We're going to stream this, so that's why we're just kind of waiting to get the, get the set. Wow, look at that. I meant to tell you to watch it. No, you meant to tell me. There we go. All right. Okay. Here we go. All right. I feel so abandoned. Welcome everybody. This is on. This is on. Welcome everybody. I'm Scott Stoner. I'm vice president for programs and resources with APAP. Pleased to have you all with us this afternoon. This afternoon we are going to talk about a program that is entitled Emerging Markets. It's based on an initiative that we found of interest a number of years ago. Of course everybody was talking about community engagement, but as we began to work more closely, particularly with the Creative Capital Foundation, with the National Endowment for the Arts, and really learning more about the kind of work that artists from those groups were doing and particularly emerging artists. When we became clear they were working more in the area of connecting directly with communities and creating work that was not site specific so much as community specific, work that was meant to reach into the diverse population of the community in which they were going to build a relationship with. So it was looking at ways of building new kinds of partnerships and deeper partnerships within a community as opposed to simply coming in working with a presenting organization doing the performance and beeping. We wanted to know more about this, how this process works, and also how do you actually engage and develop a deeper engagement in a community. How do you market and promote that kind of work and what kind of impact comes with that kind of work and what kind of process needs to be put in place in terms particularly of the artist working with the presenter and the artist working with partners that the presenter may not already be working with in a community. We were able to get a bit of support from the National Endowment for the Arts for this and with that support we identified five presenting organizations that are members of APAP and then we identified with our partnership with the Creative Capital Foundation artists that they'd been working with and did a match. So what you're going to hear about this afternoon is what came out of that matching artist with specific communities and the kind of work that occurred there. Now to guide us through this afternoon is Sarah Billman, a colleague who is the Director of Marketing and Communications at UMS. We asked Sarah to come on as a consultant in this area and actually go to these communities when the artists were there and do some site visits and work in advance also with the presenters and to kind of document what has happened there. We are going to prepare our report out of this work week that's not complete yet. We've just now finished the process. It really happened over this past fall and last spring also, last spring this fall. So Sarah's going to kind of guide you through this. We have some of our partners here with us and some of our artists with us. So if I could clone myself I would be standing in another room at this time too. So I have to go there. So I'm not going to be at the stage of the session but it was really important just to kind of I think lay the groundwork for what you're about to hear and certainly we're going to be interested in getting in exchange of your own ideas and your take away from the session before it's in your room. So thank you for being here and I'd like to introduce you to Sarah Billman. I know that I just found out actually that I was listed as the only speaker in this session and that is certainly not true. I'm joined by a terrific group of people who will present in the order of Jacob Yerro from the University of Iowa at Hancher along with Elisa Regas representing Taylor Mack who is the artist matched with Iowa. Taylor was also matched with Dartmouth, the Hopkins Center and Stephanie Pacheco will be talking about their project. Then we'll move to, you'll have to pretend that I'm representing the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans who couldn't be here. They worked with Lisa D'Amore and Katie Pearl followed by Lane Cieplinski who worked on the boards with complex movements and invincible and then closing it out will be Jenny Person from MDC Live Arts in Miami along with Taylor Hobinum. We also called this the Taylor Match Program because it seemed like every artist when we were first starting to work was named Taylor. We need more of those. We need more of those. That's right. So Scott gave a great introduction of the program itself. This was funded in part by NEA and really a partnership with Creative Capital Artists. A fascinating organization that supports young and emerging talent and so part of the goal of this was to really try to identify too how do you work with communities with artists who may not be as well known and trying to build a market for them. As Scott mentioned we had site visits between April and these projects happened between April and December but certainly a lot of planning work happened well before that. And the goals were really to explore how involving an artist in the planning process can have an impact on the overall success of the project and looking at that collaborative approach. And so what we're going to do is kind of introduce the five projects have each of the presenters and artists talk about them and then close up with some of the kind of overarching findings and trends that we saw and then some Q&A at the end. So we're going to kick it off with Jacob and or Alisa talking about Taylor Mac's residency which happened just about six weeks ago at the University of Iowa. Jacob I think you may need to use the microphone for the screening. I'm in a lot of dead business. It was exactly comfortable with all this. Fancy technology. Hi I'm Jacob Yaro and it's always a little challenge for me to know what's helpful to y'all so yell at me if something's more helpful. I don't know exactly what. How many of you are familiar with Taylor Mac's work? Taylor Mac is an artist who I'm really excited about and love Taylor's work. Alisa you're welcome to talk about its own job. This piece is a very ambitious project that's in the year four and is going to be kind of completed this year. It's a 24 decade history of popular music in the United States. It's an alternative history of popular music in America taught from the point of view to quote Taylor from the point of view of a radical fairy. And some of its music that was widely popular, some of its music that was popular in little pockets of the country. Each decade has an hour long piece beginning in 1776 and ending in 2016. The whole shebang will be performed I believe in October. As a 24 hour extravaganza of all sorts of craziness it's going to be a wonderful performance. It has also can be divided into acts like three decade chunks of eight different acts of three decades and you can do six and we commissioned one of the decades. I don't know if there's more I was going to say about that. Is that a pretty good overview? I would commend to you a visit to Taylor's website and to see this work but also one of the first places where I really got very excited about Taylor was he wrote a theater manifesto that's on his website. I believe there's video of it somewhere on the internet perhaps on the website. It's really excellent about what he's trying to accomplish and spoke to me very deeply about what I'm trying to accomplish as well. So I would check that out if you haven't. I said that on something similar to this last year without a doubt. So we decided that we would commission a decade and trying to figure out working with Alisa and Taylor to figure out what made sense, what would be helpful to them, what would be a point of relevance for our community. We landed on the 1850s and specifically then it became 1846 to 1856 and in that decade Taylor matches Walt Whitman against Stephen Foster. We're the writing university at the University of Iowa have a really strong literary tradition. We are home to the Whitman archive. We have one really prominent Whitman scholar. We have one major open online course at the university that's all about leaves of grass. Whitman is a really big deal in our town. So it seemed like a really interesting way to try to build a connection with people and Stephen Foster as the father of an American song is a really interesting person to just oppose there. So what's helpful? What we did is interesting, but I don't know if it's all that helpful and we were trying to... I mean just to see what it is. So in trying to find those connections how do we then draw that line from the academics and the interest in Whitman to this work? As it turned out often we decide to do projects that are really rich in content. This is a crazy rich project and then figure out where the connections really are as it turns out the main Whitman scholar is on sabbatical so that worked out really well. But we were still... because there's a bunch of work around that we were able to find other ways to pull Whitman in with another English professor who hosted an excellent talk and gave... and is both like a Whitman scholar to some degree but works in contemporary theater and actually teaches a class, an English class about drama and they read Taylor's play here during the class and were really well prepared to deal with the content area. It's interesting because she said it was halfway through the semester before her students finally mostly stopped calling what they were reading novels. This is just like an interesting group of people to engage around Taylor and the theater. So we did some typical sorts of talks. This talk was really interesting because Matt Ray is the musical director it's a band and Taylor sings at some level and so Matt's the musical director has arranged 280 songs or whatever it is that's in the full piece and having Matt talk because he's so... he's a part of developing the whole piece and really brought out extra things that Taylor hadn't said in other circumstances and was a slick move and helped our theater students develop a connection to the piece that we were kind of struggling to get to and really all the other visuals I have are really fun. Pictures of the show, so those are like potato chip bags on the costume designer's machine dazzle who's a remarkable designer and tends to work I think it's fair to say in ephemera like found objects so the potato chip bags about two-thirds of them I think made it through the show I wanted to to make a point about deep integration into academics like with this one English professor's class we merged that class with a class called Performance in the Americas that was talking about drag as part of what they were learning about drag performance and it was important to us especially in this case not to kind of go like oh well Taylor writes plays and your class reads plays so we'll get together and like talk about plays and sometimes that's actually like a pretty valid way to approach it depending on the playwright and things along those lines but in this case it was really important for us that the class had read here and it was also important to us and was familiar with Taylor's work and they prepared and they watched up that the performance in the Americas was coming from sort of a different place and interest in the work and to put those groups of students together and see like what happens is very interesting to me I'm always amazed at how much college students are concerned with just not being embarrassed no matter like what classes we go to how it's hard to draw them out and putting two classes together makes it that much harder and it was a really interesting and I think successful exchange I don't know some of the questions that are sort of the frames of this program with like developing new audiences are questions that I struggle with personally like I don't exactly understand what a new audience is and I'm not totally proud of that I guess because probably I should but we were trying to create an audience for Taylor and for all of the activities, the discussions, the performance all of it and felt really good about it some of the sort of indicators of success that we put out there we didn't meet we had the University of Iowa's football team has been awful for the last few years like they were going to fire the coach and on and on and on so some really smart person on our staff made the decision that there's no way in heck that teams going to make the big 10 championship game so we're going to program this on that Saturday and the football season will be over for us well on the night of this play the newspaper came that morning and said the most important game in Hawkeye football history is tonight and it kicked off at 7.45 and the show started at 7.30 and we know that like football can kill our sales oh my goodness can it kill our sales I think we sold 20 tickets in the week leading up to the game once we knew we were going to be in that game like nothing and so that was kind of a drag but I don't know what are you going to do that's part of life and I did get to stand up on stage and say yeah I'm the dummy who's making you miss Hawkeye football and these are some of the things are there other things that I can say that are helpful Sarah? is that good? that's that's the end of our show when everybody's on stage because Stephen Foster passed out in a hotel room for two days and he's having a hallucinatory dream about Walt Whitman poems awesome Stephanie why don't you do you want to start with a video? well no the video is in the second slide I'll help you with the video oh I see what we're saying hi I'm Stephanie Pacheco from the Hopin Center she's a performing arts center at Dartmouth College in Hanover New Hampshire very small, rural right on the border between New Hampshire and Vermont so we're definitely a university town with a broader regional poll as one of the anchor performing arts centers that really serves that region so we also had Taylor Mack come and when thinking about which decades and which act was appropriate certainly we said well if you're going to come to New England we should look at the Revolutionary War so we took Act 1 which was 1776 to 1806 and one of the things that we wanted to do was look at bringing together audiences that aren't typically coming together in the same either performance or programming I run our region arts education programming so I'm really kind of looking at this all of this through a lens of community partnerships and campus and community engagement so one of the things we said is we have pretty good relationships with there's this great artist community queer community very experimental in White River Junction, Vermont right across the river from us there's a radical fairy camp right down the road and we also have this rich academic historical community both campus based and also local historians historical societies are the tried and true blood of those local Vermonters and New Hampshire folks and we wanted to see if we could pull them together and have them interact in conversation with Taylor and also in conversation with each other which doesn't always happen so we do have one of the things we did and I just want to pause it so one of the things we did which we're always happy to do is bring Taylor up for an advance visit so our engagement with him in performance was in September, he came up last March for two days it was very quick but we had him do a whole series of meetings with community members, with academics, historians students and that was really the core of our audience building, we knew when he came it was going to be the second day of classes in fall term and if we didn't start to build those relationships early on it was never going to work and we also, it's such a complex project we wanted people to hear from Taylor and meet him and that infectious energy is really infectious and one of the things we did was film, he graciously agreed to get in full costume and truck around the upper valley in March when we still have very deep snow and so we kind of hauled him around to all these historic sites so we could shoot this beautiful video and do some interviews and that was actually a big part of what we built for our audience building efforts that we could then use late summer into fall to get ready for the show so I'm just going to show a little two minute clip of this because I think this is what we did I think we're good and everybody here, we don't really or we're going to have some buffering issues try and refresh it and then if it doesn't take it from the air I still try to look for the ways that I can authentically fail on stage and put myself through a 24-hour concert experience since one of those it just felt like it would be interesting to find out where the careers were in our America it just felt like it would be interesting to find out where the careers were and where I'm such a force to lose this credit that there ever was don't give us more thank you here I'm at the California zone in England, it's history I tell you about Europe so if you wanted to know what the story is about in the US it's what I'm going to do today we went to some of the oldest Shari Facebooks the original reading house out those bills which was about 300 years so I'm going to over-stand the real first dollar what I found interesting about that is that it's funny with nuggets that you hear that someone might just say off-hand like a little nugget that aren't in the classroom there was a stick in the church and a hammer on the other side and the man in the back of the house would fall asleep and put that stick out there and I got the hammer so of course I'm going to have somebody with a stick in the back of the house and it's like that's mad genius that's the kind of thing you'll find out from coming an hour to people in the original story so that is a clip of a greater about five minute video that we used and actually we edited versions we shared with some other New England presenters we edited a New England version there's also some where he specifically talks about the Dartmouth show his different people presented different decades but Taylor Mack is so generous as an artist but to always have explanations of the show being filtered through us as a presenter is certainly challenging and we knew that having people hear from an artist in his own words was just going to be incomparable in terms of building those audiences and building audiences in all of those different students and student groups and folks we were partnering with and it's a complicated show and messaging we can talk more later about that but to get the community to understand his work you had to do it with Taylor we did some really interesting things these were some of the folks from historic societies getting him we used still images and the video from all of these visits which really resonated with our audiences because these are local sites and they're local sites with a lot of nostalgia and a big fan base and so I think the community felt like oh he's willing to invest in us and get to know us and learn about who we are as a community and that built in turn our residency programming when he returned in September there's a local quirky museum called the Main Street Museum that partnered with us on an event where we did like pachakacha style talks on what revolution means to me for a night and these were some pictures from the event and we had a woman talking about a personal revolution of getting divorced and how it caused her to discover Mardi Gras New Orleans culture and costuming and discover a whole new side of herself and she dressed up in costume for the event Taylor was in plain clothes this night and we also had Taylor speak, we had a woman from the historic society who actually built the stick with the feather and the hammer and used it in her talk we had somebody else from a different historic society talking about the history of the Abenaki tribes so we really were saying well here's this question that Taylor's posing about revolutions, about untold histories what does that mean to us as a community and we had a lot of people at this event and the museum said it was the most diverse event, most diverse audience they had and brought in both the older subset of the community as well as the younger we had folks from the college, we had pretty much folks from their 20s on up through 70s at this event which was great the other thing that happened certainly Taylor did a bunch of research, we had students because they met him in March get really excited about the idea of doing bling and flair and costume flair is a very Dartmouth student thing they liked to wear it for special events so they did a flair swap before the show for a couple hours where people could drop off their flair from orientation and buy new flair and get new flair we also gave flair to the audience during the show, we collected about 350 pieces of flair we also had a very diverse audience and I think saw I would say there was probably between 50 and 60 new audience members new to the hop out of a house of 320 but there were audiences we don't typically see together in the same house so that was really important to us in terms of young and old queer and straight, academics historians, artists and the other big thing that grew out of that advanced trip is active audience participation which was our other big thing that Taylor for those of you who've been not only makes the audience get up, sing, dance do things that they wouldn't normally expect that they'd be comfortable doing but we also had about 10 members of our community sit on stage for 3 hours and knit and he said to us in March I want knitters and we were like okay well knitters up here for sure but what do you want from them and he said I just want them sitting in rocking chairs on either side of the stage the whole show just knitting and it was really extraordinary they most of I would say all but one of them had never heard of Taylor Mac before they were game for almost anything they came from a diversity of backgrounds themselves and Taylor was a new artist for them and some of them we got a lot of feedback from them and most of them A said I actually didn't feel exposed to vulnerable on stage I was grateful that I could sit up there and knit and not have to do everything he made the audience do and the other thing was that there are a lot of them that are like oh my god where else can I see Taylor I'll go down to New York to see a 24 hour show and one of the most beautiful pieces of feedback we got was from somebody who said who actually walked away saying you know what I don't actually like the content of what Taylor was talking about I thought it was a little too over the top sometimes too vulgar Taylor is very in your face and controversial about pushing questions of social change but this person said you know I disagreed with it it wasn't my thing I knew there were a lot of members of the knitting group who were more conservative Christians I was kind of curious whether they were offended by it but I would totally do this again please call me I would love to participate in a hop event so that was really powerful to us that somebody could say you know I took a risk and I disagreed but I would come back and do this again so we can talk more later about sort of challenges and things but that was Taylor McAdara anything you'd like to add so we're producers of the 24 hour event and all of the components of this very ambitious very complicated project for every single person involved including the presenters Taylor asks a lot out of his presenters this is not business of visual especially these two engagements that were so involved I mean the Hopkins Center in particular I think because this was the first time that he had done those three acts you know he was this was a very evolving process his needs were very much evolving now it's not every day that you're asked for knitters on stage but these were very influential presentations for us and for Taylor and have are ones that even in his shows now he continually references in the content of a show he literally has built these presentations into his banter for all the future incarnations of these decades in particular so I just wanted to say that they were very resonant up until this day I know they will be part of the 24 hours we're currently looking for knitters now for every single time he does those particular decades for that which are not sometimes they're easier than others and sometimes presenters are not as up for that as these are so I think for everyone undergoing this takes a lot it's not just an easy formulaic one shot deal now she has to deal with the knitters deep in back again that's not going to be the easiest thing so and for Taylor too now there's repercussions on everything it's also a lot on the artist to come in advance and this is not something that Taylor as he's building this piece can do in every location so I think this was a very unique thing that really worked and it would be a blessing to be able to do it everywhere but sometimes the realities of that do get in the way financially staff resources timing all kinds of things and I think we also need to think about how more things can happen remotely that give some residence for him maybe in a return visit now that they know him a little bit and just sort of where the where the opportunities are that we can grab them when we do have the artist because this is not every case but it was a magical one in both situations and as longtime supporters and fans of creative capital we were thrilled that Taylor could be part of it and benefit from it so much so thanks to all of you guys especially those two I would also add that when I talked to Taylor back in December in Iowa he told me that one of the things that he did that wasn't on the schedule so to speak in Dartmouth last spring was to go to a frat party which inspired the section or helped to inspire parts of the section on temperance songs so that was a fun time for me campus engagement a different kind of campus engagement again the contemporary art center in New Orleans unfortunately couldn't be here but in October they presented Pearl DeMours piece How to Build a Forest and this was done in honor of the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina since then there have been other environmental disasters and this was really a piece that was meant to bring attention to that area Lisa DeMour were up in New Orleans so this piece was very personal for her as an artist and of course it had a lot of resonance with the art center there it's an eight hour durational theater installation it begins in an empty space so this is probably about two and a half hours in I would say two hours in and a team of artists construct dismantle an elaborately fabricated forest and they trace every piece of material back to its original source and where it came from in fact they developed this field guide where they actually spelled out for each item in the forest they were able to go back and whether they bought it at a Goodwill thrift shop or at Joanne fabrics or wherever the case was they were able to trace it back to where the materials originally came from it was really fascinating to enter the forest in the middle of the project but they checked your tags of your clothing so that they could keep track of where everything was coming from really interesting piece that ultimately was also really exploring the notion of where do things go when we're done with them when we discard things we forget about them and how do they end up reappearing and reemerging this was an interesting project about four hours in after the large tree that was actually on at least a Morris family property that was destroyed during Hurricane Katrina this was representative of that and there was just a that was pretty close to when the forest was quote-unquote complete although a forest of course is always changing so there was constant movement and things happening in there I think what was really interesting about this project was even though both the artist and the presenter were based in the same city they had very different approaches to community engagement and for the Contemporary Art Center which does multiple programs throughout a year they were really focused on their public programs and audience outreach and for the artist of course this was the project they were really working on and so they were focused much more on developing relationships with the local artist community and the local environmental activism community so there were some differences going in that in truth I don't know where ever completely resolved and kind of happened in parallel process unlike I think what we heard from from Hansher and Dartmouth where a lot of that was actually happening at the same time and it actually leads to one of the findings that we'll talk about a little bit later but that was just a very brief overview but we actually only have about 35 minutes left for everything so I think with that we will turn it over to Lane Tchaplinski and on the board is talking about complex movements Super hot So thank you Complex movements beware of the Danny Lions is a sci-fi hip-hop opera it's by an ensemble of artists and activists from Detroit and they make an immersive pod situation that about 25 people can fit in and they project they perform outside the pod it's led by an invincible invincible as a rapper a hip-hop artist and does a spoken word meditation on complex science, biology sociology and complex science is sort of a metaphor for understanding complex systems and how you can bring about change the pod because it only contained had capacity for 25 people we had 23 different performances people were guided in for about a 30 to 40 minute performative experience and then they were led into another room where they had a community conversation with people who are different activists in Seattle but whose relationships complex movements have established over the course of the residency the pod could also exist as a standalone installation which we had gallery hours four different times where people came and went for that this gives you a sense of it's three sided and it just basically happened all around you we filmed this for on the board's TV which is a little light-headed I'm wondering if we could and then I could come back and sit down so that then takes us to MBC live arts and the acoustic bicycle tour with Taylor and happily both of them are here do you want me just to play a video? I want to talk first hi so we were really really excited about this project and transformed by it I guess we're going to talk about the transformative impact, future impact later right? so we use this as an opportunity to do things we had never done before with doing on-site performances in our view like knowing that was something we wanted to do we thought working with bicycling musician would be a really great opportunity to engage audience where they are and experiment with on-site performances in all of our campuses as well as in public spaces so I should say Miami-Dade College is the largest undergrad academic institution in the country with 170,000 enrolled students 170,000 enrolled students that includes online students on eight campuses throughout all of Miami-Dade County from Homestead to North Campus which is not quite all the way at the northern border of the county anyway that's a lot of students and a lot of campuses of road for a cyclist and additionally we present in the community mostly we do not present on campus I mean we don't have a venue like a lot of academic institutions so we use venues all over the county houses everything from 150 to 200 seat black boxes to 2500 concert hall type situations so we are geographically and sort of like culturally community based in our presenting as well we serve the community as much if not more than we serve the students so we were trying to accomplish a lot of things with this project we wanted to figure out new and creative ways of engaging students new and creative ways of engaging audience where they are as I mentioned and also new audiences because that's what the grant was about or the project was about so we just thought this was such a great sort of hook into those things so we were fortunate enough to be able to bring Taylor down also like the other presenters did in advance for a planning meeting some of the different populations and organizations and personalities who we would be working with later so he came down in February and the residency was in April and we took him around to different campuses and he was not on his bicycle for this part and different campuses and different community organizations there are so many organizations that we partnered with that I hope I don't forget anybody so Taylor I'm going to need you to help me remember everybody we worked with some of it we'll see in the video so we decided to engage the cycling community in Miami like many cities we have a very robust critical mass community critical mass and lots of different cycling organizations and environmental activist organizations that are about cycling we chose one and we built a relationship with that organization and they were fantastic because one of the founders of that organization actually ended up lending Taylor his bicycle which we retrofitted to brand MDC Live Arts acoustic bicycle tour hashtag this hashtag that and with flag on the back which was for the purpose of safety as well as branding because I don't know how many of you have ever been to Miami but it is not bicycle friendly it's not pedestrian friendly and it's not bicycle friendly so we felt like it was really important to put a flag on the back of Taylor's bike which actually oh no you don't see in that picture but you'll see in the video so so that was how the cycling organization was involved they helped us with that they helped us identify people to engage and they helped us they connected us with like a co-op a cycling co-op for anything that Taylor might need bicycling wise or cycle wise and they also helped us create a ride so I think it was like you did like 7 engagement activities which included 3 performances right before if you count audio tech so another organization that we involved so this was like okay let's engage the cycling community and let's also engage the experimental music community is it okay that I'm saying experimental music okay so there was a lot there was a lot there was sort of like an ongoing discourse about you know about naming the genre or perhaps lack of genre or what have you so of the music of the work and so we we developed a ride with Emerge Miami which was the cycle organization and then April is poetry month as we all know and Miami has a month long community wide poetry event called O Miami which happens all over the community and basically it's one organization that gathers events and produces their own events but also encourages everyone else to create events as part of the festival the idea originally when this organization was founded was that in the month of April every single person resident in Dade County should be touched by poetry so they specifically look for all kinds of events not just standard poetry readings and venues where one would normally see poetry but you know things that turn poetry on his ear so we decided to be part of that as a way to engage their audience as part of our audience building and so they had a program called poetry in the park which is one of their anchor programs of the month of poetry events that draws like five to seven hundred people in an outdoor park that's part of the new world center where a new world symphony plays which is an extraordinary venue by the way if you've ever come to Miami definitely check it out but we're in the park outside so we decided to program Taylor was really clear about wanting to engage locally based artists which is really really important we feel really strongly about that because we also work with locally based artists and talk about more about that as well in terms of the future impact of this project and so he was like I want to work with musicians and make music with musicians and then we had a conversation about working with poets as part of this Oh Miami festival so we created a ride separate from the first ride that I mentioned that was that went through sites throughout well not such a huge part of it, it was a 15 mile ride where there were sites where we stopped and certain selected poets did poems related to the spaces where we stopped and then Taylor would collaborate live with that poetry reading and also just play without poetry and then we would continue on the ride and end up at this poetry in the park where everybody read their poetry and we were met by two members two more members of Taylor's ensemble who would also come down so that's why the card says April 7 through 12, various times and locations we did two rides we did a concert at a radio station's jazz night with the full ensemble with Taylor's ensemble and then we did we did the Emerge Miami ride that ended at one of the college venues where the result of Taylor having collaborated with the local musicians was performed on stage there as a collaboration actually with the whole ensemble and the musicians from Miami so bike ride that culminated in a concert so that was another sort of like new method of getting people ride up to the concert and then there was a concert I feel like I'm forgetting a concert oh it's the right oh really? there wasn't anything oh in the new music space oh audio tech, earlier in the week in order to access experimental composers and musicians we partnered with an organization called the South Florida Composers Alliance which hosts Subtropics music festival for those of you in the room who are composers who might be interested in submitting to be part of that festival at some point and also has a space called audio tech where on Wednesday nights they present different kinds of programs and so we did sort of a lecture demonstration for his film of his first acoustic bicycle tour ride which was from the Canadian border to the Mexican border through California through the west coast of the country performing gigs all along the way I guess you can talk a little bit more about that if we have time anyway and so there was that and he jammed with the composer who runs that organization all these different activities and all these different populations and the poetry audience and the music audience and the bicycle audience and it was this really great thing and one of the things that was particularly rewarding about it was these on-site performances he would ride up on campus he rode to five of those eight campuses that I mentioned like really long rides like when we talk in Miami we say oh he's riding his bike to Kendall campus the Hialeah campus which is just riddled with construction and people who don't know how to drive and streets that aren't really streets and just craziness and that is the one where people were like no there's no way he rode his bike to Hialeah campus but he did and he did in some cases we connected with faculty and he did like a master class or a lecture demonstration in a music appreciation class but he played at every campus and we gathered around him and there was like a little conversation as well to really talk about the work and talk about the experience for the students so that was really that was really exciting the success of that was really exciting for us and has actually led to this year we've done on-site performances with many of our guest artists on campuses and it's sort of like the door was open and we had our template we knew like what we wanted to do from a marketing perspective to promote all of those things on campus and in the community the other thing that was really great about this project from a marketing perspective is it was the first time that we as a team had implemented a social media campaign we had never done that before so this idea that the bike had all these hashtags all over it and that everywhere Taylor went we were posting everywhere and so that was a really good exercise for us to figure out how and why to do social media campaigns I know it sounds like hello it was 2015 why are you just doing your first social media campaign but we had never really done a targeted like robust campaign like that so I'm gonna I'm gonna show you the video and then talk a little bit more about some of the outcomes that that were left as a result of this project okay thank you college everybody's all over Miami from Kendall to Jeremy with students giving top-up performances speaking with them there you rise all over town there's a little band all over Miami beat downtown and it culminated these great performances on Kagan's performance we're trying to implement the blockade of this West Coast story on bicycle playing using that as an analogy to talk about the creative process I'm trying to implement so that you're the nervous that part of the challenge being that Miami is known as not being a multi-friendly environment so having a chance to explore the city in a different way working with my musicians and colleagues and working for a musician from Miami, great poets from Miami trying to find ways that we can incorporate alternative means of transformation and alternative means of creativity and music and sound talking a lot about Miami that was to explore the city and the people in a really exciting way but as I said, the people have an impact on it transportation is a structure needs more but it's been a great experience as we're together it's been really fun music it was there so the things that came out of it for us were this sort of new way of working marketing we developed all of these new relationships and have ways to work with all these people again and I mentioned earlier that Taylor was really interested in working with locally based artists and we have a program where we bring a guest artist for a month to do what we call our live arts lab to create work to work on their time for themselves in the studio as well as an opportunity for locally based artists to have professional development through being touched by someone else's practice and process and technique and Taylor actually came with his wife Rachel Burns who's a choreographer and they talked about collaboration and improvisation and for a month with the relationship with Miami and I'm just trying to think of everything really quickly that was lasting about this and then yesterday I was at the up next pitch session and I saw this squawk proposal and they were like we're doing a bicycle thing and I was like oh my god we can do that obviously it sets a model for lots of things in terms of community engagement but in particular now we have these relationships with the emerging Miami and we understand what it means to do a bike ride and I think that's it because I don't want to take up more time Taylor anything? I love how you said in the video that you got people to meet each other even when they live in the same community and I think that was something that came out of a lot of these. Is there anything you'd like to come up and add? I would just say for me it was a nice affirmation of taking the time to take a little more time and build a really collaborative relationship between presenter and artist as opposed to sort of a one night stand such as it is it really it really allowed I think for them it opened up a lot of things for me for my own work it opened up a lot of things and developed a model of being able to do community based residencies build towards larger ensemble projects build towards fine models that I have used much the year and have used since then and so I think that's really it really was I think a deeply mutually beneficial opportunity and I think that's something taking that a little bit of extra time and investing and we were lucky you know we got the support from the APEC Creative Capital thing we had the creative capital support behind it we got this great Chamber of Music America presenting grant so all those things together we were able to take that time but it was just it was absolutely worth it to be able to spend that kind of invest that kind of into it I think one more really important thing I forgot to say I just want to say that I think possibly one of the most important things behind the success of this project was working with Taylor who binom who and I'm not just saying that because I love you I'm saying that because he's the kind of artist who was like understanding both sides of the relationship and understanding the needs and so flexible and so like involved so interested in collaboration and not having you know like a prisoner artist relationship that's about you know the contract I mean there was a contract but that's key and that's important and working with artists like Taylor is like a dream and truly led to the success of this project so thank you Taylor I think that means you can raise your feet right so so as part of this project I went to four of the five site visits and talked with all of the presenters in depth as well as the artists and it was really interesting to see what themes emerged over the course of it and I think probably listening to all five and we're going to keep moving since we only have about 15 minutes left and we do want to leave some time for Q&A as well you've probably noticed some of the themes but I would say that you know certainly one of the one of the biggest was not just the artist community relationship or the presenter community relationship but also the artist presenter relationship and I think what happens a lot of times in these large scale residencies is that you're building the relationship with the community at the same time that you're building the relationship with the artist and those things can happen in parallel process and sometimes there isn't that framework developed in advance between the artist and the presenter for working together and certainly the most successful projects were those where that was clearly spelled out and understood in advance and they talked about the individual goals and how they could work together to make that happen and I would say key to that relationship were really two components one was communication certainly and being clear about who was responsible for what but also just making sure that people were in the loop even if they may directly affected but the other was transparency and this was actually something that I heard from a number of the artists when I talked to them was that they didn't really understand why the presenter had a grant to do community building and what the purpose of that community building was and so I think as presenter sometimes we get in a sort of myopic point of view where we're thinking about our community and what we're doing but we're forgetting to involve the person who's actually the nexus in making that so you know as a lesson learned from this certainly that I'm taking out of it is how important it is to make sure that all three parties are represented and that when the artist is at the table with the community the presenter is also there and vice versa when possible likewise in the advance visit you heard from a couple of people talking about how critically important that was in building interest particularly when an artist isn't as well known in a particular community it is a lot of time and effort and expense to make that happen but the investment of that time really pays off and reads big dividends in terms of I would say a few things one is that the marketing staff and the staff of the presenter really understands the project much more and is able to present it to the community in a more honest and able to frame it in a way that makes more sense for people but secondly the community as I'm trying to remember I think it was you Stephanie who mentioned it how the community then had this trust and understanding of knowing what was going on and so they didn't feel like they were just being sold a bill of goods by the presenter but they really had that relationship with the artist and felt committed to that and then of course the artist understands what's unique about the community and brings that into the show and certainly having gone on the bicycle tour I saw that happen in Miami and other cities as well so it really creates a win-win-win for all three of those the partners longer planning horizons these projects take a lot of time and I think instead of too little happening too late it's often too much happens too late and we forget particularly in working with new audiences it takes a lot of time and a lot of explanation and often repeated hearings before people really process and understand what they're being asked to do so I would say that for a sustained multi-channel approach allowing a lot more time for the planning process is critically important and we even see it sometimes in the sales process where people may not buy tickets until the last minute but they've known about it for six months and they've been mentally planning their schedules around a particular event even if they're not actually acting on it so making sure that that planning horizon is long enough is really important one of the goals of this project was really to focus on quality rather than quantity and go deep rather than go big in some cases it was both there were certainly as Jenny talked about the number of events that they had in Miami but it was also a very deep personal connection for the people who were involved and the impact there was was quite huge the capacity building effects was kind of an unintended consequence of this residency and a number of the presenters talked about thinking about residency building in this way really built their staff in a different way it built a greater level of trust among staff members that they've been working together for years but didn't really necessarily know what each other was capable of and that it really pushed the organization to be better than they had previously thought they could be and now we're extending that into other ways and then the final thing was marketing experimentation that people talked about everything from new modes of marketing to using video for the first time or working with new partners in the case of MDC they distributed all of their hashtags and social media channels to every partner in advance so that there was a consistency in messaging and then planning it so that everything really hit at the same time just when they wanted the interest to peak and they weren't alone in that working with new and experimental artists you also have to change the modes of communication to draw the audiences in on that so with that oh and then the last thing I would say is missed opportunities that's a great thing when you end a residency and feel like there's more that you could be doing or you could have done if only you had known or things that you can do better that just improves the process over and over again so I would certainly encourage everybody to think about what are the missed opportunities in any major residency but also not to beat yourself up over it because that's just a way of making it better down the road so with that we can open it up we have about 10 minutes left if anybody has questions for the group or for a specific presenter or artist and if not I have a few that I can throw in there as a ringer in any case so go ahead anybody can feel this I'm wondering at what point in your process was the community brought in had the each case had the artists already been selected in the project taken on before the community was then engaged to interface with it or were there cases in which the community was having a voice that led to the choosing and implementation of the project in the first place I think that's a tremendous point before I blacked out I flew back in the course across the country I had to go home and open a show and came back a little under the weather you know because as a curator you're always choosing the games that everyone gets to play and that's annoying and I think I noticed with complex movements I think Sarah's point about getting on the same page about what your goals are initially became really that was maybe a missed opportunity because then there wasn't a trust when we began initially trying to find those people in the community to build a project we had a group of people that we said that we thought were the right people for them to talk to who could introduce them to any number of stakeholders they wanted to do that work themselves and I understand why and I think that was a real learning point through it and it's led to a larger issue in my mind going forward about and you just hit it in initiating a project like this do you want to be that kid determining what your community the game your community is going to play not to say art is a game but you know what I'm saying or do you want to use those relationships as an opportunity that the community wants to take on and I wouldn't want to program an entire season like that but when we're talking about deepening relationships with specific communities of people I think it's one we really have to consider as curators and producers going forward go for it and then I'll talk about it our experience was that the way the project worked is that there was like several artists that and we had to apply for the project so the artist was definitely selected before the community relationships were developed the community did not select the artist we were kind of like wow this seems like it would be so it would groove really nicely with our community and then in the process of applying to do it we connected with some of the potential partners and we're like hey we have this opportunity if we do this would this be interesting to you and would you want to participate in it and there was a yes and then it was like okay we'll let you know and then we got the opportunity and we went back to build the relationship further just quite similarly we also had obviously selected the artists we knew by that point in the year that Taylor Mack was going to be on our season whether or not we'd be able to do the advance visit and the sort of deep audience building work was different but I think that sort of trust building the very low risk piece of being able to go to partners last winter and fortunately they were people we had relationship with had just never brought them together but to go to people and just say hey do you want to have lunch with this artist they're coming in they'll talk about their show for next year we'll buy you lunch like that was a lot different than that normal process of being able to say we have this artist the show is here do you want to do this event two nights before with us and they're like oh what what what so it was a lot easier to say sit down with this artist hear what they have to say and if you want to build something when he comes back great if not it's just an interesting meeting of the minds we do do other work and we have recently started experimenting more with the process of saying here's a community partner we want to work with you we want to help you serve your constituents let's select an artist together and that's certainly a very complicated project process that I'm happy to talk about offline but yeah well and I think especially in the case of Taylor Mack the title of his show is so long a 24 decade history of American or of popular music and it kind of it confused people because I think in some cases people were talking about the 24 hour show and that this was a subset of it but it wasn't necessarily always clear in the communications to the community that that was the case so having that one-on-one opportunity certainly helped to clarify that a lot as well so other questions yes go ahead I'm coming from I'm from then the college and through my program we the students art and marketing which was up to you how did you guys engage the college can you come from a diverse group of people who are involved with more sports to come to your event and also engaging your community filled with a lot of people so the question is sort of like how do we involve the students know how that you promote the event to the different sectors of individuals and are you specifically asking about students or just the community both students and the community at large both well as Sarah mentioned we we involve all of our partners in the marketing process so this social media campaign that I referred to and as she mentioned we had it was like we had this schedule it was like what and when to post and what and how to hashtag so that people so that it was scheduled it was all like having the same time and then we of course asked them all to promote it the way they would normally promote things to their communities so for example working with the bike group you know they have a blog and they have whatever other ways they have they have a weekly meeting that you know so this bike ride was like on their agenda every week leading up to it and was like don't forget our ride for April is with the acoustic bicycle tour and so it was really about having the partners reach their constituencies in their own vocabulary yeah I would say for us that we I keep moving seats what did you say this room stinks I keep moving seats oh you're talking about marketing we believe quite a bit in mass media still we buy ads and papers stuff like that we use direct mail and like segmented direct mail we've presented a number of things that relate to Taylor Mack so does everybody like a lot of stuff relates to Taylor Mack so we you know for each of those people really directly we spend a lot of money on Facebook but not other social media like because people are going to see our Facebook posts once we spend money for them to see it and you can target that pretty interesting things like that and in this case we did some really grassroots stuff with like people involved in our literary scene literature the literary scene there is a big big deal so there's all sorts of different structures that are interested in that and alternative papers that I don't think the main newspaper didn't but we had preview articles along those lines too I mean it's all pretty like standard stuff and I said like our sales stunk the week of the show we sold 250 total tickets like which was like 50 short of our whole like which so it's all just great but it would have been it would have been a different story to tell here our football team had got to be there until they got their butts kicked in our Rose Bowl I'm going to ask one last question of all five of you or however many of you there what is the and just really quick what is the biggest issue that you faced in doing this residency compared to other residencies that you've done what do you mean by issue biggest challenge the biggest thing that you had to overcome or the hardest thing or the biggest surprise there were several for us but briefly I would say the idea that cross cultural exchange equals good it's a good thing that was an assumption that I maybe maybe a privileged assumption I would have made going into this project but one of the things we found because the pod only contained 25 people if it was the our audience who typically comes on the board the subscription audience that could be a very white audience and that could change the complexion and the tone of what the show did from the audience development standpoint if we're bringing in the new community and they were watching the show it was very different experiences this is something we talked a lot about with the artists after the fact if there had been a way that we had understood that differently we would have been able to maybe engineer or think about how we reserve seeds to really ensure that it scripted that experience a lot more timely I think for us certainly looking at any more experimental work there are artists that your audiences are unfamiliar with the complexity of the project of the artist of the message was certainly something that was more challenging for us here but I think in the answer to that there is this idea of hearing from the artists themselves about their own work and it could be in an advanced visit which works as Alisa said sometimes well sometimes it's not possible it could be immediate it could be the video it could be you know an interview they're trying to find ways to stop filtering through the language of your own marketing departments or the talking points of the agent and the manager and finding that artist voice because that's what's going to resonate and that's what's going to give somebody a perspective into the experience that they're going to have and I think people who interacted with Taylor or saw the video were more willing to say I still look at this show and the preconcept the preconceived notions of what they thought it was going to be or they weren't sure if they were going to like it like that was a hurdle but they had that trust to say okay I'll take a chance on that and I think that getting that artist voice more directly into your community earlier in the process Taylor what was your biggest challenge as an artist? Other than like Miami really sucks to bike in I think it goes actually very much what you're saying is the idea of branding and preconceptions and both accepting the fact that in a way I love the fact that there's called the inclusive bicycle as opposed to being a free jazz show or experimental classical show or whatever it was nice at the same time I don't want to have to bike to every show and don't ruin my life so how to get people to follow the artist and not the project brand if that makes sense Every challenge was time I guess we could be doing like all sorts of different activities and performances and discussions with Taylor for weeks like literally there's so rich and interesting and but it's also a show that's being built like it's an enormously ambitious show and we would at some point we thought we'd have more days in advance of the show but it needed to be rehearsed it needed to be built and it was two other decades were happening the weeks right afterwards so all those sorts of practicalities and we would have been happy to do that but we're also happy to support the work and to me part of supporting that work is being like you know what you need to come a day like come on Wednesday not Tuesday or whatever it was and rehearse and be sure you got you're doing your process and if I could just jump in because that actually was the huge hurdle especially I think in Iowa is that this is supporting an artist doing their work the grant didn't necessarily support that artist in practicality it supported the presenter doing a special marketing thing which wasn't you know the resources were very limited and it's a pilot program everyone was on board and understood that but I think when it is an artist at work there's a certain reality to that and there are expenses that are associated with that of having a band come and gear and playing tickets and all those things to do advanced business and things like that that's where the realities really come into play is that sometimes all of this community building actually takes really hard it's not just a relationship it actually takes hard dollars in some cases and that's where you know that's where I think I think are challenging about it and the realities of that are really real for the artist and certainly one thing that I heard too was that artists are applying for grants to support the creation of the work presenters are applying for grants to support the presentation of the work and if those two aren't talking to each other it can be really confusing about well wait a minute you got this grant to do what with my work what do I have to do for that and am I getting paid more for that or is my time being valued there's a lot to think about with that and being respectful of that on both ends that's really that whole conversation that we had earlier about transparency and one last thing on time frame for us we're going to bring Taylor back that's another reason why like sure we'll lose a day we're going to do other sections of this piece and whatever the next projects are like this is a not a like oh we had to build an audience these four days in December this is an ongoing this are really interesting artists Jenny you have the last word and then we'll thank everybody for suffering this 140 degree room I just want to underscore what you said and what Taylor said and keeping the art at the center but the other thing I want to say is for me the challenge of deep deep community engagement especially with all of these different partners all at once is the so many moving parts is managing so many moving parts and maintaining authenticity and maintaining the art at the center yes one last word I just have a quick question about the Detroit project I don't remember hearing much about any kind of specific outreach you might have maintained Detroit hip hop community yeah that's because I blacked out the complex movements basically spent a year their own relationships they formed what they called a community cohort led by members there was somebody from James Williams who was from an organization that's about ending the prison industrial complex another one was Lulu Carpenter 206 Zulu Nation and invincible as a touring hip hop artist has a lot of contacts nationally including in Seattle so those contacts were made a lot they were over there were six kind of town hall style meetings that happened over the course of the year and they really did a great job of creating a new set of relationships that we didn't have and that we've been able to build on ever since going forward into new projects that's really exciting yeah yeah I'll say finally it was I programmed that work to challenge the community and they actually challenged us first and it was almost like a hiring the artist to do a power audit of your organization and a lot of it has really come out of that and that is a great way to end thank you everyone for coming and for the conference thank you for that thank you Chris look at this video it was great fall


I first came out when I was about 17 to my friends and myself and I didn't come out to my mum until a couple years later and my mum took it really well you know she wasn't surprised she just sort of said that makes a lot of sense and you know I'm really lucky that I had a supportive mum like really accepting who you are such a long journey and I still think I'm on that journey you know it's going to take me a long long time to really come to a place where I fully feel like I've accepted who I am. It feels like you know you kind of have to come out again and again and again because you have to come out to your friends you come out to like people you work with it teaches you something different and I'm still trying to learn those lessons I think with years and years I kind of came out to the world so pride's important to me because for so long I felt like I had to hide myself my sexuality and hide who I feel I really am you know it's taken me a long time to get to a place now where I do feel comfortable with my sexuality and so I think pride's still super important because it reminds us that we have to be loud and we have to be proud of who we are and that can sometimes feel really scary and difficult but it's all about celebrating where we've come from and how far we've come and celebrating each other. I always thought I was gay and because I really like I fancied Aladdin when I watched Aladdin and other Disney princes and I mean I love Jasmine but mainly because she had such nice hair when I was growing up I I mean I can't remember any out pop stars really I mean I knew George Michael was gay and and I was aware that he'd had this quite difficult coming out and he was in the closet to begin with and I don't know it felt like there was really sort of no one out there who I felt kind of represented me we really can't sort of like underestimate the importance of representation and we're getting much better now you know we've got so much so many more artists who are like taking center stage and having their experiences heard but we need to kind of I think keep encouraging more and more people to get their voices heard and you know represent our community which is so diverse having artists who are speaking about their experience and kind of stepping out there and not being afraid to be who they are it's just really encouraging for whoever you are so I think if I had sort of had that as a teenager if I had seen that reflected in kind of popular culture I think I would have been less scared to be to be myself I think our greatest support is each other and to you know I found great comfort and through my queer friends who you know can talk to me about their experience we can share our stories and and you know we can support each other and it's a bit like we are a family I think and we have to lift each other up find another queer person wherever you can and and and and share something because because you almost always find you're not alone


That's what this government is all about, Mr. Speaker. Hello and welcome to another installment of Parliament Roundup. My name is Jesse Layance. In its first sessions of the year, members of the Honourable House approved the declaration of a state of emergency in St. Lucia for a further period of 90 days, commencing from 11th February to 16th May 2021. This accompanied by a curfew, a 10-hour curfew of 7pm to 5am. Petitioned by Prime Minister Hon. Alan Shastney in the House, the declaration he believes will buttress the COVID-19 prevention and control legislation. He told the Lower House that recent analysis indicates that over 55% of the persons who contracted COVID-19 are between the ages of 25 to 49 years old. Contact tracing data also discovered that most cases and their contacts were involved in breaches in the social sector, hence the institution of the curfew at night time. Whilst over the last few weeks we have pulled back and limited social activities, there is still mounting evidence of social events taking place, especially in the evenings at private locations. This is among the biggest threat in our fight against COVID-19, and hence the need for the curfew, which now will allow the police to better manage and contain these illegal activities by restricting movements at those times. The Prime Minister adds that the curfew, which can only be instituted under a state of emergency, will assist contact tracing operations by reducing the movement of persons. Opposition Member, Parliamentary Representative for Cass Street's South Honourable Dr. Ernest Hiller contended that the COVID-19 prevention and control legislation on its own was sufficient to address breaches in the social sector. Honourable Dr. Hiller also questioned whether the overnight curfew was best, as he says people gather and interact more during the day. Honourable Chasne did share his sentiment that the COVID-19 prevention and control legislation has robust measures to mobilize the national response. However, he says compliance to these measures remains a challenge, and St. Lucia is at a critical juncture, having to cull its highest infection rates to date, whilst approaching another holiday period, Easter. The Prime Minister asserts that a curfew, whether increased or reduced, must be permissible at this time, as it has been proven to work in the past. The COVID-19 Act that we put in place has served us well. But sadly, given the inability to cause persons to adhere fully to the protocols we're putting in place, and the breaches that are obvious to all of us, it is necessary for us to be here today. It's certainly my government's intention to continue to be guided by the evidence. And as we see the numbers coming down, Mr. Speaker, and we recognize that the COVID Prevention Act can continue to contain the situation, then we will suspend the state of emergency. Along with the State of Emergency Parliament also approved amendments to the COVID-19 Prevention and Control Act. Protocols that guide physical distancing, business sector operations, and physical closure of schools have also been legislated. And these expire on the 16th of February 2021. Parliament has also signed off on the suspension of alcohol sales, and this expires on the 24th of February. Quarantine facilities in VG Castries and Rodney Bay-Groselle have been approved for reinstatement. The rapid antigen test has been inserted into the legislation alongside the PCR for COVID-19 testing in St. Lucia. And while the PCR test remains free, the rapid antigen test will cost no more than EC$100. A list of five laboratories designated to carry out the antigen test have also been included. And they are the Laboratory Services and Consultation Services Limited, Microlab Inc., Global Clinical Laboratories, Descartes Laboratory, and Alpha and Omega Laboratory Services. In the meantime, the Forensic Lab will be assisting the Owen King EU Hospital to process the backlog of PCR tests. The minister responsible for the institution says the government is exploring all its options to address chinks in the COVID-19 response. Last time we were here, advice was given to us that we use some of the private labs. The private labs are being used. Pressure has been placed on us because returning nationals to their countries now have to get the PCR tests. So additional problems arose. We are now going to be using the Forensic Lab. And the Forensic Lab will be functional from Friday to be able to do some of the PCR tests first. So we are trying. That was Senator the Honourable Herman Gill-Francis. A reduced quarantine fees for returning nationals have also been approved. A single occupancy, which was US$95, is now reduced to US$25. Double occupancy, which was US$160, is now reduced to US$45. And triple occupancy, which was US$240, is now reduced to US$65. Double and triple occupancy applies to families within the same unit. The daily fees cover the cost of a bed and bathroom, air conditioning, Wi-Fi, three meals a day, toiletries and bottled water. The government will continue to honour requests for exemptions for returning students within three months of completion of studies and also to individuals who have travelled for medical care. And the government will also consider the dire circumstances of persons including the forced repatriation of nationals. A travel requirements have also been adjusted in the legislation and prior to travelling into St. Lucia individuals must now have taken a test and have a negative result for that test five days before arrival instead of the previous seven days. Minister for Health and Wellness and Leader of Government Business in the Upper House, Senator the Honourable Mary Isaac explains. The five days that we are requiring, it is making the test more valid and more reliable, more dependable than the seven days that we were requiring before. Because of the spike, Madam President, we have decided and based on the technocrats' advice, we have decided to tighten the space between the time that the people take the test and the time that they show up on our shores. So we are just ensuring that we have a test that is more valid than the seven-day test. A Leader of Opposition Business in the Senate, Senator Gibyan-Ferdinand expressed concern that there was insufficient basis for the adjustment to pre-testing. Even if we do not believe that we should move from seven days to five days or from seven days to any number of days, there is a trend of thought from all of the practices that all countries are trying to reduce or to minimise the period between the time the test was taken and the time the visitor arrives at your shores. In some countries they have decided to test upon arrival and in some countries they have gone to three days like I mentioned. We have decided to move from seven to five. It's not just a statistical move, Madam President. There has to be something upon which this is predicated. Senator Hon. Isaac clarified that the reduced pre-testing period will increase the validity of the negative test as there have been instances of arrivals testing negative seven days before travel and contracting the virus during that time gap indicates that the five-day pre-testing will be subject to review after assessment. Why I said we will wait and see what happens is because we are instituting the five days but when our diaspora, people in our diaspora get here and they express the issues that they are having you may well see that we have to move to another measure where we may start having to test when people get here as opposed to just requiring a five-day test but this is very fluid Madam President so I did not want to go into all of what the technocrats are looking at when we try to put measures in place to control the virus. And finally Parliament also approved the value added tax concessions for February and March 2021 on imported barrels that carry personal items food, clothing, toys and other household consumables Independent Senator Mauricio Thomas-Francis commended this initiative and used the opportunity to highlight the continued remittances and other resources that seclutions in the diaspora send back home despite their own challenges in this pandemic. The barrel concession is very useful because it provides much-needed help to St. Lucien that are struggling and cannot make ends meet to actually take care of their basic needs. We need to be very, very thankful and not to take for granted the assistance that families receive from the diaspora. And that was independent Senator Mauricio Thomas-Francis there. Well, we've come to the end of another edition of Parliament Roundup for the Parliamentary Proceedings on the 9th and 10th of February 2021. My name is Jesse Leos signing off. Do stay tuned for more NTN programming. Goodbye.