course changing your name fixes all of your problems and Between them they have a little over 80% of the market the other two Companies are heart inter-civic and sequoia systems Ohio uses ESNS d-bold and Heart they do not use sequoia, but last summer Secretary of State Debra Bowen who's the Secretary of California Commissioned a similar study that the California top-to-bottom study in which my advisor Matt blaze was the team lead that studied the sequoia systems So between the California top-to-bottom study and the Ohio Everest study Every major vendor of voting systems has had an in-depth analysis of their source code their hardware their procedures their Documentations and they've all been red teamed so oh while there's no correlation between lines of code and and Market share there is a connection between two of these companies For a t-shirt. Can anybody tell me what the connection between ESNS and d-bold is? This isn't Come get your shirt ESNS was started by Bob and Todd Yerosevich their brothers Bob left and spun off a company called d-bold so 80% of the votes that are tallied in the US election are tallied on on systems sold by companies owned by brothers It gives a new meaning to the term family values So what exactly is a voting system and this is where I have to dig out my really cool super NSA laser pointer In a voting system only those two parts. Oh Sorry in a voting system only those two parts which are the touch screen and the Pre-synced optical scanner are actually touched by the voters Everything else is part of the back-end system and that includes Windows servers running XP or Windows 2000 database software all sorts of removable media CF cards PCMCA cards even zip disks and Just it's a horrifically complicated Rube Goldberg system So the three things that everybody are familiar with are the electronic voting machines, which this has this ridiculous name DRE The precinct optical scanners Which is where you fill out a paper ballot and you go take it over to the scanner and you put it in and you know Right away whether your ballot was accepted or rejected and these centrally counted optical scanners Which are mostly used for absentee votes and for Provisional voting so you want to know what we found The first thing that we found is that special interest groups don't want you to get any work done We were hired to start in September and for the first four weeks Everybody battled back and forth as to whether or not they were going to let us publish Patrick Matt and Giovanni lost Days of sleep going back and forth over this because they weren't not going to let us sign anything Until we had control over our publishing. We did actually win Everything that we found is in the report Except for the actual examples of source code and those are in a private annex But there are pointers to them so you know what we found you just don't know exactly how they wrote it And you guys know what that stuff looks like anyway, but because we only had We were hired for three months, and we had a hard deadline. We had to finish all all of our finding and write a 300 page report In 10 and weeks and we were so worried that we wouldn't have enough time to find anything but we did manage to find a few things and Here's a list. I apologize for the small font, but I couldn't get them to fit on the screen So This the blue teams who were made up of 13 people 10 weeks 700,000 lines of code in the SNS when we combine heart and premiere with that 1.4 million lines of code that we had to go through we could not follow any set methodology We had to hack them So basically we threw darts and wherever a dart landed somebody went and looked and luckily for us The systems were such crap that we couldn't not find things um So What what exactly did we find just what you'd expect? Think back to your middle school intro to programming class and your your teacher telling you things not to do It's in this code. It's just bad. I know seven What seventh graders that write better code than this and Besides it was a bazillion languages even cobalt of all things all all in a mishmash Um So rather than give you any sort of specific examples, which would really violate them the nondisclosure agreements anyway You know what a buffer overflow looks like you know how to implement a sequel injection attack Instead I want to lead your your thoughts on along a different path I'd like to examine these voting systems as part of a distributed system instead of as individual attacks You see when academics and I don't know how this is in the corporate world But when academics find problems with a with a corporate piece of software We'll approach the vendors and we'll tell them and the first thing they try to do is trash our names and discredit our research But when they can't do that Then you get this sort of nebulous response from them. They say things like well There's absolutely no way and a malicious attacker is going to get close enough to our source code to implement this relatively Unimportant vulnerability we have all these other security procedures in place and these other security procedures include things like oh physical security Hardware authentication tokens tamper evidence seals Passwords encryption, you know all very valid items that you want in your security toolbox But the problem is that this is a system not an individual thing and they don't act by themselves They do interact and that Result in serious serious breaches and security So we'll start with physical security because those of you who know me know me in locks If any of you remember this photograph about a year or so Princeton was playing around with with debold voting machines And one of their sys admins not one of their their researchers, but one of the sys admins notice the key looked familiar He went home and he brought back the key to his home minibar and it is so familiar. It's identical So if you have a home minibar, there's a 90% chance that you can unlock a debold voting machine But guess what else your minibar key will unlock Ballot box on the left heart inter-civic ballot box on the right debold premier same key So maybe they got them on sale ESNS does not use the same keys, but they use exactly the same crappy design principle They are also cheap filing cabinet wafer locks You can buy them anywhere. You can buy the keys anywhere They use two keys one unlocks the electronics and the other one unlocks the ballot box If you don't want to bother to buy a key Deviant Olaf has a brilliant way to make a key from a picture of a photograph or print out of a photograph and a Guinness can So ask deviant to show you how But if you don't want the key you can just pick the locks You see Ohio didn't send us the keys for the first five days So in order for us to turn the machine on at all we had to pick the locks Paperclip and a little jiggling the real problem with these three vendors choice of locks and keys His oh god, you can't make this stuff up That that they use exactly the same key I'll give you the part numbers if you like But if you've got the key to a machine in California You've got the key to the machine in New York and Florida and Alaska and all over anywhere that they sell these machines It's the same key so What about the tamper evidence seals? Ohio's procedures specifically state that when the removable media is inserted in the slot that slot has to be covered With a tamper evidence seal now the removable media is used for a number of things including loading the firmware and Storing and tallying the votes and the audit trail. Okay, so this machine was set up for us by Ohio and Exactly as it was used in the last election and you can notice that it's got one of these really nifty little blue tamper evidence seals on it How good are these seals at detecting evidence of tampering you tell me they have to raise your hands because otherwise I can't get you your t-shirts for a t-shirt somebody give me a way to remove these seals undetectably Hair dryer works great. Come get it. Can get one Peel them off with what? thumbnail works actually if you watch the video hacking democracy the DVD Hari Hari Hurstie actually Peel them off using that the earpiece of his glasses and then pasted it on to a strip of ones that had never been used and then had the Elector Florida election officials try and find it and they couldn't Okay, any other ways? Go ahead Water won't work because it'll smear That's sort of like peeling it off, right? Go ahead Nick All right fair enough. I got One more t-shirt left anybody else way back in the green shirt. Thank you We are the ones at the strip we ordered 500 of those really cheap and and you And you can get them with any any serial number that you want By the way, the use of these tamper evidence seals allows a very fun Denial of service attack if people in your precinct are going to vote for the wrong person Election workers are taught to look for an intact seal a broken seal implies a compromised machine So go around breaking all the seals and they get their votes won't be counted. We don't want tamper evidence We want tamper resistant So maybe it's too much trouble to remove the seals and it's too hard to get a key or pick the locks you can always just Access one of the many open and unprotected ports Ethernet ports modem ports serial ports parallel ports every single vendor has at least one that you can get access to Some of them are hidden behind the crappy locks, but most of them are just there like this So Secretary of State Brenner told us that until she had seen this photograph She hadn't understood what her own election officials had been telling her her people had been watching Regular voters on election day walk up to these machines and pull out that plug And what happens when you do that first of all you disable your audit trail and second you get access to the serial port So so that leaves us only one real other form of security. Oh, I forgot there I Do you remember this photo from I think it was Defcon 12? I borrowed this from major malfunction who gave a great talk on how to own anything in for red The ESNS top of the line touchscreen machines are entirely controlled through infrared Unfortunately, they also have a reed switch. So you can't do it from very far. You also need a magnet. I'll get more on that later But yeah, yeah So what about the hardware authentication tokens and this is important All of the vendors require some form of hardware authentication token in order to have full control of the machine but the one That one there and this one there. This is heart inter civics spirus key and this is d-ball premieres Smart card encoder and smart voter cards. Both of those are available commercially They have very little if any crypto on them you can just Put on them, whatever you want get a hold of one right right your own stuff They're hella easy to program and get them now this box over here is a little bit more problematic That is ESNS's personal electronic ballot or peb and you've got to have one of these They you can't boot the machine without it. You can't upload firmware without it. You can zero out the vote totals You can't Start an election. You can't close an election. You can't collect all the votes You got to have one and they are not available commercially. We did try However, I did hear about three months ago. Someone stole some of them in Pittsburgh So you might be able to find them on eBay But you know we're hackers in our community if you can't buy something how do you get a hold of it? You have to Thank you. We made ours with a palm and a magnet Okay, any infrared transmitter will do we probably could have used a TV remote control and That's it for the hardware authentication So that leaves us just passwords and just encryption This would be great. I have to tell you I'm I get kind of depressed about this, but I have to laugh or else I'll cry Every vendor sells at least one machine that uploads firmware without asking for any password authentication whatsoever If you can stick your removable media into that machine, it will run whatever you give it in every case the default passwords are Ridiculously easy to guess as a matter of fact, let's do a little test Everybody shout out at once what you think the debold default password is one two three It's debold And In the cases where where the and the default passwords are rarely changed in the cases where they are changed They're easily crackable. Sometimes they're only six characters long So oh And you know what they hard-code passwords So the heart inter-civic hard-coded password is a five-letter word that means stupid In The ESNS I'm sorry because this is just awful in the ESNS We found a comment next to the hard-coded password and it's stated I kid you not We hard-coded this password so that hackers couldn't use it You can't make this stuff up In the places where they use encryption They use very bad encryption Um Well for example Debold machines use a password to encrypt the connection between the smart card and The actual DRE one smart card means one voter can cast one ballot. That's a good thing We want this to be encrypted They also use a password to encrypt the communication between the DRE and the removable media this do I have my This is actually a PCMCA card from an Ohio Debold voting machine. So that's also a good thing. We want them to encrypt that. We don't want it to be easily accessible and altered They use a third password to encrypt Those keys and store them in a file on the DRE and this is a bad thing You see they derive that password from the serial number on the side of the machine Um Heart inter civic they don't use a smart card. They use a pin number and one pin number equals one one voter can cast one ballot and When you first turn on a heart inter civic machine the system is is Networked and everything which is another bad thing When you when you first turn it on the first pin number of the day is generated using a decent random generator Every single subsequent Voter code is generated using a very predictable algorithm. So if you know one voter code You can predict all the next ones and vote as often as you like. I Think that if parents really loved their children They would drum into their wee little brains Along with the never takes candy from strangers never use homebrew crypto so You don't Yeah, I love this photo You don't have to worry about the passwords or the encryption Because there are backdoors into the system and you can get a great deal of flak from telling a vendor That you found a backdoor But I don't know what else you can call an intentionally coded function that when it is called provides its user with complete root Access to the system and it doesn't require a password. That's my definition of a backdoor So let me give you two examples the heart inter civic precinct and Opt and and central election headquarters optical scanners allow you to run test Elections and this is good because you want to verify that the optical scanners are counting the ballots correctly So in test mode in order to save you from writers cramp You can print out as many ballots as you want that are preconfigured with your candidates ovals already filled in So you could do a thousand or ten of thousands of these run them through the optical scanner And it will count them and you can determine whether the count is accurate fine in real election mode You can run those preconfigured ballots through and the optical scanner will actually spit them out and not allow them to be counted However in the software, there's the option to turn that check off So you can actually flip that little bit turn the check off run tens of thousands of Preconfigured ballots with your candidate going to win through the scanner and there's no way for the for them to tell the difference Let's see. Yes, and S Has another one You remember that little box that personal electronic ballot thingy. Well in the documentation They list three of them. There's a blue one. The blue one is a voter peb That allows one voter to cast one ballot There's a red one the red one is a supervisor peb That allows the poll worker to open and close the polls and collect the votes and reset the passwords if necessary There's a yellow peb. That's usually used by The vendor representatives if there's a problem with the machine and that resets everything back to its its default state It turns out Not in the documentation. There's a fourth kind of peb And this peb gives you complete root access to the machine and it doesn't require a password You just stick it in the slot and you have root. I Don't know what color it is But ours was black. So once you've got access to these machines This is my tribute to pirate radix Once you have them, what can you do with them? Anything you damn well, please here's a photograph of our little palm peb emulator resetting all of the passwords to Everest Here's an example of one of the election central big batch scanners Excuse me Displaying our Everest software very happily. I might add here's an example of the heart in your civic machine running Penn States own versions of firmware You notice the Penn State logo? We were going to put the University of Pennsylvania logo on there But ours is a Quaker and that just doesn't have quite the same intimidation So What does that leave us that leaves us with paper ballots and optical scanners? So I'm going to show you a couple of flaws with these but don't get me wrong This is still the best that we've got okay, and we can talk more about that later so The electronic machines the DREs are just broken. There's absolutely no way that we can recommend using them We can't recommend any fixes for them The paper ballots Have some serious flaws as well They rely for their security on a special type of ink and This special type of ink is Called a non-reading because it's absolutely invisible to scanners and So what happens is that though you can't you can't tell That little box is printed in special non-read security ink and further down on the ballot There are some other boxes that are also printed in special non-read security ink While the rest of the ballot is printed in regular ink The scanner is programmed to recognize where the dark spaces in the white spaces should be so if you Try and make a copy of this ballot your copy machine or your printer will print the whole thing out in regular readable ink And you'll put it through your optical scanner and the scanner will look at this and see dark spaces where it should have seen White spaces and it'll spit it out and it'll print across its little LCD screen possibly counterfeit. Oh By the way, these scanners spit the ballots out so fast. They are dangerous to stand next to When we were testing different ways of card stock just to see what we could get through the system The heaviest weight card stock went through the machine so fast it made a dent in the machine across the room We really wanted to try sharpen sheet metal, but we ran out of time So how do you forge one of these ballots with this non-read security ink? Why it out? Just blot out the parts that are that the scanner shouldn't see make as many copies as you want and stuff the ballot box this ballot was accepted as Valid by both the precinct based scanner and the election central big batch scanner. It can't tell the difference so You you might argue that that okay if we want to forge a ballot we want it to look like a real ballot the The average age of a poll worker in this country is 75 years old Voting election day starts at 5 30 in the morning and by the time they're counting ballots. It's what 11 30 at night So they're not going to notice any difference Besides that the ballot for my precinct is different than the ballot for your precinct So if they're going to an into a county where that which may have hundreds of precincts Since election law states that there has to be a precinct within walking distance um They're not going to notice any difference, but if you want to get picky okay You have to put the non-read sections back and that means you have to get a hold of this really special security ink Now you've seen this ink on a lot of things if you have a mortgage You might have seen or a car deed. You might see it on the deed. Usually you'll see it in yellow or you'll see it in red It's possible to get a hold of the yellow and red, but it is almost impossible I I tried for a week or so To and I'm pretty good at finding shit I Tried to get a hold of the black ink. There seems to be only one place that sells it They only sell in big batches and they only sell to known customers But in our world if you can't buy something how do you get a hold of it you? Make it we made ours with the cheapest inkjet cartridge. We could find it CVS So, you know what non-read ink really is? Ever run out of black ink cartridge on a black ink in in your inkjet and have it have to make ink out of the other three colors That's all you do is take a paintbrush dip it in all the holes smear it around until it gets to the to be the right color and Okay, it's an ugly-looking splotch.  Oh by the way the use of this ink makes for another interesting denial of service attack Denial of service by gel pen you see this non-reading the reason it can't be read is because it doesn't contain carbon and Most gel pens also don't contain carbon So if you'd like to disenfranchise a lot of voters who are going to vote for the wrong person Have a bunch of pens made up with that person's logo on them Stand outside the voting the precinct and hand them out to whoever will take them They'll mark their ballots with them and those ballots will not be counted and and I'll tell you it will not Cause any alarm though it when ballots aren't counted. It is called an undervote under votes happen all the time There was actually a lawsuit in Florida a year or so ago because a woman running for Senate in a she was democratic and she was in a democratic precinct and The normal average undervotes is about 3% and suddenly this precinct showed up with 13% of Where people just hadn't bothered to vote for her at all or vote period that that vote was apparently blank And a number of very well respected researchers two of whom worked on the California talk to bottom study We're hired to try and see whether there was any malicious Any evidence of maliciousness in this and they couldn't find anything that they could prove so Denial of service seems to work very very well So What else can you do? Well, this this is what we found the first time we turned the machine on You can simply recalibrate the touchscreen by touching to the wrong point and you can make it impossible to vote for any candidate You know you know how to recalibrate a touchscreen There's a little X and you touch the X just touch at some place bizarre on the screen and But we'll never count What else can you do? This is a debold smart card encoder Buy one of these off of eBay Hold down the turn it off Turn it on holding the on key and the yes key and you can program for as many unlimited votes as you like Yeah, it's that hard So you can cast multiple votes you can erase the audit logs disable the The audit trail zero the totals anything you damn well, please this picture by the way is an example of what happens If a toddler spills a sippy cup on the on the audit trail I think what they did is they just held up a straw and and drip down on it. So I started out my talk Telling you that I wanted to discuss the idea of The security of voting machines as part of a distributed system and I've spent this entire talk showing you example of an example at an example of individual attacks But I maintain that I have been discussing the Security of a distributed system and here's why The risk of viral propagation You see we demonstrated that it was possible for a single person With either voter access or poll worker access to upload malicious code onto a either either in the electronic DRE or onto an optical scanner system that they had in their local precinct At the end of the election that malicious code can write itself onto the removable media When the polls are closed that removable media is taken out of those machines and it is sent back to election central Which is at the county headquarters At that point it can exploit one of the many many many Vulnerabilities that are in the election database software and in the windows 2000 and windows XP software that the servers themselves run And it can upload itself onto that and then it controls the votes of the entire election It also controls the audit trail If you don't think that's important Let me remind you that in 2004 the entire country Waited to hear the results of the election in the state of Ohio Ohio was waiting to hear the results of one county Kaya Huga County I'm sorry you guys Um Kaya Hula County determined who got Ohio's electoral votes and that determined who became president of the United States One voter really can make a difference And that's not the worst case scenario You see these machines aren't used once and just thrown out Um This was a funded mandate in order to buy these machines in the first place The county's actually got money from the federal government that has never happened before and that will never happen again They are not going to charge their taxpayers money to replace these machines so This same database system is used to program all of the voting machines for the next election and the next election and the Lever machines were in use for over 40 years. Who knows how much longer.  They set up the elections for the individual counties They either send their representation Representatives to the county headquarters to set up the election or the county set send their voting information Back to the vendor headquarters and the vendors set up the election for them So in the absolute worst case scenario We've got a vector that goes from one voter in one podunk little precinct in some tiny little county in some Midwestern state Back to election central in the county headquarters and from there to the vendor and from there to every machine that they sell It is a worst-case scenario, but we're talking about The elections in one of the biggest and most important countries in the world that has to be something considered so one of the Responses that we got from the vendors when we published our report Was well, these are just a bunch of eggheads sitting in an ivory tower. None of this stuff is practical Well, I remind you Giovanni Vigna and his web boy security people read teamed everything They demonstrated they did not have access to the source code all they had was access to the to the same machines a voter would Have or a poll worker would have and they were able to carry out this virally propagated attack Part of our mandate with Ohio was to provide mitigation strategies and recommendations in most of the cases It's so broken We could not our best recommendation was scrap it and start over from scratch So what do I want you to do? I want you first of all to vote I Realized that I've just told you what's wrong with voting, but there are a lot of issues consider the wiretapping stuff the motion picture Copyright stuff Them going through your laptop at and any border these are issues before up before our Congress right now and we really really need Clueful people involved so I would do do Hope that you will vote in this election if you're a US citizen I leave that up to your wisdom I Want you to become poll workers as I said before They yeah, you get it. Oh, I love you guys As I said before on the average age of a poll worker is 75 They are simply not equipped to understand the technology and to recognize when there are problems and to fix them When they happen your counties need your technical expertise You get two hours of training you get up maybe a hundred and fifty dollars And you get one exhausting day, but you might also get the machines in your living room the night before the election I Know and I'm speaking from from actual knowledge. I know people who had eight machines in there in overnight The last thing we can do really is We have to build a better system We've got to get involved we have got to build something open source that runs on an open source platform not on proprietary hardware like all of the voting machines are and Like anything until we reach critical mass until enough of us get involved in this nothing is going to change But but we can change the world we did it with Linux. Why can't we do it with voting as well? um Copping ye who worked on the California voting system actually his thesis is a 461 line Python voting system that so far seems to be very very secure So we don't even need to do seven hundred thousand lines of code The last thing I want you to do is to remember To elect me supreme overlord of the universe, but you know what even if you don't I'm gonna win anyway, so we actually have some time for questions if anyone would like to ask Yes, can you can use a mic is there a mic? Yes, he asked is the report available online if you go to the secretary of state of Ohio's website And you look under elections all of the reports are there and ours was the academic report. So look for academic Ah SNS claims that they that they are are used in 43 states Debald is using about that in that many as well Now what's interesting is that? Secretary of State Burner Well, not not a technical person really did the right thing after the report Was turned in and she was getting a lot of flak from from a bunch of people She decided to push for the removable Removing of all of the electronic machines in Ohio. So they are going to she went beyond our recommendations actually They are going to use paper ballots and centrally counted optical scan systems California is doing the same thing And surprisingly God and this really threw me Texas is looking to get rid of their Dres and and go to completely optical scan as well who to thought Yes If you can get access to it you control it. There's no protection against it So if it might be hidden behind some of those crappy wafer locks, it might not depending on But but there is absolutely no the optical scanners have no protection against your uploading whatever firmware you want Say again Okay, so the question is do I think that right once memory might help strengthen auto trails? It would be it's certainly be worth testing. I could never prove any maliciousness I can tell you that the code is very poorly written So there's definite definite signs of incompetence There's no proof of any any form of maliciousness but Proof of greed if if you can say Getting something that is not ready for prime time out and sold on the market to 80 or 90 percent of the different states greed.  Okay, so he's asking whether or not There should be a single vader vendor for every state so that every everything is the same and everyone understands How it works or whether you should have multiple vendors? I don't think that that is ever going to happen that would have a single vendor because Most state and federal laws require that you accept bids from a number of different vendors The thing is is that whoever is in charge of the elections be it the secretary of state or a lieutenant governor or whatever like that Has people test the machines and then certifies which machines are allowed to be sold in that state and which versions of software they're allowed to be running And then the software supposed to be an escrow and things like that so I Whether One system is better than than several I Couldn't say Because they're all just bad Behind you first the state of Ohio right now Jennifer Burner just is has a suit with debault because What they what they discovered when they tried to upload the votes into their back-end database system was that the removable media suddenly was missing votes and Debald is currently claiming that that's a result of the antivirus software that was running on the servers so So while there have not been any class-asked and locksuits by by the public there have been some brought by EFF there have been some brought by the States themselves and there have been some brought by by some special interest groups like black book box voting and a few other like that He said there's at least two vendors that have gone under because of lawsuits So we're pretty much out of time But but we'll be in questioning in the room across the hall. I think it's 109 So feel free to come and let's chat


Yeah, we're trying to make a circle so that it's no longer spatially clear to the panel and here is the audience. Why don't we do it? I was just going to say, I think it's spatially clear. Yeah. Or we could sit on the table. I want it to be spatially clear. Hi. This is freaking me. I'm not used to seeing all your chairs. They're so bad. They're so bad. So yes, hold up, hold up, everybody who's far away over there, come closer. Come closer. It'll be warmer when we're closer together. I'm too close to the camera. I don't know. Is somebody keeping track of time? Is that somebody's job or is that my job? What time does it go to? I don't know. Okay, and is somebody... Do you want me to set an alarm for 4.40? If you could keep track of time, maybe give us like a 30 minute warning. I think we're going to try to keep it not talking and then questions later, but just to know what we're 30 minutes towards them. So hi, I'm Krista Kriya, I'm the coordinator of this panel. These two people are with me. Can you just introduce yourselves? My name is Amelia, I'm a curator at DanceMaker's Center for Creation, which is right over there. And I'm also a choreographer and teacher writer. I already introduced myself. I'm Evan Weber and I come from... I live in this place, Toronto, called Toronto. I work... I'm a writer and I make performance within this collective called public recordings mostly, but I also do some curatorial facilitation work like for the past couple of years until just now I organized this residency called Hatch at Harbor Front Center, which is an interdisciplinary performance situation. That's enough. I feel like we should continue around the circle somehow. Is that okay? Sure, I'll go next. My name is Taliesin, I'm a creator. I work mostly in device work and movement-based work, and I've only kind of just recently started to use text. And I'm also a dramaturg and artistic associate at Canyon Stage, so that's kind of put me into the text world a lot. And so I'm always interested in ways we can talk about movement and visual languages that maybe aren't text related. My name is Marie Baraliso. I'm a playwright and dramaturg from Montreal. I work at Black Theatre Workshop and also at Tap de Do. I'm text-based, but I also actually work from my body and create texts from movement. I live in the New York City area. How do I define myself as a theater maker who's really interested in the dramaturg of the body and using the body as a meaning-making and also as a film craze practitioner, so I'm really curious about the connection between that and I happen to teach writing at a state university, so how we can use the body in writing. Any kind of writing, whether it's under or not. Hello, my name is Maddie Boutita. I'm an incoming 30-year MFA student at Mary Baldwin University's Shakespeare Performance Gractor Program in Stanton, Virginia, which is very text-based, so I'm very interested to see how dramaturg and non-text-based work, like devising and working with different types of movement. I felt in Christ and Suzuki and things like that could influence things in interesting ways. My name is Alejandra, I'm a New York student. I'm a musician. I also do creative psychotherapy and I think I'm doing a masters at some point. I'm also a tech person. Are you allowed to join our circle or do you have to sit over there? No, I'm charging my phone. I'll be right there. You have to join us when you feel good. I'm Talia Kingston. I'm from WAM theater in Lenox, Massachusetts, a company that intersects activism and art. I'm mostly a dramaturg, mostly text-based and playwright, but I'm about to go into rehearsal with 13 teenage girls to devise a performance. I've done devised work before, but it's been a while, so I'm just wanting to remember how to rotate some of the discoveries that they make in their bodies. My name is Lauren Sullivan. I'm a dramaturg in New York. I'm just graduated grad school. I'm especially interested, as someone with a visual impairment, interested in how I can be involved in non-text-based work and devising when I found that I struggle with non-verbal communication and I'm still discovering what parts of non-verbal communication that I don't perceive because I don't perceive them. I'm Valerie Bauer, and I've recently just moved to Toronto and sold everything I ever had to get here and given it up, everything I ever later earned. But my background is I was 25 years as a high school educator in theater and also an ice skating choreographer, and I come from three generations of ice skating and grandmothers who own studios and a mother who's still 82 laced up, but the long and the short of it is is I want to create a play for theater on ice and I have no concept of what a notation or a vocabulary would for transferring the theater knowledge and the dance notation to ice skating to blend it somehow to create something that may have a departure point or a legacy. So I'm hoping some beginnings and some inroads might happen here today. I'm Amy. I'm an Appalachian dramaturg and my work is cited really, really heavily in language and text and storytelling and story circles and oral tradition and culture. But a recent project has me asking the question, what would an Appalachian avant-garde look like and what tradition are we pushing back against? So it's got me asking also how generational and cultural knowledge is cited in the body and what might be a non-verbal expression of our culture. I'm Mark Lai. I'm a dramaturg, theater creator, audience enricher at the Shakespeare Theater in D.C. and Welder, which is a playwright's collective. It's the name of the playwright's collective. Welder's. Yeah, I know. I know. I know. I know. It's still exciting. It's still exciting. And the idea is that you can focus on one playwright's vision and create the whole structure towards what that vision is. So my piece is coming up this fall. And I've done a lot of devising and I'm very interested in work that decenterizes the playwright. Hello, my name is Eva Kearns. I work in Ottawa with the Canada Council for the Arts. I'm responsible for the playwright development centers across the country. And also I run a program that funds professional development opportunities such as this conference. So I'm here really to stay on top of what current conversations are in dramaturgy, play development work, and my own personal disciplinary background is actually in dance and device theater. My name is Susan Bond. I'm a freelance classical production dramaturgy here in Toronto. I'm also training as a librarian and I come from a really, really text-based background and I'm increasingly aware of the knowledges that I don't have access to because text is privileged, so heavily in my background. So I'm interested in particularly about embodied knowledges. I'm Brian Drater. I'm just coming off of 14 years of director of playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada. And I just moved back to my hometown of Winnipeg where I'm the director of the Mental Association of Playwrights. In terms of dramaturgical history of work with Cirque du Soleil and also a museum that did a design which is sort of where my interest in this panel is in terms of expanding the text-based board beyond dialogue. My name is Jess Apodome. I was a dancer. I did theater. I studied performance studies. Then I got my name Dramaturgy. I have a theater company one year lease. Movement is core. I'm part of the development of Newark that we do and we have a movement director there. I have collaborations with set designers where I make Newark with them. I work with choreographers. For me, I write about devising and dance dramaturgy and I am consistently wanting to remind dramaturgs that we exist in bodies and I think that it is imperative that we figure out different performance languages because we're creating and generating Newark. We're working with people who have many different forms of performance that they're working with and so I'm consistently figuring out and wanting to push the envelope of who we are, what we know and what languages we speak. My name is Lowe and I live here in an additional one-spot territory in Soutler. I'm a performance artist and I do dramaturgic thinking around my own processes. I'm very involved in creating conceptual work that involves dramaturgical processing and I come actually study clown for like 20 years of performing with Pachinko Clown and Toronto. There's a tradition of Pachinko Clown which is partly from the Native North American tradition but also European clown and kind of mixed this guy. Anyway, whatever. But there is a big tradition in that world of self-sourcing material and creating work from the body and writing on your feet and I've merged it with kind of improvisational practices where I do spontaneous admins and manipulations with objects and stuff like that but I see myself in a visual arts context now but yeah, dramaturgical thinking is like huge for me. Maybe I should also say who I am. So I'm impressed. I thought this was a good idea. I am originally from Toronto but I'm based most of the year in Brussels. I work in an interdisciplinary fashion kind of in the intersections of dance, media art and writing and I work kind of overarching practices actually as a curator and then within that because I curate almost explicitly new works I typically have ongoing dramaturgical relationships with artists both those who are working in performance and also those who are working in visual arts which is kind of a wacky thing because they don't do dramaturgies in their works so it's... yeah. So the title of the... there's so much fun over there. So the title of the panel I think what I submitted was there are no words dramaturgie and non-text-based performances does that sound accurate? So just as a starting point there's two lies in the title that I think we need to address before we go. The first is that when we say non-text-based performance it's actually slightly more specific than that. We're talking about dance dramaturgie today. We're kind of hijacking the LMDA event. Theater oriented space to talk about dance and art form that within the greater scheme of performance is usually kind of kicked to the curb. So we're taking over the space. The second is when we say there are no words a lot of the works that we will be talking about today have words in them but they are contextualized by their creators as dance. The goal of today is for me to leave the session today with a series of questions which we can then potentially develop into a longer one day multi-session conference on dance dramaturgie. Hopefully we have it at some point next year on Toronto. So again all of us have questions, I'm sure some of us maybe have answers but the goal is not necessarily to come to any conclusions it's just to kind of say so this is a bit of a think tank session for another conference that will happen. If anybody wants to leave now you can do that. So I've asked each of the panelists just to arrive with one or two questions that they wanted to talk about so maybe we can just kind of go in order and then potentially continue around the room tossing out questions addressing maybe proposing answers to them maybe not, I'm going to be typing madly because I'm stealing all of this information from you you're all doing unpaid labour for me right now helping you rethink what my conference is going to be. Is that enough of a starting point? I never in these things usually prepare anything I just try and work from a place that's always sourcing what's currently interesting to me so what's been really interesting for me this past year is the notion of aesthetics and how they're just this unfathomable type of guiding force that we're all operating within I think when it comes to I actually really hate the concept of dramaturgy sometimes especially as a dancer I sometimes feel like it's theatre colonizing dance I'm also mixed blood Anishinaabe, an Irish person so I'm always looking at things through a pre and post-colonial lens my own evolution has been in visual art I come from an area Jebanon Ng Park it's one of the birth areas for the Eastern Woodland visual art tradition and others in the Indian group of seven so I started with visual art went to a performing art high school in Sudbury moved through contemporary theatre in a regional setting and then found dance and fell in love with it and spent my 20s dancing in a contemporary way but I'd actually call it classical in my mind for a lot of companies in Canada and in Europe and Germany and England and after a decade of abused body I started to create my own work and when I started to create it it actually went back to visual art so I actually think almost everyone or everything is creating from a place which I think is fascinating especially having somebody with a visual impairment in the circle just because if there is any sort of language that every one of us across all the corners is speaking and everything in the world that's living it's moving images we can't possibly comprehend each person's language or each human language it's a little sister and brother language but we're moving through a language of images I believe and those languages are governed by aesthetics which sometimes work in our favor and often work against us they're used against us so in that way you say visual art there isn't a practice of dramaturgy it's because I believe in visual art it's nothing but dramaturgy it's embedded in what we do to make sense of things we're constantly trying to make sense of the chaos around us I think a way to understand I think what I'm talking about in terms of being governed by images I'll do this really fast and I'll do it over here so that I'm not sure how close you can see but just so you can see I have a what do you want to see? I don't I have a square and a triangle and when I put the triangle on top of the square what is that? it's a house so what's it missing? what else? where's the ground? it's probably here probably made of grass chimney on top what else? sky little sun probably some people for the house sorry what was that? a path a path a little fence probably leading up to the path tree what type of tree? an oak tree an apple tree an apple tree so you can do this exercise across the world and you'll always end up with this and I know where I come from none of the houses look like this and I'm going to guess that even in the heart of the western world where we are none of your houses looks like this so where the heck does that come from? and how many other aesthetic laws are you constantly struggling with? sometimes they work in your favor the male Robin has this brilliant crimson red breast to attract the female that's a favorable aesthetic and then there's the media overload which we were all faced with and there's a semiotic overload of signs and advertisement and all of that and that's getting used against this but when I look at our forms especially in dance and in theater and how they just often seem to be just struggling really struggling to find ways to insert themselves with other media forms that are in 2018 I think what they're actually struggling against is their old aesthetic rules that make no sense I'm born without a left hand so you could imagine that was quite trying in company sort of dance world and it's really funny and you'll get in contemporary dance this notion that it's incredibly progressive because it thinks it's really like high art dancer you know and you will not find often somebody who's not 25 to 35 and really beautiful even if they're native they're like either very aesthetically white passing or they're a Halle Berry type of black and we're really governed by that in dance and we're governed by still this notion of it being high art and of the court and theater is working with its own set of those things as well there's rules there's these rules that nobody out there actually understands they walk into a space and they have no clue this weird set of rules that we've made for ourselves so I think that would be my first question to pose to everybody is when you're making a choice dramaturgically is it from a place that is embodied and felt you know or is it coming from a place that you've convinced yourself is actually felt but it's thought and it's working in this aesthetic rule that you just carried on for no reason can we talk about it? sure yeah that's so fascinating that idea of like where we want to go and as an audience and as a public like the play needs this, the story needs this and as dramaturgs we're always doing that or as a director like we know that that's you've set up this idea and it wants to go here and we feel that and sometimes that is the audience feels that too and it's like successful or whatever but I think there is like a big question like I think us watching you draw that was like satisfying like we felt good about it but those moments like how to find those moments where it's broken and is that satisfying just for artists you know is that a conversation just between artists when you break that or is it you know can you do that in like a community context and that still be satisfying to people who haven't you know spent years of their life thinking about that stuff it's really beautiful it's the natural next step to the question about aesthetic is when would it actually be of use to break it I think you would position yourself in a better way to just understand that that's what's going on when you're leading yourself to a place to try and tell a story because there's a whole other one I could do right I could go I was an indigenous person I can go what's this a semi-circle in two lines it's a teepee and what's missing from the teepee and we'll go on a beautiful racist tangent which is a responsibility you have as a drama church to not go there or to understand when you're going there I've been in works before I still keep up my theater practice just as a muscle to work with and I was in play two years ago in the tarragon a kind of contemporary classic institution here and I played like half breed homeless delinquent and I had another white homeless person with me we were playing teenagers why is the costume designer making my clothes dirty and hers clean why is the makeup artist putting some like makeup dirt next to my table and suggesting I put it on myself because it's painting the homeless indigenous narrative and it's going to tell an easier story for the audience they're going to get in there and they're going to get it in 30 seconds well we can start to change that actively and you can clock when you're working within an aesthetic that's been handed to you and actively break it and there's actually innumerable possibilities when you break that aesthetic you could find moments in your own life when that aesthetic has been broken maybe you're with a loved one and they're dying and it's not the way you've seen people die on TV and it's incredibly important to feel that it can be grotesque it can do all sorts of things your dreams work outside of this aesthetic so a real masterful artist can work within the aesthetic laws and tell a story and then smash it open and take you to a place which can transport you to anywhere but that's a great follow up because what is it as a useful thing to understand you're working in this way and I guess it would depend on context who are you talking to what are you hoping that they understand or that they see I've been thinking about this a lot from actually I've protected a lot of words my husband's a poet and we talk a lot about audience response in terms of story or in terms of emotion and I think dance can do both and theater can do both but theater more often than not relies on narrative and story and once the conclusion and you were talking about having a satisfying conclusion that's letting everything that's like entertainment we're going to have a great night at the theater but there's another layer of audience experience that is purely emotion based without understanding and thinking of like someone like Becket who created works that were text based but also were very physical and disrupted expectations there's not really a question in that because throwing this to the table that's very interesting to me because I am since I've been in New York I've been at Brooklyn Academy of Arts a lot they bring in a lot of dance and I've met so many audience members after they've seen the performance that were just so moved by the emotion of it and everything but I as someone who's visually impaired unless I was sitting really close I missed it completely and so I'm kind of wondering if there's because I also when I just sometimes when I miss visual cues I can still sense what people are thinking or feeling about what I'm saying in a conversation and so I'm especially wondering when it comes to those dance forms when I can't get as close as I want to like how, maybe how can I still access that emotion I'm coming from a really different way of thinking about the proposition than Brian has so my questions are going to be a little more like you need dance detail dancing the first question that I that I came to was about thinking about the role of dramaturgy in more formal dance practices I come from a background in classical ballet and a lot of the kind of dancing that Brian was describing and I like a lot of people do and a lot of crews do coming out of a dance form like that I cut off my hair and rejected it and then recently I've been coming back to it and looking at really formal dance as a side of power and I've been thinking in a couple ways about that the first question that I had was what was the role of dramaturgy in really formal dance environments I also don't work in formal dance forms at all my own work isn't particularly formal although I have questions about it and I'm making a face because he's curated a work that I done in formalism but as a curator I don't work a lot with formal dance so I'm curious about the role of dramaturgy and of dramaturgy in formal dance sites and the other question that I had is more about responsibility and the role of the dancer and I'm wondering about what or what the role of the dramaturges to dancers or what the responsibility of dramaturges is specifically to dancers in an environment where dancers are working this first question we talked about this yesterday the relationship between dramaturges to working with classical forms so one of the panellists who wasn't able to be here is Nova Bhattacharya who is a choreographer who works with Bhardhanathu which is a highly coded from very rigid dance form and she works with it in a contemporary context but you're only allowed to move your body in certain ways it's very very restricted so when you're working within that highly limited movement palette what does dramaturgy look like because actually there's only certain choices to make the same thing if you're working with classical European tradition of ballet you're only supposed to move your body in certain ways so what does dramaturgy look like we don't have anybody who's speaking from that perspective we both study ballet at certain points in our lives but I don't know how to talk about it anymore so this is like a panel probably for the conference I'm wondering not so much about codified classical dance forms and just about formalism and dance in general like dramaturgy in something like early TDT work or like Toronto Dance Theatre they're a modern dance kind of gram company so I work that isn't necessarily codified in that way where you don't have like only certain movements that you can do but where it's predominantly about let's say like non-narrative, abstract movement focused beautiful images movement focused work like I just saw this work in Montreal at the festival de France Amérique called 6x9 by Talier they're a hugely successful choreographer from Beijing this like beautiful army of identical androgynous dancers and I wonder about the role of dramaturgy in a piece like that where for about 12 minutes a row of six dancers these like very fluid spinal movements in quite exacting unison so when there are dramaturges in the room on works like that I wonder about what questions are they asking and what's the point are they asking questions I mean I think so or is that the only labor that they're performing is is asking the question or are there other actions that dramaturges are doing when working on new pieces with choreographers yeah well I don't know and I don't work in that world of dance and choreography and I I guess then there's also this role in dance of rehearsal director of somebody who's and this is why I ask also this question about the responsibility to dancers that a rehearsal director is somebody whose responsibility is coming to the dancers a good rehearsal director will be like on the dancer's side and puts the schedule together and gives the notes bad rehearsal directors are assholes and make dancers feel bad about themselves but so in a situation when there's also a dramaturge in the room which also just to say this imaginary situation is so rare like I don't know in other contexts where people are working but I know in Canada there's almost never anybody else than the choreographer and like maybe their friend who they're paying for in the room so it's quite unusual but I yes I'm just gonna finish my thought yeah I have this question about the at a conversation with Fiona Griffith and she was saying maybe in Montreal but there was quite a different system of dramaturgy probably than here they have no money do you want to say something yes a couple years ago in New York there's a there is a woman her name was Kathleen Susinski I funded her as part of the live grants she lives in London and she's a dramaturge text based but also a dance dramaturge and she actually came to New York and did a series of dance clinics for us I at my advanced age participated in one of these in fact for 2-3 hours and it was about 15 other people and it was quite extraordinary what she did it was part of my funding of what she did she went over to Germany and she looked at she interviewed Pina Bausch's dramaturge and covered what he had done on Bandia that work of Pina Bausch that extraordinary work and she knew a lot about dance dramaturgy both from textual way and dance dramaturgy and this became a book in fact so there's a lot out there about I'll say I wish you were here I co-created the workshop with Catalan and have stumbled one of the verbs that I like to use as a dance dramaturge when I'm working is that we're offering we're stumbling and we're stumbling with the process of choreography that is happening there are different verbs that and labors that we perform questions is one portion mirroring sometimes which becomes verbal we're showing what we're seeing sometimes with language and other times I work with a choreographer and Jody Oberfelder and there are times when she'll do the movement as well and then share the details of what that feels like so I think it's always an exchange of figuring out vocabulary what the difference between her asking you to do the movement and tell her how it feels versus her asking the dancers what it feels like this was like a one on one that she was making a solo piece that was a portion of the dance and it was just a moment of exploration so the workshop that we did in New York City was based on a woman named Mara Rafaulowicz's work and she was a dramaturg with Joe Chacon and there's a whole series we tried to like accelerate what it is to create a dance piece from beginning to end and the primary there's no answers to anything but the primary questions that we're asking dramaturgs is how to be in our bodies as well while choreography and movement is happening so that we can both take, we can both figure out the notation of the choreographic and also take care and be present and part of a dance social relationship to New York so there's a lot that's present I'll just speak from my experience because somebody formerly trained in dramaturgy and I ran from that term for a long time I always wonder, just to add this to as an and to the conversation, why we place dramaturgy outside of us in this person because the act of creating is an act of dramaturgy and we are all creating our dramaturgy and is an embodied act so I always wonder why is it out there when it's here and we're all doing it and dancers are doing it and creators are doing it and what happens when we shift that conversation to it being this action as opposed to this outside thing I would actually I love that you asked that because I believe that dramaturgy is an embodied thing and we've gotten so far away from it that that's produced the need for a role of the dramaturgs like it would have been so cool if Nova was here because I also think she has a giant show big superstar my mistake because when I look at well even when I look at ballet and it's roots like from renaissance to post renaissance to like early classicism I would omit the last century like dramaturgies absolutely built into what's going on because it's in its nature interdisciplinary which is really funny because we always like every generation wants to feel like it's inventing something but we've become so I don't know what we've become in the advent of the digital revolution but the live arts has certainly become really bland in some ways and I think we're coming out of that with new information from digital information but when I look at when I look at my own traditions the difference between when you're dancing when you're storytelling when you're singing when you're drumming is like not much at all it's like now this is the part where we drum and now this is the part where we weave the story into your regalia from what I do know from Bad Acnazium it's from an age where something similar was going on it's completely in itself an interdisciplinary form people train together and can either become the person who's creating the music where the person who becomes the dancing but they're starting from the same place and storytelling is totally embedded in the form and because I don't like it's we think of those things as well as being highly regimented in my own personal question to get back to the aesthetics is how we should look at what we're doing right now and how it's regimented I had a recent I'd say debate but it was actually an argument with a friend about a lot of the top 10 most popular European creators and she was going on about how different this one was and that one you know what in 20 years all of their work is going to look the same it's going to be that period where it was so completely neutral nothing was said and mostly naked with bright lights and clean lines and it's like you're functioning in your own way in something that's highly regimented it could be subconscious but the aesthetic is so strong people will not move this way in the future there's a set of rules that you're following so maybe in that way it's the dramaturg's role to help the creator relate to other forms a little bit more I just wanted to come back to the second question you had about dramaturgs caring for dancers one of the things that often separates dance from theater is that theater performers usually have a union that protects them how they can be treated and how they cannot be treated and dancers usually don't have that and this question about how the actors are treated I don't think in a theater dramaturg setting that comes up because somebody else's responsibility to deal with that but in a dance setting because that actually is usually not somebody else's job the fact I don't have a response to it but it's interesting to me that that's a question that comes forward it's also an issue that I was just saying that it's interesting to me that this is a question that dramaturgs in a dance field could potentially be responsible for ensuring that dancers are treated properly it's less about is it the dramaturg's role to ensure that dancers are treated properly and more I think it's everybody's job to ensure that dancers are treated properly but my question is more about in their consideration of the work in the labor that's being done to develop the work what is a dramaturg's responsibility to dancers and how do they consider the dancers sorry there's something there we consider it in a time spectrum and I know that we're focusing on the production and rehearsal process and development but I think it's worth considering that dramaturg is critic and how we relate to dancers in that time period the dramaturg is critic and a really extreme example that pops to mind if anyone remembers Arlene Croci's responsibility Jones's piece in the 1990s she wrote a piece called I think it was in The New Yorker reviewing The Unreviewable and Bill T. Jones choreographed and I think he performed in it as well a piece that was entirely danced and performed by HIV positive dancers so they had an embodied knowledge of mortality that they were communicating in their dance their knowledge was absolute in what they were communicating and she wouldn't review it she wrote a review about how she wouldn't review it and why it didn't qualify as art as far as she was concerned because these dancers and he as choreographer had not sublimated their knowledge sufficiently they hadn't processed it to make it bearable for the consumers for her and so she rejected their vocabulary of their embodied knowledge and she wouldn't interact with it and it sparked this debate of responses from all these famous writers and authors and celebrities but the dance I never read anything about the dancers in that process or a response from them or how that rejection impacted them their health their careers so that to me is a dramaturgical issue on her part what was her responsibility I mean dramaturgs often become critics so that's a part of the career conversation that we need to have as well what is our responsibility to the dancers who perform as we critique their performance or the possibility it seems like you're speaking to the possibility of a dramaturg heading off that kind of criticism with thinking it through although that's like her response was like it it might be hard to imagine that kind of response when you're an artist and a human being but yeah I can see I think that seems to be the flip side of what you're suggesting to I don't answer a question for anyone it's just a bit of a question so many questions it just seems to me like what's made of me from a million question was the idea that the body is text if the dramaturg is to care about the text then in the dance the body is the text so the care is there it seems like really important but then I've been hearing about the dramaturg is asking questions so that seems to go down the other path of the critic so is the question asked or the caretaker and I think that that diverged split comes up in curation as well we talked a lot about that curation is it to care for or is it to ask questions who is it caring to ask questions when can you weave the two together and how do you weave the two together do you have a question well I would a couple of things come to mind because it's already been pretty there's a lot of there's a lot of riches here I guess I might say that first I have worked I haven't really worked in conventional you could say conventional theater context in a long time but that was my training and I've done mostly work that's interdisciplinary which is presented in dance contexts for the last 10 years and it's been work that more than anything else is working on groups and group process and it's collaborative but that said I come from a theater training and a theater background and so when Brian started talking about aesthetics I was like well for me in my experience it's possible to substitute that for text really and the reason why I think working in dance and in relation to dance and choreography has been the most sustaining contact in my practice as a writer is because I think in dance processes we are working most directly with text we're working with the text that that's encoded in us that's encoded in spectatorship directly without even without the imposition of a text coming from a stage and the moment of interpretation and translation that happens you've got your own text you're already playing when you watch a performance without words so working as a dramaturg and taking up dramaturgical questions and say sometimes wordless processes seems to be a way of working working directly with text so I wonder you know when you say like this is like a secret mission to establish the case for a dance dramaturg conference I would say it could be a case for expanding the presence of conversations about dance dramaturg in the LNDA or whatever in similar and it's kind of been my hobby horse as somebody who's facilitated curatorial type situations you know it's so important to recognize and work to articulate the practices that are informing the people who are the artists who are making and what they're making but I feel like that this kind of disciplinary thinking is so unhelpful in presentation and so how do you as a curator and possibly as a dramaturg and because I think those are quite related tasks how do you work to how do you activate ideas how do you activate process with the energy of discipline which is often a negative one and it's often a traumatic it's often like traumatic experience that people are moving from trying to move through and then create a circle that can a circle that can receive and hold that so I don't know if there's a question there that was kind of just I've been trying to find one there isn't one really that's just the reaction what's the shared vocabulary because that seems to be what the struggle so often is when in a multidisciplinary environment when disciplines meet what's the shared vocabulary when I started working with Sirk for instance and I'm coming purely from a theatrical background and how do I talk to a trapeze artist and just to start to rethink how I think what I think narrative is was a huge door opener for me because we're coming from tech space discipline at theater so we think of dialogue as the vehicle for narrative but of course there's physical narrative there's emotional narrative there's visual narrative there's experiential narrative and I know for myself that really helped me just to get at least a baby step in the right direction what is our shared vocabulary as opposed to what we often focus on which is just well this is so much different from that so we have to create a new vocabulary which may be essential but to begin to create that new vocabulary starting with things that we at least somehow dimly recognize as a shared vocabulary I just offer that as a a real door and window opener for me when I started to think of narrative in physical terms visual terms experiential terms is huge when you're working Sirk but emotional narrative is huge for me in dance I experience it as an emotional journey what is my journey in relationship to that piece I just saw I can't articulate necessarily in words but I can feel it I can feel that that was the emotional narrative of this piece for me I can recall it within my body as an emotional journey this is this curious thing that I come across or notice when I work with people who come predominantly from a theater background is this desire to encode narrative in what dance is doing including I don't see a text based narrative I don't see a temporal narrative there must be an emotional narrative I really don't know how to describe that I don't work with narrative and of course it becomes present and it becomes visible but I remember I gave a talk one time to this like emerging theater creators thing and there was a she was probably 20 or 21 years old and a young playwright and she was asking about my curatorial work and asking if there was a theme I said no and asking if there was a narrative and I said no and she said well if there's no theme and there's no narrative then how is it a thing I don't know what to do but it's not a thing but I think I could reflect back sorry Lurt part of what I speak of let's say for instance the emotional narrative I'm not necessarily referring to how you're creating it I'm referring to how I'm experiencing it and that can be a dramaturgical function that I can reflect back to how I'm experiencing this which may or may not give you some information in terms of how to create use it as you will but eventually whatever you're creating meets an audience and if I can let go of my subjective perspective and try as purely as possible to reflect back to what I think it's for me it's a healthier this isn't a critique of the word critique but the idea of the critic is I always have a challenge with because it's got such weird connotations but reflecting back reflecting back to the creator what the effect of their work is in whatever way may be of some dramaturgical benefit as an author I think that the way that I might be able to ask a question from that reflection that I had was that it seems like maybe finding the moment when a practice becomes a process is part of what I'm seeking in what I I could articulate my responsibility as a dramaturg in as much as I am typically in that way and that's I think that task is somehow contains my belief that people are coming out of ways of working and they're formed by ways of working and that all of the information that creates that way is part of is vital and needs to be respected and also reflected upon and critiqued but that for it to really meet the world it has to be acknowledged, it has to get beyond that it has to exceed its own informing conditions so practice and becoming process is a way of thinking whether that means the best where do you find that and what are the tools that allow you to find that to be present in that moment when it turns that's what I'm wondering would you be talking about I just I think I think it's so smart and so can I don't know for like nine years I was a dramaturge at the Guthrie Theater we did largely classical work it's 12 years I just run the playwriting program at Yale it was all about new plays new plays and not that I was teaching Aristotle or whatever whatever but and then I was very lucky then I went off for five years and even still now doing a lot of work with this incredible group of people led by Moses Kaufman and the core of that is this idea of the moment work that the starting point is we can't think about behavior in a certain way we can't look at three sisters and say okay this is the way people behave this is the idea of a play is written this way the starting point for there putting together a stage of it what about plays about stage events is that when I teach this way I talk about you have at your disposal a hundred elements you've got sound you've got rhythm you've got emotion you've got smell you've got all these things you've got an audience and so when I look at my playwrights I tell them stop stop using that word action you're being helped hostage by actors this idea of what I call the tennis match I'm sending you the action stop thinking that way think in terms of the pressure the pressure that's building you're talking about I don't think like the narrative I don't think about the narrative the plot driving me along there's other things that are happening to you I don't know what they are and you as an artist you as an artist know about those that's the way I talk about it some of those things build the pressure drives you forward and drives those actors through space because you were being through space I don't talk about plot I don't talk about action there were pressure pressure on the images things like that in space and that's the moment that it does because I think it's a healthier way of looking I appreciate what you're saying about pressure because when I I don't I identify as an inter-artist so I don't have a problem with mixing or finding a common language with other artists because I'm quite versatile that way but in any of my experiences in theater, dance and visual art I've trained classically and formally in all of them and whenever I was in one it was like you guys need to understand the other one and the experience goes on and on but the baseline is the corporal, it's the body and that's what when you described you've got all these things sound emotional you're describing all experiences of the body and they're sensory absolutely and they're almost you can't put them to words but then sometimes all we have is words especially speaking again to there's a lot of wisdom here with the experience of the visually impaired because it's still it is the one thing that's connecting all of us is your body you can write me paragraphs on the experience of cutting your arm but nothing is going to compare to the experience of cutting your arm the flow of drugs from the hypothalamus and the feeling of danger in the body absolutely so if that was the moment you were trying to communicate or trying to assist with as a dramaturg the research needs to happen in the body and that's not taught and I'm not sure what moving forward in that way would look like because we do have a problem with the written word only certain things are written I'm working with my community in the north where there's just a couple of us scattered in the same area the provincial park we're aware of that it's one of the jewel park systems it was a big site for the group of seven it actively erased us they burnt out our hunt camps they did all sorts of things so as we're trying to consolidate the area currently with a small working group of 40 mishnas up there there is no written word we've only got our embodied knowledge of the land and oral tradition you come up with this thing where a thing needs to be printed to exist Bill T. Jones's experience needs to be written about to have existed I did like some of the proudest things I've done in my career people don't write about like I did earlier this year Ngojewanong write of spring like a write of spring project in Peterborough on a parking lot that's a burial ground and it had 40 community members three year old to an 80 year old and every age in between nobody wrote about it because nobody wants to touch that and that experience will only exist in the people who can carry that forward and the physical research that is the thing that's connecting all of us the one thing I'd say like a huge problem with audio I'm losing my words audio assistance when you're watching a play I found I am trying to get a lot of my works audio described the practice of audio describing is trying to be totally neutral and it's that you can't actually describe what I'm doing physically as totally from a neutral place that there has to be the presence of of this pressurized talk to convey the experience it's in that in-between place that I think you would see the presence of physical dramaturgy come out more in the theater that's so interesting just talk about the audio described because what ASL has done in terms of creating variation translations of works on stage when you're watching an ASL interpreter they're not doing a line by line they have someone who's a director who's watching and making sure that the signs that they're using are doing storytelling and telling a story and it might actually shift from what's actually on stage because it is going to be subjective based on whoever is designing those signs and the idea that audio interpretation doesn't do that is very interesting to me now I'm like maybe there's a market for that but it's happening when we talk about the dramaturgy the dance dramaturgy as the person who's helping the artist create or the dance dramaturgy as the person who's being a set of reflective audience eyes or who's providing context for the audience and I think those are three separate roles and I guess a question that I have for choreographers and for dancers is how much they're thinking about the audience experience of what they're doing or how much it's about the physical experience of making it which goes I think back also to an aesthetic question because I think those would require different types of care and assistance and thought that's the dance tendency is to not think enough about the audience and the theater tendency is to think too much about the audience so we have about five minutes left so what I was going to propose is if everybody in conclusion can offer a question not one that we're going to answer now but offer a question either that you came in with that wasn't answered or that's based on what's happened today so that's with five minutes left that means that we have about 15 seconds per person to do that so we don't have to do it in a circular order if you know what your question is you can just say it but I just want to make sure it's fascinating how you audio what's I know audio describe a dance piece that's my question other questions I'm interested in that more I'm just starting out with this question with some of the visual impairment like how do you experience the work and how can we translate the work out of these and questions my question is about structure versus narrative and if they're the same thing when it comes to visual works visual performance my question is whether the presence of text implies narrative any more than movement implies action I think my question is kind of sitting in between being a musician and also doing cranial cycle therapy I'm thinking about the fact that we are entities floating but we are solid as well so within art this energy goes through us whether we can hear it feel it, smell it but at the same time I'm just posting the question within a performance as little kids whenever they see anyone showing something they mimic my question is why don't I just teach you how to release the pain in your body from the stage as you do it with me so that's my offering how does the daily world narrative affect your narrative I have two questions only one I someone who is trained as a dancer coming to geometry as a dancer how do we how do we help audience understand dance in a non-text way even though we are based around text and digital media and why is it so important to understand the visual language in all we do is live in a society based around the visual second question and I'm showing them this how do we as dramaturgs what's the best way to advertise ourselves to dance companies in a way that doesn't seem that we are just the critic sitting in the room or to make it seem like we want to be artists as assistant choreographers my question is is it imperative to understand something that can be the title I think every time I watch the house I like that but I don't think I understand it every time I watch I don't understand it and it's not necessary my question is around kinesthetic understanding and how we can embolden dramaturgs and be embodied and participate in choreographic work my question is actually very related to what your question was how can I better be in my body for a kinesthetic response to the work that's being put in rehearsal on stage how can I do that I think my question would be is there is the experience from an audience perspective is the experience of dance and non-text theater does that include an inherently normative sensory experience I don't know if I'm phrasing that correctly I also have the question that I always like to ask dramaturgs who are interested in dance and that's how do you play with gravity to understand gravity I would ask what structures and practical tools support an articulation of the baseline collective dramaturgy that is always happening in process and allow it to be more present and stronger in work I have a question for the people in the room who said something to this effect as a dance teacher a contemporary dance for adults with no background in dance why do you consider yourself not to be embodied or to not be in your body I'm not looking for answers to me personally because I know it's a personal question but I teach a lot of adults who don't have a dance background and a lot of people say and I wonder about that question it's funny it's fine something that I'm curious about is as somebody who trained in a highly text based classically oriented theater program and then immediately started working in dance since then and have not really been around text based theater for a long time is there anything that we know as practitioners working in the dance build that the theater can scale and reverse is there anything on the scale from the theater and then how can we set up environments for that knowledge to be an extension solid, that one in the description so shall we close should there she give us he's an auctioneer okay it's something about internal dramaturgy and how that relates to aesthetic like if I'm following I'm following my own internal dramaturgy and how does that relate to aesthetic reading can you read that as just what occurs is the aesthetic or is there something else that dramaturgically people feel like there's some other layer that needs to be there beyond what I do is the aesthetic when I'm following my own internal dramaturgy what I do is the aesthetic thanks for coming