folks that need to get into this room. So welcome to everybody. You've probably gotten a little message on there. We're recording this and we are also sharing it on YouTube and HowlRound and we are also captioning it. So hopefully that will work for everybody. I wanted to say a welcome to you all to this. We've got a great group of folks that wanna share some of the things that they've been doing. I guess it's special also Mahalo Nui Loa to the folks in Honolulu for traveling the longest distance here from us. So it is way early in the morning. They're gonna go a little later in the show order or the speaking order just so they can let the caffeine kick in. So there's a lot of conversations going on right now, right about what theater is or isn't and does it really have to be this binary of one thing or the other? On one hand with all of the digital work, it's great that folks are able to give access to large number of people, not only in this country but internationally. It's great that theaters and other institutions have been opening up their archives so we could see work that we wouldn't normally be able to. I think with the digital form it's still, we still are able to feel emotion and we are able to feel empathy but just in a different kind of way. So wanted to have us explore that, the flow of what will happen in this session today, if you're not familiar with the Pecha Kucha, that we've lined up seven different groups to talk about their projects. They'll have approximately six minutes to be talking, we will be timing. And so after they go through, if you've got questions for any of them, please put it in the chat box. And one of our staff, one of our team here will be scanning the chat box and also the YouTube chat for questions there. Then after folks have talked about their projects, we'll do a little Q and A. Then we're going to a break for about five minutes. And then I'd love to invite you to join us into breakout rooms and there's a lot of us so we'll have a lot of breakout rooms. Ideally we'll have about seven folks in each of the rooms and we'll try to distribute our speakers around those different rooms. And whatever you would like to talk about certainly, but the biggest thing in my head is, why does theater have to be a binary definition? What is theater? What isn't it? What can it be? Particularly as we move forward. Then we'll come back from the breakouts. We'll do a little popcorn sharing as much as we can. We'll use the raise hand function for that and we'll talk you through that. And then if for whatever reason we don't go the full hour or two hours, then I don't think anybody would object to having some of your time back, right? So if we're all good to go, my friends, I'm turning it over to our first up, our folks from LaMama. Hi, thank you. My name is Billy Clark and I'm the Artistic Director of Culture Hub, the Art and Technology Center based at LaMama. And I'm also here with Mia Yu and Nikki Parizzo and Chris Ignacio somewhere out there. And so they might jump in. I encourage them to jump in at any moment if they have something to add. We have two videos that we would like to share with you in advance, that'll be about three minutes and then I'll speak after them, but just to give a brief introduction to what those are showing. One is just a general overview of a quick trailer of what we've been doing over the past 10 years of with Culture Hub in collaboration with LaMama and the Soul Institute of the Arts, our other co-founder. And the second video is just excerpts from a project that we've started only since Social Distancing has been put in place, which is called Downtown Variety. And I'll talk more about that after the videos. So thanks, Josh, if you could play those, that would be great. Be gone, I have nothing you want. You have nothing I need. Just go. So flat, man, that's a joy of friends. Nothing's like three more than those. Lates are meant too bad. There's no one else in your house. Are you alone? You've got someone there. As we wait for the day when things can return to normal to the way things were, I don't want to go back to that normal. Even more than herd immunity, I am looking for immunity from this herd. Did you hear it, hummingbird? I want to fly from flower to flower and freeze to admire her beauty. Thank you. So let me see, I think I have a minute or so left. I just want to talk a little bit about what culture hub is. And it relates very much to the topic of today. 10 years ago, we formed culture hub in collaboration with Lamama and the Solar Institute of the Arts to really explore how we could use the internet and video conferencing technology in particular to make a connection between these two long-standing collaborators that had been working together for over 30 years. And so from the very, very beginning, we were investigating what it meant to use live video and audio feeds and video conferencing hardware and software in the context of live performance and in conjunction with the performing arts. And we ran into a lot of issues along the way, many things that were roadblocks to that work. We were always interested in this idea of really layering these technologies on real physical spaces so that we could not only connect as individuals, but we could also convene audiences and larger groups of people and bring those communities together and cross-pollinate those communities. So we were looking how these technologies could be used in a variety of different formats, including education and distance learning, but also right from the beginning, very forward-thinking in terms of what were the implications in terms of developing collaborative, creative projects in this space. We rapidly discovered that we had so many connections in the performing arts world that we didn't have that many in the media arts and technology space. And so we worked very hard in the first five years of Culture Hub to sort of expand that network and to create those relationships. And about five years ago, one of the initiatives that we took on was in frustration with the tools that were available to us was to start developing our own software tool for the kind of work and for creative artists and producers that were trying to make work in this space. And some of the challenges that we were facing were cost, difficulty of implementation. And so finally, we're at a point where we're going to be releasing LiveLab, which is the software that we've developed over the past five years. It's ready and it's available for people to use. And it's what we've been using to produce downtown variety, which is over the past in response to the social distancing with COVID-19. We in collaboration with the whole Lamama team decided that we wanted to create a variety show, a weekly variety show that would be online that is used LiveLab as an infrastructure to produce that and stream it out in collaboration with HowlRound. So I'd love to share more about that. If you're interested in that, I'm happy to talk about it in a breakout or you can also reach us at culturehub.org. And there's also a mailing list for that on culturehub.org backslash LiveLab. If you want to sign up for the mailing list there to get more information. And I think I must be at my time, right?  There's some grace time in there. Thank you. It's all good. I actually wanted to give that space because Lamama has really been the pioneer in so much of this work. And so many people have been inspired and been riffing off of the work that you've been doing. So thank you all. We're gonna move, yeah. We're gonna move over to our friends at the movement theater company. Folks, in Josh, I'll cue you in to start the slides. My name is Deidre Harrington. I'm one of the producing artistic leaders at the movement theater company. And I'm joined with David Mendesable, one of my fellow producing artistic leaders, as well as costume and scenic designer, Clint Ramos, who is one of our curators on one move. So I'll start by just giving you a little bit of information about the movement. We're a Harlem based theater company that's dedicated to developing and producing new work by artists of color. Really giving artists of color an opportunity to explore aesthetic and form and really dream big and have that opportunity to experiment that so many artists of color so seldom get to do. We've been doing a couple of things since COVID started. One thing that we've done, especially in light of the recent murders of Black folks, we've reached out to Alicia Harris and Whitney White. Alicia, who was the writer and Whitney, the director of What to Send Up When It Goes Down, which we produced back in 2018, and reached out to them to partner with them to create what we're calling resilience, which is there's gonna be a video that's released that is a meditation on what Black folks are, how we're moving through this moment. And then we've also launched an Instagram called Love Letters for Black People, which is where we are posting all of the love letters that we've received and that we've gathered through the many productions and presentations of the show, just as a way to provide some positivity to start populating on our feeds and some strength and encouragement as we're going through this time. And One Move is a program that we started back in 2016, in response to that election. And knowing that theater takes so long for us to develop and produce and raise the funds and we wanted to create a platform, a digital platform, for our artists to respond to things that are happening in the now. And so that's what One Move is about. And then I'm gonna pass it on to Davide, who's gonna talk specifically about One Move designed by, and Josh, if you'll go ahead and start those slides, that'd be great. Thanks, Deidre. So One Move designed by, we were fortunate to be a grantee of Art Equity, the Arts and Artists and Activists Fund. And so with that money, we really were examining who are folks in our field that are not receiving support right now, especially as the theater, as we've known it, has gone away. And so we are very close friends with Clint Ramos and Chasi, and we were noticing a lot of advocacy for designers. And one of the things that we're really excited by is the visual world of theater and how designers help us shape that visual world. So we reached out to them to help us curate a commission series called One Move designed by, which is a designer-driven initiative where the designer acts with the absolute freedom as the lead artist to create digital content. And that is in the form of two to five minute videos. And the virtual gallery, which will be on our website, is gonna be launched on Monday. And the hope of this is to continue to showcase the work of these emerging designers who help us bring the worlds that we see on our stages to life in a digital space. And Clint can talk a little bit more about our curation process. Yeah. Hi. So thank you, David. So what we asked each designer was to actually create work around the idea of the pandemic, right? So the work really varied from sort of like what could be perceived as a meditation on the site, guys, or various implications that it could be. We've sort of encouraged them to be their own kind of auteurs, you know, something a designer, usually a designer in the theater is not allowed to do. So, you know, we asked them to create work that was thematically direct or tangential to the present thing. It could be political or apolitical. It could be a psychological exploration of mortality or an expression of a future joy, a form of immigration protest or conceptual peace based on a personal fear. So a lot of these, as you can see, a lot of these designers really dug deep, you know? And so I think part of this exercise was to sort of deconstruct what a theater designer's and what a theater designer's process is and sort of really look at what those parameters are. And, you know, I think what we're trying to do here is recreate that sense of community, create a tangible creation that by its DNA, you know, just by the virtue of who's creating it is inherently a product of theatrical thinking. So as you can look at all of the designer's work, which is like really varied, it produces work that I think, you know, is extraordinary, but it's also unique to a theater designer. And I just wanna say lastly, a lot of this, and I have to say thank you to the Movement Theater Company was a response to the dearth of resources that designers actually have in the American theater. The designers rarely get grants, you know? Designers are not covered with a lot of the fellowships, you know? So designers alone actually sort of suffer from a dearth of resources, but specifically, you know, immigrant designers right now are under siege because by not being able to work, their statuses in America is actually threatened, you know? They cannot apply for any federal or state resources because that would make them awards of the state, which is illegal, but they also have to maintain a body of work. They need to be constantly working because if they have a lapse of three months where they're not working, that is a ground for deportability. So I encourage all of you to sort of reach out to all of these emerging young designers of color and immigrant designers and see what kind of work you can commission them to do. Great, thank you so much, folks. So I think Josh is going to transition and we're gonna transition. We're going to go to Juggernaut, Juggernaut and pop-up theatrics. Hi, everybody. My name's Tamala Woodard. I am one of the founders of pop-up on theatrics and I'm here today with my co-founder, Ana Majananu and with the Juggernaut family, Natasha and Tanya Brava, who have been our partners in this last venture called Long Distance Affair. And we want to just talk to you about a particular enterprise that we completed only last week. First of all, just to say a little bit about the company. Okay, a little bit about the company pop-up. We were started in 2011 and the company's values are about creating collaborative experiences for artists without thinking about borders. Those are national borders, racial borders, cultural borders. All of the things that separate us in terms of our audiology or our experience and to think about how to bring people together and to dynamic and challenging art-making experiences. Participation for our audience, creating means of participation that unritualize the theater, that make an audience understand the value of their presence there in fact that it cannot happen without them. We have a lot of one-on-one experiences so that the idea that if you're not here, it's not happening is really, really profoundly true in all of our work. And then the last thing is immersion and how do we create an experience for an audience that is 360 degrees that wraps around the audience themselves and that creates a different level of proximity for them to the work. All of this is all an effort to help create a new audience for the theater that understands that they're needed in order for the theater to survive. So LDA, Long Distance Affair, was a concept actually like that came out of my partner, Anamajan Anu's mind and she'll tell you more particularly about it. But we started this in 2013 and the concept was to bring together international artists in a collaboration that happened 100% online. The platform we used then was Skype. Remember Skype, y'all? And the three, the teams, the director, the playwrights and the actors where we put people together that we gathered from literally six continents asked them to interrogate each other's lives, to look at the performer's space, to think of that space as site-specific and to create and write particularly for that space, for the time, for the location and for the actor. And to create an affair that an audience would then join them also by using this platform, then called Skype and now called Zoom, and meet a character on the other side of the world that they would have no other access to otherwise because they'd have to like get on the plane. So when this whole thing happened, of course, we got a lot of emails from people around the world who had been artists. We collaborated with more than 100 artists at this point, literally on six continents that said we should bring this forward to now. And so we created the sixth iteration of Long Distance Affair and modified it a small amount. One, we put it on Zoom. The other, the audience used to have to come to a place and sit at terminals in little boxes and little designed rooms and have their affair. And now we open that to them to actually do in their houses, on their couches, at their kitchen tables, at their desks. And have a direct conversation that's one-on-one with the character in Madrid or Singapore or Philadelphia or Bucharest or Miami or to have a conversation with a character and four other humans who have logged on to that encounter. Juggernaut will say a little bit about all of the feedback we've gotten from audiences. We wanted to create a space where people could encounter their loneliness and they could encounter other people who were also in isolation and that we could tell each other's stories, not hopefully would be healing and would be the kinds of stories that folks felt like they needed to hear right now which was about resiliency and overcoming. So that's a little about LDA in general and Anna will say a little more about this particular one. But first we will watch a little video, right? Sure. Yeah. A real goal is here. Like the belly of a pregnant woman. Here, here in Madrid, I'm cold. I should tell you all the bad stuff about myself first. If you can dream it, you can be it. I mean, there are 36 windows out here. I can only wash her. Oh, that is great. Oh my God. Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. Hello, everyone. My name is Anna Virginano and I'm another part of pop-up. So to me, one of the things that makes LDA really special is the audience interactions, the audience participation. And it's one of the reasons that we kept our performance for such a small audience is some of the shows that I meant for one person at a time while others are for a maximum audience of five. So everyone is greeted by name as they arrive at the station. People are encouraged to unmute their microphones. People are encouraged to turn their cameras on. People are constantly reminded that in a friendly way that they are actually there and that they are very important to us, that they are co-creating this performance. They are really part of it. So basically the actors would see the reaction and something would change in their attitude or they would say something about the ways the audience is holding their hand. They would be able to move to participate to the story as much as they wish. They can basically be quiet and that's also super okay, but they can be as much involved as they want to. And I feel that we kept saying our actors and our playwrights, let's not compete with Netflix. And I feel this is our way of doing it. And I think that's one of the things and I feel this is our way of not competing with Netflix. Basically letting people know within the performance and the performance is not necessarily realistic. We had angels, we have all sorts of camera movements. So it's not like this type of very realistic zoom call, but in the same time, the audience knows that they are seen and that their presence and participation matters. I'm gonna jump in, Hannah, because we have time for you all. So hopefully you'll be able to pick up more of that in the breakouts and there'll be a little bit of time after, but I wanted to be able to change if just, okay? Just in the PechaCruccia. So next up is Theater Moo. Thanks, Amelia. Hi, everybody. Thanks for having us. I'm Lily Tung-Crystal, the artistic director at Theater Moo. And we're the second largest Asian-American theater company in the country, located in the Twin Cities. And we've been around for 27 years. Since the murder of George Floyd, we are for the moment no longer doing online programming because our staff is now activated in our neighborhoods, taking care of our BIPOC communities. But before last week, starting March 16th, we implemented three virtual shows a week, both artistic programming, as well as theater-related programming. And it's really changed the impact of, it's really changed the impact we're making. As you all know, theater is a local construct and with the global virtual world, we've been able to build Asian-American community and theater community across the world. Josh, could you pull up my first photo? So this first photo is of Moo Mondays, which is one of the events we have. It's a space where Asian-American artists gather to read plays by Asian-American playwrights. And we've had everywhere from 20 people on the Zoom to 60 people, and it's become a safe healing space where Asian-American artists can connect and work on their craft and learn more about Asian-American plays and discuss those plays in a safe space. And then our next photo, what we do on Saturday mornings at 10 a.m. is a show called Family Explorations, where we hire an artist to teach families a theater-related activity. And that gives us the chance to employ our artists and actually all the artists that appear on our shows are paid. With the exception of Moo Mondays, because that's an inward-facing event. And then our next photo is from Moutini Hour, which has become our flagship show. It happens every Friday night at seven o'clock, and it happens on Zoom and then streamed to Facebook Live. It started with a company Hangout with Interstate, which is a show written by Melissa Lee and Kit Yen that I was in at Mixed Blood and we closed early. And so we got everybody together as a virtual online Hangout that was live. And we got such great feedback and there were so much support for it that we decided to continue Moutini Hour every Friday as a space for fun, but also for a forum to talk about important issues. And our next photo is our Moutini Hour from Racism. We had the Racism as a Virus leaders there, Diane Phelan and Ariel Estrada with actor Brian Kim. And we've had people on like Lauren Yee, David Henry-Huang, Lee and Anaka Winkler. And as you can see here on the right side, even if for the people in our communities that aren't on the Zoom, the chat has provided this immense opportunity for them to be in community with each other. And so that has been a great boon for our community and people have been donating because of this work and also in community with each other, which has been a real gift. And that culminated to the next photo is of our Moutini Hour with Doris Takei, Lea Solonga and Jay Quo, which reached, we had 110,000 views. And I joke that more people saw, more views happened that one night than people would see our shows in five years. It was, so that was a big sign to us of the global impact we're making. We had people come in from Philippines, China, Australia, all over the US because of George's immense social media reach. And again, it opened the doors to donations, to sponsorship of the program. And what I like to do at every Moutini Hour, even though it's not artistic programming, it's theater related, I do feel like the programming needs to be as interesting or entertaining as theater. And so I try to implement fun activities in the Moutini Hour like games or the Proust questionnaire. And in this instance, we made a cake for George's birthday and presented him with the transponder cake that night. And then another thing we did, which is the video, and you can pause it for now, Josh, and then we can play it. We implemented, or we organized, Amelia Kachapera came on with a Phil Congo Tanda and Snehal Desai to talk about the origins of Asian-American theater. And we organized a surprise reunion for Philip and Amelia with the OGs from that era, from the 70s and 80s. And I told Amelia that we had a surprise for her and this is what happened next. Hold on. Maybe I need a drink refill for this.  You're welcome. I'm gonna be right back. Okay. Wait, Lily, can we come here? Whoa, whoa, whoa, oh my God, this is great. It's okay. Sorry. I didn't watch it. Oh my God. Thank you so much. I don't know what's going on. Oh my God.  Wait, so, okay, I wanna introduce to our audience who's in the room. Oh my God. So these are all people who have worked together before. And who are they? Okay, so that was in the middle of Asian-American Pacific Heritage Month. That was a really big, fun thing for us to do and there was a lot of love in the room. And at near the end of Asian-American Heritage Month, we felt like we wanted to do more artistic programming. And so the next photo, Josh, is a variety show that we organized with dance, music, spoken word and comedy artists in the Twin Cities primarily. And you can just scroll through the next two photos, Josh. And we introduced our Mellon Foundation playwright and residence, I moved to Vongseh, she co-hosted. And there were, these are some photos from the variety show. So this was our first artistic programming since we couldn't gather anymore. And then the final photo is this last week, we were scheduled to do a play fest gathering 30 Asian-American theater artists. And you can see who they are there. 30 Asian-American theater artists to come together to create six 10-minute plays for the virtual environment. And it was supposed to happen Friday and Saturday and because of the trauma and pain going on here in the Twin Cities, we chose to cancel that event. And our mission is to amplify her voices and part of that mission is to know when to step aside to let others speak. And now, like I said, our staff is activated on the ground here, taking care of our communities. Moon Mondays has shifted into a caretaking and nurturing space for our artists to gather. And because of our increased retrieving experience over the last two and a half months, we are talking about restarting Moutini Hour to become a place for more conversations focused on social activism at this time. And eventually, when we do gather again in the theater, we're hoping that we still continue some of this online programming. Like Amelia said, it doesn't have to be binary. We'd like to still continue Moon Mondays to gather our artists from around the country to read plays. And we also would like to continue Moutini Hour just not, probably not on a weekly basis. And so that is, but it's really taught us that we can use this space to support and employ our artists and also to increase our impact globally and build Asian-American community globally. Great, thanks so much, Lily. And for everybody watching, that was not a paid announcement. It was public embarrassment, but okay. Really, you were so great. I'm not sure. Thanks, Lily. We're gonna shift actually over to Lisa Portes, please. Hi, everybody. How are you? I just feel like a little shrimp among giants here. I had the MFA, my name's Lisa Portes, she or hers. I had the MFA directing program at the theater school at DePaul University in Chicago. And I'm here really representing my graduate directors. On Thursday, March 12th, we were told that all of our productions, our spring productions were canceled, canceled. And by the next morning, each of my directors had a new path forward based on a challenge that we kind of threw down, which was what is the dream of this production? Why was this production something that you wanted to create? And how can you and your team create this under that in another platform? And literally Friday morning, we had six new ideas. So I'm gonna share my screen and please forgive me. I get very nervous with technology and I hope nothing weird shows up. So let's see, I'm gonna share my screen and I'm gonna take you through some things. So share, this makes me so panicky. Okay, so let me full screen this. The first thing that was created was down in Mississippi. The play had been, was gonna be a studio, which means a kind of small classroom production directed by MFA one director, Emil Thomas, who turned down in Mississippi by Carlisle Brown with permission from Carlisle Brown into a live Zoom reading. And so when you entered, you saw this screen, you heard, I hope you can hear this music. It was a live radio play featuring historic visuals. The program was upfront. You can see the actors. Okay, I'm gonna move past that because I'll be up for a little bit. There's Emil, the seven gentlemen with a New York attitude. The next screen would probably be our dramaturgy slide, providing context about the summer of freedom. And then you'll see, I'm not gonna play you the play, but I am gonna take you to what he meant by, what Emil was working to create historic, historic. Yeah. Okay, so the actors are acting, the actors are acting just using their audio. And then a series of images, Emil and his team put together a series of images from the period that in some way reflected or created a conversation and relationship to the scene. So that was down in Mississippi, turned into a live Zoom reading with historic visuals. The next thing that came up was boxed in by director Stephanie and Elbolt MFA too. She was working with a playwright on a play that was meant to go into rehearsal and go into production. It was a brand new play, would have been a world premiere. And when we couldn't do production, they turned it into an online experience. This is a piece based on the parents of Ted Bundy and really looking at kind of the mother of monsters, mythology, and at each piece, it's put together kind of as a curated.  It's organized by year. I don't know if I can click out of this. I think I can click out of this. So this is 1946 to 1957. And you can get, you just keep diving deeper. This was Ted Bundy's closet, deeper and deeper. What was really exciting about this is it really does, it takes a theater experience and then moves it into an online platform that really functions like an online platform. What do we do online? We click around and we find things out and we kind of dive down rabbit holes. The third project I'd like to bring to you is Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Originally, this was supposed to be a production. It was a MFA3 director, Ben Raanan's thesis project. You can't imagine the heartbreak of a student finding out their thesis project that they've built their entire three years towards is canceled, particularly this project for Ben, who is an advocate for the disability community and the differently-abled community. And what he and his ensemble did, which was really beautiful, was in answer to the question, how can you make what you were gonna make in a different way? They said, well, we don't wanna do the play and also we can't do the play for rights reasons. Instead, they created an online resource for people with autism, an arts resource for people with autism or really anybody who needs calm in this moment. And you'll see that under each of these, there are meditations. There are, this is based on Bob Roth. You can watch somebody color. You can watch somebody play guitar. The Hunter Heartbeats series by, oh, Ben, don't get mad at me, Kelly Hunter. And this really is, you can click around this and as well as honoring the original production.  Series, yes, okay, great. And I was working with a playwright, Maddie Doppelt. And her play, The Model Play, which was turned into an, which we turned into an online website and podcast, which is housed here. I'm just gonna take you through just a little bit of it. Oh, just, just a thing. Come on, fly, fly. Just be careful. The models, this follows five, 16-year-old models in the year 1987 to 1988 as they travel the world. You would listen to the podcast here. You can see what they're wearing here. There is a complete with a, oh, where is it? Oh, yes, complete with a Buzzfeed quiz. Find out what model you are. And then finally, one of the directors doing lemons, lemons, lemons, lemons, lemons, created an Instagram play where they received the rights from the director, I mean, from the playwright, excuse me, to turn it into an Instagram project. I can't find my other beautiful Instagram picture because I'm not as organized as Josh, but mainly what I wanted to point out, and I'm gonna go out of the share screen, is that it was a tremendous time of innovation and will continue to be a tremendous time of innovation. As we ask ourselves, what were we trying to make and how can we use the tools available to us to reinvent what theater is at that time in the time of the COVID and at this time and this time of actual revolution? What is theater? Who is it for? What is the cry of the project that you're trying to create and how do you create it using the resources available to you? Thank you, Lisa. Those are exactly the questions that should be forefront in our minds. And I am so inspired by the work of these students. Amazing. We're gonna see more student work because we're gonna shift to Peter Quo. Hi, oh, are you all seeing something? No, yes, no? Okay, great. So hi, I have a lot on a share so I'm gonna talk really quickly. So I directed the MFA production of In Loving Warcraft for ACT where I'm the Associate Conservatory Director where I do administrative work, direct and teach. But before I talk about my theater life, I've worked in the theater for about 22 years but for a stint of period I was working on online digital medium. So I don't know if that can happen. Yes, so for four years I was making YouTube video sketch comedies in which I was talking to myself. You can see a sample of me singing Happy Birthday to myself. At the peak I had about 5,000 subscribers and which this was an audience that I cultivated and developed and worked with really closely. Basically because of that audience when I would upload a video within 24 hours I would get about 1.5 thousand views on those videos. So as much as I really love the community and audience that I had built through YouTube the key community that was built was fellow YouTubers. So other content creators, these were people who would create content. We'd share it, we'd watch it, we'd give each other feedback and critique. This is to me just about the fact that we created online digital community. We worked really close friends. We hung out late into the night and by hanging out some of it was playing games, some of it was chatting and some of it was literally just being sharing digital space. While we were doing laundry, cooking, not even talking to each other but just sharing space. So these were my inter-friends. We hung out a lot and we spanned across the United States and to also the United Kingdom and also had people coming in and out of our friend group throughout the entire globe. Eventually this URL relationship turned into IRL relationships when we had VidCon which was YouTube's video conference we would all get together and that's when we would meet and it was such a delightful way to get to know each other but we also still stayed in contact both online and past. So several of these friends I still hang out with, we meet together once a year either in London or they come here or we'll go to Vegas. There's a picture of us all wearing our outfits as we had into a RAV4 heading to Vegas one day. Axel is a friend who I met through YouTube who is a writer at Victory Gardens. He was also, I think, I believe at Northwestern and featured recently in TCG's spotlight, People to Watch. We met 10 years ago on YouTube. And so one of the interesting things I say is just intimate close deep relationships can be formed online through screens and I just want people to know that and it can occur between artists and it can occur between audiences. So how does it translate to live video theater? This MFA production I directed was for In Loving Warcraft by Modri Shaker. So I just want to show a clip. What?  What? Go to her dorm room now. Tell her the things I wrote for you word for word. I don't remember. Blue tooth it. Blue tooth now. Battle, resin, mold, rock. Boss going into phase two in three, two, chai.  You know what?  Chai, I know you're hurting, but we don't have to step to the pool, okay? Baby, please just hear me out. Hi. So as you can see, these were four different students. Those are students of six and four of them or all six of them were in independent homes. None of them were together. So they shared space by acting like they were together. This shows specifically let, had the actors and characters being aware of the camera moments because they were playing on online video game. But we also had scenes in which they weren't talking to each other on camera. These two actors are in completely two different spaces, but they're looking at each other and they're talking to each other. Cause we staged eye line. That was part of the block on that we did. We had set design in which both actors had a piece of prop that was on their wall. And we just lined it up so that they were looking to each other. So this was them in the cafe scene. This is three actors having a three hand scene in which they were all talking to each other. They would move. Sometimes they'd be in frame. Sometimes they'd leave frame, but they, because of the staging that we did and the actors are entirely memorized, they would follow the other actors in the space using their eye line. They told us how the rest of the other people in the space were sharing. None of these floor plans actually maxed up, but this is how they shared space together. Eventually in this play that was written 10 years ago, it goes into the world of Warcraft. Now normally this is done in person and actors are wearing costumes and things like that. We actually decided to film this show, film scenes from the video game and then have the actors voice over it live. So they voiced over it and then they brought their video on and they were interacting and responding to what they were seeing in the video game footage. This is specific to this show, but I think many shows can translate online without having to have this video game online component. I directed a reading just a couple of weeks ago for a playground called Abominable. There was no talk of tech in that play, but this was the reading we had eight hours of rehearsal and it was a 90 minute play, but we use virtual backgrounds to create shared space again between actors. So we staged the actual screen lineup so the actors were next to each other and it seemed like they had a very shared space because the virtual background lined up with each other. The actors would then talk to each other, literally talking to empty space, but they would be sharing space. Couple of things I just wanna talk, what are the advantages and disadvantages of this? So when it comes to tech, generation X and millennials, they've got it in their hands, they're using it, they're consuming it. This is an audience that theater wants and needs to get. When it comes though to racial demographics, whites and Asians have more access to tech and technology and tech literacy than black and Hispanics and Latinx folks. I wanna make sure that we are aware of this because that's something that we have to work on with talking to tech industries about how we get that tech and that literacy into those people's hands. That being said, that difference of access to tech is pales in comparison to the access or the welcomingness of our space right now. This is Broadway 2006, as you can see the demographic of white population to actually attendees in the audience, 2016, sorry, is vastly large. So while we eventually still have to work on getting tech into the hands of those other demographics, there is a large audience there that has not experienced theater and has not felt welcome in the theater that we can now create through live video theater. Just a couple of quick technique tips that I wanna talk to about. Basically theater, in my opinion, uses reality and limitation to activate audience's imagination. Whereas the difference is film, commercial film takes our imagination, breaks limitations and memories into reality. When we're watching the film, we're not activating our imagination as much as we are when we're watching theater. Theater, this hybrid form allows that activated imagination to go because it's all happening live. Here's some really quick things. When you're thinking about live theater work, actor blocking, camera blocking, stage blocking, all those things can move, the camera can move, the screens can move and the actors can move. When you're talking about that kind of blocking, stage direction shift where the cameras shift. Stage down follows the camera because the audience is shifting, but zoom directions like zoom up, down, right and left follow the parallel field of the camera. Use post-it notes and spike tapes. That has how we got the actors to place and mark down where their devices, camera devices should be, where they walk in and out of frame or they could put a post-it note on the wall and know that's the character that they're talking to at this moment and that that eye line is consistent. Also start learning basic film, language and knowledge. Camera blocking, what is a pan, tilt, dolly, crane, learn the 180 degree rule. Camera on one side, actors on the other. This is just a start of the information that they have and gathered. This is some of my information. Perseverance Theater has hired me to teach a live video theater workshop which will be happening June 15th to 19th. A couple of other theaters company have asked me to consult with them, which I'm doing. Also Howron article will be coming out, talking about this and ACT is committed to doing an encore performance on an in-loving work graph that's to be determined. So there's so much more I'd love to share but I think I'm at time, but thank you so much. Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Peter, for being such a resource and actually being generous in how you're working. So the information is shared because there are a lot of people along the continuum who are just starting to get into this work. So really practical things too. Thank you. So we're gonna go the long distance and visit our friends at Honolulu Theater for youth. So Eric and Moses and Raco, I think you're up, right? Yeah, thank you so much. Great, Josh, if you wanna just go ahead and start with the slides and then we'll just jump in as we go. All right, here we go. Aloha mai kakou and mahoa hana kuyaka. Good morning, good afternoon. Good healing to all of you who are listening and thank you for having us. Aloha, Moses. We are a diverse, multi-ethnic, multicultural ensemble of artists and educators that has been serving Hawai'i's families for 65 years. Yeah, so in response to the COVID-19, we were lucky enough to partner with two different organizations. One is a local media company called NMG Network. And then our television station, our largest television conglomerate, which is the CBS NBC affiliate, Hawaii News Now. And we quickly created our own digital production company out of those three entities and we built the highway, which next slide, please. And what is the highway? The highway is a 30-minute television show that was shot on our phones in our houses that was created to bring the magic of H2I stage productions right into the living rooms of our families that were stuck at home. And the idea really was generated from our board of directors. We had a meeting when all this was going down and the board challenged us to find new ways to serve our mission and our community. And we decided somewhat irresponsibly at first, but to keep our entire ensemble on payroll. And we sort of gambled the farm and rolled everyone over into producing TV very, very quickly. So next slide, please. Okay, another show remaining true to its name, the highway. And for all eight episodes, we kept the focus on the people and the stories of Hawaii, as you can see exemplified in this picture, this beautiful Hawaiian woman. That's me, if you can't tell. Life in Hawaii is very unlike living anywhere else in the world and the experience that we have here in Hawaii, Hawaii are very, very unique. Next slide. So we knew that we needed to tell the COVID story from a child's perspective and about what the families in Hawaii and around the globe were experiencing together in an unprecedented way. So episodes included everything from social distancing and fear to new ways families were finding to celebrate special days like birthdays. Next slide, please. Great. So one of the things that I've really been thinking about in this moment is that what are the new stories that we need to teach this next generation? And I think that so often, and I'm so guilty of this, a lone hero battling against evil in the world is such a dramatic idea that we go to. But I think when we're facing something like climate change or the COVID crisis is such a direct example, I think that the stories that might be most useful might not be epic battles of good versus evil, but rather many people making small changes and finding balance and seeing hope in a community effort. And so that's what we tried to focus on. Next slide, please. Now again, we had eight episodes and in each episode we had, we had did a minimum of seven segments or stories. So if you're doing the math, that's about 60 stories that we were able to include. And in those, we made sure we had, it was an opportunity to tell some very diverse range of stories and include some really diverse characters, especially for an audience of young TYA audience. And so we were able to challenge them with all these stories that we included. Next slide. Okay, so the results are that we're a company that we travel to five different islands every single year by plane. And we're really dedicated to reaching our whole population here across the Hawaiian islands. We are really proud to reach 120,000 people a year with our theater work. So you can imagine how shocked we were when we found that in our first three weeks on television, we reached 176,000 viewers. And that was just for the first three episodes. So we're gonna blow our entire audience size out of the water in a time where we can't actually do theater. And I think that the skills we're learning to work across different mediums and explore different possibilities are just beginning. We're talking about other ways of using digital content and using, I think our piece of this story is using an ensemble of theater artists and designers in a new entirely different way that they can switch back and forth. So our fundraiser is gonna be broadcast on primetime television this year. And funders will get content and commercials on that TV platform. And I think that there are three key elements that allowed us to pull off this transformation and we'll go through those really quickly. Next slide. The first is the efforts of the company. Now, HTY has always had a really strong ensemble that's sort of a standard at HTY. And so many of us have actually been working together for years. And so that means we know how we work each other works. And so when we were challenged with creating content and new work from our own homes, we already had a system of working together that did translate to having to communicate through emails and texts and whatnot. And so we're able to create some difficult things in our remote situations. Next slide. We're also dedicated to producing new work. So about 90 to 95% of our work is original. About half of that is devised. And I think by supporting this full-time ensemble of artists that had already done so much devised theater and devised work, devising television or other medium is completely a responsible ask to make of them. Next slide. And third is that we're so very, very lucky to have invested in long-standing relationships with community partners like the Department of Health and many others that span governmental and public and private sectors too. Next slide. Hey, we have a picture here of Keoki, one of our main puppet characters looking at the moon wondering what's gonna happen next. So if next for us is we're gonna continue to use this new way of working in whatever we do and however we move forward in the future, we know this is gonna be a part of it. And we've already committed to and have started on nine more episodes that are gonna start playing sometime in the fall. Next slide. And we would love to share the highway with all of you. So if you and your families wanna jump on the highway, you can go to www.htyweb.org or to get in touch with us because we would like to be a resource for all of you. Mahalo for your time. It's been such an honor to speak with you today. Great, thank you so much. My brain is just full of all of this amazing work. You all just thank you for sharing that. And I know that there are a lot of you all conceivable with questions. I've been looking at the chat. I know that we've got some questions on YouTube. So we'll just spend a couple minutes maybe taking some questions. And I know my friends on the TCG team are scanning through looking for some questions to pull out. And so if you've got a question, enter it into the chat. That would be the easiest way for us right now. Later on after we do the breakouts, we'll be able to do some race hands functions and hear y'all verbally. But maybe if you have a question now enter it into the chat. I know one of the things folks wanted to know about was the PowerPoints and the websites that you all shared just massive amount of information. So what I'll do after this is check in with all of the groups that have presented and make sure that we can get some resource documents together and check with them to make sure that what they wanna share is something that we're honoring. And we will put that on mighty networks. It may not happen until later today or tonight but that is our promise to you. So I think my friend Erin from TCG is scanning some of the questions for chat or there's anyone else on the TCG team that has got some questions that you can pull out for our friends. I think we're good on YouTube. Are there some questions on the chat that any of the TCG team wants to pull out? Because otherwise you'll be able to be in breakout sessions too and I think there'll be some of this that'll come out in conversation. I do have one question. This is my goal from TCG. So other than Zoom, Skype, et cetera what software are you using to put your materials together? And I think that's probably for anyone that presented you can unmute yourselves presenters. Sorry to repeat the question. I didn't catch part of it. What other materials? Other than Zoom, Skype, et cetera what software are you using to put your materials together? So we primarily use Zoom that gets transmitted to Facebook live but for our PlayFest which we had to postpone or we chose to postpone we were starting to use OBS which is open broadcasting software something like that. And someone might correct me. And OBS gives you a little bit more it's a free I think platform and it gives you a little bit more flexibility and branding and adding sound and title pages and all that. We use LiveLab as I mentioned which is now available so we can share those links and then we use that in tandem with OBS so LiveLab is a video conferencing aspect like Zoom but then for streaming then we use a version of OBS called Streamlabs OBS which is also open source and free LiveLab is open source and free as well and that's how you can then transmit it to broadcast it to wherever you want YouTube or Facebook or HowlRound. Anyone else from the presenting team wanna join in on that? Otherwise maybe we'll shift to another question. I know there are a lot of platforms people can use including Twitch. I think Twitch is one that has built in interactive components so that you can have like live chats going on people cheer it on and you actually see that in the video. We made sure that when we did our show we had the live chat functioning which helped the audience get a sense of collective laughter, sadness and just there was that point where the actors were creating hashtags Team Ryan, Team Raul of which person they wanted that main actors to fall in love with it was really fun and there is a point where like the whole audience got silent and I thought we lost them but then some people were like I just I can't see anything right now I'm so invested and other people chimed in that like I can't talk this what's gonna happen? So it was creating a digital space again I think is one of the things to think about. We just have to say that you can live hack it in a way in a fashion that is useful to you. One of the things that's super important about theater and the idea of live theater and the question that starts this is what is theater? To me creating a possibility of live interaction for the audience and for the audience to hear each other and see each other and feel each other is important and I think that we've I've sent out the charge to people to say we've got to create a new platform actually for theater artists so that we can maintain a sense of liveness and interaction that zoom allows but also a space that can be more heavily designed you know like we're dealing with OBS so come on I'd also like to say that I am absolutely all about the live experience and I also found that when my students when many of them went to move to creating websites that that sense of one audience member in relationship to the project becomes also a really interesting rabbit hole to fall down one audience member in relationship to a narrative that is then exploded into a web format so I think I would it's a different kind of performance but remains a performance and a platform nonetheless I'm going to shift over to Aaron because I think there are a couple questions so Aaron do you want to pull one out? Sure we had this question come up a couple of times for Peter how did you ensure the camera alignment was as you wanted it on zoom and there was a bit of a follow-up question if you had if you wrote a guide if something like that was available So there's a how-round article that's going to be coming out probably within the next week or so it was going to come out this week but I talked to them they responded about putting a pause on it with everything that's going on with the civil unrest that's happening right now in our country and I thought that was important to give that attention but when that comes out a lot of that has a few of that information it's mostly about why live video theater is valid I think what Amelia said right now is that there are a lot of criticisms of this format or that theater that digital theater is something that's worthy but it is and not only is it worthy it's its own art it's not an in-person, live in-person theater it's not film it's its own hybrid thing and there's money to be made on it there are theater companies that are already selling tickets through this experience so it can be commodified and it can re-stimulate our economy it can create jobs for our field and so sorry that's just a whole tangent of why that article is written but I am teaching these workshops in which I will be giving some more of that information back to as far as specifically the island side so Zoom does Zoom specifically and a lot of platforms do have some kind of a algorithm to how screens get laid out and this is what I call screen blocking basically if you remove yourself from the Zoom video everyone else is in order from left to right up to down so if you as an actor will never see what the audience sees because you will always be the second person in the screen but once you remove yourself that order is consistent for everyone else so it matters when you bring audiences in or when you bring videos on when you bring them off that lines up who is standing next to who so that is where screen blocking comes in that's kind of a general conversation about that I go into detail more Cool, thank you Peter I think Erin or other folks on the TCG team maybe we'll take another question and then we are gonna take a break, a pause Yeah, this is one that was boosted by a couple people is there any way for recordings of Zoom events to be viewed with the chat streaming alongside it at the same time as it did when the real event was happening the chat is such an important feature and so much information is shared there or maybe that's just a feature of the live event that can't be viewed after the fact I can answer that question so on Facebook the chat happens in conjunction in real time with the event but once the Facebook live will record your event and for example all our events live on our Facebook page and when you view it in recording you can watch the chat also in real time or you can watch it all at once you can say real time all comments most relevant comments and so the answer is yes you can record Zoom events and then at least for Facebook I don't know about I think on Twitch you can also and Peter may know more about that but at least on Facebook on Facebook you can watch a recording and experience it in the same way that someone does live in the chat Cool, anyone else on the panelist team wanna weigh in on that? Okay, well we're gonna take a five minute break because I think being in front of a screen for any length of time gets taxing so we'll take a break in a moment but for a moment before we do that I actually would like to bring something else into the space right now that George Floyd's family and his brother in particular Terrence Floyd was doing a memorial that is happening kind of in real time now where he was speaking and then folks in Brooklyn were gonna walk across the Brooklyn Bridge so I just wanted to take a moment before we go into our break to do just a moment of quiet and time to send out positive energy to the family so I'll stop. All right, thank you folks for that. So we're gonna take five, Josh I'm not sure if we have a timer but we'll take five then when we come back we'll be able to go into breakout groups and talk more in detail and wherever the conversation goes for you all I don't wanna hold that too tight but we are going to be spreading our panelists amongst the different breakout groups I don't know how many breakouts we're gonna have we'll be in the breakouts for about 20 minutes or so then we'll come back as a group, talk some more and then we'll see where we are. Y'all good? All right, thank you five. I'm at 157 Eastern. Hey friends, it's that time I know folks are like making their way so I am just scanning. Yeah, we've got a good critical mass of folks. I'm gonna turn it over to our Zoom guide, Josh and Josh you wanna talk us through going into breakouts? Hi everyone. So I'm sure most of you are familiar with breakout rooms on Zoom at this point but I'm going to open them in a minute and then you should see a prompts on your screen to join or if you don't see that prompts then just go to the bottom of your screen and search for the breakout room icon. It's not there yet but it will be there now. So just let me know if you have any issues and feel free to return to the main room if you're not comfortable in your breakout. And Josh, I think what I forgot to do was rephrase the prompts so maybe we could send that to people. It's the prompt is the definition of theater theater is not a binary. So what is it? Jimmilla, can you hold? I'll just close all the rooms because I think- Sure, sure. Absolutely. Folks are returning, they're like unexpectedly returning. Give us 10 seconds folks, folks are rejoining because I just closed the rooms. All right, take it away Amelia. Ah, okay. So yeah, the prompt question is if theater is not a binary, what is it? Put back, we got put back into this room. Yeah, a lot of people got dumped back. Yeah. Yeah, you'll go back in a breakout room in a second because I think some folks were asking about the prompt question. So if the question is if theater is not a binary, what is it? Pretty simple and wherever you're gonna take the conversation, cool? Yeah, sorry folks, we realized we didn't give you the prompts that's why I brought you back.  Wow. All right, there you go. There we go, thank you. Sorry about that. Okay. I think what always happens is people might be away from their screens. And just so folks on YouTube know, we don't have a breakout room capability if you're following there, but we do have to have room in the Zoom in this Zoom space if you would like to join the Zoom, we can accommodate you in a breakout room here. Amelia, I'm not sure if you're at your computer. Yeah, I was actually just answering a question in the chat. That's what I was talking about. Sorry to not totally understand it, but there are four of us in the breakout room and none of us really knew what you meant, so. Okay, sorry, that there's some conversation that feels that theater has to only be in a physical space, a theater building, and there are other folks that are saying theater can be a different form in a virtual space, which is a binary in either or. So if it's not either or, what is it? What can it be? Okay, that we might, okay, that helps. How do I get back to my group? You just saw the breakout button at the bottom of your, I don't know how you're viewing, but usually you can see that. Okay, join breakout room, I see it. It was under more. Thank you very much, I appreciate it. Great. Hey Josh, I'm just looking at the list here to try to find your captioner. I'm just not seeing anybody who had, usually our captioners put that they're a captioner within their name, so I'm just not seeing them in their group. I can transfer hosting back over to you if you think you remember their name at all. Or actually, Josh, would you mind doing something? Cause you could send a message to all of the groups, right? True. Cause it's maybe the definition of the binary, what we just said that, sorry, just went brain dead for a second. By binary, we mean, is theater, this theater can only happen in a theater, a physical theater building. If it doesn't happen in a physical theater building, it's not theater. So is the binary physical space versus digital space? Yeah, I guess, I guess, yeah. We're not, Sam, you can just go ahead and make me host. Yeah, I just broadcasted that message. Oh, okay, thank you so much. I've lost track of time, where are we, time-wise? We're about six minutes. Okay, cool. Hey there, folks are making their way back. Welcome back. I realize actually, I wasn't my most clear in sending you off to your breakouts with those prompts. And so midway, we put something in the chat, but nonetheless, I hope that you had conversations that kind of fueled some good ideas and questions were asked and grown out, maybe not always answers, right? That's kind of where we are right now. We'd love to be able to open the space up, not necessarily a report out in a formal way of what you talked about in your groups, but thoughts, questions, resources, anything like that that came up. We're gonna do it two ways. And Josh, do you wanna tell people about raise hands and, because they could raise hands and then that'll automatically stack and then we'll also continue to take questions in the chat and also YouTube. Yep, just go ahead and use the raise hand feature on Zoom or the chat on Zoom if you're more comfortable with that. And then if you can just comment on the chat on YouTube if you're watching that way. So I'll just hold and make space for some questions and I'm gonna be looking at my friends, other friends on the TCG team to see if things are popping up and if folks are raising their hands and we wanna start a queue. I think we have a hand raise from Daniela. Go for it. Hi everyone, I was in group two. My name is Daniela and my group, we had Gavin, Amanda, Teresa, Yana, Jeremy and Olga. We talked a lot about what does it mean as artists what we find sacred and deconstructing the idea of the art being sacred in four walls and exploring outdoor performance as a different way of practicing theater. Some of us are educators and so we were also looking about different hierarchies and how maybe some theaters might create like, I'm blanking out, I'm so nervous. Overall, we were just talking and listening and supporting each other and how to translate theater into different mediums, expanding, not just what we know from writers, going again with Peter and collaborating with graphic designers as our new frontier of theater is going into this new digital era. And also, yeah, just, that is all, thank you. Cool, thank you. Great, TCG team, do you wanna queue up? Who's next? Yes, we have Diana raising the hand. I just wanna make a quick comment. I think one of the things that we, that I sort of re-remembered and that we emphasized in the group was the internet inequity and lack of access for a lot of our wider communities. That's really something that we're gonna have to take into account and figure out as we continue to share out virtually. Absolutely right. Thank you. Next we have Jay, hand raise. Hey y'all, I just wanted to share something that I've been thinking about and we talked a bit about it in our group, which is the ways in which theater is in service of community. And if we maintain that, that's what we use theater for, to reach, to change, et cetera, our community, then what are the ways in which we might be able to theatricalize service outside of the walls of the theater, whether that be in terms of getting people, in terms of food justice, how do we maybe create a Zoom experience where we go to a grocery store with folks who maybe have a bad relationship with food or otherwise feel like they don't have access to good food that is nourishing and not a piece of plastic. That maybe there's an actor where you could choose your adventure and go to your kitchen and pull out the ingredients that you feel like you can make nothing with and there's an actor completely dramaticizing some cooking show and you end up with a beautiful meal that is nutritious for your family. So looking at a lens of being in service to community and how do we theatricalize that and so that we're still creating theater though we may not be inside. Absolutely, absolutely. We actually had a session earlier today that was called theaters what the community wants us to be and there are folks exactly doing that. We had Jack from Brooklyn that is a food distribution hub. We also had Target Margin on talking about a variety of their programs but also the mass distribution that they did, they made a performative effort basically delivering masks throughout farm arts collective, which is literally a farm and so they distribute food to the community and they actually have started videotaping cooking shows to help people come up with ideas of how to cook what is in your food box. So there definitely are folks out there. I would look at the list of the folks that were presenting there, that's a good start and we'll try to generate notes out of that earlier session as well, but there might be other folks on this call too that want to speak to that or any other topic. Great, I'm kind of just going off the hand raises here so we have Keith next. Yeah, so our group, we got a little more literal about what the theater experience is and really focused more on the interactivity of it, the interaction of it, that the essence of theater is the direct communication between actor and audience, between performers and audience. And so working with these new mediums in a way that that interaction, that connection can happen is something that we didn't want to lose sight of as we were talking about. Cool, I know that we're at 233 Eastern and there are still a few more questions our conference team said that we could go another minute or two more. So whoever wants to stay, welcome to stay if you need to run, cool. But maybe we'll just take one or two more questions and go for about another five. Is that cool? Mm-hmm, okay, cool. So Josh, are anybody scanning the chat for questions? I think we have Andre. I think that it's important to highlight how this platform makes us more available to communities that otherwise wouldn't be able to buy a ticket to our theaters. I think that it's really important to be able to, even though we were talking in our group that changing our mindset, but we are hitting more people and everyone was talking about it, everyone talked earlier, was thinking about how people suddenly have more views than in their whole year. And I think that's part of it. We're able to get to communities that we wouldn't be able, that aren't available to buy a ticket. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just hopefully every theater and every theater maker is thinking about the relationship to community and audiences not as being transactional, but of building relationships over time that you can't expect to do one show, somebody comes and then you call them up like another month or two again to come to another show. It's transactional versus where's the mutual benefit in that relationship, not a one-way street. That's something that TCG, through our audience revolution program has been working on. And I know I'm scanning through, a lot of y'all are already really doing that quite well. Another question or two, and then we might have to wind down, folks. I see Francine in the queue. Thanks, this is great and our group was great and we were really excited about the fact that all of these new discoveries create so much access for people who haven't had it before. I too want to remind people about advocating for broadband. I live in a place where there's not a lot of access. But my question, so this raises a question about when to monetize and when not to monetize. I did do a Mutini. I loved what Theodore Mew is doing and they had, I know when I did that I donated money. They asked for donations and I'm wondering if that's what other groups are doing or if they're charging a certain amount and how they're doing that. I know that probably can't be answered now but it is something on my mind. But I can answer really quick if that's okay. So with LDA we actually did, we had ticket sales and we had a scale anywhere from $11 to $40 if you bought a package. So it was a big question mark for us when we first started obviously during COVID and everybody going through financial hardships. But what we did find is, although one ticket is a 10 minute experience is that people wanted to have a longer experience. So that $30 or $40 ticket gave you that and we also, the way that the show was structured you could come back multiple times. So if I bought one ticket for $11, I can come back again and see another show and go to another city. So I do wanna say that it did work and people did buy tickets. And people bought the $40 tickets, those sold out first. Yep. People wanted an optimal experience if they were going to sit down and actually watch something online, they wanted to optimize their experience. Well, what I appreciated Kamala in long distance affair was that you could choose your own venture, you could go to one city and so that was an amount you could go to more cities, it was a little more money. So there were options for people to choose according to budget too, in that way. We talked to a pricing specialist that came in and talked to the National New Play Network and they did a seminar on it which I'll see if we can get them to share. But what was really helpful is them talking about that people putting multiple price points in that start anywhere from five, 10, 15, 25, 50 with really no other benefit except that people choose their price point and actually people chose higher price points. So they said there's no reason to not do it because people do select the higher price points. Also Francine, we've been able to leverage some of our programming for sponsorships, or corporate sponsorships. So for the Georgia K episode, obviously, but also for our Play Fest, we had a corporate sponsor. And I would also... We were... Go ahead, Dad. I'm with Arts Consulting Group in addition to being a stage director. We were actually gonna do a session about this on Tuesday which had to be moved obviously because of all the changes in the world. But the big takeaway is that there's more and more theaters experimenting with it and basically they're not having any trouble selling again, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, $50 tickets. And the other interesting point about it is that a lot of those tickets they're selling to people who don't already participate with their organization. So it's people who would never have come in person not only seeing what they're putting online but paying for it. So there's a lot of lead out there. Obviously the flip side is even people who've been charging for online content for a long time are giving it for free right now in a lot of cases because it's a crisis moment. But that's what's happening out there. Thank you, Douglas. I think we're gonna have to start to wind down folks because there are other sessions happening later and wanna make sure that y'all are taking time for breaks and the TCG team too, we need some breaks. This has been fabulous. My promise to you all is to gather the information and the resources we have and it'll get posted probably on mining networks. And like I said, give us a little grace period. It may not happen right after we close this but certainly between now and the end of the conference maybe I'll say that. I wanted to give a big shout out to all the groups that presented and inspired us. So thank you, thank you. A big shout out to the TCG team that was frantically running the backend and the chat and YouTube and HowlRound and our Zoom God, Josh and Sam. I know there are probably other folks, a big shout out, we couldn't really do this without y'all. So to be continued, this is not the end of this conversation, right? Ciao, bye. Bye, thank you. Thank you. Bye, everybody. Thank you, thank you all very much. All the best. This was fantastic, thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for being here. Peter, you're on. Thank you. Thanks for your life. Thank you, Amelia. Thank you, Amelia. Yeah, Josh. Thank you, Amelia. Michael Francis. Oh, no one was.


It can be a little intimidating trying to predict what disasters the future might hold, but you should always at least hazard a guess. So, the election. Lots of people very worried about the outcome, lots of hand-reading about what the future of the country looks like, or how life might change for certain people. If you're of a certain frame of mind, like I am, you may have spent some time imagining specific events and phenomena that probably won't happen, or probably won't happen to you, but become uncomfortable possibilities in such a tense and unpredictable political climate, things like power grabs and riots. Engineers in particular tend to develop a sort of reflex for rumination on all the myriad ways that things can go horribly wrong, as it's often a useful habit when your whole job is to ensure that things reliably work the way they ought to.   Unfortunately, as anyone who's been alive in 2020 can tell you, the number of things that can go wrong is practically endless. Global pandemics, killer hornets, police brutality, wildfires that blot out the sun for weeks at a time, trying to come up with and implement strategies to deal with all this stuff ahead of time would not only require some serious divination magic, but a whole lot of time and resources. Analyzing, developing and implementing solutions for every single possible problem that crosses your mind isn't just an endless undertaking, it tends towards bike shedding, optimizing solutions to the small problems that are easy to deal with rather than the big hard problems. How can we be sure that we're putting out the closest, most pressing fires first? No pun intended. This sort of thinking has led engineers to create an analytical tool specifically geared towards identifying which risks require the greatest attention and focusing effort to efficiently mitigate them. In the 1940s, the US military developed the failure modes and effects analysis, or FMEA method, a version of which is now used by just about any organization you can think of that does some sort of engineering, as well as several that don't. FMEA turns out to be such a good way of thinking about risk and how to handle it that institutions like libraries and coffee shops use it to reduce risk in their internal process. And if you're looking for a way to organize your thinking about everything that could go wrong in the near future, you could do a lot worse. Now, I'm sure that some of you have started looking around for literally anything to pay attention to that isn't an Excel spreadsheet. But think of it more as a set of prompts, a way to hold everything that could go wrong up to the light and inspect it from every angle to make sure that you're not missing anything. Then to take decisive action to stop disaster. It's not a table, it's a time machine through which your future self can communicate what went wrong and how to prevent it this time. First, we're going to list out all the functions that are critical for things to work smoothly. Ideally as pairs of verbs and nouns, open doors, select floor, close doors, lift passengers. If you're talking about company processes, think about necessary steps in the flow chart, things like receiving orders or paying employees. Importantly, we're operating at kind of a high level here and only considering what actions are necessary for things to keep chugging along. Don't get bogged down with stuff like not break, screw one, not break, screw two. Once you have a solid list of these verb noun functions, a complete process or successful operation from beginning to end, then you can start brainstorming every way that things can go pear shaped, both the mode of failure or how our functions can get screwed up and the likeliest cause. What event is probably going to participate that mode? Cable snaps caused by fatigue or maybe loading the elevator beyond capacity. Doors jam caused by external obstruction.  All the horror in mayhem goes here. It may be unintuitive, but we're only going to assume that one function fails at a time. That's not really how the world works, as 2020 has shown, but we're trying to identify the cornerstones of this system, the eigenvectors, the jenga pieces that everything is balanced on, and that requires focusing on each element of the system individually. Now, we consider the likely effects of these failures and their severity, assigning a number that indicates how big of a deal it is if something goes wrong in this particular way, generally from one to five, where one means that things can keep working as intended and five means that multiple deaths may occur. Gum in one of the elevator buttons is annoying and inconvenient, but although it will cause the elevator to repeatedly stop at that floor, things will otherwise keep working as intended. I'll give that a two. On the other hand, the doors getting stuck is going to put the elevator out of operation, which is kind of a bummer, but trapping people inside is also a big deal. What if someone was on their way to the bathroom? What if someone's claustrophobic or has some sort of medical emergency while they're locked in a steel box? I'm going to give the doors being stuck a four out of five because if it happens, it might well end up killing someone. The cable snapping, yeah, that's an easy five. Next, we're going to consider the probability of these sorts of things happening, again, from one to five. One would be a freak occurrence. Five means it's a foregone conclusion that is going to happen at least once. Finally, we're going to assign one more number that indicates how detectable the failure is, how quickly someone will know about it if it happens. This is important because sometimes it's not clear that anything is wrong until it's too late to prevent the worst possible outcome. If someone cuts your car's brake lines, the danger isn't really in the failure itself, it's in the way that you find out about it. We multiply our three numbers and get a series of weighted values for each failure mode. The higher numbers indicate things that are deadly, probable, and hard to spot. From here, you'll have some clear candidates for highest possible risk. Obviously, if you have the resources to head against everything, great. But taking care of the largest probability mass of disaster first is really your priority, and the FMEA method can highlight some potentially unintuitive aspects of where that might be. For our elevator example, you might have thought the cable snapping would be the top of the list for things to worry about, but its weighted number is actually lower than the one that we came up with for doors getting stuck. With modern materials and quality control measures, it's actually a pretty rare occurrence, while people are constantly dropping stuff into door mechanisms. Armed with that information, you can work your way down the list, figuring out how you're going to lower some of these numbers with additional features or strategies. It can be helpful to think of decreasing each of these assigned values directly, making the effects of failure less severe, lowering the probability that they'll happen, or finding ways to discover them before they're a real issue. To mitigate the risk of doors getting stuck, we could add an escape hatch and evacuation routes if people really need to get out. Add protection to door opening mechanisms, so it's less likely that someone will drop their keys into something important. Mandate routine inspections and maintenance to make sure that they're not getting worn out or gummed up with dust and debris. When you're talking about machines, these sorts of measures are often simple changes that drastically reduce risk in obvious ways. Problem X, do Y, now you basically don't have to worry about it. When you're talking about reducing risk in life, although it can be nice to simply change a thing and eliminate some unnecessary hazard, like keeping the fire extinguisher somewhere that's not likely to be on fire, often the only thing that you can do is to have a detailed plan in place, a strategy that you can pull the ripcord on and execute to come out in the best possible position when some risk beyond your control comes to pass. The best contingency plans have two parts, a discrete easily determined trigger, some metric or event that you can evaluate quickly which will prompt you to get moving, and a detailed step-by-step set of actions that don't require a lot of interpretation or improvisation to satisfy, hopefully with some redundancy or alternate paths forward in the event of a roadblock. If things get dangerous, go somewhere safe is a bad plan. If there's a wildfire within 25 miles of home, put these items in the car. If an evacuation order is given, grab the dog and drive to this location, unless it's also on fire, in which case drive to that location. That's better. Of course, a lot of the stuff that's made 2020 such an interesting year has been very hard to predict, let alone to form action plans for.  The same is true of machines and companies. No matter how hard you fill out your FMEA spreadsheet, there's always something unimaginable that you're not accounting for, a monkey wrench ready to drop into your whole apparatus.  What comes out is the biggest risk in your FMEA calculations. And why is it heart disease?  Please, leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah blah subscribe, blah share. Before future Josh gets here, if you'd like to maybe avoid doing this next election, please check out electionscience.org. They're a lobbyist group pushing for approval voting, which might break up a little of the insanity caused by our first passive post-elect plural system. Anyway, like I was saying, don't forget to change this man. Yep, it's me, future Josh. Just a reminder for anyone watching this, episode 200 is coming up. I'm going to be rewatching some old episodes to comment on them. If you want me to sit through one in particular, be sure to visit the link that's in the description and vote for your favorites. All of these favorites.


Hello and welcome to another episode of the Minor Issues podcast. I'm Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute. Well you're probably already sick of hearing about how bad the government shutdown is going to be for the economy when that really isn't true. I mean a few bistros in Washington D.C. and of course government workers are going to be out of work for a while but it's not harmful to the real economy. Now of course it would be nice if there was legislation that would guarantee no pay or benefits to congressmen, senators, and government employees for work that they don't do and of course it would also be nice if some of the vital paperwork such as passports could be transferred to the private sector in these times. But I'm going to focus here on the data shutdown. The fact that government data is not going to be collected and released during this government shutdown, the Department of Labor, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Commerce Department, the Census, the Bureau of Economic Analysis is not going to be issuing its normal typical reports and this has happened in the past, in fact the recent past. So it might mean things like durable goods orders, economic indicators, consumer spending, retail sales, housing starts, new home sales, statistics won't be reported on time. The primary issue here is the Federal Reserve which has been talking about ad nauseum, the fact that it's going to be data dependent on its policy decisions. So what's the Fed to do if it doesn't have data? Well let's take a look at what we know and where we've left off with the Fed. In a recent episode I talked about the touch and go landing economy new at the Fed where they increase their projections for economic growth this year and economic growth next year telling us things are fine and dandy looking out into the future. But also at the same time they reiterated their position that they are going to hold interest rates higher for longer in order to stamp out the inflation that it already caused by printing up too much money. Well the biggest impacts that we've seen so far as a result of this higher and longer attitude on the part of the Fed and its touch and go landing economy where we're supposed to take off economically speaking is that there's been a big run up in 30 year government bond interest rates and the 30 year fixed rate mortgage. So in terms of the rate on 30 year treasuries we've seen an obvious increase of about 7.5 percent on the interest rate that the government has to borrow long term. We've also seen a continued run up in the tightening of commercial lending standards on things like commercial real estate loans and really across the board lending by banks going forward is there being more careful in lending money into the future particularly longer term loans. The recent press conference with the Federal Reserve they were asked about pending issues in the economy like the resumption of student loan repayments or the problems in commercial real estate refinancing and they basically said well we can't estimate those kind of things and then of course there's all the labor strikes and the impact of the government shutdown and they said well basically we don't know how those will impact the economy we're not sure if they're going to take place or how long they're going to last so we're not really considering those things in our projections of the future. So where does that leave us? Well basically as I'm looking out into the future I'm wondering how the Fed's confidence game in the economy is going to play out. In other words they're telling us that everything is great everything is fine but at the same time they are busying themselves breaking the economy as usual. They're breaking the economy like letting a wild bull into a china shop or for those younger listeners it's like letting a woke mob into a Taylor Swift souvenir store. So again we're looking for the Fed to break the economy fairly soon and then for the Federal Reserve to come rushing in like a white knight charging in to save the day and open the floodgates to more money printing reducing interest rates bailing out various aspects of the economy particularly banking, commercial financing and the massive amount of government debt out there in the economy so those are some of the things that we're reading into the tea leaves while the Fed is on hold data dependent in a phase of time where the data is not going to be released.