We're very honoured to have Dr. Babatunde Oztiman here today, Under Secretary General of the United Nations with Executive Responsibility for the UN, UNFPA as I knew it, the UN Population Fund. And he has been here to launch the World Population 2016 report this morning with the Irish Planning Association. And I think they have hit on a master stroke by looking at the 10-year-old girl in the world today in various countries and tracking the progress of 10-year-old girls over the next 15 years, the length of time of the sustainable development goals. So by the time they're 25 to see how they are doing. Dr. Babatunde is, as I said, Under Secretary General and Director of the Population Fund, a physician and a global health leader. And he's had a number of prestigious positions in several academic and health organisations, including Provost of the College of Medicine at the University of Ibadan and Chair of the National Action Committee on AIDS in Nigeria, Director General of Nigeria's National Action Committee on AIDS, and Health Minister of Nigeria before taking up his present position in 2011. So I think without further ado, I'll pass the microphone to you, Dr. Babatunde. And we'll be very interested to hear your presentation today. I want to start by thanking the Director General for inviting me, Tom Arnold. And he and I share commonalities with David Nabarro, and we've just been talking about him. So I was asked to speak about women's health and gender equality, and we could do that for the rest of the year. But I think, you know, given the centrality of gender equality in the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, I think it's a very apt subject to speak to. The new development agenda calls on all of us to lead no one behind, and to start with the farthest, with those farthest behind. And we know all too often that these are women and girls in every circumstance. And I think it's important to state here that the development, the Sustainable Development Goals is not about developing countries. It's about all of us. It's universal, and all of us have to be part of it. And when you look at women and girls, women and girls are left behind everywhere. The pay, the gender pay gap is an index of what is happening just about in every community. And I was telling a group just now that I was very surprised when I got to the United States, I've lived there now for, it's my sixth year, that corporate America does not actually give maternity leave to women. It's like, where did that come from? But it tells you the frame in which women are held and what the mean to the world. And which is wrong? Because I believe and I've lived it all the time that women are better in management, women are better in many circumstances. And if you give them the opportunity, they will show themselves. I used to teach in a medical school. And my best students were girls.  They are the ones who look after them. They are the ones who deliver. The boys are busy playing football or snooker. And they don't come to the table. They don't do what they have to do. But unfortunately, when it comes to selection and when it comes to the way we place them going forward, they disappear. And so I think it's important that we begin to address this. Now, around the world, women and girls feel the greatest impact of poverty, of climate change, of food insecurity, lack of health care and education. I mean, health care. And I will say this because I was in Japan last year. We're talking about the issues of gender in Japan. Japan has the largest number of long-living people. I mean, that is the oldest country in the world. But of course, within that demographic, women live longer than men. But you know what happens? The women who outlive their husbands actually are poor because the system doesn't look after them in a way like you expect them to be looked after. So in a sense, in every circumstance, we have to continue to think about it and make sure that we look after them. And today, 65 million people have been displaced from their homes. So migration and refugees is something that we have to contend with. And women and girls make up an increasing proportion of migrants.  And their rights are increasingly under threat. So displaced women and adults and girls are at a height in risk of violence, rape, trafficking, and sexually. And I think we have to ensure that as we take all this into consideration, these are the things we must act upon.  This includes pregnant women who may face potentially life-threatening childbirth complications. Yet in humanitarian settings, these services often take a back seat to other urgent needs. And I'm sure that if I ask you today what would be your first priority if there is a crisis, you would tell me food, sanitation, water, and shelter. Nobody thinks of the dignity of women. But it's very important. And, you know, just how we satisfy that and we look after that is so critical in going forward. So the health and the well-being of women's world, of women's, world's women and girls must be top priority if you are to achieve the sustainable development goals. So what I'm talking about is in peace and in conflict and in disasters, we have to have systems and mechanisms in place to look after them and to ensure that they get what they require for us to be able to have a sustainable system. Now, so the peaceful, stable, and prosperous future we all want for our healthy planet is totally dependent on the welfare and the way we look after our women and girls. And so when you look at the sustainable development goals, the world leaders recognized that and the family embedded gender equality and women and girls empowerment throughout, you know, no matter which of the 17 goals you look at, there is a piece of it that speaks to empowerment of women and girls. And I think that that's something we must carry with ourselves all the time now. Also, I must say and there was a conversation on this morning that when it comes to, and I'm going to talk to some SDGs, but I want to put a prefix to it. When we talk about the sustainable development goals, they are supposed to be implemented together. We are not supposed to now say the priority for Ireland is SDG 5. No, because SDG 5 is dependent on one, two, three, four, and on peaceful societies and, you know, all the things that we put there. So you have to put all of them together for it to make sense. So it is with that prefix that I will talk to SDG 5, which specifically calls for an end to discrimination against women and girls and the elimination of all forms of violence and harmful practices. And let me say there are some things that are violent. We all agree to that. But to also say that one in three women in the world, no matter where they are, will suffer gender-based violence in their lifetime. One in three. So it's a pandemic. Many people don't talk to it, but it's there. But there are some things that stand out. Early and forced marriage. I mean, those are things that we cannot accept. How do you marry a 10-year-old? How do you marry a 9-year-old? What kind of man will marry a 9-year-old? I mean, those are things that we have to stand up to and say we have to stop. And just before we came here, we were talking about female gender mutilation.  And in the name of culture, there's no culture that destroys people's bodies and lives. And I think that, you know, we have to stand up and speak against this and try to make sure that it stops. Now, SDG 3 aims at ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for women at all ages and contains targets on reducing maternal mortality and ensuring universal access, sexual and productive health, and care services, including family planning. Now, I think it also links to SDG 5.  It's not acceptable. And I think we have to look at it from a rights perspective. We count and should not look at it as health. Because when you look at it as health, you reduce it.  And to that extent, we have to invest in that life to ensure that in giving life, she doesn't lose our life. Now, that's a right. That is not something we must compromise. But we do compromise it because it goes back to the value we place on the women in our societies. And we don't do enough to protect them. I'll tell you a story. I went to a neighboring country, to Nigeria, when I was minister of health. And I got to the hospital because they thought, as a doctor, they should show me a hospital. I'm tired of looking at hospitals. But they took me there. And I entered and I saw this woman who was in labor. They said, how long has she been in labor? Been in labor for 36 hours. So I asked the doctor, so why have you not done anything with her?  I said, no, this is unacceptable. How much is it? I'll give her the money. So now he says, minister, you don't have to pay me. I said, no, because that's what you just told me that she has to pay. Anyway, they went ahead and tried to operate as she died, the child died, which you can expect. But I asked a further question. So where's the husband? The husband brought and dumped and left. I think that husband should be prosecuted because how do you, how are you responsible for the pregnancy of a woman?   But that tells you the value that he places on that woman and on the child she's going to bear. And when I asked, okay, so what is the attitude of society? Society looks at it and says, he can always take another wife. So in a sense, it's about value systems, about how we look at this and we want it to have. Now, SDG4 is on quality education and calls for elimination of gender disparities in education and ensuring equal access to all levels of education. That means that all girls and the ones that we're talking about, the 10-year-olds, must have access to science, technology, mathematics, engineering, everything that boys get into.  That's not the way it should be because, as I said, my medical students, the female medical students that I teach are the best that I've come across. So in a sense, what you are saying is we should have a level playing field for everybody, particularly women. But all the SDGs from eradicating poverty to protecting ecosystems and promoting peaceful societies depend on the empowerment of women and girls and ensuring that they can have access and exercise their rights. The 2030 Agenda's comprehensive integrated approach to development recognizes that we can't just focus on individual problems in isolation. We need to make connections for truly a transformative change to happen. It's also a universal agenda that I said that before to all countries rich and poor. And this is critical because what we face are universal challenges. Issues such as child marriage, adolescent, pregnancy, and female gender modulation are not just confined to a few developing countries. For example, it is estimated in the United Kingdom 65,000 girls under 13 are at the risk of FGN. Moreover, many of the gains we have seen in recent decades in reducing maternal and child mortality, improving access to sexual and reproductive services, including family planning, boosting girls, school enrollment, and so on, mask significant inequalities in our societies. Beyond that, I also see that there's a rollback in many Western countries of some of these things. I was in Paris the other day when I saw a large group of women marching in Poland. These are issues we have to continue to jury. It is not static, it's dynamic, and we have to continue to make sure that even for the progress we've made in countries like this, we cannot afford to stand still. And even in some weather countries, inequalities prevent most vulnerable marginalized and excluded, especially women and girls, from realizing their rights, including their rights to health. Whilst women's rights, including the right to sexual and reproductive health, are key to achieving many of the sustainable development goals, there's a strong pushback on gender equality. And women's empowerment in many places. This is especially true with respect to SRHR, sexual and reproductive rights, which are the foundations for a life of choice, empowerment, and equality for the women, for the world's women and girls. Too many women and girls, particularly the poor, still live without access to SRH services, including family planning. And so it should come as no surprise that one third of the world's burden of disease for women between the ages of 15 and 44 is related to poor sexual and reproductive health. Too many women continue to have more children than they would prefer to have. And as I speak, 225 million women in developing countries who want to avoid pregnancy are not able to do so because they don't have access to effective contraception.  And this is the second largest leading cause of death among women of reproductive age. Adults in childbirth are as declined, but it's still high in many countries. In fact, when you look at the band of Latin America and the Caribbean, that is the one thing that they want to resolve, which they are not able to resolve. But when you don't do a critical analysis of it, what you see is that teenage pregnancy is consigned to the poor in those countries. So poverty and exclusion is an issue which we have to continue to worry about. So every day when you add it up, adults and girls and women have been left behind. Now I've just come from the launching of the UNFPA, State of the World Population, for 2016. And the report shows that our collective future depends, to a very large extent, on the investments we make in today's adult and girls. When a girl reaches the age of 10, the beginning of a journey through adolescence are world changes. And in a sense, it depends on where she is. In some parts of the world, age number 10, as we saw Hannah, who was presented to me today, it can be a time of exploration, expanding horizons, new possibilities. But in some other parts, and in large part of the world, it can be a time when girls, horizons, choices and opportunities contract and bearers emerge on their path to adulthood. In some countries and communities when a girl reaches age of 10 and approaches puberty, she may suddenly be seen not as a girl capable of anything that she says her mind to, but as a commodity that may be sold, traded or trafficked for marriage, for childbearing, free labor and for sexual exploitation. Although risks are bound for both boys and girls, gender discrimination makes this risk worse for girls in almost every way. And the consequences in loss of health, empowerment, education and opportunities for work are profound. Communities and societies potentially feel the impact if they understand it. And every day, about 47,000 girls, many of them as young as 10, are the risk of early and forced marriage. With child marriage comes pregnancy and with child pregnancy comes the health risks and curtailed education, undermining girls' prospects for jobs and self-sufficiency. I mean, I'm not sure how many of you have seen these girls who have developed fistulas in their lives. Fistula destroys the lives of these girls because they have to be taken away from their social context. They actually are thrown out of homes. They are outcasts in their societies. And in many circumstances, they never recover. Even when you go ahead and repair the fistula, it's difficult for them to reintegrate society. And they're young. So a girl develops a fistula at 11 or 12, it's difficult for her to even go back to school or do anything with herself. And somehow it is this sort of thing that you see that tells you that society has to do something about empowerment and gender equality because that's the way it's going to be. So for many of these, for millions of girls, the level of poverty marks the beginning of a lifetime of poverty and powerlessness. Now, their lives stop being their own and they're dozed to the future slam short. This is an unforgivable injustice and a violation of the fundamental rights of these girls. But when a girl injusta rights is able to stay in schools, stay healthy, and is protected from child marriage and early pregnancy, she has a better chance of realizing full potential by the time she reaches adulthood. She will be better equipped to find a job and a good wage and seized opportunities as they arise. And the report that we just launched shows that girls who reach adulthood with an education and their health and rights intact stand to triple their lifetime income. High incomes are greater and greater productivity, of course, have the full progress of their own personal economy and the economy of their communities and their countries. I must say immediately that as a rights advocate, I never like to talk of women in terms of money. But you know, that's the only, that's the one way that ministers of finance listen to me because when I say, well, listen, I mean, I can double your GDP.  Now, over the next 15 years alone, developing countries together stand to gain a profit at least 21 billion US dollars, depending on whether they invest in the well-being and education and the independence of these 10-year-old girls. Now, you might think that that number is small, but considering that it covers many countries, it might be small. But for the individual girl, the gains are very substantial, the ability to who she wants to be, ability to have a job, ability to start a business, ability to marry when she wants to marry, to have children when she wants to, if she wants to have children and the number she wants to have and the distance between the one and the next. It's such a profound thing to the lives of these individuals. Research has shown that a girl who makes a safe and healthy transition through adolescence to adult youth has her status in a household and the community and invests and back into our household. And as was said earlier, even the children that bear are better off than those of the girls who don't go to school. We know that if a girl has children before she's 18, the livelihood of that child as compared to those who have children after 18 are very different. Survival is different and the quality of life they get is much, much, much better. So now, so when you, you know, if you try to ensure that we do that, we can, we can set in motion a circle of social and economic empowerment that can last for generations. The benefit of keeping a 10-year-old girl's life on track are indisputably large. Doing so requires support from and investments by everyone around her, the family, the community, and government. Men and boys have a critical role in tearing down the barriers that prevent girls from realizing their full potential. We would never achieve gender equality without addressing social norms and gender stereotypes that perpetrate the belief that women and girls are worth less than boys and men because they're not. So how do we keep the girls' life on track? Three things are critical. First, end all practices that harm girls. That means we must enact and enforce laws that prohibit child marriage, that ends female gender mutilation and protecting girls from violence. And it's not about just carefully choosing words. Enact and enforce because if you don't, then it doesn't work. That means that you must work from level of policy all the way to communities to make sure that that works. Second, enable girls to stay in school. That's critical. School education transforms society considerably and at least through high school. And studies after study have shown that the longer a girl stays in school, the less likely she is to become pregnant as an adolescent. The more likely to grow up healthy and join the paid labor force. Third, we must provide extra support to marginalized and impoverished girls who have traditionally been left behind. And we've seen that happen. Societies that have difficulties like that, we've given conditional cash transfers that ensure that the girls go to school and stay in school. And I think we've demonstrated that the poverty that goes with this is something we can alleviate and make sure that these girls do better. Make sure girls, before they reach poverty, have access to information about their bodies. I've never understood it. Why people tell me that I cannot talk to boys and girls about their bodies.  And I'm like, how is that supposed to happen? Oh, yeah, you know, you don't know. I say no. Because I'm a doctor. I've been a doctor for 45 years. I know what you're talking about. You know, a girl should know that she's going to go from a child to an adult. And there are physiological and atomic things that would happen to her during that period of time. So she can take responsibility for her body. She can actually look after sanitation and be told and understand their vulnerabilities. And in those circumstances, can prevent things from happening to her. Early, you know, pregnancies, teen pregnancies, infections, HIV, all of that. Those are things that we can actually prevent if you tell them what's going on. I was astounded. And I actually had to, I had to, I really had to fight a minister in Southern Africa because, you know, he was talking about, oh, no, no, no, we don't want to do it. I say, really? You have the highest prevalence of HIV in the world amongst adults and girls in your country. Only 27% of them know how HIV is transmitted. How do you want to defend that?  And incidentally, it is the adult men in those societies that are transmitted HIV, not the boys. So in a sense, this is something which we must push and use evidence all the time to talk about what's going on. Now, adults and girls and young people need access, and I've just said it, to compare sexuality education, whether they're in school or out of school, and sexual and reproductive health services, including contraception. So they should be able to say, I don't want to get pregnant now. I want to stay in school. I want to do things. And you know, people argue against it, but you know what? These girls access it and they get it. And if you don't tell them what is the right thing to do, they go and get it from the internet or get it from friends and they run into trouble. I've actually had a girl stand up before me and say, you know, I didn't know I was going to get pregnant. I say, really?   I mean, like, no. Then, you know, you're wrong because you didn't get the right information for this to happen. So we must protect that right to information and give them the appropriate information. We have every reason to prioritize the development of every girl's capabilities. Our collective future depends on this. In fact, I always say that the real test of the success of the new development agenda will be whether each of today's 60 million, 10-year-old girls will be healthy, educated and productive in 2030. It is possible. So we have 24 years to get there. So we have to start now and we have to put in place mechanisms that ensure that that happens. And that implies it's not government alone. It's civil society. It's the private sector. It's the media. It's everybody who must ask the questions. We must insist that these things happen because if we don't, then 50 years on the road, we'll ask ourselves, so where did you lose it? We have today a better program than we did with the MDGs. We have today a program that actually has indicators for all of this. We have today an understanding amongst ourselves. When I was talking to Michael earlier today, we need to also mobilize societies to understand it. Communities must understand that this is not business as usual. They must invest in this. And investment is not just about money. Investment is about expertise. Investment is about everything that we have. Today we have a better society, more informed society, more connected society. We can transmit information and get information better than we've ever done before. So it is possible to do it, but we have to get ourselves to do it. And we cannot do it as Ireland or as the UK or as Nigeria or Tanzania or Indonesia. We have to do it as a global community because what works here can actually work someplace else. And we can share those, the knowledge, the expertise, the information. So we don't reinvent the wheel in many parts of the world. We can do it. And that is what this is all about. Universality, sharing information, open borders. Let's do it and let's get these there. We cannot, at this stage, afford to squander the potential. And even more important, we cannot, and the 10-year-old girl of today would not forgive us, when she gets to 24, 25, and she understands that we had those, we had the chances and we just squandered it. Because it's only then that we can have the world, the world world. I thank you.


Unsafe levels. Lockdown in advance. Demand presence at Unsafe levels. Demand presence at Unsafe levels. Lockdown disengaged.


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So welcome everybody, back to you to the Martin's CEO Center at the Graduate Center. My name is Frank Henscher from the CEO of the CEO Center and I put this very good test together at our 20th anniversary. So it's a very special one, it's a very important one to us. And since we are at the university, the key of the importance of education institutions and academia is over what we had the tremendous influence in the panel before we just talked about 15,000 students perhaps graduate in this year alone every year. A lot of money also goes into providing actually services for the theaters, for the professional theaters. It's not really often acknowledged. And the question is how do we spend those resources? What do we educate the students for? What are the new challenges that we have today? I'm also on political, complex situations, not social, complex situations. So it's a logical wrong, so we have to react. What do we do? And we have a panel that we tried to open up everybody. We'll introduce some, give a short statement, then we have a discussion, then we will open up to audience questions. We would also like to welcome our viewers on how around, and we're going to do a little experiment which we did before. We're going to ask three people in the audience, right off the bat, what comes to your mind when you hear academia and professional theater, what's right, what's wrong, what's missing? Let me just start for a minute. What's missing from academia and professional theater is the deep relationship between the two and the three of them, being able to write scholarship and be in a room with practitioners and not have this divide between our worlds. In being a failure in the New York City school system and an academic, I always found that education was missing excitement. If you really want to touch people like myself, then I should be excited about going to school. And I never was. And that's what's missing. What's missing professional theater's house inside the institutions, which wasn't always missing, but it's missing now. I would say by thinking of masters and activate programs like a transition where ensembles can emerge out of the university, so they can have an incubator before they go into the professional world. So like bridge. Yeah, so this was where a little preparation, we had a little bit, not a lot much more time, but a little bit more when we saw all the really great workers in the field and the video, so we're going to hear some sorts. It's also open, you know, it's a discussion, so it's not going to be nobody's expecting a written paper. So really the idea is, so listen, what's on your mind? What do we say? We live, I think, in dangerous times. I think we live in very serious times. The theater is in a complicated situation at the moment, and I think academia has also to reason what is going to take it very serious. Maybe you can stop this, you can take a break. I'm going to take by heart the email. Can you take? You'll have the live people see this. Yeah, take this one. Hello, thank you. I'm going to start with a word from my dog that is really connected to the word I'm believing. I'm going to take it into heart that email you sent for it, so I'm going to stop it whenever you want. So he sent five, seven years of presentation, so that's what I'm going to start doing. I'm going to visit a really personal overview. As a director, actor, educator in March, I just came from South Korea teaching as an assistant professor in the Institute of the Art Department, which was a really focused, accurate training program. And now I'm teaching MIT music and theater arts, which is a completely different type of theater. That approach from Korea to now MIT is completely different. By that I mean now working with actors that usually don't have a background, don't have a training. But my surprise was even though I was working in a focused program for actors training and non-actors training right now with MIT, both scenario situations, my approach has been the same. I have noticed in the eyes of the students that hunger to be this role, to connect. So my approach, my answer to what we're going on right now is to embrace germs, decolonization, and pathophysics. After the pandemic, I felt that there was a fear to touch, to connect face to face. So I didn't know how I was going to be making or theater or teaching theater, so that was a big question. So the first production idea after the pandemic was my loneliness at this time. It was an experimental musical with deaf actors, deaf and hearing actors. We get back over years. These two play at the New York theater, now they're close to the New York theater. Anyway, all these participation that will come set has always been part of my theater out of it. But I had no idea how to approach it after the pandemic. So not knowing how to move forward in that first project, I decided to embrace fear, bucket, celebrating germs, no fourth world. Then the reaction of the audience was really beautiful. It's a surprise reaction, feedback, reviews, overwhelming. The audience wanted to connect. The same thing happened with Joe in South Korea and Matt Manander on and Kara Turkey. Even though I was not speaking the language of when I was in those countries, there was a need to connect, a need to communicate. Again, people wanted germs, they wanted to play, they wanted to connect and then I saw it in their eyes. And again, I'm talking for my practical point of view, not an academic point of view, like academia, great also practice in the field. Same thing happened to me being in academia right now. I see the hunger of the students. They want to connect, but they don't know how to connect. So let me see. I think academia should absorb what is happening in the present time without forgetting the macro of history. We must take this information that just hopefully take, create a free superset, create a space, lab to bond with all this and see what comes out. That's the academic classroom I'm trying to create and fight for. I try to train an actor to listen to their inner temple and voices. Actors already with deep visual opinions of art and why art, a space that they're allowed to be stupid or make mistakes, a space where we celebrate diversity. This has been my experience performing teaching in the US and abroad and the results have been positive so far. And I want to stop with two thoughts from, two words from them from my mentor at Columbia University MFA program. The first word is Ipsy Dixie and the second one is Cooley. Ipsy Dixie means those who remember to hear beyond the words. Cooley, the one-on-one dialogue. There's no magic form on our equation. The formula is always changing. And then the roots of everything for me, theater is going back to the circle, the fire. We have this mysterious need to tell stories to each other. We must move forward without forgetting the past.  There's no movement that is going to dance. There's no movement that is going to dance. There's no sound. There's no song that is going to chant. There's no action that is going to prayer anyway. I don't know if I'm saying it, but hopefully this creates a discussion. Hi everyone. It's a little bit of a tough act to follow. I'm not a practitioner. I'm a control producer and I've been working in New York for the last 10 years. And I've been working mostly in the field as well. I've been teaching at the Arts Administration Masters at Cooley. And I think some of what you would all be saying was interesting to me. I'm sorry. It didn't seem that you knew that this morning, so I didn't prepare for minutes. But something that you weren't mentioning, and this was mentioned also in the previous panel, was the lack of connection with practitioners, the lack of excitement, the lack of professional leaders in institutions, and the lack of incubation or the lack of incubators. And a lot of that is what I've been dedicated my life to and my work to. Right before my current job, I was at the Shea and one of the things that we did was an open call. And thinking about how do emerging professionals in the performing arts and individual arts transition to a professional of our arena? How can we support them? I think a lot of this is also about how do we work after the pandemic? And so that has been inviting artists in. I was laughing when you said South Korea because I'm coming to South Korea in May next year and I want to hear all your recommendations to a conference called Arts and Society. And we're going to be specifically talking about engagement and curation. And what does this mean in terms of how do we create audiences, which is also something that you were talking about? How do we ensure that artists are brought in not only to create the work, but also to connect with others and to create what I call like mirrors and windows, mirrors for others to see themselves reflected in and windows to discover something about someone else and something new. And I think that's what we as professionals, what we as practitioners need to continue doing. I'm particularly very interested in seeing that creating an audience and building an audience is more about like listening to practitioners and allowing them to bring their own communities into spaces. Many times from professional Jewish or predominantly white institutions have a hard time doing that and allowing for tickets to be free or very accessible to go to these communities. So that's something that I've been thinking a lot about. I think a lot about how do we disrupt and our artists, the best people to do that in the panel before also, they were thinking about how communities, queer performance communities didn't need to be brought into institutions or academic institutions and how we need to keep those spaces sacred and I agree. And also, I know, for example, an artist like Carmelita Tropicana, who is like one of the founders of WoW Theater, one queer practitioner got invited by Yale and really changed the way in which those young people were being educated and we were being trained. And I think engagement to me is that is how do we bring artists to be those agents of change in institutions. So just sharing a couple of the things that I'm thinking of right now and how do we like to be reserving and inviting those artists and reserving legacy as part of it. Thank you very much. Yes. Hi, I'm Alexis Jamal. I'm an associate professor at Silverman School of Social Work that's under CUNY, under Hunter College. So you're probably wondering why I'm on this panel. Well, I use, I try to integrate drama-based and theater-based arts with social work practice and to bridge many divides that were mentioned, so bridging the macro and the micro, bridging the micro-macro divides. So understanding how macro processes have micro consequences, for example, you know, with culture, laws, customs, you know, they're influenced by our values and our beliefs and how I think maybe some of you may know the Clark and Clark doll study in the 1960s which demonstrated internalized anti-blackness. So these young kids, four years old, you know, three years old, five years old, black, many kids of color, black kids were asked to pick which doll and one doll was black, one doll was white, and so they were asked which is the good doll, which is the bad doll, which is the pretty doll, which is the smart doll, right? And so every time there was a good characteristic, it was the white doll, right? And every time there was a bad characteristic, it was the black doll. So, you know, we have all of these messages of white supremacy, of anti-blackness that are in our culture that are internalized and we're socialized into. So, and that causes a lot of problems from the molecular, from our, from, you know, it's under our skin all the way up. So I, as a radical critical social worker, and actually I'm a sole show worker, I'm all about bridging the micro-macro divide and creating multi-level interventions that are grounded in critical theory. And I also have a very interdisciplinary background. So I started out with an education in law and then you know, very quickly understood how, one, how unjust our criminal justice or criminal legal system is. And I have a background in applied theater and of course social work. And so I just, I have a lot of notes, but I'll probably get to them through without the conversation, but I just want to end with something that blew my mind when I was in my master's program in applied theater. You probably have heard of Jim Crow, right? So Jim Crow were the laws that, you know, legalized anti-blackness and discrimination and segregation and everything like that. And until a couple years ago, I thought Jim Crow was a person. I thought he was a senator and that he proposed these laws. Little did I know Jim Crow came from the theater. He was a menstrual performer. So I'll just read real quick. The Jim Crow persona is a theater character developed and popularized by entertainer Thomas D. Rice. In his menstrual shows, a racist depiction of African-Americans and of their culture. Rice based the character on a folk trickster named Jim Crow that had long been popular among black enslaved people. So that's, you know, we can use theater to oppress and to harm and to dehumanize, but we could also use theater to heal, to process collective harm and to transform. Thank you. I don't wonder what you're doing on the panel. I'm Toby Simona and I'm an associate professor at NYU in the chair of the undergraduate drama program at NYU. I don't have prepared remarks here, but I think I want to take up the question that was posed in the summary of the panel, one of which was asking about the role of academia is in the contemporary historical moment. And this question was posed about whether, I'll be paraphrasing now, but whether the role of academia is to reflect, mirror, theorize and document or to participate in transformation and to help create the change we want to see. And the thing that I've been sitting with most in preparing to come in today was that I don't understand those to be separate sets of actions, right? I don't know how any of them happen without one another. I think this is something that all of us who engage in creative practice of any kind are really familiar with, right? That any process requires moments where you leap and moments where you assess and moments where you revise, that every process requires both the risk of choice and action and transformation and participation and that also reflecting, mirroring, theorizing as a way of participating, right? And so I've, you know, not to turn this into a club for NYU, but I think part of the reason why I've been there for so much is my career, why I'm just a student there, why I continue to believe in that program is because there is such an understanding that that scholarship and practice are not bifurcated, they're not separate endeavors. They are symbiotic endeavors and in some ways are the same endeavor actually. And thinking about, you know, what the role of academia is in the in the contemporary historical moment for me isn't saying that this is any historical moment, but there can be a tendency to think about academia as the keeper of a canon of knowledge. But actually, right, its intent is to be an incubator for the generation of new knowledge, right? This is the purpose of the academy. And then within that to educate young thinkers and makers to come as humans to participate in the making knowledge and meaning of the world. And that is true no matter what the circumstances are, no matter what the context are. And I really, really appreciate this idea about joy and fun in learning. I'm a big nerd for progressive education models and I think the biggest job of any educational institution is to help people learn how to learn and help people learn how to love learning so that they can be self driven, curious, engaged with the world outside of a formal classroom throughout their lives. And I think this is something that artists lean toward organically, kind of curiosity what if mentality, which is what generates us as makers, right? But I think that's that isn't a need for any person who decides to enter the world as a permanent learner, right? How to be in gendered curiosity, in a way that's joyful. That makes the students I think the thing I think about with our current generation students particularly is how much fear they carry. And I think this has always been driven teaching undergraduate spaces since like 1998. So this is not new for undergraduates that they desperately crave the security of some sort of handbook or manual for how to navigate the world, especially in the field of theater and performing arts. They've given the historical insecurity of that profession for folks financially that they want to know what do I need to do to survive it? What do I need to do to make it? And it's a myth that there's no such insurance policy for them. And I feel like a huge part of what an undergraduate education is for these students in particular is disabusing them with that desire. And but also particularly right now they have so much terror of getting things wrong. They have so much terror of not knowing. They end up almost kind of moral conviction that there should be the right way. And that we should all be following that right way. And it's just not how what happens to be human is not what it is. And a huge part of what I consider my job to be in the classroom is helping them develop the muscularity of being able to sustain what they don't know, to be able to sustain what is uncomfortable for them, to be able to sustain despair, and to be able to continue to move through even those things with a continued curiosity and what if mentality and the stance is a learner. Because I feel like we need them to have those skills to shape the next half century of the cultural industry together. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm a theater scholar and theater maker in the department of French and cultural food and culture at NYU. And so I just become a sort of interstitial space here because so I think I'm teaching management students, running programs in the US for the past 50 years, but at the same time, my archives, collaborations, and most of my practice is I'm currently in the French and African world. Interstitial students, I'm a theater historian, but this is quite interesting as a point of view on this stage, both in the US and in the world. And also interstitial because I'm developing and co-leading different projects in the section of the scholarship and creative practice, so research based practice and practice based research at the same time. So the way I understood the topic of this panel was quite intimidating. And if you say what's the basic performance where crisis has people, the condition for everyone, what can I do and what won't. So obviously, we cannot answer that question but with the meaning and the openness that is to say goes with the caution that is required in the moment of writing, so it's true that no political change and with the urgency that is called for by it. So then the question for me in the past years has been how to be slow and fast at the same time. How to reason rather than to prescribe and at the same time act rather than be a male observer. I think that the past three years, since the spring of 2020, I've put in the forefront three major questions for me. First, who gets to tell a wizard story as well as ever telling a wizard. Second, how to be good, power dynamics at playing in the rehearsal room and in the classroom. And third, after theaters across the world were deemed inessential and forced to close the doors, what is the actual necessity of making performances and making performance studies. So in this context, which is bright, I feel that we have to reinvest the conception of theater as a relational aesthetics, in the sense used by French reference, of course, French writer and collage to describe the practice of art based on human relations and their social context that is to say aesthetics of the encounter of resistance to cultural homogeneity, based on inclusion and rooted in decolonizing decode and the need for redistribution. So I think today, I will share a review with the melody and openness, some of the guiding principles that absolutely by forming the past years for me has, as I said, an educator, an educator and also an academic administrator. So I put on this interface, which is not organized. And so, among this kind of guiding or telling a principle, there is, of course, a mythic of radical university, which is not going to create space for the privateizing perspectives, practitioners and spaces which have been historically underrepresented within the theater is published. So we both, of course, with decolonizing syllabi and art making techniques, but also recruitment, recruiting colleagues and students of different color, race, developing gender and social background. We don't suppose we're disentering our research as a scholar by paying more attention to what I call local exceptions, that is to say, initiatives that can be useful, that provide identity models of cultural production and consumption, both today and today's story. And it also goes with decolonizing the methods through which knowledges are produced and disseminated, in particular by including embodied practices as a way of researching and as a way of writing how paradoxical it might actually sound. Another cognitive principle is a commitment to cultural mediation understood as how to make anyone a cultural player. And it goes with the redefinition of the artists, not only as a maker, but also as a facilitator. So this is a sort of a key module of our times. But which I think is important for me that it entails actually new competencies on the back of our students and on our own part related to mediation, something which is what we kept after the conversation in academia now. And for me, the questions are, there may be, how to make students aware of the possibilities of intermediary spaces and not only commercial world we're seeing, how to empower them to inhabit these other commons as defined by how to train them to imagine projects of smaller scale, how to run a collaborative and participative structure, because it's not even a scale, to train them how to approach dialogues with local communities, something which is not even a scale, to contribute to the development of applied theater innovation. And all of these are a lot of questions, not to mention, of course, the challenge related to the equivalent availability of this kind of project. So what is our responsibility when we kind of encourage our students to go there when they know that that's not where the money actually is? Another principle we believe, maybe the last one I don't know. Like, to promote a practice of extra disciplinary as defined by a few of Dr. Bayern Holmes, we just need to be even more in our harsh world of division. So the idea of extra disciplinary is that people with an artistic background, whatever it is, should go on terrains as far away from art and as diverse as, I don't know, biotech, AI, urbanism, psychiatry, hospitals, prize and prisons, to bring forth on those terrains the capacity of theater to provide a sense of connection and mutual care, as it was said, but also the capacity of theater to control the community and our communities to their own dissensions. And I think that the essential dimension of theater is actually key to a moment when it's getting harder and harder to be in there with each other. And along those lines, on that, I think there is a two-day large space within academia, a large space to innovate and a real potential at intersection of research and creative practice as a way to engage with academic and non-artistic audiences, but also to develop some sort of interstructural transversality through partnerships at different levels, be a professional and also be a national band. As cradle is there to inspire to see what's in the moment, of course, everyone who's here on the panel would deserve one about our talk. I mean, when you do that also, I would see you talk to a few often though, I could hear more from you, but now we react to also what inspires things you said and what's in the moment. Hearing all this, what do you say? Oh, hello. One of the things that lifted out most, actually the two things that you just said that really lifted out for me, and we have two initial questions of what's missing is the trust in slowness and time, or I guess whatever the opposite of urgency is. And there's such a, I think this is true in the field and the industry in academia as well, especially as educations become more and more expensive of an urgency to produce in large amounts or in a lot of frequency. And it's not profitable or efficient to allow something to have a lot of space and slowness to explore and discover itself. And what you were saying about scale that I'm biased toward minimalist sort of a way of working not necessarily as an aesthetic, but just as an economy. And I think that there's both in the industry, and particularly in New York and academia for the students, there's a sense of money and spectacle and scale being equivalent to larger levels of mastery or greater levels of legitimacy and visibility that with greater professional legitimacy and visibility come water budgets, right? This is how this is the latter.  And I think there's less than one space to invest in that kind of work and what's to demonstrate what's possible there, not just in terms of the how much the body by itself accomplishes, but also with how much aesthetic was possible in terms of design, in terms of technology, in the simplest of configurations and with very, very little cost. But there's a, you know, unsurprisingly, I guess, in this country, right, there's an attachment, where if you're spending very little money, then it's somehow not enough that the work is not enough, that there's not enough there that you can do. And I'm interested in thwarting that expectation in the students in particular, especially knowing what they're inheriting, and looking down the road in the next 20, 30, 45 years about what they're inheriting, that I think they're going to need to be able to be scrappy and return to a kind of hustle that is not the kind of curated institutional festival framework that we're operating in now. Thank you. So a bunch of ideas came to me and I'll say something and then wait for my turn again. So one, I heard from a colleague, another social colleague, Dita and Houtar, that we move in the direction of the questions we asked. So I like to keep that in mind because we have posed a very big question for this panel and for our work, but we have to dare to ask the questions because that's the direction that our work will then move in. And it's not about finding the answers, but about asking more questions. One question leads to the next question. And so I like to keep that in mind, so that I don't feel bad when I don't have the answer to like end racism or something like that, which brings me to the point what you just mentioned about scale, both mentioned about scale. And so my, I use a theory that I started to develop during my dissertation. And that theory is all about developing critical consciousness and tapping into radical imagination and then putting that consciousness into action. And one of the things that in the action problem that the theory ends on is called critical action project experiment. So it's to address that scale question, which we don't have to do action that will win a Nobel Peace Prize. We could plant seeds, we could start ripples. I think that a lot of things that we have mentioned, like the urgency, the perfectionism, the wanting to get it right is all part of white supremacy culture. And so when we start to you know, excavate that and counteract that, then we get to these other ways to incubate ideas. I mean, like thinking of this as a laboratory is, and it's experimental. I mean, America is an experiment that has gone very poorly. And it needs to end in some ways. But you know, that's that's the work. And so just another thought. I also think that there's what you mentioned, told me about the fear that students have and the fear that professors have. You know, there's educational trauma, you know, that we have all been socialized to that we've all been socialized in. And it's about, you know, having the right answer, being trained for the test that we can't take risks anymore. And then we also have completed the idea of safety with the idea of comfort. And I think that's a big issue within within the educational environment that, you know, you can be safe and uncomfortable. And that's a good thing.  But it's safe. So I think that's also what the what what pairing critical theory with the arts can help has been moved toward asking questions. I'll come back to the idea of urgency, because I remember one of our timelines in the past was like the urgent issues of our time, right? Like, and I understand the wrapping movement, but I don't complain with urgency in that sense. I think there's something about urgency and link to relevance that I'm very interested in. And again, going back to the public and who is the work for and I'm going to keep going away from academia a little bit, because I do see or my experience in academia has been like, connecting students to the real world as much as I could and bringing a lot of colleagues that are in the field to share their experience from me in the field. So just to say that I think one of the issues that many times we're finding is that we're doing work for doing work and because we think it's going to be commercially successful, but not necessarily because we're thinking of what are we trying to say with this for and how do we build new audiences. So all that you were saying, I thought immediately and going back to something that we were all talking about at the beginning is like when the pandemic started, everything was cancelled and delayed, be a lot of big institutions took their archives out, right? And we're like, okay, we have all of this past work, we're not going to pay artists again, because, you know, we already paid them at the time that they did it. And I think not to bring myself as an example, but just to say like one of the things that we were thinking at the time at the shed was like actually like no matter what, like how do we aid artists money? Because we kind of do the work, but they need money, they don't have social insurance or health insurance. And so how do we support them? And what do publics need right now from us? And so we started a digital series where we invited artists to think about like what do you want to do? And they were, you know, performing really and thinking about like new models. And so thinking about like, for example, there were two artists that we worked with, two composers that found in Zoom a completely new way. And at the time, Zoom was very new to all of us. And a completely new way of using it. And a completely new way of talking about what was going on about like the numbers of the pandemic, the bringing, you know, poetry and music and participation to the space, right? And so I'm bringing this example just to say, I think urgency doesn't necessarily, isn't necessarily the problem. I find the lack of intentionality to be the problem and the lack of relevance and the lack of thinking, what are we trying to do here? Yeah, just adding that, just continue thinking about it. I just want to like, when it comes to my listening to everybody, like, we all agree that theater brings people together. Like what we're searching for right now is how, I mean, destroy the plot and then how we build it back together. How we assemble that? Am I like bringing great rights, new people to the academia, to these Soviet students in the classroom embracing environments with people, especially MIT, like they really want to get it right. All the questions, they really want to be resized. Am I doing it right? I'm doing it right. Sorry, the French folk that, you know, like just, they just make mistakes. So creating that and that new theater or movement between, I mean, academia and also in the practical world that we can't hear your voices. I don't know. That's what comes to mind. But we all agree that theater brings people together. And I think that's really great. Well, it comes to me, and I'm moving from like this idea of the use of this maybe to the idea of collaboration is because it seems that we kind of all, I mean, we are from a different professional field. It was a traditional compartmentalization of the cultural field. And we all agree. So I think that there is also a dramatic need for more collaborations. And I think that we've seen the best decade of no-use shift from this traditional borderlines between artistic practices, between different spaces in the society, in the social field to sort of border continuum, meaning like artists of course working with and across different arts, but also artists combining different roles in the creative process. And I think that this shift has also challenged deeply the traditional distribution of competencies and also like this power dynamics also within the creative process. And I also think I'm speaking from my educator with my editor, but this is something that we don't do enough in the classroom is just like to develop many more and experiment, implement, collaborative methods that bring together students, students with other social agents. And also, I think that we don't, all of us, we don't have the skills for collaboration. And I think that we did that for granted, but this, we just need to be in the same room and to work together is going to work. And I also, I mean, for me, that's been a real question that I've been working with, also digital developers, scientists, as well as scholars and makers, we, it's very hard to find the same vocabulary, the same language, and also the same relevance. And you might need, might be conceived of as a time in relevance. And that's quite an abstract question that I like this idea of the realization of relevance is really something I've been struggling with in the past years. Yeah, as you see, it's big. What we talk about, it's very serious. And what people say is it's very significant. You know, what, why are we doing this? I think this is what I hear why, you know, and it has to be different. We learned that not only because of COVID, but so the question is, is it kind of like a song, something that has to come back, how it was supposed to be, or is it a revolution, like something has to turn? Is it something new? What do you all, what do you all see? How do you feel? I like for that question, I think I mentioned the fire and the circle going as a dinosaur. And when most point that sense, I'm embracing through dimensionality and type germs. I know there's a lot of technology going on, which is great. And a lot of people are doing great work with technology. But for me, what I'm seeing with the audience as a practitioner, that in on stage directing or teaching, there's a need to connect. And germs is sticky. That's what I'm seeing. Germs. Germs is sticky. And I'm seeing it, like here and abroad. So it's not, I'm seeing it. So I think that's the way how we move forward with theater. That's my thing. Do you mean that in terms of like being willing to infect each other? Like with germs, we create antibodies. With germs, we, you know, we, if you're educated, they bear feet and you create antibodies that this fear after the endemic of mass, not touching, that break that, like people want to have, people want, and we invite people, there's a lot of clowning working in the work, the company does. So, and people want to participate, they want to be there. So we stop the play, we stop the play, we keep them on go home, whatever we feed them, and then we continue with the play. People are, that's what I mean by germs. Yeah, to connect. May I just add a little comment? I think we also need to find the metaphorical germs in the sense that I'm thinking also of disabled communities, for example, that have been connecting digitally for decades. It's not even a new thing. And where safety means a different thing, and where there's been so many deaths, etc. And so, and where there's also a lack of accessibility in moving through spaces. So I love the idea, but I also think that we need to be open. And that's why I've read the example before, like this performance by so I think there's many, many ways. And I think it's just about finding intentionality in whichever way, whichever algorithm we're connecting in. And I am really absolutely about connection, but I think also like, can we keep being super minded on what does connection look like? And all the ways it can take place in. Your question. I feel like there's the piece of me that wants it to be about a return to lay the fundamentals of body and for space and time, and that there's a part of me that's like, well, now I asked it to be a turn right, like we're getting to a new space of a new era. And I was just thinking that I, I think what I think about more is like an allowing. Right. There are things that are structures in the way that the performing arts operate in the United States that are disassembling, closing, wobbling, right? But there's a, it feels to me like there is a really stark unsustainability to the way in which things are done structurally, operationally, that and an attachment to wanting to preserve institutions. I'm getting into scary territory here, but I wonder about whether it's about an allowing for things to fall, if they need to fall, and then discovering what's possible there. And I mean that operationally and artistically, in terms of intention, in terms of content, in terms of education. And I think, you know, rooting back into academia for a moment, I think, you know, one of the big conversations that has been coming up in most of our faculty is in the, in the wake of Zoom school, right, coming back into everyone, re-acquiring into teaching person again, like blissfully and also weirdly, right? Yeah, it's different now. And finding also that the students are radically different, even than they were a few years ago. Their brains are different. They process information for me. They process social experience differently. And so it requires new approaches to pedagogy, you know, in the spirit of teaching the students you have and all the students you think you should have or wish that you had, right? That there's a really immediate move for new pedagogies.  But more of a, there needs to be a presence. There just needs to be a present attention to what is in the room and a willingness to let go of and allow to draw things as they have been that have been confident and comfortable and be willing to step into the unknown with them about what figuring out where we are now, what's possible from where we are once we let those things go. So I can't really speak to a return or something new because I don't have the formal education in theater. So I'm not exactly sure what that looks like. When I use theater as a tool, right, as a tool to raise consciousness as a tool for action. And it's a tool for really aesthetic distance, right? So it can be a tool for aesthetic distance on the field of theater. And I love that idea of aesthetic distance because it's about reflection and reflecting. And if you're too close to a mirror, you can't see, right? And if you're too far away, you can't see. So that's what theater does in my work is that it helps to put people at the right distance so that they can see themselves. They can see others and relationships and environment. And then be able to figure out how do we address past harms? How do we disrupt current harms? How do we prevent future harms? How do we humanize? How do we build? How do we collectively build a society that supports everyone's humanity to the fullest extent possible? So I use theater as a transformative tool. And so I'm not really thinking about how to transform theater itself. And I guess the last thing I'll say about the reason why theater is so amazing for me and for what I do is because when we think about social, biopsychosocial, cultural, environmental problems, usually we get stuck in one of two places or both places. One is figuring out what to do and the other place is figuring out how to do what we need to do. So the what is creativity and the how is spontaneity. So theater taps into both of those components and that's why I think it's just such a wonderful transformative tool. Rather than talking about revolution, which I think we cannot ask, and that's the question we cannot assess at the moment, if we're right in the middle of it. So that's really hard to, you know, to escape a sort of theoretical way that we see that. But that's where we're going, it's a completely different flow of past practices. And I usually think more in terms of multitude and really the way in which this political concept has been theorized back to Negri. So this idea of the multi-principle of projects, practices that are engaged in a sort of dual process of both emancipation toward hegemonic octodonts practices. So emancipation on one hand and sort of really pagination of what has been done. And then it creates a sort of constellation, complex and heterogeneous network. And I think that this heterogeneous network of social agents of organizational dynamics, because all these projects actually work on different administrative and organizational ways of practices. And to return to the question I kind of know is that actually, I mean, I don't know, but I feel that I cannot conclude a sort of prismatic space for this heterogeneity, which is both absorbing it, reflecting it, analyzing it, but also contributing to this process of plantations of practices, really the same way of prison as an object at the same time reflect, reflect, bend and also transformed by the light that goes through it. So I think that academia is, that would be my metaphor, the metaphor of the prison. And the question of the return of some or not, I think that history also shows us that here, the history of the practice has held both as a space of crystallization for conservative and discriminatory thinking, and as an emancipatory tool. And I think that it's still the case. I mean, there is types of years that are the practices which actually solidify a conservative sort of what to be as a mystery, why there are emancipatory practices. And then I think the question is what the revolution would be, would that be to who would be the person deciding where the line between the two is should academia be that space or not necessarily to decide, but to think about the complexity of deciding and making that choice and then between the institution, yeah, the question about what would be that. I would like to bring one more thing to the table. I think someone mentioned sustainability and one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about is also what happens after. We are in a clear moment of crisis. I think for me, for example, festivals like Under the Braider and American Realness that have been such foundational emerging revolution, you will, or at least disruptive or interesting spaces of creation have disappeared in the last couple of years. Many small spaces are struggling to a really concerning degree. And then larger spaces are doing business as usual and still within crisis. So just bringing that up, because I think my concern is always thinking constructively about this phenomenon or phenomena, but then not connecting with what's really happening out there and how do we bring that together and how do we continue. I don't know if anyone read, but there was a recent New York Times article on hydrogens and thinking about what's going on. Sorry, Blankey Lincoln Center and how they're trying to do a big change and they got Shanta, Take to join and they're changing the way they're doing things, but they have the whole previous audience and the people that are putting money into the space, et cetera, complaining and really concerned. And so just, and I'm doing that very weird to get to the idea of like revolution versus continuity in thinking about like how can we start, you know, when revolution or change, I wouldn't call it revolution, but definitely change in traditional spaces. How can we think, I think it's something that you brought about how can we redistribution and resources? How can we think about support and platformage or pay for that? So just bringing more things through the conversation. Yeah, one of the things that you think about is, you know, the fact that I was living outside the United States for six years and then moved back in like July 2020. So my sense of where things are may not be fully plugged in and I'm still catching up a little bit, but I, you know, I came up in New York in like the late 90s, early odds and the independent theater scene in New York in that time was just overflowing with self-producing artists and companies. And it's my perception that the way that things are now is that where new work is incubated or where emerging artists are developed are in curated spaces, right, that there's somebody making a decision about who to invest resources in and who to give incubation space to because there isn't the same kind of infrastructure anymore economically for artists to be their own incubators and develop their own audiences. And it makes me think back to the earlier point in the conversation about artists bringing their audiences with them into these institutions. But what happens in these curated spaces is that those artists have been plucked out of their contexts and then dropped into this institutional context where there's an existing audience and that was considered like a rise of the ladder, right? And when I was in my 20s self-producing and producing for other independent artists, the joke all the time was like the only people in the audience are our own friends, like we're just made in work for each other and that was the complaint, right? But now that's sort of like this rarity of like how do we get those people to our theaters, right? And I, so I wonder about where that space is or how do we create that space where artists can be the agents of their own incubation and audience development as opposed to, okay, here's who has the resources and let's argue about how you're investing many people or who you're investing in. Do you know what if they're like, yeah, how do we, how do we create space for artists to invest in themselves? Where did that go? Is that just about rent prices? Like, you know, where's the independent theater scene on that level? Yeah. I was speaking with Brady, he's the head of the theater program in Lehman College unit and we were having drinks, we were talking and he was talking about this same thing you mentioned and one of the ideas he came about what he wants to try to do is to bring people that he trusts together to create some kind of like artist community or something to start, you know, sharing resources instead of competing for resources. So that's, I don't know how it's going to happen, but that's something that he's has in mind and so we move to any brains, you know, minds to see how we can, we can invite to see what happens, you know, but that would be a solution instead of like searching and competing a space. I just have a quick note about that because I'm actually going to be on a panel later today about initiatives that are made in France at the moment, assign the state funded system of theater in France, which is like very specific and the panel is about what's going on in Marseille, which is sitting in the South of France, which is a multi-cultural city. And precisely about the development of something which is called in French, the coordination of national association of international spaces and international spaces that are considered as a spaces that kind of join private and public economies and navigate self-producing resources with other resources available in the cultural field at the moment, giving also artists much more decision or power in the programming of these spaces and also relying a lot on values, partnerships and different levels within the international level and at the European level. And I don't really know where we can get with that in the US as I speak from an investigial position, not necessarily knowing how models can be transferred from one one's cultural space to another one. But again, I think that there is something there in terms of the I come back to this idea of collaboration, coordination that we really need because we are in this transitional moment of reimagining structures and no one can do that by themselves. And that's really, and I think also makes me think about like something slightly different that I also would like to bring to the table, which is like how close and go back to academia there, but how close academia should be in dialogue with activism. And I think there is a lot of pushback at the moment. And this is really clear in France also, that it's also the case in the US of delegitimizing either scholars or artists whose work is deemed to activists or to political. And I think there is also, there is also a very important conversation that we suppose and that we all agree on this space, but that we need to have to advocate for the political commitment of what we are doing and again, both as well as as as leaders. Yeah, that is every every point is so significant. It's so important this shows how important we really talk to each other, listen also. And before we go to the audience question, maybe every one of you as a person, what is an example because now we also looked at it in the theoretical world, but what is an artist or a group or a project you're being involved in or doesn't have to be long description or what you're so is again, this is how it should be. This is something different. This is perhaps close to what we talk about in a vision. Is there something you can pin on to? I'm going to lift up Josh Gelt and theater and quarantine and it looks just unusual to me because I'm the we were just talking about this outside is like I'm not a tech person I have a very light being in the room and just it's a body in a work like it's magic. But what Joshua Gelt did in the course of the pandemic of creating the theater and quarantine project for me exemplifies this thing I was saying earlier of like okay well this thing fell down. What do I have left? I've got this this zoom thing computer camera and this closet. We're going to figure that out. This is nothing right so for me with the excellence of what Josh has done is not about even the technology or the structure of the format right but it is again about intention and about the the relationship to where whatever the resources are whatever the moment is and being able to bring artistry and intention to it with integrity and curiosity and exploration. I think especially some of the early experiments he was doing some of the most theatrical work I've seen on the screen at ever in any context and the commitment to theatricality inside of that moment that they really exemplifies that this thing that I was talking about earlier. For me is that guy when they're sitting there drawing lines is our not three parts together right over now three or four. We started before the pandemic and after the pandemic. Like we have academia we have practice but everything I'm doing in the classroom we put it in practice on stage and seeing if it's working if it's not working and again all these participation generals the the poetry the stylization the nonlinear work I think we just we did the last project at the New Ohio Theater. Beautiful experience now we continue to develop now Mercury Store so I'm really looking forward to what that takes us. I don't know we don't have a theater now so when I'm excited theater-wise we're going so I'll put you in this spot over. Some work that I'm excited or yeah excited about that I have been part of is I designed an elective course for the School of Social Work. It was called a critical social work bridging the micro macro divide and then for my thesis in the master's applied theater program myself and my thesis partners we took that class I mean we took yeah we took that elective course and we changed it to critical social work bridging the micro macro divide with applied theater so we had these social work students learning about applied theater and then they actually implemented they designed a session about their interests and then implemented their sessions with the community community and it was amazing so here we have you know breaking out of our silos because I do think it is about collaboration you know collaboration is what creates radical imagination and and so on and so and it needs to be interdisciplinary so that class with Brenna Warwick and Anne Luhearn and Tabitha Lopez was great we did it for two semesters um and then the second thing is I created a elective courses for the doctoral program in social welfare um what it's called uh the name keeps changing but it's something like arts academia and activism research and so just bringing this content to doctoral students and I'm on a few dissertation committees and doctoral students are breaking out of the mold of this archaic document and doing more creative public-facing work um with community and in community so I'm proud of all of that um I would lift up that project that I was talking about before um by two composers Troy Anthony and Jerome Ellis um and they meditated her while like being in the building together by chance and you know composed a song together and this was all before the pandemic and um I think um Jerome had a performance at Joe's pub and so they played that song together and I knew about this um and then when the pandemic happened we invited them to collaborate Jerome had just um lost his grandfather and so they decided that actual ritual was going to be how they were going to connect and it was a performance that was a ritual and actually if you now go to the shit's website you won't be able to see the performance entirely it's just the little pieces of performance because there was so much participation and they wanted to ensure that that was a safe space uh but not only that um Troy afterwards did when we were able to finally come back in person um created a beautiful beautiful piece about togetherness and coming together um for which he um formed a choir of 25 people in one week and since then has created a choir that he's incubating at the shed called the Fire Ensemble where anyone can come and sing and he's using song and performance as a way of healing and um again all togetherness and germs um and I think that's a beautiful example of even how integrated spaces and I completely agree with you by the way um about this problem that we have but those are where the resources are right now and those are the friends in New York um there's space to be carved to create spaces that are active spaces and and and really different spaces so um well I don't think I define that as a as a as a kind of success school initiative but that's um so I'm um I'm a choreographer project of digitization of the administrative archives of the national french theater in paris and um what we've been doing almost every year for a long time now for 10 years now is um to um to conduct uh intermedial uh intergenerational or interdisciplinary workshops bringing together uh graduate and other graduate students from the front of the world and the U.S. historians um uh developers and designers uh performers and musicians to create pedagogical tools which are mostly digital but that can only be activated through um uh through an environment when we get together and students have had also the opportunity to go to um classrooms in secondary schools in the area of paris to use these pedagogical tools and show how we can use this sort of connection between research and history digital possibilities and performance as a way of performing the archives to a nurse like plays and practitioners that have been completely invisibleized by the organization of the history um that can be used also to make visible workers within the theater which is extremely rich in terms of the workers that have no place in the history of the theater and also give this opportunity to uh to a modern young audience who doesn't necessarily have a cultural background to um fully grasp the relevance of these plays from the past to actually test it or to put them uh in test uh through performance-based workshops with the musicians and the practitioners who are part of the project. So that's a kind of multi-health automated uh project that takes different um shape depending of the year but also depending of the energy and also depending on the success of the collaborations because sometimes it's a real failure and I hope that to the fact that collaboration is really very complicated. We want to even it but I think we have a bit of time between the next and the other one which we reserve so we really always have a discussion here it's important to us it's a little bit shorter today but I think all the contributions are very serious actually and important so um I hope I'll give you first. Hi and thank you so much for all of your thoughts my name is Jess and I'm a PhD um uh doctor and candidate uh in the theater performing around here I'm also a practicing felon deter and it strikes me that one of the things that we actually didn't define or like settle on was what is the academy what is academia like we kind of just took that for granted as its own shape and form and to just call forward the fact that this notion of of continued learning continued education and the continuation of new knowledge is in a moment of precarity as much as live performance is in a moment of precarity so just thinking about how these two worlds might be able to support each other in finding the new forms and in bringing performance as research and performing research and embodyment to the table and and so anyway I mean that's just for future seagull talk but it's but I think it's relevant for us to think what is academia and how is it serving and I just want to talk about that. Yeah well does it go back to Plato's academia but did you I mean this this word is charged and has a lot around it but I was just thinking of the idea of trauma and I teach at NYU I was just an adjunct there and I had a conversation with my ITS classes introduction to theater fitness classes after we were introducing them to modernism because we've gone to like a reading or state reading of a Bergenstein piece and they said they feel like they live in a just protracted state of trauma and it came out of a discussion of tic tac and this constant just assault of violence that they might get because of what an algorithm and someone said Gen Z this is why Gen Z loves data and I was like I didn't even knew what data was and then that started a conversation about it I was just so inspired and I mentioned them today I was like why don't we do a weekend workshop of data if that appeals to you that's where history and practice actually intersect and they came to it I didn't tell them that they found it and so I think that I think that we're grounding the students and listening to them and saying we don't know it I don't think that tell me about it I just feel like there's hope I think it's really easy to feel that we're all getting like sucked down but they have a lot of answers and I feel like I'm learning I know it's cliche but I do feel like I'm learning more by listening to them and then saying okay I have this tool let's try it um so it's a little bit of hope yes thank you for the work you're doing with them I would love to know where should we do my I didn't prepare my five minutes I know I had a the thing that I that hit me in this was something uh tell me said was we came up in a similar era and it just made me think that like we did so much in like also with Robert like who presented my company um in like the 90s and early 2000s and like but yeah at that time we could I could work two nights a week in a restaurant and pay my bills and I didn't have health insurance and and I was like this is awesome nobody we're not making any money but we're doing this thing we love and I think we don't people do not feel that way anymore and I think that's a big difference I know part of academia for me has been it has like been a place to experiment and support my like my theater habit um and like like like Daniel was saying like I do look at the classroom as a laboratory not just as like like and it goes back and forth you know what I'm trying with my company or in those shows I'm making is seating it's way into the classroom and what I'm trying in the classroom is finding its way out there so there is a cyclical thing I don't know if those two things are were really as related as they still got with me but and then and then to something so that's that I remember we were on tour at we were at Shia and perhaps like Nancy and all the French companies were like oh you have to go back to New York because you have a restaurant shift you know and it was just such a different like the such a different reality um that is what I think yeah very interesting I was thinking about a conversation that Frank had with Basil Jones when he said that uh during apartheid they closed down all the live theater and the only theater that was allowed to go was the puppets why because puppets nobody takes them seriously and this was at the time of Trump and a code and I talked to myself wow that's we have to be aware that we're in a potentially hostile environment and the academic world in and in universities are where revolution start but I take issue with your word revolution I think of it as evolution and then we when I was helping develop the new york city board made website I spoke to the director and used the word creativity and she said we can't use the word creativity because that is owned by the religious right oh that's all good so with that I really want to thank you again and I hope we will have ongoing conversation that we also perhaps find a way you know collaborate great great the crooks and the thinking and we really also live what he asked for and do it in real work but it was very important to me from with everybody and there was good feel there's a different level of listening and seriousness then you know two three years ago and I think this is a good thing so thank you all I mean going to go off to the next panel and there's a thank you