All right, I'm going to start talking. I saw it in Boston. I didn't feel that way. Good morning ladies and gentlemen. When I was texting Jojo at seven in the morning, we were having really fun texting times at seven in the morning all week. She was like, how many shares should I set up? How many shares should I set up? I'm like, people were out late last night. I don't think that meant. So delighted. You all were coming. Thank you for coming. Thank you for coming. You're trying to stack the Australian deck. You don't know what. But you don't know what the project is. So I was very fortunate playwriting Australia, and I'm sure many of you have already met them, which is the director of their international programs right there, very kindly invited me to see the National Play Festival earlier this year and I was in Melbourne where I met Vanessa. And I had a marvelous time and I just remember thinking, and I'm struck by something that you said to me after your first trip to New York, which was last week, you know, how amazingly crazy and wonderful it felt to you. And I said, but Dan, it's strange. You've lived in Singapore. You've lived in major major cities, bigger cities than New York. Why does it feel so wonderful and marvelous? And I think what you said rang very true to me about my experience with Australia, that it is extremely foreign but extremely similar to my experience. And while I was in Australia and seeing the marvelous work that I saw, I was really struck by the way the playwrights were, so many playwrights were dealing with many of the same issues that American playwrights deal with, issues of race, issues of gender, issues of sexuality, because the country is very similar, much closer to the United States, frankly, from a cultural perspective than I think of the UK or Scotland or Ireland, or any other English-speaking country, because the geography is similarly spread out. There are similarly two poles, Melbourne and Sydney, one LA, one New York, or the United States. We're trying to be very nice to you. Make you feel a little better. No, but very similar, and also dealing with crushing migration problems, long history of racial oppression, and trying to deal with those things creatively and emotionally, and that was where the idea of this panel discussion or conversation or whatever came about. And we called it a smackdown, only because here at Willie down the hall when we were putting this together, the elaborate entrance of Chad Deity was playing, all about wrestling, and so I saw the play, and in the morning I was like, I'm going to call it the Australian-American smackdown. So Dan has a prize for whoever wins. Do you want to show us? Yeah, it should be a surprise. It should be a surprise. Oh, because they'll throw the game. This is a prize. It's full bottles. A blueberry beer. It's a traditional Australian beer. And it's very bad manners too. And the moderators smack down the panel and win the beer. So indeed, in order to make this even, even when we couldn't do just one moderator, we had to do two moderators. I've already given last night that we're here in Incomium to talk about it, and I'm not going to do it again. Sorry, I told you. But Todd London is artistic director, is a new dramatist in New York. If you don't know the organization, go visit the website, which is quite beautiful. Learn all about Todd, who is, in addition to being, a vital force in American theater, a novelist in his own right, and an artist in his own right, so you should go out and buy his books. And he's also got this fabulous book coming out. And you've got... Give it up, I don't say I'm not going to do it. Done. Let me talk about Christine Evans to your left. Christine Evans is sort of... She's sort of a switch-hitter, right? I'm on the cover agent for Australia. That's right. You're a bi-curious playwright, because you're Australian, but have lived in the United States for the past 15 years. An amazing playwright. 12. I'm sorry. An amazing playwright, plays in Food Trojan Barbie, waitlist, one of my favorites, Pussy Boy, for reasons I'll tell you later. And many times awarded with fellowships and honors and so on, you can certainly go on to the website to learn more about it.  You'll be able to read their bios, but I'm delighted that we have Carson Kreitzer here. Jacqueline Lawton, if you didn't meet Jacqueline or Jackie last night, you can so... What rights am I in so... I wasn't there.  You weren't there. She is delightful and wonderful. She's been blogging all week, actually. Is it JacquelineLawton.com? Yes, JacquelineLawton.com. So I'll be taking lots of pictures and just be prepared to be gorgeous. Yes. She's one of the four playwrights on here. She's West. Carlos Murillo, who's played Diagram of a Paper Airplane, will be seen very soon. Duck and Green, who's played Moth, will be seen very soon. And that's a base, who's played every second, will be seen very soon. All right. Let the smackdown begin. I suggest keep your knees. Thank you, Duck. Well, welcome, everybody. We thought that we would just start by talking a little bit about something that's pointed out in the program, but people may not be so aware of, which is some of the differences in the landscapes of the two countries in terms of theater and art. And then, then we'll hear from the one of the playwrights. So Australia's population is 23 million, and the U.S. is 315 million. I just want to point out here that the federal arts money per capita in the United States is 46 cents per person, and in Australia, it is $16 per person. Oh. So I'm out. I'm out of here. I'm really going to that beer. Who's buying dinners? It's a really big difference to the kind of landscape and to the way that artists are able to go about their work or the kind of partnerships that they make to do something. Some other interesting stats before Todd speaks. In 2012-13, in Australia, 57% of players were written by men and 43% were written by women. In the United States, 70% of players were written by men and 20% were written by women. 60% of Australia were by Indigenous playwrights and 7% by playwrights from a non-English speaking background. In the United States, 10% of players were by ensembles and 21% of players were by playwrights of colour and that means produced players and statistics collected. So I just thought that would give a little framing of some of the factors operating in the larger landscape before we hear from these wonderful playwrights about their own work. Todd. So just one thing, are we live streaming? Okay, because I don't feel very alive at this moment, it's kind of... but just so everybody knows and we're going to try and turn to everyone for a conversation after the writers speak.  We've got six. Or six. Or two. Then, then ask you guys to speak through your work about this particulars of your whatever you mean, Americanism or Australianism or being an American playwright or an Australian playwright through the work. You know, I was thinking to 20 years ago in this country and I was noting that plays were very invested in plays. So, we had within a couple years of each other, we had Angels in America, the America Play by Susan Lurie Parks, the American Plan by Richard Greenberg, the Kentucky Cycle, we had we were in the middle of August Wilson Century Cycle which was really about the American Century, Twilight Los Angeles 1992. You know that there was really an investment in plays and thinking about how the prevalent sort of identity politics and gender conversations of the time really went towards defining communities within America and that the conversation in a way had moved more towards race and gender than towards American-ness and what that meant what about your project is not specifically or all about race and gender but really about nationality or plays. So, I think this is a little bit where I'm interested in going and Christina and I seem to be on the same page about this. The only other thing I want to say is before turning to first to the American writers and then to the Australian writers I was in Boston and Arts Emerson, I guess it was last weekend or the weekend before and learned this great game. It's a kind of cultural mapping game and a woman named Obey He Janice taught it and she had learned it from Michael Road of Sojourn Theatre and it's called Where I'm From and it's like a it's a kind of musical chairs game where there's one space too few in the circle and the person who's stuck in the middle has to say something about the place that they come from and then the people who share that go into the middle with them and somebody gets the empty space in the ring so there were things like Where I'm From we refer to our elders as Sir and Madam and anybody who came from a place like that or Where I'm From we wear bikinis in winter or Where I'm From children are not allowed in the living room because it's covered with plastic who shares that sort of cultural thing so we're not going to do musical chairs unless you guys decide to do smackdown but this is a little bit about Where I'm From in the most specific terms that you can so let's just start maybe I'll start with Carson and we'll just move this way geographically you know the question is really a simple one what about your work in specific do you see as part of being an American writer or as an American project we've asked everybody to talk for about three minutes so that we can sort of get through that and then maybe we'll talk across and then we'll talk around so Carson you want to start sure well that's what I get for sitting on the end it's interesting I consider myself more consciously a citizen of my gender in America but probably very unconsciously in everything I do I am American and it's probably just the edges I can't see I am definitely engaged in filling in the gaps in recorded history or the history that we are taught which often is missing the interesting women so I have been sort of play by play filling in the gaps of the women that I wish I had known about growing up most recently Lee Miller who was man raised muse and with the surrealists in Paris and became a World War II combat photographer and I was so upset that I had never heard of her because she just lived her life so so bravely and in a way that men are allowed to generally aren't but I also I definitely have more American plays I have a play called the love song of Robert Oppenheimer about the atomic bomb that is also sort of about re-racinating the atomic bomb as Jewish because again the way it was taught to me in school was this very sort of abstract weave the bomb against Japan and learning that it had really been created by Jews who mostly had fled from Germany to stop Hitler was a very different different thing I also just recently wrote a play called Flesh in the Desert or recently produced I have been writing it for a while about Las Vegas and that one very much felt like a play about America and a sort of tender and exasperated play about America and all of our foolishness and headdresses and just trying to make it work and the last sort of truth that will be reading on Saturday is I somehow keep coming back to the World War II era and there are many many plays that touch on that and this is about the man who invented both Wonder Woman and the lie detector machine and which is also is a sort of very American striving for truth and justice in the American way and the little strangenesses so I think that may be what I have to say about my Americanness Before we move on to Jacqueline I love that phrase too the edges I can't see I think this is what we're getting at Kristine and we're talking this morning about and I don't want to paraphrase you but you said something really moving about this sense of whether you can or cannot see the culture that you live in and the politics, the economics and how they come to bear on what you wanted to say I think I need more coffee Okay Jacqueline So it's really interesting this idea of being an American playwright I first actually went to Australia in 2002 as a part of the World Interplay so these young artists and I was with three other American playwrights and I was told by these lovely Australian gentlemen you always know when the Americans into the room they entered with such confidence with their heads held high and she thought that was really quite interesting this identity so I was all 25 at that point and I was very much a Texas based playwright so this idea of Texas is south meets west with sheer determination and always the willingness to leave the country which I very much was left the country a lot but in terms of the work I do the piece that I wrote for the podcast plays for you all here takes us west so that takes us past the FBI building with how American can you get with that with our own sense of national security it takes us past the IRS Dear God help us all and it takes us to Freedom Plaza this marble concrete honor to that which we fought for which is freedom and we continue to fight for our freedom every single day it feels like and you turn east and you see the Capitol yet again in your two blocks from the White House my gosh that's all these American symbols that are in the way and so for me specifically as a writer I'm a race based and feminist conscious playwright so I'm very much aware of roles for African American men and women and also other people of color I'm very interested in the race conversation that we have in this country I'm more interested in the conversation that we don't have the one that we're really terribly afraid of having the play I have that's about to be produced at theater J the Hampton years the second world war two and I'm very interested in that time period it was a pinnacle moment in our nation's history for many many reasons we gotten ourselves out of the Great Depression we stood firm on ground to fight for the freedom of the world and women left the home this new definition of who women were that then changed who women could be and it's still changing we're still trying to understand the role of women in this country so that play specifically is looking at the black and Jewish relationship which is an ongoing very tenuous delicate relationship and so that's what that play also looking at the role of artists these are particular visual artists so there's sculptors and painters muralists how does gender, how does race allow or deny access into the field of profession something I'm very interested in this play that I wrote called Blood, Band and Tongue Tide which was my first big play out of the Kennedy Center Playwrights Intensive it looks at self-hatred within the African-American community so that specifically is looking at how this construct of beauty from an American perspective be it television, magazines what is beautiful defined nationally how that impacts other being whether you're a heavy set person whether you're autism but what is that other word is beauty lie so that's and then often times how internally a culture can turn in on itself and start to feed on itself which happens a great deal in the African-American community and it comes to with skin color so you have the paper brown bag test which is to say if you're darker than a paper bag you're not as beautiful as say if you're lighter than a paper bag which I think is quite fascinating so and then with my play The Devil's Sweetwater it looks at right after 9-11 there was this message if you see something say something so this idea of what happens for me specifically if you fell in love with the other, with the monster with the terror in the room so I adapted Faust and had a woman fall in love with a Muslim man who might or might not either save the world through curing cancer or a huge jihad so so at the core of my work as an American playwright in dialogue always with race and gender I'm really trying as Carson said to look at these conversations that just that really aren't being had because there's fear in those conversations and I think that if we can at least start the dialogue getting a room with people then we can start making progress moving forward and I think art is such a beautiful way I feel we all would agree that theater is such a beautiful way to be able to start that conversation because you're good at the three minute thing yeah you can say that I know the wife thank you is it my turn? I guess so alright I actually think this question has been at the center of my work for the last 10 years what it means to be an American I think that partly comes from how I grew up on the child of immigrants in Columbia my mom was born in Puerto Rico and I grew up in the suburbs in New York in a very kind of middle class assimilated lifestyle so throughout my entire life I've always felt like well I have some connection to my parents culture but then I also listen to the Ramones and where that sort of fits in for me has always been an operative question and I think it really crystallized with me in relation to my work in 2003 I had this Grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to basically travel around the United States and the rule of that particular trip is we couldn't ride on the interstate highway because we could only ride on the secondary roads and as a life on the east coast where I live in Chicago now I just moved to Chicago when this grant happened you know when you live on the coast there's this place you fly over which is the rest of the country and you don't really pay attention to like the little nuts and bolts that make up the whole picture and that trip was really amazing and we spent 7 weeks traveling 13,000 miles in pretty much every region of the country and the kind of lesson I gleaned from that is that we live in this kind of insane work in progress that shouldn't work and should have destroyed itself and has destroyed itself in the past and rebuilds itself and creates itself and then I found myself in very strange situations but why am I more comfortable why do I feel more of myself than I do in New York City or anywhere else or why do I feel really alive in this little town in Nevada where I'm meeting these weird collectors who collect artifacts and mines and that sort of thing and so that really sort of sparked my imagination since then and really asking a question like what is American identity and having grown up in that area you're talking about when the sort of how did you describe it the sort of pockets of identity kind of speaking as opposed to a larger American picture having grown up in that era and beginning writing in that era I thought the sort of next project was to really ask that bigger question while we all do possess these separate identities but what really links us together what's the what's the kind of blue that holds this bizarre fabric together because it's really astonishing when you go to these places and you drive to my wife crazy and you tumble down a road trip and you kind of go see the ball of yarn and go to these really bizarre places I find this really enriching and that's informed my work the player you're going to see this afternoon there's a character that doesn't actually appear in it but is sort of central to the entire play he's really sort of like a demented version of myself and he's asking that question and he's sort of the author of several of my plays this guy named Javier C and I think the most kind of crystallized example of where some of these ideas come together is a recent play by Calda a big description of Harry Smith which is about Harry Eberich Smith who was the musicologist his most well-known work was the Anthology of American Folk Music which came out in 1952 but he was also a painter and he was an occultist and he was part of his Bohemian scene in New York everybody knew him but nobody knows him and so I created this piece which was really like this I wanted this to be kind of like a road trip through the United States using some of the music from the anthology with new lyrics telling his story as a kind of as a sort of underground denizen who shaped the culture in a lot of ways and trying to be really optimistic because I think there's a lot of certainly in the last decade there's a lot of negativity about the idea of being American certainly from the last administration and some of the conversations that we've been having in the last election and I kind of want to find a way to celebrate the idea of being American that we are this kind of weird, wordy, monstrous beast that is constantly readjusting itself and trying to find what it is, what it means so that particular piece is described as a proto-psychedelic prairie hum companion which tries to capture some of that spirit but certainly a big preoccupation and the current plan I'm working on which I'm going up to New Dormers in two days to work on deals with some of the same questions it's so interesting to hear of all of these wonderful stories and the specificity of the angles there's one thing that comes to mind especially listening Jackie to what you're saying about the tour and about this idea of freedom and American freedom I just want to share one little anecdote that I think may connect into the Australian stories that we're going to hear I first moved here in 2001 and I was looking for the hanging chads and the election of the George Bush and September 11th happened but I'd only been here a short time and the thing that really struck me after that day walking around the streets in those first days of complete shock in the country was that I heard the word freedom everywhere and I really didn't understand it as in Australia I felt as though in that moment I saw this kind of hidden side of the country in the sense of what is the gut value that comes out under pressure and I was wondering all the time and I was wondering around thinking what would happen in Australia if something really terrible happened and people articulated the sort of gut core value of the country and you may have a really different feeling about this but for me it was the idea of the fair go that feels like the absolute core value that is ideologically embedded in the Australian mind that it's not freedom in the same way at all but this idea that everyone should have a fair go that people should be mates and of course this has its undervalued which is that if you're too good at something you're stepping out of line that is the tall poppy syndrome in Australia but it's just one of those really raw moments in this country that suggested to me that the core felt value that meant being Australian was different than the core felt value that meant being American I just offer that in a late response to your question As a captain over here I'd love to first hand to Declan and would love to hear about your work and how it relates to where you come from Sure I think for me most of my work is really kind of concerned with culture and kind of mass cultural dissemination and the way it actually arrives on Australian soil so I think my work is kind of deeply about Australia in the sense that it's actually not about Australia at all and it's about Australia as a magpie culture and an extremely young country and a country whose sense of national identity is a very warped and strange pastiche of other cultures I don't feel like even this sense of fair go I think it's a very kind of splintered and fractious idea it's an idea which is kind of reiterated constantly in our national psyche but at the same time is a complete odds with the massive human rights disgraces that are occurring in our country as we speak, we're a country where we incarcerate the people who turn up on our shores seeking a fair go from overseas escaping persecution and put them into detention centres in the desert it's a real disgrace so in a sense I think that that shame is kind of at the core of my work as well that said I'm also very passionate about my country and I love my country but it's a very kind of difficult love pay relationship and I'm sure that's something keenly felt for a lot of artists but the majority of the work I kind of create is on one hand I'm kind of really interested in creating work that's very very kind of localised work that kind of embraces theatre as something which is resistant to mass production and so in terms of the work I create in my hometown which is Melbourne in Victoria it's very much about looking around the resources I have on hand which might be which will be not necessarily actors which might be people who are my friends from the queer community people who are kind of like strippers or drag queens or kind of MCs or party hosts or DJs and then kind of getting them to enact narratives which are appropriated from other cultures and actually this invariably tends to be these tend to be American narratives because this is kind of the country with the greatest kind of influence I think on the development of Australian national identity so I did a work recently which was about making the great American Civil War epic so the idea of like going with the wind and staging that in a garage in the suburbs of Australia with the cast of Drag Queen in in Cronorns so kind of I guess in a sense that's kind of about thinking about the way that we kind of structure ourselves in relation to this kind of constant kind of a pressure from other cultures and then next year and that's kind of with this theater company and we've we've made about five shows now and I think they all have been kind of a cast of non-performers kind of struggling with American accents to some degree tragically but it doesn't really matter I'm kind of like with this theater company I'm really interested in creating kind of very messy kind of live experiences that even where the play text is not the kind of sacrosanct thing it's something that shifts constantly and that's why we're trying to work with non-performers like people who are comfortable in front of a crowd and we'll kind of roll with roofs falling in and neighbours screaming at us to be quiet and we're kind of a sense we're a queer theater company and I think our interest is thinking about queer theater and thinking about queer narratives and queer narratives not in the sense of kind of the queer narratives that find their way onto the Australian main stage which are invariably narratives where kind of the gay or queer community are structured as embroiled in conversations about gay marriage or invariably structured as kind of a pedophilic influence or struggling with HIV or AIDS and thinking about queer as a dislocating social force something which can kind of disrupt the I guess white, heterocentric narratives that are at the core of our cultural identity and we do that by putting drag queens in dresses and making them talk in American accent. The play I'm presenting in the festival has nothing to do with any of this. It's done. It's done. It's a truly interesting hearing you guys talk about the kinds of work that you do and the subjects that you're interested in and at first I was thinking my work is really I don't think it really says something about Australia about being Australian but then when I kind of thought about it I come from a kind of non out of the city so not Sydney, not Melbourne and bizarrely there are actually more places in Australia than just those two. So I spend a lot of time in kind of regional areas and the first play I wrote, Darling Oscar that kind of got out there was a play about a girl with a mother not dissimilar to a character that we saw last night in a reading, a character with large hair. This girl gives birth to a fish and it's all about that whole thing of leaving the family getting out and when I think back on that it's so of that time and me leaving getting out again one of those sorts of plays and also being not in the centre of things not in the city so I think regional being not city, being regional has actually played quite a lot of a part in my writing the plays that I'm writing there's always been gender things I've always been attracted to these kind of female characters and also families and mothers and daughters and the plays that I've just written recently Porncake and Every Second which is on here are now about relationships between people of my age and they're about long term relationships and they're kind of small kind of these really tiny little mysteries that happen within those relationships and how they impact upon people and in terms of the regionalism in those plays I think it's probably it's about people missing out and feeling like they've missed out either missed out on the most important moment somehow or missing out on the potential that was always there for them so that makes me feel really sad about myself sad and it's a game wallow in that I'm wondering about the questions you have for each other actually but while you think about that I'm struck by this notion of value whether it is this sense of fair go or freedom and how it's articulated in so many different ways it makes me wonder and this is maybe a terrible question because it's so general it makes me wonder if in a way as artists you aren't always finding a way to actually assert the real value inside the stated value of your culture like what freedom really is in a complicated and contradictory America what fairness really is in a place that detains its immigrants and if there isn't that sense of the opposition of you as artists to the either the dominant culture you live in or the dominance of other cultures that come to you isn't in some ways to assert whether it's in a more domestic or in a more social realm the truth inside the stated value that I don't know if that's a question or just amusing or if you want to pick it up or not but what I'm really actually more interested in is what you think of what you and each other said what you might ask in relation to what you and each other said I love the notion of the fair go and that does seem so alien to the way we run things around life but I something I should have mentioned in the work I do with its Americanness is I am very attracted to female anti-heroes which I think is just a basic right of male characters to be unattractive and make bad choices and hurt people and women are not allowed so that so I felt like desiring a fair go that but that notion of freedom and the individual rights and the fair go has led me to write three plays about women who kill which is not admirable but but is something that we should be able to speak about it is something that is often admired in men and it is absolutely promoting women I think it's interesting that quite a few of the plays that you guys have talked about are kind of a character that's within them or maybe more is actually a real person would that be right? it's like it's about history it's come from actual history yeah most of my plays are based on real people and that's really interesting I think the one I'm writing now is the Hanson years but traditionally I don't write about yeah do you guys have that sense? partly to me what I hear is this sense of unwritten history writing unwritten history and I guess we're both fairly young cultures I think I find myself drawn to historical figures there's something about them that embodies all the complexity of America so Harry Smith to me he's sort of unwritten and underground circles he's sort of worshiped but there's something about the contradictions within that person that embody the whole idea of America for me you use a great phrase things to be ashamed about and they're all kind of wrapped up in this particular individual and at my new play there's also another minor unknown figure who seems to embody these things I guess I don't know I think of films like Citizen Kane where there's the kind of iconic American as the central figure in the storytelling I'm interested in the city a little bit but the Farago freedom I think if you sort of hold Americans both from the right and left about the idea of freedom certainly people on the right would say that oh that is the Farago that everybody's after themselves and if you're successful great and then other people would define freedom on the left hand side of the spectrum that Farago needs to be part of freedom in order to achieve so it's just interesting the way those two ideas have you ever heard that phrase from you know when you were trying to I think it just told him that all the time there's something interesting to what you're saying this idea of artists speaking to so there's a notion of freedom there's a notion of Farago and then there's what everyday people are actually living and experiencing which often times is very different from the lovely writ that's at large and I remember two years ago Washington Post critic was asking about the DC playwright's voice so there's always this desire to define the DC playwright's voice we're all individually fighting this question we're not wanting to be defined and what he was getting behind is this idea we're in the nation's capital I live seven blocks from the capital from the Supreme Court and we're not really writing about politics we're not really writing about the things and I don't know if there is a grand desire to because we see it played out right in front of us all the time but what I think is really compelling is I do adhere to the charge of artists speaking to what actually is happening speaking to what is the truth to dispel that national myth I think that that's really important because it is giving voice to people who aren't allowed who don't get that national platform to say this is how it is this is what's going to this is what we accept but in fact it's quite simply not the case I think it's really interesting to speak to this idea real people this play Armand Beverly Snow is about this free person of color and his restaurant was actually at 601 Pennsylvania Avenue so just a block around here and it was in 1835 and there was this race riot and he was actually he snuck out and got away and the restaurant was attacked and he was attacked because he was a free man of color at a time when free people outnumbered slaves for the first time in DC's history and he was successful and the large white community which was very poor at that time was enraged that this free man of color became successful and I decided to write it because I see that echoed in what's happening with President Obama you know I just wanted to show that but this raises a question to me do you know what is our time we do really well oh great so we'll have lots of time questions so start thinking what you want to ask too so I have a question for you guys what Jackie said about being a DC playwright there has been a century long conversation in America more than a century about local playwriting, rural playwriting local playwriting as opposed to bicoastal or metropolitan playwriting and I was talking to some of our friends from Buffalo last night and they were talking about cultivating the local Buffalo playwriting community and so on and so you know this thing about what does it mean to write from outside of Melbourne or Sydney what does it mean to write from Melbourne or not Sydney or where do you come from this notion of where I come from and being important to my voice as opposed to having a national voice or this sense that oh you're a New York playwright therefore you speak for America in some way is there a conversation around locality, ruralness specific place in Australian playwriting I think one of the main conversations that's occurring at the moment is actually about particularly in Australian playwriting culture is actually just about a larger shift that's occurring away from a playwright driven theatre where we're moving towards being a reggae theatre culture where it's completely director led and actually the role I think a lot of playwrights are being kind of moving towards now is kind of being putting this position of kind of like adapting canonical texts for and actually trying to locate a very kind of specific voice that's astringent and speaks to the local audience from your city or the theatre you're writing for in kind of a relation to a much older canonical text which I think is kind of interesting and kind of again feeds into this idea of Australia as a pirate culture actually trying to locate our identity through the stories of other cultures and I think that what's kind of interesting especially is that you know we have the kind of view with the audiences who come to theatres in the kind of major city centres in Australia are kind of by and large wired middle class over the age of and if you're adapting a text a canonical text to make it relevant for this audience you end up adapting it specifically for these audiences and for these people there was a production at the salesman that just went on to kind of create a hyphen to claim in Melbourne in Australia which was done completely in Australian accent where they completely stripped the set and just had a car sitting on stage and all the action was kind of hovered around a car and this action of kind of adaptation was kind of like really massively controversial firstly because I mean it was almost embarrassing. I went to see I thought it was an incredible piece of theatre but at the same time I was like it's incredible that the kind of values of the 1950s finding 50s American can still kind of speak to Australia in this way that's almost perverse like you know but then also that the director kind of cut out the final monologue and then got a massive bitch slap from the estate of Arthur Miller yeah it was hugely controversial and kind of like but yeah the same theatre company kind of did a version of It's Since the Wild Duck where it was set kind of behind a glass box and the text had just been rewritten to make it about white middle class people that you might see on television and it was kind of behind a glass wall which kind of made it all the more about white people that you might see on the television. It's just anyway so that's a very long and roundabout way of saying that Australian local identity on the main stage tends to be about white middle class people and urban centres and those are the voices that are articulated by playwrights and I think that's kind of a problematic thing. So it's a kind of self-reflecting thing that the audiences, the work has written for and to the audience absolutely. Yeah I think it's very close. Well I think that's true what Declan's saying there are other kinds of plays that are being done as well and other kinds of other kinds of work that's less text based and more performance based and that sort of thing there are plays that I've written that I think now they are kind of middle class kind of plays I guess but I don't think of them that way I'm Eurasian and I don't think I'm running a white play you know I'm just writing a story about these people that this thing happens to them You said that you didn't come from Sydney or Melbourne, what's the place you come from? Well I would say probably Newcastle which is a couple of hours north of Sydney and I've lived in Sydney for a long time I've actually just moved back to Newcastle but being from Newcastle you know being not from Sydney and Sydney being the major centre that was kind of nearby but you know obviously I'm not from there I don't want to say I get a massive chip on my shoulder or that people do but I think there is something about that and it's this fair go idea I think comes into that it's excluded and exclusion I think playwrights do feel very strongly about exclusion for whatever reason or you know Do you feel any need to represent for Newcastle or that you're source material I've written a play that it was about that siege in Moscow when the the Chechens took over the theatre and on the weekend that that was resolved in Newcastle a young guy tried to hold up a bookshop with a son of shotgun so there were two newspaper articles that I was kind of looking at and it was just interesting that in both stories there was this young aggressive young man out armed and an older woman who tried to negotiate with them and in one all happening on the same weekend but on different parts of the world and in one story it ended really badly and in another story it actually ended okay and I kind of woven through What's the name of that play? That's a checklist for an armed robber and and the thing with the Newcastle that play is being done over and over again in Australia loads of universities and drama courses are doing it now but it's never been done in Newcastle and there are theatres there but it's just sort of I don't know why that is I don't push that interesting kind of thing and the plays that are being done there are not often often not Australian plays and I was really excited because I did a one of the local theatre companies did an Australian play just recently and I was like Yay! It was a lot man So I have a question this is very stimulating for me feeling my bipolar relationship to our countries one of the things that strikes me about coming from Australia and hearing you speak especially what you're saying about the shards of American culture that are reflecting everywhere there's a difference between the two countries that is that Australia is always within the shadow of American power and America is almost singular in the world in being a country where you can live in America and only think about the country you're in there's very very few other these dangly centric countries where that's even a possibility because everywhere else is within the radiance or the shadow of American mass culture and the other thing about Australia too is that it's an anglophone nation a very multicultural anglophone nation on indigenous land in Southeast Asia I mean Australia is geographically in Indonesia and East Asia Thailand and Japan and India we're much more we're much more in that part of the world and so this Australian idea of identity in country is really complicated by being in place and out of place you know Australian identity is always in dialogue with other countries and displaced geographies you know one of the things that's really struggling about coming to the stakes is this sense of the mirror ball that this constant thinking about America and what is America is somehow not always oriented to the fact that America casts big shadows in other places so it's sort of like being inside of a mirror ball with all the mirrors shining inwards outside of a mirror ball with a lot of light getting in your eyes in some ways so I wonder if anyone could speak to the complexity of place that that generates in either place because I think it does have effects in this I think with Australian playwriting there was a period of time not very long ago where it was really kind of frowned on to do a play about being Australian or I remember a director saying to me oh god another Billabong play and because getting then to the that tricky subject of actually getting on if a play doesn't get formed does it exist really? it's on paper in your desk drawer so if you're kind of worrying about who's going to produce your play and they don't want to see a Billabong play then you may not write it it's like a little tract of water and it's really swag man it's like it's good you're going on so it's just a kind of it's like yes Rick the other thing too that maybe Americans would be interested in knowing the concept of the cultural cringe which is very pervasive in Australia and still exists which you guys are sort of talking about and the cultural cringe is sort of a unique embarrassment of one's own culture that still exists a lot in Australia and what Declan was talking about about our little kind of a new tradition of producing, of adapting old classics is sort of a bit of the cultural cringe in action we're far more comfortable at taking other works and trying to find ourselves in them rather than defining ourselves or championing new stories to be told Bethan I do what do you feel cringe at all towards your own culture American narratives and stuff like that like not necessarily about the kind of like your heart and destiny and freedom thing but just more about how like you've been the narrators it's upon you it's upon you I will say I had an American cringe moment when I was actually in Belgrade so this was in 2002 and I was teaching at this embassy because a friend of mine was working there you know they were going through, in 2002 they were going through a really huge transition this was after Milosevic was ousted they were really coming into their own and so I was there and I was watching television and oh my gosh so they're very nationalist which I love and I think it's really tremendous because I love that when I go away I want to go away on television was The Simpsons and Friends but it was in Serbsky so and I was like well Ithia have to have of all the American television shows to bring over I had it not to denounce The Simpsons or Friends product placement but it was just quite something I was thinking of all the things that could have been transported to this little place going through this huge transition how fascinating that it's these two pop culture shows but thank goodness it was in Serbsky so America hadn't completely taken over so I had a little but there's also a kind of automatic legitimacy when British companies come to the United States and the Brickham Academy of Music then British company comes and automatically comes with a stamp of approval regardless of the quality of it I'm just fascinated to hear that Australia seems to feel more in dialogue with America than with England I think because we still have this weird it's true of the whole world it's Christian's point that we're the only ones who don't see other countries in any field I was just going to say and is that Australian society that feels like that or the Australian theatre society that feels like that because I would say in Australian theatre society that the UK and their works are I think at least as you know I'm jetland but half of it is really it's doing that to me the beautiful thing is this is the UK and this is the US so that's kind of even hands with theatre I wonder if there's something about the two countries being born out of exile communities having some connection I mean we're both kind of constructs and these vast lands that we're populated by regional population which I think feeds into a lot of the shame we feel or the kind of ambivalence we feel about our history that we sort of grafted and it's hard to talk about American identity because I don't think it's a fixed thing I think it's such a complicated thing and like I said being at urban centers is a totally different experience than being out in the middle of nowhere and how we define that but that sense of no one is from here except the original peoples who were here and they're not many of them so I wonder how that translates into the thinking there and if that influences you guys or yeah I sometimes think that cultural cringe is kind of about a very specific set of Australian frontier narratives and about like even that kind of thing like Billabong or the jump-up or waltzing the children for me these are ideas or motives that are really deeply entrenched in colonialism and I think that even in an intuitive sense sometimes I feel that cultural cringe I get when I hear waltzing the children or when I hear somebody talk to me about Australians riding around in wallabies or something like that or wrestling crocodiles or fighting the struggle against the land for me that is actually these are motives of colonialism and are about the core of terror and genocide the foundations of our culture and yeah sometimes I think that's kind of a really knee-jerk and voluntarily kind of discussed about the way we came to have it in that country I think these are such huge topics and I hope that we can continue them all weekend I mean one of the things that we haven't touched on but would be great to talk about over the weekend is the Indigenous theatre in Australia and the strong kind of rise about the last 20 years I guess but now we need to make some time for our audience to be in conversation with us and I have anything to say ask yes we started out hi my name is Jamil Jude I'm the NNPN producing residence at Mixed Blood Theatre Jason made me say that you started out by quoting statistics comparing the US and how we fund and produce plays I'm interested especially here about new play development in Australia and how that compares to the style of new play development I think we're here to champion the best practices of the new play field so I'm wondering if there are things that we can learn from you all and just talk to your experiences and how do you all get to the point where you're almost at 50-50 equity when we're still like 70-20 what are things that we can talk about as far as new play development and then also more specifically for me in new play production how can we get towards that equity that may not be a 5 minute question Dan, do you want to weigh in on that? well it was interesting when Jason came to Perth and talked about the rolling the rolling premiere can you speak a little louder sorry to put you on the spot it was interesting when Jason came to Perth to talk about the rolling premiere because I think the key issue for playwrights in Australia is is that sense of getting a production past its first production and having the opportunity to reflect on the work and work with not one company on that work and when Jason explained the model there was a lot of excitement within the theatre community there because it was something that was a practical solution to a problem that we've been grappling with equally another problem is the idea of emerging playwrights and there's a lot of support for younger writers in my other capacity for another organisation I've run an emerging playwrights programme and there are a number of mentorship programmes for younger writers offered by the Australia Council and other organisations but there's a point where you've gone through that and you've had your first production but then where do you go from there and certainly I know that even established playwrights when they've had a considerable success with a new work or Vanessa said this year once that success has been had it's almost like people move on and they're looking for next again the exclusion not just Vanessa not just me so it does seem that as I was saying when Jason was talking to us in Melbourne structural issues were facing quite similar structural issues you also though just quickly to tack on a lot of the companies that specialise in doing new plays there's a certain kind of territorialism about it because there's ability to tour those plays and offers for those theatre companies so nothing against like the Belvoir which is a really fantastic theatre in Sydney but they'll produce a new play and it'll go to X theatre in Melbourne and X theatre in Ferd and X theatre all around the country so there's with the same cast with the same so it's more of a touring model like the UK than anything we have here and then the other thing that I think is hugely different about new play development I'd like to say that PWA playwriting Australia and New Dramatists are occupied by similar places in their respective cultural landscape but PWA is funded by the government you have a brief from the government to develop playwrights in Australia and so there is it's not like you have a giant budget but you are given a budget from the Australia Council to go to every city every territory in Australia to develop those playwrights there's no whereas our gameplay development systems in this country are highly regionalised highly based on where you can get funding there's government funding the government has no only local governments if anything and state governments have any interest in making sure the playwrights are supported and that playwriting as a cultural form remains vibrant I just want to do we think that because I have a friend who I'm sorry I'm Bridget Bridget O'Leary from Boston I have a friend from Canada who talks a lot about and I don't know if this is still true but at least six years ago that Canada was investing a lot in its artists but mostly in the exporting of the artists and that there was incentive to produce if you were in Canada to produce Canadian playwrights I know we don't do that in America but I wonder if it has anything to do with what we're talking about this idea that we feel like we have our solid identity and that is very easily getting out there into the world if governments of countries that maybe don't feel that they have such a global presence need in some way to incentivize that getting that out there I mean certainly that in our conversation I mean you there's an international programs manager they're at a very important senior position in PWA which is all about getting that out the LARC the LARC here in the United States well it's really more about bringing people in I will tell very briefly the story of when I was talking about the Rolling Rope premiers and Chris Mead the former artistic director the former Todd London at PWA he was explaining an NPN and this exchange and there was a whole I won't go into all of the details because it will be embarrassing but there was a lot of debate about NPN at the senior level about whether we should do an international exchange with a national new play network why are we possibly bringing in and supporting international playwrights and Chris Mead is introducing me saying we're so lucky to have Jason here from NPN they're very nervous about the Australians possibly taking over the entire theatre so this is you again is that I know why please Seth Rosin with the interactive company curious to know about the relationship between the new play industry in Australia and the media particularly reviews and the relationship to the major metropolitan centers because in this country one of the things that we face still even in our own in our midst of the NPN is that the New York Times is the de facto artistic director for much of the country or for most of the country really I'd say in that if at times gives a good review that play has a better chance of getting produced everywhere regardless of what theatre's mission is and regardless of what community they're in and is that is there anything similar to that in Australia I woke up this morning to find my play I got a one star review from it's from the major right wing tabloid rag in Melbourne so I'm actually very proud it's you exactly I hope it's going to funnel the right people through the door what do you labour under as playwrights in terms of reviews and which papers and is there a singular voice in the way I don't think there's anything anyone who has the kind of power that the New York Times has and I'm very grateful for that because that sounds more I think it's one of the challenges in this I mean do you feel like the I don't know that much about the New York Times but do you feel like the I'm kind of critical to that paper for a particular standpoint or a particular taste I don't think that's the issue I don't even think it's our industry's criticism of their criticism it's the fact that by virtue of its influence it makes decisions for how sellable something will be anywhere that's all it's not I think people who read it regularly might have think more or less about any particular critic but that's not the issue it's that a single person in one review can determine the success or failure of that piece but also can determine what's on everybody's seasons next year I think I could weigh in on this just looking from both countries that I think the ecology of arts funding has a lot to do with the lesser dependence on critics and I think there speaks to Richard's question as well which is those kind of programs that look out would there again more to do with the politics of arts funding and the capacity to fund art is something of independent value that these things all look together that's interesting because it puts the economic context in because when you say that about the New York Times and I think you get no disagreement for me it's an indictment of the theater community it's not about the New York Times it's about the people who program and so what is the economic context of those decisions that they make I just want to go back to Jamil's point and ask you guys this sense of gender equity for one thing on the stage in Australia you know this is a 30 year really battle in America that just keeps coming up and we keep coming back to the exact same statistics you know it's actually more like 17% of the plays on American stages are written by women do you labor under a sense that you have a different kind of struggle as a woman playwright in Australia statistically you don't seem to you know I'm really surprised that that's statistic you know because I thought I mean but what's happened in Australia just recently is there has been this huge kind of you know again with the hands but the you know kind of rise of indignation of women playwrights and they're all kind of getting together and the Arts Council I think last year wrote a big report on how women were women playwrights how many were getting up and you know asking companies to be accountable for that and I think companies took that on you know they they really did so I think this year with the new kind of announcement of which plays are being done is a lot better than last year and tons better than the year before and years before that you know that statistic is only last years and I just want to quickly say about that statistic because the statistics in there if anybody has questions about the statistics please see me no no because we assembled them from cobbled them together those are PWA statistics from last year but from a select group of theatres the Australia Bureau of Statistics that looks at even a smaller group but of larger theatres and the statistics for women are much worse at that of course is there a difference are you all aware of sorry David Goldman none of that large board member there's a group in the Bay Area which you may know about or not know about called 50 50 2020 heard about that parody by the year 2020 and that's a completely devoted group whether they're going to be successful or not who knows but the fact is that it is a groundswell and it's important and people are devoted to you've heard of it right in terms of your MFA writing programs what's the percentage of it's much more equivalent actually I think it's a greater percentage of women yes and in organizations like membership based organizations playwright center it's very much 50 50 or even leaning more towards women other questions a lot has been said Alice I'm Zell I'm the playwright residents at Interac Theater on the point of MFA programs I'm actually curious what the training system is like in Australia in comparison to here as taught the book 20 out of a few years ago we have a system that is very very beholden to seven programs in this country and I went to one of them and I'm very fortunate but honestly we don't have a system that is where we get the vast majority of our stories and our storytellers so we're going to places that are very expensive that require you to be able to take a significant time out of your life so if you got family or if you aren't from a background where you pay for that type of take on that type of debt you don't get a chance to really be a storyteller I feel like here what is the training system like in Australia do you are you dependent on MFA programs are you how does it how do you actually get how do scripts get to there's only I mean I don't know that much about the history of Australian theater but certainly in my time like practicing out there the only MFA playwriting course in Australia started last year that was there was there was Knight had a playwright studio Knight had a playwright studio that was like one day a week afternoon a week for a year for a whole year it's much more like just doing work experience I feel like I learned how to write on the job completely and just by doing kind of scratch shows which has been a really great thing because I think that I've kind of ended up with I feel like my strength is that kind of like sculpting live text and about and I think it does mean that there is kind of a greater variability in the stories because actually you don't need this kind of degree to work on stage you just kind of need to be good at your job as a writer but um and I think we're very different kinds of writers Declan and myself because Declan is very involved in making his work putting into work on stage which is great and I did do that originally but I don't really do that anymore so it's very my works really reliant on a company picking up a play and doing it and that has its own kind of momentum I suppose that's how you kind of learn seeing your play on and then getting another one up and you know so are the theaters there actually accepting of work that isn't by people who already have representation or who aren't the non-study program are they accepting of it? how do they accept scripts? how do they combine? most Australian theatre companies don't accept unsolicited manuscripts but the organisation down works through playwriting Australia that you send your script to them and then they'll generally do kind of like an assessment report or something and then recommend scripts to theatre companies and that kind of becomes a mediator between kind of the reading and is that is that fee based? does it used to be an Australian National Playwright Centre? so you could just send called you could send your scripts also because the country is so small I think the pathway happens a lot quicker so if you work with an independent company saying you go on in a small theatre and you're not being paid you're really likely to get an independent theatre company Griffin and Belfly to come and see your show and you can kind of in a year or two break through and have your name known to the people that need to know your name and start a relationship I think that relationship happens a lot quicker in Australia so I think we have time for a couple more questions maybe like one or two more minutes I've actually got a question for the American Playwrights being in the United States it's been incredible to hear how much Spanish has spoken and how in terms of the demographics and the changing demographics and I wondered in terms of the structure of the industry and the number of Hispanic Playwrights coming through how that will be how the industry will change in the next couple of years and how are you representing bilingual productions ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? it's a question about bilingualism and the presence of Hispanic voices on stage Karen Zacharias is here who's a Latina Playwright do you want to speak to that first and then I'll jump in I think it's something that American theaters are struggling with because the excuse for sometimes not putting on a Latino play is we can't get Latino audiences to come and see the work but that doesn't seem to be the problem when they're putting ips in they're not running out to find sweets more regions exactly but anyway that's what the country is struggling with and the fact that Latino is a term to use a multi-national multi-class type of community that is here that I think we're treated as a foreign entity people who have not been at the table and I think just as the politics is turning around and realizing that we can cover the political spectrum it's a roaring lion that's starting to get out of the cage that hopefully we can start shaking things up and largely ignored or scared or you know they we haven't been treated as if we're part of the the fabric of what makes the United States and I grew up in Mexico I am really not even a first generation I'm an immigrant myself and so in Mexico the big saying is and it seems like in Australia poor Mexico so far from God and so close to the United States and it's a prevalent type of feeling of what I mean there's always this defensiveness of Mexico as part of the Americas too we are America as well and yet moving to the United States is a profound changing influence that's why so many people are coming here and I think it's a really interesting complicated story I mean Carlos is Puerto Rican and Colombian I'm Mexican and Danish and that is what being an American is starting to be it's a really interesting it is interesting because people I think from a producer standpoint and not only Latino culture I think all minority cultures in this country are sort of lumped into these monolithic ideas so there's an Asian American play what does that mean there's dozens and dozens of countries and then the various mixtures that we come from and I just find it really interesting I don't have a dialogue anymore and I think one of the interesting things about the last election was looking at the two ballrooms on election night and there's the ballroom in Boston where everyone is glum and everyone is of a certain demographic and often I walk into theaters and that is the demographic and then a lot of coming in how do we outreach or how do we connect with minority culture and the ballroom in Chicago and it's not even a question it's just the fabric, it's just the reality we live in a multicultural society we're not even talking about it in that way how do we do this kind of outreach of course they're doing that in the back offices but there's just an ease to it that I think is entirely absent from the theater in this country and I hope for the day when all stories are just part of the fabric the question of what is American I think there are a handful of theaters that play Latin plays because I think the Goodman Theater in Chicago is a great example where they do African American plays Latino plays, traditional white plays but it's not part of the conversation where like here's the Latino play it's just what they do and I hope that more and more theaters will take that mindset because there is a sort of slotting mentality where we have a grant to do the multicultural play and then there's these like concentric circles of monoliths so there's the Latino play and then there's the black play and then there's the Asian play and then there's the multicultural play so if we do a multicultural play we've hit everything do you know what I mean so if we did the Latino play this year then we don't have to do the Asian play until next year or we don't have to do the black play for another three years so I still think that a lot of the mentality from the 90s where there was a real focus on identity is still part of the vocabulary from the producer standpoint and I just wish there was more visionary voices that reflected what happened in the ballroom in Chicago Really quickly from Barclay Borderlands Theatre Tucson Barclay about 80% of our work is Latino or binational but there's a song that kept going through my head as you were speaking and I don't know how many people in the room know it it's called and the plan played Waltzing Matilda which is about returning World War II veterans to Australia who are wounded and the play we just did on the border in one of the background songs about what this Mexican family that had a veteran was and the band played Waltzing Matilda and that says a lot about what we're doing doesn't it Thank you Barclay Thank you to everyone I mean it's interesting just to squeeze in one last word after Carlos two is this this sense that I guess it makes me want to say this to you and you guys you know the question is also geographical it is a big country as Christine said at the beginning so the Latino population of California is really different from the Latino population of New York and the waves not just the demographic waves but the theatrical waves so there was a time in the 60s when Puerto Rican culture was so booming in New York at least and then Cuban culture and Miami is so different than Arizona and so this sense of wanting you to see our country whole and particular and wanting to see yours in the same way it's just such an ongoing process and so I just want to thank everybody for sharing in that. Thank you guys for sharing your work and your thoughts and all weekend and thanks for bringing us together and thank you to the people at home for taking care of us I would love to get a hug for everybody


You need a financial advisor with the freedom to focus on your specific needs. Whatever your goals, Reeve Potter can create a game plan tailored to you. Call Reid at 432-0777 at Pikeville, Kentucky to learn more. City of Martin Police in Santa Claus himself came out to deliver presents and gift cards as part of the Shop with the Cop program Thursday afternoon. We do Shop with the Cop every year with kids in Martin, which is in Grigsby Heights and Padgett Hills. We have some presents that Santa Claus is going to be delivering them today. And we also have some gift cards for the families to go at a local grocery store and help them out through the Christmas season. Do what little bit we can. With help from the community, City of Martin Police delivered over 50 presents and gift cards to families in need. Chief Stidham says it's an awesome feeling helping others.  And we just love helping the little, small children. That's what it's all about. We hope it helps them through this season.  For Mountain Top News... Ho, ho, ho! I'm Joel Chorjol.


Hi everybody it's Sarah from Mixed Up Craft. Thank you for watching my tutorial today. I'm going to be showing you how to make this double shaker card. Now I've made mine in the shape of a circle. You can do any shape you want but basically what I've got is the center bit here is all the sequence and then the outer part has these little theories. So you've got two different you know shaker parts in there but they're not mixing up and I think it looks really really pretty. Very straightforward to do. Like I said you can do any shape you want in any size so it's really it is very simple to you know change it up however you want it. Then inside here I've got the same papers this is all from the fairy tales collection by Dovecraft and I've done some heat embossing. I've got a little straight part there that's basically just lands the card so that it does stand upright and doesn't roll. If you were to keep it all completely circular possibly will stay but it's just handy just to have that at the back so it just doesn't yeah just kind of roll off and disappear. All of the beautiful embellishments are all from the collection. I've used the little wand there. If you have missed my music box that I've done I'll link it in up here. I'll also link in the unboxing which shows all of this collection. There's the butterflies there. The little paper flowers I've added that bow. So this one is very very girly it would look lovely with a big number here imagine like 21st birthday it just yeah it's just really really special I do love this one. Now this is 8x8 I had these huge 8x8 cards lying around I thought you know I'm going to do a really large card. In the UK we do like large cards you go into the card shops and we have huge there's some of them are massive and I know my sister's always a bit competitive and she always likes to get bigger cards than me so yeah I think that's why I like doing 5x7 and 6x6 cards. I do like a large card and I think when you've got all these beautiful things especially in this particular collection you want the space to be able to show them all off and yeah I know postage means it's a little bit more but generally I do hand deliver my cards but this is easy to downsize so any size it needs to be square so 5x5 6x6 7x7 that will work and obviously you can go down to 4x4 if you wanted to do a really really dinky one. So that's what we're going to make so I am going to do another 8x8 style so this is the paper pack these are all the bits I've already prepared this is the huge envelopes I can't remember where these were from but I want to say very old Duffcraft I've got a feeling it may well be I'll link in 8x8 cards anyway these are a really nice like cream colour so yeah I had a few of them lying around so this is the 8x8 card now you want to have whatever card base you've got you want when we do a cutting you want to make sure that your fold line is at the top so it's a top folding card you want it in that orientation so if you've got a pre-cut 6x6 card bases that would probably be the most common one and I have done 6x6 circle cards before but I think they were easel ones that I've done so I've pulled out some paper there this is another nice love this style and it's that one there on the pad again I'll just lift up that kind of overview page there just you can see all the beautiful little prints that are there so that's what we're using so first of all I'm using this wonderful tool which many of you who've been following me for some time now will know how much I love the X cut tool so I've got this one but also the cutting system that some of you have got which is I think it's a 6 inch and then an 8 inch circle and then it's got 7 inches on one side and then it's also got 5 on another one on the smaller one until you see it you'd understand but that would work for this obviously and along with this one but if you just got a dinner plate or side plate something like that would work as well so here is my like I said card base top folding and you just want to maximize as much of the card as possible without going off the edges apart from the top you do want to go over just enough so that you've got that join so at the top here this is this score line here so you need to have a little bit I've got about two inches there to keep the card attached okay so with that in mind I'm going to set my dial here and I'm going to move it up to seven and a half okay so those of you have got it I found the seven and a half worked just right for this one you can go closer to eight if you want but I just found that that one worked fine for me now if you push it down or lift it up if you so have it so it's upright so it's lifted off you can just go around and what you want to do is make sure there's a blade just under here the blade wants to come up so it's going to cut off this bit here which I'm just feeling there so that is and then you just want to go around you want to make sure you don't go over this side and you don't go over this side here but you want to go off up here just slightly and you can feel I can feel how much that's going to come off once I'm happy where it is just push it down so it's completely flat put your finger in the middle here and you really want to kind of hold I'm going to go this way make sure you've got nothing catching you let's just pop that out of the way as you go around you need to keep everything in place do not move it I am cutting through two pieces of of good quality cardstock so it is a bit more challenging I'm just going to go around and just make sure that I've cut through both of those you can feel when it's cut away there we go now keep it in place don't move it at this point here um am I at the right no no it's fine you can take it away you can remove it so now can you see I've still got this bit and that's the join so now we've got this perfect circular card now open it up and if you line up this flat side with a if you've got a grid paper or just against a really you want to make sure that you've got it completely straight so now I'm going to open it up and I can see it's obviously running through there and you want to take just a little bit off the bottom of the inside and like I said that's just going to ground the card and stop it from rolling so I'm going to make sure my rulers all I'm using the grids under here just to make sure and I'm only taking off you know it's even like a sixteenth couple of millimeters it's it's minimal because you'd be surprised once you've removed that it will stop that circle rolling away okay and it's you know it's not too much so it's going to kind of impact the design or anything so now when I stand that up it stands there perfectly you can see it's kind of rocking a bit I think I've got a bit of yeah my pads a little bit warped but it will stop there we go all right so that's what you want so that's that card base all prepped now with this still set at the same size or if you're using a dinner plate anything you're using you want to use that same thing again and you want to cut out some patterned paper so something of your choice I'm going for something that's not too detailed so you can see the one behind here is this lovely pearl eyes it's got a slight pattern you can just make out there because you've got so much going on on top if you've got too much of a busy background you won't really appreciate all the lovely elements that we're going to add to it so I thought this one here is still quite plain in a sense that it's not going to affect what I'm putting on top of it so again I'm just checking I'm not pushing down on that blade just checking that it's all where I want it to be so now I'm going to push down and this is just one sheet of paper so this cuts like a dream so that's that piece now okay and then that is now going to sit over the top so whether you're using six by six whatever you're doing now your pattern piece will sit perfectly on whatever size it is you're doing so that's what I like doing these cards when there's no real set measurements because it doesn't matter what you use you could have a huge dinner plate size can you imagine how great that would look it'd be lovely so that's that piece now already so you can probably start to see how it's developing then you want to grab another bit of card so this is one one kind of side of one of those eight by eight cards and this is what I'm now going to use to make my frame so with that still in the same setting and whether you're using a dinner plate or anything else you want to cut out another size again I'm just sticking with the same colors but there's it doesn't matter if you choose to have this you know any colors you want it really doesn't matter so but this is what we're making now is this frame on the top now the easiest way to do this and this is the I guess the most challenging part of the card pop this in the middle again you want to make sure that it's going to obviously cover yep so I'm going to go around cut this out okay now this is when you don't want to move um this tool if you're using this tool don't move it now if you're using a plate lift it off that's fine what you want to do next is find something a smaller plate that is going to come down and give you I mean you don't want to go any smaller than what I've got there and that's about a half an inch frame so whatever plate you bring in next you might even use a die and draw around a die you want to have so that you've got about half an inch or more overhanging but I wouldn't go any less so what I'm going to do with this now is I'm going to bring this down whilst holding this in place I'm just unscrewing my dial and I'm going to bring it down half an inch no I'm actually coming down it wasn't as much in the end was it let me yeah so I'm bringing it down now so it is so mine's on I'm just popping mine down now to just over six and a half but again it's entirely up to you but I wouldn't go any shorter than half an inch so now I'm just tightening that up and I've pushed the blade down whilst doing that and I haven't moved this but the reason you don't want to move this is because this is in the exact centre of this circle and in order for us to get a nice frame you need to have that in the centre so if you've got a plate it'd be easy for you to move that around and you just want to make sure that you've got that frame all the way around so now I can cut I don't want the card to move you want to keep everything really in place like so and it should join perfectly and now I have a perfect frame okay keep this this is coming handy you may want to use it to decorate inside I've just used that paper there but yeah you could add some nice colours to it and use it on other cards it's nice strong card anyway so that is now the frame done we've got our pattern paper that sits perfectly on top of this the inside piece I think it's just now at this measurement again so the smaller plate and I just cut the same decorative paper and then that's just from Anesta dies and I just heat emboss my sentiments that's all ready to stick inside in a moment but this piece now here and with that still no what you want to do now is go back to the original size yeah so back up but just if you can come slightly under even if you're using a plate don't worry just cut it to the same original larger size with this I'm coming just under seven and a half because we're going to add the acetate sheet and you want that to just kind of come slightly under here otherwise it may hang out but what I would say is if you're cutting it exactly the same size which you would then go around with a pair of scissors I'll show you in a minute and cut that out but basically I'm just going to grab my acetate here now I have mixed the crafters companion acetate with acetate from UK car crafts it's a hundred and forty microns so I'm not sure which one it is I'm using I think the reason I've done it is because they were pretty much the same so yeah just have a nice it doesn't matter if it's a really flimsy one doesn't have to be a particularly strong acetate because it's only acting as a little screen so with my original size so the size that I cut this piece out with that's what you want to kind of be cutting with now but if you're using this just drop it down a little bit under that just so you don't get any overhang and again you want to go around and the nice thing about this machine is it does cut through lots and lots of different materials so you can see you know I've done obviously paper card acetate I've tried thicker thicker cards like you know coming up to a chipboard kind of um size but you want to obviously be careful there that you're not going to blunt your blade so and you can buy replacements as well so now I've just cut my acetate now if you just cut it with your dinner plate that's the same size one that you used for this you just want to go around the edge now and just take a very thin amount all the way around and it just means you won't get anything overhanging because what's going to happen is is this frame is going to stick over the front of our acetate there so with this piece and some double sided tape okay I've just got this quarter inch red tape and you just want to go along and just pop it through the middle and twist it around doesn't matter if the top plastic coating is buckling because you're going to pull that off anyway so just kind of manipulate it around trying to keep it kind of in the middle really you don't want any of your tape oozing over the sides you can use a wet glue but the problem is you're sticking a plastic to obviously glue so it can take a long time but the red tape is obviously I just find very very good for sticking to acetate so I'm just going to start another one there like so again just making sure there's no air bubbles be careful you don't want to obviously crease your frame okay and then I can just take off the release paper okay and then with your acetate sheet you want to as neatly as possible stick it over and then just kind of let it fall down if you've gone slightly off on one side to the other side just carefully turn it over this way and just go along and just trim it but basically you just you don't want to see any of the acetate hanging over and again do go over it like this and get any air bubbles out because you don't want you might be adding maybe finer like glitters or little kind of beads in your shaker you don't want any gaps where they might get out so now that's completely secure what's something in there a bit of card I think but now that is our frame already next we're going to add the foam so I always like to use you can use fun foam I've done it with fun foam I've got tutorials up where you can use fun foam sheets and cut them and use them as your kind of dimension your lifted part here so you see all inside here is white foam between those two layers there the inexpensive way that I do it is this is my foam very cheap pound from the pound shops or the range and then I undo it and run a strip I'll do this one next to it because I could do with another one for something else I'm doing so there we go stick them down and you can see this one here I've already cut and the reason I do this is so that now I can cut as thin as strips as I want so I know I want to have something that's going to sit around there and again I don't want you to see it hanging out at any other side so I'm cutting about a quarter inch strip now you can buy these on rolls for shake cards but personally I think they're very expensive you never get a lot and I just think it's wasted money so I think that is so much better to do and like I said these rolls last ages and you can get you know I could probably cut three of those strips yeah you can see I can get another two out of that and that's probably the kind of width I always use when I do shake a card so and if I make any other styles I just use normal square foam adhesive little pads so then I just keep the the release paper underneath my finger there with my thumb and as I go around again just manipulating it to curve around the frame shape and I'm pulling the backing paper off as I'm going around this is just so quick and that's why I like it with the foam yep it's another great one it's just a little bit more fiddlier it does take up a little bit of time and you have to you can buy the pre the fun foam ones you can buy double sided fun foam if you've got fun foam yourself then you can apply double-sided sticky sheets to it and then die cut or cut the shape out but because of the size I'm doing I find this is just always been my go-to I've done this for a long time and then this one here I'm going to use this other quarter inch and this is just wax paper or we call it grease proof paper whatever the one is that's shiny because obviously you don't want this to actually stick to it you want it to be able to come off and then just continue that and if you do start a new one like I have make sure you get at the join right up to the other one and then as you come around to here you want them to join again and when you cut it make sure you cut it so your scissors are over the grease proof paper don't go under otherwise you're going to get them all sticky if you cut it over let my scissors are perfect these are just um I picked them up the other day from IKEA for 50p and do you know they're really just good because what I was finding was I was picking up my nice ones for glues and stuff whereas now I've got these ones for 50p but they're actually really comfortable I'm really nice in your hand and they're yellow so they match my room so anyway so now I'm just going to go around just make sure that's all stopped in next we're going to create our frame for the inside this is to have this two shaker part element to it now if you don't want to do that then don't and you can keep this as one great big shaker so don't feel you have to do this if you're new to shaker cards putting two in you know it does take patience and time and precision and all that kind of stuff so just see watch my tutorial see how I do it and then you can decide but basically I've got this outer frame and I've got this is an X cut one this is a I can't remember where I got this one from anyway this sits perfectly inside and when I run that through my die machine I'm using that scrap piece here when I run it through that is the frame that I get and it is perfect and I've used it on a few different shaker things so I'm going to go and run this one through okay so I've just run that through my die machine and you can see now there I've got a lovely frame so pull that to one side what I'm going to do with this piece is again with my red tape it's why at the quarter inch red tape I go to this a lot you've probably seen this featured a lot in my um tutorials I just really like the size of it it's great for doing you know all these little things which at first I didn't think I really done a lot of but then since having it and I buy these from every crafts a pound you get 23 rolls for 10 pound and you get all different sizes but you get a lot of the smaller size and I have been buying them just drawn on the floor I've been buying them from them now for well over a year and they've lasted me ages so yeah that's where I get my red tape you get nice big rolls as well so make sure that's all stuck down and then this is going to stick on top of our acetate so at first this is just purely decorative it's not until we do the bit underneath so grab your acetate frame here and then you just want to stick it as centered as possible so I'm just looking in my screen I think that's about right if it's a little bit off by the time we decorate I'm not too worried but you're sticking it on the top okay like so now flip it over and you're going to add this backing just over the top so exactly the same way and this is why I like cutting my backing down as well because I can cut it this is just going to work but you can cut it so that obviously it's really really thin and it basically just is acting as a little wall to stop the sequins kind of you know so I'm just concentrating um the sequins going into the other section so just push that one around and I just need a little bit extra and again like I said before when you're continuing on from another one just make sure you butt it right up and don't worry if it starts lifting and like I said buckling and stuff because as soon as you take the release paper off the top it will flatten out again keep that backing down and then snip like so push that all down okay so now it's time to fill it up now usually what I do is let's stick let's prep this bit first so this decorative piece here you want to stick right over it's quite a big area I don't want to put just all glue on it so I'm going to run double sided tape plus this is going to be held down by the time we put the shaker frame over the top and then what I do is just pop some wet glue more so around the edge there I'm just putting a very thin amount just on those parts where the tape hasn't reached you just don't want any of it lifting inside really when you because once you've stuck everything down that's it there's no getting back in it's into it so just make sure my pattern's nice and straight and that should stick perfectly over the top like so okay so now if you're not adding this piece here I would say tip whatever shaker bit you want onto this okay and kind of spread it out a bit you may want to have your message so see this is a topper that's stuck on the acetate you might want to stamp emboss or stamp something and stick it stick that down on here first and then sprinkle your shaker bits over the top so that when the person shakes it it reveals the message so if you do want to do that then do that all now because I'm doing the two parts here making life a bit difficult for me I'm going to be tipping into this and because this is round I'm going to stick this directly over the top because it's so easy to line up okay so there are a couple of ways to do it and I will link in all my other shaker cards up here because there's lots of other like kind of hints and tips along the way so I'm using these clear ones again I picked these up from the range I think they're a pound 50 they used to be a pound years ago always a pound I used to get loads and loads now everything seems to be increasing just by 50p or a pound so yeah I'm making them last a bit longer so you just want to put enough in there that when it's spread out you don't want it to be bulkier than the height of your foam otherwise it's gonna yeah just look a bit odd so I think that's enough there so that's those and then for this bit here are these gorgeous fairies and again I did share them closer up but can you see you can just make out all the detail on here and it is it's tinkerbell so you just want to go around if you've got these and just kind of spreading them out and some of them get a bit stuck so some of like her foot or her wing kind of gets caught in the foam but that's actually quite nice because it kind of just you can see there some of them fall down but they're all kind of stuck around I just think it's nice that you can really see them all so yeah just to try not obviously to get them falling into the other bit because I know a lot of people got a love-hate relationship with shake of cards my mum has a love-hate relationship because they are one of those things that if you get it wrong when you've gone to stick it down or you're slightly off if you pick it up and start you know knocking it that's it everything was gone all over the place and I've had it before and you know I've had sequins stuck on this once I've opened them you know gone to stick it down and stuff and it is it's heartbreaking so yeah there is a process to it but if you start to do them a lot which I now have done you find what kind of works and yeah I don't mind doing them anymore so you can see there that one's got a bit static on it she doesn't want to stay where she should that one's a little bit stuck there I think that's enough okay so I've got them all laid out where I need to then what you want to do is try not nothing like this is what I mean don't knock it now or anything like that just carefully I'm really kind of pushing it down with my left hand there so that I can pick this all off without really moving it so I'm just going to carefully see even like that that could have been disastrous you just try not to move it too much because I've got a few stops and starts there with my tape I just need to do it a few times right so that's that one all removed and then I just need to take the backing off very carefully in the center here it's why it's good to use a pokey tool as well because you can kind of extend it right over and do make sure you've taken all the backing off because believe it or not I've done it before as well where like there you could hardly see that that's still a backing on and if you go to stick it all down and realize then that bit's not stuck and you've put beads in or something they all fall out so again now at this point make sure nothing has gone jumped up onto the top of the foam because again that would stop it sticking to what you're putting on top so now you want to get your base now because I'm working with a circle and I've got no wording or anything on it I can just stick this on top now and it doesn't matter all I need to focus on is that it's completely married up just pop my head right over the top just to make sure that I am bang on and now I'm just going to push that down like so I've got some hot glue on the back of that which is a bit annoying but no my and then just make sure everything is stuck down when we turn it over there we go look at that and they just look great I've got a random don't you hate that see as I've got a random you see that little this has happened before it was on the unicorn shaker card I made and there was a little like rogue different coloured sequin there's a little dot there from a bright pink that's made its way in but yeah it should it should kind of disappear or stick to the side eventually but look at that now and then if I open up my card it stands up perfectly so now you just want to decorate so you can see what I've done here I'm going to stick that inside in a moment so I've got the the topper pack here so I've already used a couple and I'm going to use this yellow because it is perfect and matches so this is when you want to make sure your card is at the right way so that line that we kind of cut here if you line that up with your grid underneath you know now that your card's in the upright position and then I can stick that about centre yeah like so I mean already just by adding that it just looks really pretty there's so much of this collection I'm going to have to already buy extras off because I've only got two of them left and these are really lovely toppers the paper flowers are nearly gone my butterflies are nearly gone there's so much yeah nearly finished with so now I'm going to decorate it and speed up the video and yeah just enjoy it so there you go guys how gorgeous is that and you can make it any size you want so I appreciate people that don't want to make really large you know circle cards you can obviously drop these down and it will be the same process if you're using squares rectangles ovals it's the same concept to what I've done you just always need to make sure that you've left this little bit here attached so that you can obviously keep it as a top folding card but they both stand up perfectly and I think they look absolutely gorgeous love all the different elements to it I love that there's two different kind of shaking parts to it but you don't have to add that piece you could just stick the frame on and still have this all kind of set in the centre but you could just have if you've got these fairies or just sequins all over it would still look lovely but yeah hopefully you've picked up lots of little tips along the way and if you're new to my channel and you've never made a shaker card then do look at the playlist because I've got more basic styles there so maybe used to start off with and then kind of you know build up that way but yeah that's it so I hope you've enjoyed it do share anything you make over on the mixed up crafters Facebook page many of you do and it is really appreciated because we are all enjoying seeing them so until next time if you've enjoyed today please give me a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel so you get to see more thanks for watching bye