California and was really yearning, you know, for a sense of connection to the Asian-American community. And so for me it's full circle from the time of being at the very first National Asian-American Theatre Conference in Los Angeles, which is my hometown, to now being able to welcome all of you to my current hometown here in Philadelphia and to be able to host this event. So thank you again for being part of it. I think there are a few other acknowledgments that I want to do. I'm trying to decide the order. I think what I would like to do next is actually invite the my fellow Kata board members to step onto stage and to be able to be acknowledged and to introduce themselves. Should we do it in order of geography? Hi, I'm Andrea Saf, artistic director of Artreaction, Inc. Hello, I'm Jorge Ortoll. I'm the executive director of my company in New York City. Hi, I'm Tim Dang. I'm the producing artistic director of East West Players in Los Angeles. Tisa Chang, Pan-Asian Repertory Theater in New York City, probably the oldest one in this room and maybe around a lot of theaters. No, no, no, me personally, Tim, me. So I just say East West is the oldest theater and Pan-Asian second oldest, but I'm saying I am. Therefore, so I'm really happy to be here to see you and to know all of you. Thank you, Tisa. I was almost going to say that we could line up in order of age, but I already had a chance to introduce myself. I'm Leilani Chan. I'm with Theater Productions in Los Angeles. I'm Rick Shiyomi. I'm representing all the independent artists here. Hi, I'm Meena Natarajan and I'm the executive and literary director of Pangea World Theater in Minneapolis. I'm Randi Reyes. I'm the artistic director of Mu Performing Arts, otherwise known as Rick Shiyomi's theater company. I'm Rick Shiyomi's godson. I'm Victor Mayag. That's not a joke, actually. It's a truth. I'm Victor Mayag, artistic director of 2G Second Generation in New York. One of the newest members on the board. We're missing one person and that is Mia Katikbak. She is the producing director of Natco, National Asian American Theater Company. She's doing a show currently so she'll be here at one o'clock in the morning after her show and head back to New York City at three o'clock because she's doing a show. But she says hello and you'll get to see her tomorrow morning as well. And she is the chair of the board, yes. Thank you. And also very quickly, all right, board members are welcome to sit back down. Also, I just wanted to acknowledge two other individuals, Jeff Musso, who is the general manager of Kata. He said he did not want to come on stage, but maybe he'll like raise his hand and let us wave. Jeff Musso and then also Juliet Lee, who is our local confess coordinator this year. Was she out there? She might still be at registration. But without the two of them, it would have been impossible for this event to be to be able to happen. So thank you both to Jeff and to Juliet. And I hope that if you haven't had a chance to meet them or any of our board members that you'll be able to find opportunities to connect over the course of the next two and a half days. Also, I wanted to acknowledge some of the funders who have made this gathering possible. Generous support from the Ford Foundation, through the Institute of International Education, the James Irvine Foundation, the National Performance Network, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and we'll hear from Sharon Battles from the Pennsylvania Council in just a few moments, I think, if she's in the house. Yes. And the Wincote Foundation here in Philadelphia. Thank you to those funders. And then also thank you to many of our local host committee members who are listed in the program. And then also our co hosts, the venues that are that are partnering with us, including Interact Theatre Company, Satrasen, Fringe Arts, which is gorgeous space we're in tonight. And also Underground Arts, where the open mic will be held tomorrow night. So thank you to those folks. And Sharon, are you here? Yes? Okay. And so I wanted to invite Sharon Battles onto stage. She's someone who has been, she's a program officer with the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. And among her other duties runs a very special program that's called Preserving Diverse Cultures. And it's her program that first supported Asian Arts Initiative as we were becoming an independent nonprofit organization. And it's also the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts that has been an incredible supporter of us bringing the Confests to Philadelphia and to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. So I'd like to welcome Sharon for a few brief comments. Welcome, everyone. This is wonderful. My performance days are long gone. But I wanted to say on behalf of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, we're delighted to welcome the 2014 National Consortium of Asian American Theatres and Artists Conference and Festival to Pennsylvania. The richness and diversity of the many different Asian cultures represented in Pennsylvania by your attendees make the Commonwealth a more vibrant, interesting, and global community. And keeping with your conference theme, home, here, there, where, you have found a home in Philadelphia, which is in turn home to your host, Asian Arts Initiative, some of your hosts, Asian Americans United, and Catsey Villafone, who you have probably seen on Death Comedy Jam. She's really made a name for herself. And we were very privileged to have her perform with us. We took her to California when we went and she performed there. So we, we claim her. We appreciate the honor of hosting Qatar here in Pennsylvania. And thank Gail Issa for having the genius and tenacity because she's been talking about this for at least three years. A reality. Gail is no stranger to remarkable foresight, starting with the founding of the Asian Arts Initiative, to receiving the 2005 Governor's Awards for a creative community, to being the first Asian American to serve as a council member on our governing board. PCA provides support. Yes, she does. She deserves a huge round of applause. Support for many of the organizations here, including all of the hosts. As Marcus Garvis said, a people without the knowledge of their past, history, origin and culture is a tree without roots. Two decades ago, the Asian Arts community was comprised of community arts organizations offering folk and traditional programs. Today, there are organizations that span the spectrum from folk and traditional to presentation and exhibition of contemporary arts. And the recognition and representation of those contemporary Asian artists is owed to the hard work of Gail Issa and some of the original members of Tiger Tiger, probably about 20 some years ago. And the Asian Arts Initiative and the founders of the Asian Americans United and to all of those artists and administrators, we say, thank you. And I really want to close by saying Pennsylvania is rightly proud of the growth and development of its Asian arts community. We look forward to continuing the work begun during this conference and continued in this historic conference. Finally, to our friends and colleagues, all of you from around the world, we wish everyone a successful conference and festival. Sincerely, Philip Horn, who unfortunately couldn't be here today.  So a few housekeeping types of announcements before we get folks up on their feet. We are very pleased to announce that that HowlRound TV is live streaming tonight's plenary, as well as the plenary and breakout sessions throughout the conference. These sessions will also be available for viewing after the conference is over on HowlRound. And the link is bit.ly slash the N-A-A-T-F. It's also listed in your program if you want to look forward that way. So please participate in that way. Also, a couple of additional, several additional things I wanted to highlight. One of the other partner productions that myself and Asian Arts Initiative have been supporting is happening tonight and also tomorrow night over at the Painted Bright Arts Center. And it's a performance of Dennis Kim's Tree City Legends. So if you are able to fit it into your schedule, we're providing complimentary tickets to all confessed attendees. And we hope that you'll be able to appreciate what is really a beautiful story of four brothers sort of raising themselves in an immigrant family. And coping with both loss and love. And so I hope that folks will have a chance to check that out. There's more information at the registration table if you need it and also in your programs. Also, some of you may have noticed that we are trying to make lunch available during the conference days. For those of you, especially who are going to be rushing in between different kinds of events, the lunch is available for purchase. And I can assure you that it's going to be delicious and sourced from a lot of amazing Philadelphia Asian American restaurants. So I hope that if you are interested that you'll take time tonight to actually pre-order or so that we sort of know how much food to have available. Also, I want to encourage everyone to join us again tomorrow night for the Kata Open Mic that will start at 10pm as I mentioned over at Underground Arts in Asian Arts Initiative Neighborhood. And Reggie Kibiko, who many of you are familiar with, will be hosting that and is still open for signups and also other features who want to volunteer yourselves. So we hope that we'll see you there. There will be a cash, there is a cash bar at Underground Arts as well. So it should be a really fun late night venue. And then on Saturday, if you're able to stick around, after the plenary and breakout sessions, Asian Arts Initiative will be hosting a happy hour wine reception at 6.30. And then also a closing night party starting at 9pm. So I invite you to be part of that as well as everything now and in between. And look forward to seeing you there. Finally, for tonight, I'm definitely excited about the plenary conversation, both for the introductions of everyone in the room and then also a mini panel that we have planned, really exploring the themes of community engagement and activism as well as discussing multidisciplinary work, which is so much of what, for me and for Asian Arts Initiative, really drives our own programming and our own vision. And so look forward to that conversation tonight, being able to help shape the conversations for the rest of the conference and also helping us really chart the future for our field. And with that, I would like to invite Andrea ASAF to begin the facilitation of the next section. Thank you, Gail. Hey, Gail, is there a hashtag? What's the hashtag, y'all? Hashtag NAATF.  So I am going to introduce, well, we are going to introduce something that's happening. We already started today and it's going to be happening throughout the conference is that there is a devised theater workshop happening that I'm facilitating with this amazing team of artists who are going to introduce themselves to you in just a second. And our job is to to engage with you and reflect back and play and keep a sense of interactivity and conversation going throughout the conference. So you'll see us popping up in a few different ways. And we are going to co-facilitate this interactive opening. And first, you're going to meet them come on out team ensemble. And they're going to introduce themselves to you in just one second. And they get nine seconds, nine seconds each to introduce themselves. Okay, who's started which end are we starting on? Yeah, great. Wait, wait, wait for the clock. Okay, so ready, go. And how you identify? Oh, you weren't there for that. Okay, we'll come back to you. We'll come back to you. KT, wait, for our team. I have to do it.  That's basically it. Now, so give it up for our devised theater team one more time, our ensemble. And now we would like to invite you all onto the stage. Come on down. Please leave your belongings at your seat. Join us out here. Don't be shy peeps. This is a great moment to find your peeps. So just kind of find your way into a circle so everyone can see. Okay, great. So how many people have been to a Kata conference or festival before make some noise. Awesome. How many people this is your first one? Oh, awesome. Okay, so some of you have maybe done some of these before, but because we are different every time, we are going to do some similar things that you may remember from previous conferences. And so the first one we're going to the first one we're going to do is about this notion of home. And we're going to ask you to place yourself in the space. If this mark, if this orange green spike mark were Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the United States on the continent of North America, place yourself in relation to this spot in terms of where you were born. You all got to figure that out. Where's north? North. Okay, great. And go. Okay. Yeah, so feel free to, of course, introduce yourselves to your the people in your spot. So let's see. So is this our is Philly here? Philly there? Okay. And DC, Florida, Puerto Rico, India, Philippines, Australia, Phoenix, Los Angeles. There's a big LA group there. San Francisco, the duo in Seattle, Toronto, Canada. Did I miss somebody? Oh, Chongqing, China, South Korea. Manila, Philippines. Yeah, so we're connected. It's too bad we can't do a globe, right? All right, great. So now the next question, everyone. Again, if that spike mark is Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Where is home now? Where is home now? Get a sense for a few of the London, England. This the Philly group here? Okay, so Philly, and just a few more. I won't get everyone this time, but Pasadena. Okay. And all right, so great. So now we're going to animate this journey.  And when I say go, you're going to find your way to the place that home is now and use your body to explore or say something about what that journey was like and how you ended up in wherever home is now. Okay, so you're moving from point A to point B. And how you move is an expression of something about that journey, that path. Okay. So everybody focus. Quiet. Ready? All right, so let's just throw out into this space, a couple of like a word or thought about that journey. Anyone just call out something 110 freeway across the country and back road trip. Adventure. Improvise. Parents, show to show. Word. All right, nice. Give yourselves a hand, everybody. So moving to the next thing. Now we're going to reconfigure ourselves totally. I'm going to ask you to do something to I'm going to I'm going to create some categories that and knowing that some of you may inhabit more than one. And so what you will have to figure out is what your relationship is to these different categories. Okay, totally self identify. One of them, let's see, let's put upstage over there is if you identify as an artist. Okay, and then if you're in that corner where Tracy is, that is educator, if you're an educator. And over there, where you see viet and Justin, those are activists and organizers and advocates. So move to where you primarily identify as in the current moment, artists, educators, downright. And if you don't identify as anything, you could stay in the middle. So organizers, activists, and advocates down left, educators down right, artists up center. And so if you hold multiple or have different relationships to these different things, go ahead and figure out what that looks like in your body, how you move between these spaces. Go ahead and animate this, like what is that relationship between these identifiers, you can use words, you can use sound, your body, whatever, and pause. All right, so tell us a little bit, let's just popcorn out like a few thoughts or things that came up for you as that was happening, observations or your own choices, fluid can't seem to settle. Multiple hats, fun, tired, stretch, inevitable, reaching by default, bridging. Excellent. So we're going to move into the next section of this. Next section.  So I'm going to leave that to you to decide what professional means and what creative field means. We're going to do your one year or less if you're new to the arts and your first time here, that will be KT over here. That's one year and we're going to go all the way to 50 or plus. 50 or plus and that's where Tracy is. So somewhere on the spectrum, the middle will be 25 years. Line yourself where you professionally identify with how many years of experience you have in your creative field. See all of your beautiful bodies. Let's push this way. Let's let's stretch out this line a little bit. Look at this amazing group. Look at this wealth of experience over here. Hello. What? So, so let's let's speak to this. What I want to do a photo shoot for Vanity Fair right now. This is amazing. So please tell us how many years would you say you've been in the arts? More than 40. More than 40. 39. 39. 34. 34. 32. We're looking at 30 plus years around this side. Give them a round of applause. I'm just I'm just odd by the number of young people standing on this side of the room. It's amazing because it gives us such hope and confidence for the future of of this theater scene. Yeah. How many years? 20. 20. Two. Two. I'm so excited. My name tag fella. And right now we're plop in the middle. Gail, how many? 21. 21. Awesome. Give yourself a round of applause. Great. So, so I actually actually got my start at the Asian Arts Initiative 16 years ago. In a workshop with Dan Kwong. Yes. So now I want everyone to think about what is your vision for what we can achieve through API theater and performance in your lifetime? Think about the biggest possible picture of that and a word or a phrase that embodies part of that for you. And take a moment reflect. And as you reflect, thank you for asking what is your vision? What's a word or phrase that embodies part of your vision of what we can achieve through API theater and performance in your lifetime? And as you contemplate that, please move about the space. Eight. Yeah, and we're we're using API Asian American as inclusive. And why as so it can it is expansive and expanding. And as you're moving around, contemplate what your word or phrase is. And once you have figured out what it is, come into a circle facing inwards, come into a circle facing inwards as we began. And if you're still contemplating that's still awesome. But I'm going to go around and hear your word or phrase for us bias about us and near us. And if and if you resonate with that, please make some type of gesture that is visible as you are able. Oh, can you come back to me? Brown stories at the center for all theaters of color as regional theaters. No longer silent. To always have a seat at the table. Asians on the West End Asians on Broadway. Thank you. Those are some beautiful visions. And we're going to come back to this question later in our time together before this weekend is over. Please give yourselves a hand. And super quick, we've had a request if we can do a group photo, but this is going to have to be really quick because it wasn't in the plan. So as we right before we transition into the plenary group photo, so everybody go over there. And and let's see if we can do this real quick, because you all are so beautiful. We are all so beautiful. Get close. Don't be shy. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. Yes, we definitely need the cat aboard in the in the photo. And Jeff. All right, who's taking the phone? Here we go. One, two. Okay, thank you everyone. Now find your way back to your seat and give yourselves a hand. That was awesome. And we'll need chairs on stage, please.  You will be seeing them again. And Gell. Okay, so I'd like to invite our our plenary panel up to join us. Come on down and take a seat. I can't see you out there. Come on down. And we're gonna go straight into this in just a moment. As soon as we've got everybody. Okay, great. So I have the great honor and pleasure of being able to moderate a really awesome conversation that we're about to have. And I want to emphasize really that it is a conversation and that the folks up here are are here to help us start the conversation.  And that this is the beginning, hopefully, of some conversations that will continue throughout our time together. So the first thing I'm going to do is ask our plenary folks to introduce themselves. And I have to flip pages. Okay. And the way they're going to introduce themselves is very briefly, to say their name, something about to introduce their themselves, their work, what is their connection to Kata, and something that they see emerging or trending in the field. And that's going to begin our conversation. So we're going to hear from each, each plenary panelist. And then we're going to hear them have a conversation about what they hear each other say. And then we're all going to have a conversation building on that together. So and I think we actually choose an order. Oh, well, for introductions, we'll just go down the line. And then we'll, is that cool? Yeah. So name some introduce yourself, your work, your connection to Kata, and something that you see emerging or trending. Okay. Hey, everybody. My name is Tracy Katokiriyama. And my relationship to Kata, I performed with edge of the world in 2007 in New York, and then with pro project in 2011. And now I'm here with the artist exchange. I'm a multi platform artist, which leads to sort of a fluid artistic identity, but a much compartmentalized experience. So I work in the fields of theater, in devised as well as more traditional theater, I write for publication and short form poetry and stage. But then I also work with movement and music and different kinds of performance. Organizations that I'm with names like Tuesday Night Project, Generations of War, and with a new knee K LGBTQ gathering called Okaeri, which means welcome home. And something that I wanted to touch on two things. I'm starting to see at a better pace. I think as a person who works with an aerial artist as a stage partner, my partner, Kennedy, we're starting to see very slowly an emergence of more acceptance for aerial slash circus arts within theater narrative. But it also is where I think we're a long ways away. But I think we're starting to see more openings for that in different presenters. And then I think in a longer in terms of like the longer run when I think about a lot of my friends who identified principally as actors in the 90s. Now, many, many, many have emerged to working in different platforms and working in different disciplines and finding passion as writers and producers. So I feel like I see a lot more self determined pathways and pathmaking. Hi, I'm Sumi Kim. And I am an actor and performing artist based in New York City. I am here to present my project Change, which is based on an inspired by the life of Kathy change who was a Philly based performance artist and activist who self emulated on the campus of UPenn in 1996. So I this project is I'm a resident artist at here Art Center, which is a theater in in New York City, and they support artists who are creating hybrid work. And it's also being it's also part of the NPN creation fund in residency. And so I've been being presented by Qatar, as well as Asian Arts Initiative through the NPN. And so I'm super excited to be here. And this is my third time with the National Asian American Theater Festival. The first time was in 2007. And presented a show called Legion Dairy, which was based on Bruce Lee. The second one was in 2011 in LA, did an adaptation of Teresa Hawke and Charles Dicte, which was called Dicte bells fault appeal to sky. And my work is very collaborative. I collaborate very closely with a director as well as designers and musicians and work in a multi disciplinary platform. So some of the the waves of the trends that I see I can only speak from my own experience is that artists and residents at here Art Center is that I see a lot of a lot of people reaching out and branching beyond their their main discipline of say music or playwriting or choreography. They're like creating performance work that kind of blurs boundaries to to make work that is device and and expands beyond genre. Another thing that I'm seeing in the Asian American community is like the strengthening and voice to the communities, primarily in New York City, through organizations like APAC and Asian American Help Me Victor put coalition. Yes. Yeah. So anyway, there's there's a sort of like non silencing of voices through the Asian American artist community. And that's something that I'm seeing that's very proactive and excited. Thank you. So my name is Nina Natrajan, and I am from Penji, a world theater in Minneapolis. And my connection with Qatar is I'm on the founding. I'm the founding one of the founding board members, correct? Of Qatar. It's like a long time ago. But it really and and the work that we do in Penji is multi disciplinary. It's also we do all kinds of work. It spans the same spectrum. We do community engaged work and also work that is crosses disciplines, as well as present and produce plays as well and work performance art. So it really kind of runs the whole spectrum. The kinds of I thought I would stick with the Midwest, just in terms of like the trends that I see, because I feel like there's so much arts funding. And part of it is also arts funding. So I'm actually looking at how can we look at work that you know, is also created because arts funding is there in the in the place. But a lot of creative place making funding is coming to Minneapolis, St. Paul. And so I'm just seeing a lot of work that is goes outside of the theater that actually percolates into the streets that goes into stores that actually mobile work that happens on on the streets as well. A lot of vitalization, the conversation of economic revitalization. And you know, so the whole creative place making thing. And for me, and I'd love to speak about the concerns of that. But that's not right now. But I do see that trending and a lot of great work going on, which I love. And also connected with that work, we're actually having conversations around things like equity. So really, I feel like I've been part of so many challenging conversations around equity that are wonderful. And in Minneapolis, at least, I see a lot of coalitions of people of color coming together and actually talking about equity issues around funding around the work that's presented around work that's seen around who presents what and who does what. So I'd love to be able to talk more about that. Hi, my name is Snehal Desai. And I actually got my job through Cata two years ago or three years got the first conference. I attended the TCG conference in L.A. and through that met Tim Dang, the artistic producing director at East West Players. And I also was in the opening plenary there, but in a weird mask costume. So you may not recognize me. So this time I'm unmasked, thankfully. And I am a theater director and playwright primarily, as a director, I love doing site specific work. And as I also am a solo performer, because I am the worst scene partner in the world for most people. At East West, I am now the literary manager and artistic associate. And I'm interested in three things. One of which Mina mentioned, which is event based theater or site specific theater and kind of theater that's going the trend of say what's happening with the book store so that people aren't interested in large houses. They're not interested in Barnes and Nobles and borders. They're interested in specific experiences, individual experiences that are smaller. So I'm interested in the dialogue about that. I'm interested in this new model of theater of consensus building. And a shout out to Sima Saueco at Pasadena about that. And finding audiences that where there's a mutual offering of what do you have to offer us and vice versa. And interested in those models in the theater. And then the third thing that I'm interested in dialogue tonight about is, you know, this idea of that the more people you put on stage, the bigger your audience. The more you base your theater in your community, the more interaction you have with those members and the more, the wider the base. And the question of if you do that, do you compromise artistic quality? And so I think that's something that's at a kind of a tipping point. And so I'm interested in questions about that. Thank you. And I am a spark leader with TCG this year. Thank you. Awesome. So that was fantastic. Lots of juicy things. I'm going to pull out a couple of threads. So interdisciplinarity, self-determination of the work, coalition building, conversations around cultural equity, interactivity as a way of making work and also as a way of engaging. So now you all get to have a conversation for, really, maybe we'll do this quick. Maybe we'll just do like six minutes of hearing you respond to each other and then we'll open it up so that we end on time and we get to really hear what folks are thinking. So anything you want to respond to in each other's comments. And I'm going to push a little bit on this because we got some good juicy stuff around aesthetics and process. And I want to push a little bit to also talk about what is emerging or trending in terms of socially engaged or community engaged work or politically engaged work. So go ahead, Jill. I think maybe it'll help to speak about what the consensus building model is that you're talking about. I do think that's a really good starting point. Great. I'll talk about it briefly, but I'm not an expert, so just correct me if I'm off. It's a model of kind of finding shared common ground between groups. So if you're doing a theater piece about, say, origami, case in point, finding groups that in the community that are working in origami and doing that and going out and soliciting their advice and connecting them so that they, you know, and finding out what their needs are as a community and then as a theater trying to see if you can help them. And as a theater, obviously, your needs are wanting expertise about whatever you're doing a show about, but also audiences and finding a base and finding new audiences. And so it's about kind of that finding those intersections and those Venn diagrams and seeing how you can both help each other out versus, I just need this from you, you know what I mean, and trying to build relationships that last over time in those ways. Well, I'd love to hear, can we already put it out to the audience? Not yet. We're going to listen to you all for a few minutes. Let me just say that it's interesting to me how similar patterns of ways of working get called different things at different points in time, right? So there's this framing that's around like consensus-building as an artistic process, but then you might also call that community-based work or community-engaged process. Go ahead. And I think the vocabulary is co-opted from community-building. I think it's built from community-organizing actually. I think that's where she's directly, see my thesis, taken it from if I understand it correctly. And I mean, I guess I'm interested in work that gets created with community because we do so much community-based work and what does that look like and how do you build consensus when you're actually creating with other people in the community. And I feel like recently we've been engaged in a whole process about what really what really, really makes a difference. So the difference that makes a difference in a sense from human system dynamics and really looking at that and saying, what is it that we absolutely have to have in this community-based process? So if it's like work around social justice or it's around, art has to be a part of this or this, something that community-organizing has to be a part of every single meeting that we do, whether it's with the organizing committee or whether it's with, so I feel like I'm really kind of interested in those processes that also have social justice as a piece of the of the whole because if we're talking about social justice work we've got to practice in a way that includes that methodology. And I also want to just tease out of what you just said you said human systems dynamics, right? So that's another kind of inter-disciplinarity that we might be seeing more of one is aesthetic, but also literally collaborations between disciplines, between arts disciplines and outside the arts, right? And I would say that that's something that I see trending or emerging or getting stronger in the field as well. Well, I mean you know, projects that are specifically collaborations between science and art, for example, or technology and art or I'm right now, I never in my life thought I would be doing this working with the military like with veterans you know, collaborations between social service organizations and the arts. So, you know, in terms of how socially engaged work happens it seems like there's more inter-disciplinarity maybe emerging there as well as aesthetic experiments in across disciplines. I think it's worth it also to kind of go back to your point about does that compromise the art when to me it makes so much sense that it increases or it can increase the excellence in the process and the production itself. So you use the Origami example and like I would think that bringing someone who is an expert into that process and having some actual work, I'm not sure what you actually did in that process but you have them engage with the actors on stage who are in any way relating to paper and their character with that paper and that intention and that experience makes so much sense. Yeah, I agree in terms of the research that it definitely deepens the experience. I think it's a question of it's about the actor actually so is it a local actor that you're casting in your production and you're casting someone from another city who is had a very, you know, I think that's where it's a question of the artistic level but definitely anything that you can do to deepen the experience for the audience members and connect them I think is wonderful but I think a lot of us talk about or aspire to everyone to work at regional theaters and I think regional theaters often are the most out of touch with their communities in terms of who's there and who's working and so I think it's a question I think that's what 90% of the companies here in this room are very community based and driven and they find their artists there but it's funny because everyone wants to work at these other institutions that aren't as connected to the community. I guess just coming from the perspective of someone who is like an independent performing artist and produces their own work what I found through subject matter is that there are different ways to engage within your community and have conversations and reach communities that you may not have been otherwise engaged in previously so for me through the Hemispheric Institute because of my project Kathy Change I have been able to hold artist talks and have conversations and there's also broader conversations about Asian American women and mental illness or like performance and suicide and political activism and what is performance art and what is activism and how do they merge so there's been a lot of amazing experiences on my end personally through the doing of this art making process that has brought in my scope of what I ever call myself doing as an actor I guess that just reminds me of the fact that I mean I spoke about coalitions before but I also feel like one of the things that I'm really interested in is how do you create collaborations or create coalitions between communities of color right and so that would be something that I would love to ask a question like how many people here work within like two communities of color or really also the other community that comes to mind for me is immigrant community like first generation immigrant communities and how does that work what does that work look like aesthetically and so I'm interested in these questions as well and actually as we were preparing for the panel earlier we had a conversation about perhaps a question or challenge for the field is how do we move beyond this disconnect between this gap I would say this like chasm between artists who are first generation or working in immigrant communities and really are working in those communities and the national arts infrastructure that you know the networks the funding systems the organizations the national organizations and how do we bridge that gap how do we create more access and more collaboration and more exchange perhaps so now I see you have the mic and I'm going to open it up if you would like to pose another question or challenge as we open it up yeah I would love to just echo actually Mina's comment and open it up it's a question about it's tied hand in hand to this of an Asian American artistic aesthetic and what that is and where it's going I think we're very interested in that question particularly from a place of I think a lot of what has defined Asian American art in the last two three decades is about being first generation right so it's about first generation struggles and I think as we move forward in time and there's greater cultural diversity in this country I mean I think that's what we're interested also is this idea of cultural intersectionality and as artists you know we're all interested now in putting the world that we see on stage but often what we're still seeing is the singular play about one experience and so is there anything that we can do to support that or help that or you know what is the aesthetic or where is it going and how can institutions support artists so I'm going to open it up and we have about ten minutes to dialogue and I really want to encourage us to not make this a standard Q&A but to just widen the circle of the conversation so folks can respond to each other they can you can respond to stuff you've heard you can share something that's percolating for you and can we get more house light is that possible because it's really hard to see folks up here and I see a hand up there already and maybe can someone else on the devised theater team help run Mike so that would be awesome I just wanted to shout out to the people who are not on the coast and also especially to folks in the south because I think those of us who are in the south in the midwest geography necessitates Asian Americans working with other people of color and that's something that I kind of a lucky coincidence and so I almost all of my work is done with Latinos and people of African descent and I'm excited to hear more about other folks who find that that's the case even if you're on the coast I'm headed over there and so one of the devised theater team please help me run Mike's can I have a volunteer please I have something here I think in the work that we do with as diverse communities that we are under the umbrella of Asian American which is a huge in just the Twin Cities there are 40 different ethnic under Asian American there's 40 different cultures under that specifically in the Twin Cities in Minnesota so to me there's a huge issue in terms of engaging community based on a project and how do you sustain that how do you get other communities not to be if you're Hmong you're interested in this Hmong play if you're Vietnamese community you're interested in the Vietnamese community but how do you get them to be interested in the Asian American work that we're doing what we share together that to me is a key and I worry that this is the same thing that the other bigger regional theaters do is when they have a black play they engage the black community they have an Asian play suddenly they care about you and they're giving you free tickets and then in the rest of their season they're not there anymore and that's the kind of work that I want to avoid that oh because I'm doing a Vietnamese play right now I'm engaging this community but how do I keep them engaged the whole season because I'm telling stories that aren't told because I'm telling stories about the Asian American experience I'm not answering Randy but firstly I want to thank you all because I love hearing the input from newer artists, younger artists I do when you ask talk about community arts and collaborative arts and this whole new way of devising theater or creating theater I do think that we have to look back and think a little bit about some of the parameters that are recognized so I would love to because you're asking a lot of questions and one of them Andrea you talked about is the chasm for instance in terms of funding or recognizability so I just want you to be sure because to not forget and to keep wrapped up in your creative process that there are things unlike training and excellence and standards of standards of excellence that I think that perhaps help to shape and define where you're going so I wanted personally just to really say that loud and clear because I think that that is sometimes what is missing you talk snail you are so eloquent and articulate I love hearing you this guy isn't he is amazing but when you what we are all very very concerned about the direction what is what what defines Asian American theater where are we going who is participating who is drawing where are the demarcations and why you know and Pangea you do so much work with Gail you do so much work with community arts I just want to say that let's not forget some of the parameters that we need or criteria so that we can absolutely really really achieve what you're doing so we've got two people on the docket but I want to give the panelists a chance to respond to some of these questions as well anybody I guess and in response to that I really would like to say that I am interested in figuring out what does it mean to really have multiple aesthetics in the room like that is affected by multiple multiple way you know like because this is just the western aesthetic is just one thing that we see and many of us especially as new generation immigrants come from countries in which we have long artistic practices so how does that get included into I mean I'm actually asking another question I think training is it's a mixed bag right and so how how does I mean how can we I mean part of what we're doing really to and I'm not I guess I am giving a plug for the institute that and are to actually creating which is that we're really like looking at the next generation of theater directors and people of color and women directors especially of which there's been a lack in the field and saying okay what do we do how do we train a new generation and how can we actually use the expertise of people like say no book or people like you know people from everywhere all over the country and how can we define that new aesthetic and also really look at say American work and see how does that influence us what's the aesthetic like is it different where you know what's the storytelling like what's the storytelling structure like what's form like what's content like and so how's that going to change how we see a theater in the United States or Asian American theater in the United States so I just want to pick up on something that was earlier about self self-determination right self-determining our own work our own standards of excellence our own understanding what techniques and we are actually valuing and how we learn from each other in that we've got one up there and then here and then here so we've got three testing okay hey my name is Ratna Owen I'm actually from the south Atlanta South East Atlanta College Park where we don't have a public system of transportation that got taken away from us and like most of the Asian stuff is up north in Dorival past Atlanta so I can't access those stuff and the API orgs are very electoral they're based on getting rights to citizenship and things like that and you know arts is encouraged already within our communities but like we were talking about like what's next what's the next step in Asian American arts like I'm not even there yet like how do I enter that space you know how do I get there it's like where's it at like I don't know how to navigate it so like yeah just want to connect to y'all so I just want to say hi to as well thanks I was just from the south okay I will say to that the one thing that helps us in this day and age is technology to break down the distance barrier if nothing else and so you shouldn't ever have to feel isolated in that way if you can't physically get somewhere that we should all be able to reach you and you should be able to reach us otherwise and so much of the work is created that way and so it's about finding those networks and those connections and keeping that dialogue going and building this network exactly briefly the generation first generation second generation and the four generations I think the immigrant generation is probably more interested in the preservation of the culture the second generation and those going forward that's most of the people in the room I think are interested in integrating into the cultural quilt of the nation that they have adopted so I think well for playwrights in particular as a playwright driven company Mai always tries to think outside the box in terms of why do playwrights today the young playwrights in their 20s, 30s have to write about first generation blues I think we have to go beyond that now and write about whatever we want to write about whether it's about teenagers in outer space or about the microfinance situation or about biking cross-country to the United States with white people I think we need to go beyond thinking that we have to write about Asian-Americans, Asian-Americans, we don't I think we have to liberate ourselves from that thinking and if you want to really integrate into the cultural quilt of the nation that's for the second and third and fourth generations going forward yeah and just to follow up on exactly that and Randy's comment I think it's a little bit about what we have to do is find a way about it's about easy marketing versus smarter marketing and what we have to do is to fight selling our families as the Vietnamese drama or the Korean family drama and the drama about a medical fit you know what I mean I think we have to dig deeper because no play is about one thing we often market those stories or reach an audience versus finding the deeper ways that are deeper themes that that play is talking about because I think when we go to see death of a salesman we're not like oh that's about a white family or that we're going because it's about a family that we can all connect to in a different way and I think that a lot of our work has been marginalized or pigeonholed because it has been in that way self-segregated and it's almost how do we find a different way of telling our stories okay so we're winding down on time we've got two more people in the docket and then I want to close out with the panel I'm going to pose a question do we want to integrate is that the goal I'm not sure that all of us have the same answer to that question Hi Lenny Daniels I founded the Philadelphia Black Theater Festival in 2000 it lasted until 2006 of course when it was time for someone else to step up people started going to it so I took a break but here's the thing you know we celebrated works by African American writers that our younger artists didn't know anything about you happen to mention death of a salesman it was just done by an all black cast here directed by Ozzie Jones and got wonderful reviews but again most of those artists had never heard of it so we find ourselves the people who have been doing this for a long time who actually went to school and got a degree in it no matter how much it does it serves us you know we came out thinking that we could pass things along and that's what we're trying to do the only reason that I'm here tonight is because I happen to call Sharon and tell her that I just proposed to my group that we're going to do the sound of music with an all black cast because it's a story and I think too often we let race separate from the story years and years ago the first time I had ever even looked at Fiddler on the Roof I was hired by an all white suburban school to direct it for them so you had one black woman a whole group of young white people and their parents and me bringing in Jewish actresses to talk about the experiences and that what this is supposed to be it's about educating everybody and letting them see that we're not that different color of skin means nothing if you're deaf if you're blind if you're poor it doesn't matter so the whole point of all of this is to not have to say to my younger students okay I know you like this music I know you love this story but you're never going to be cast in it professionally I'm sure that that's the same issue that Asian Americans have that Mexicans have that black people have I'm not saying that the Caucasian has taken over I'm saying that we've allowed it to matter what color of skin is more important than the people whose story we're supposed to tell we got two more and I know we got a wrap so Jonathan in there I think that I'm a theatre director from London and I've been working a lot in China and Hong Kong and I think that there's something about the fact that people are missing the fact that Americans are seen as sexy internationally and that would include Asian Americans I'd say and there's something about American dominant culture with the music African American the movies etc etc come on guys let's tap into this American sexiness that the world buys and you know it's the Asian bit but there's the American bit as well let's remind everyone that's the first point my second point is that we are very very international and all of us are connected with people in Asia or Europe whatever we talk to our family around the world all the time and I think there's something about that energy I've joined the dots as a second generation going back to China dealing with the root culture and actually there's lots of Asian Americans there actually all descent business wise so I think there's something about that strength you know those inspirations you've looked at Europe I went to the Medea piece today there's the Worcester group Aesthetics Influenciation American Work let's try and find what is the next influence you know who would have thought black slave culture would dominate the whole of the UK and the world now and you know so and I think that's looking forward Obama talked about the pivot to the east and I think you know there's a way to sort of exploit that you know the African Americans ultimately African American workers completely pervaded the west end last year and you know on broad day currently and I'm thinking that you know there's pivots to east and west that I think people can maximize and look into Hi thanks you know I strongly believe that we are stronger together than we are apart and that's a huge plus but I also want to remind us that Asian America that the phrase is an artificial construct that we don't have a lot of necessarily organic affinities that growing up my father had stories in the 20s about lynchings of Filipinos and segregation so I feel a close affinity to the African American community after 333 years of Catholic Spanish colonialism I am you know as much as I deny that I am Catholic and I have a close affinity to Latino communities I would just encourage us to expand and blast out the definition and not get so doctrinaire about Asian American and what that definition is especially because in these days where there are people who are mixed race and are not necessarily choosing to identify in this way we have to allow people meet them where they are rather than saying this is the way that we must define ourselves I'll stop there alright that was an amazing conversation please give a hand to the plenary and to everyone who spoke and I know there are a lot more thoughts and ideas and conversations to be had so please continue this conversation it is 750 and I'm handing it over to Gail thank you everybody so all of you for participating Andrea for facilitating and allowing me to not be on stage I think that right now we're actually going to be clear I'm looking at Jeff because he's going to tell me if I'm wrong okay so there's a short break so we want to be able to clear the theater for about 10 minutes so that we can set the stage for the performance showcase at 8 o'clock and we invite you out to the bar in the restaurant if you haven't already had a chance to get a drink there's the bars open over there and for those of you who are not staying for the performance showcase I hope that we will see you tomorrow morning bright and early at 9.30 a.m. over at Asian Arts Initiative where we'll be meeting


Welcome to building an edge computing platform for network services using cloud-native technologies. With a title itself being such a mouthful, I guess we'll just get right to it. So these are the genders. So we will first look at the problems that we actually looked at first. The framework that we came up with to address that problem. The demo, which is actually basically a description of the framework also. And what are we going to do after that? So who are we? We are a team of OPNIV contributors from Huawei USA, actually FutureWay. What is OPNIV? OPNIV is an open source project specializing in integrating a bunch of upstream projects and to address various different NFV use cases. What's NFV? NFV is network function virtualizations. It's basically the idea that the majority of your network functions that are currently deployed as a vertically integrated network appliances can be provided instead by software running on commodity servers. And each of these network functions, we would like to call it virtual network functions, like a firewall, for example. And that is a term that I'll use through L, so that's why I actually kind of put it out there. For the team that I just mentioned, the OPNIV contributors team in Huawei, for a few of us, for the last several months, we've been focusing on whether or not we can build VNFs as cloud-native applications. And the obvious benefits are there. I don't want to insult you guys for why you want to build cloud-native applications, given the venue. And if you are able to build a cloud-native VNF, we actually think that it's actually very suitable for the edge network use cases. The nature of elasticity for the cloud-native applications allows you to optimally utilize these resources. So that's actually, for an edge case, that's actually kind of good, because the constraint on resources are much greater. The telecommunication industry, particularly edge networks, comes in all shapes and sizes. It goes from something like tens or even hundreds of servers, all the way down to maybe your home gateway that your Comcasts give you. Needless to say, if you go further and further towards the edge, the maintenance cost is actually higher. So the nature of resiliency and fault tolerance is a great benefit for the edge case. Usually for edge nodes, the images are being pushed by a central management system. And for all the mods, I read it somewhere that if you push a mod patch or something, it depends on the edge node itself. You can have anywhere from 5% to maybe even 30% failure rates on a push. In this particular case, if you're cloud-native apps, you can definitely create something like a sandbox. After you run your CI on a cloud, you can still run a validation on the box itself to see what it actually runs. And if you really don't like it, you can have intelligence on the edge nodes to actually roll back. And on the other hand, if you really like it on one site, you can replicate and repeat on various different sites moving forward. So with all this great benefits on building VNF as cloud-native applications, why haven't we? Well, actually, the big reason is because there are actually a significant amount of gaps to get there. There are some that would take a very long time for a lot of people to do, which are things like security issues, performance requirements, latency requirements, throughput requirements, or compliance requirements. All those things would take a lot of efforts for a lot of people to get it going. For this team particularly, we're basically looking at two functional gaps that are somewhat obvious, actually. The cloud-native application, most of the common cloud-native applications, which are mostly web service backends, usually expose an endpoint, allows the clients to send requests to an endpoint, and then from there, they basically just go through the application flow. There is a very large subset of VNFs that are not exposing any endpoints to the clients. So we call them transparent proxies. They basically intercept the packets and start actually processing it. So we commonly refer to that as a surface insertion problem, and we need some mechanisms to basically redirect traffic, and that's only one type of thing. You also need to allow them to listen to traffic, and if they listen and analyze for a while, you want to give them a programmable interface that they can basically say, although you want to deny it, or you want to ray-limit that traffic flow. And finally, and most actually kind of challengingly, is you have to allow VNFs that are ported to cloud-native applications to be able to bring their own data path. I'll actually talk about that later. And the second obvious gap that we're looking at is what we call VNFFG. It's an NFV thing. FG stands for folding graft. It's an orchestration function where the operators can specify a chain of VNFs where the traffic would actually traverse through. And then the realization of that desire is actually being carried over by the data path. If you converted the VNF into a cloud-native VNF, most likely, instead of having, I would imagine, I would hope anyway, that you don't do a lot of data path stitching, but instead it's actually creating a service graph by just stitching, by making the API it's calling each other between microservices. Now, the really big difference here is instead of the applications defining what the service is you're going to subscribe to, it's going to be operator-defined. So those two are the gaps that we are going to address, and the framework is supposed to address both gaps. Before we go into the framework, these are the terminologies that I'll be using describing the frameworks. Cloud-native network functions, which is basically what I've been saying, the cloud-native VNFs.  So it goes into three, just CNFs. This is something that is defined by the operator, and it's made up of a list of microservices. So what is an operator? An operator is the guy that actually defines and deploys those CNFs for the clients to subscribe to willingly or unwillingly, which is, in one case, maybe for enterprise case, maybe your IT administrators, for some mobile case, maybe AT&T and Verizon, or it could be cloud providers on some side, too. Microservices are basically just microservices. It's nothing special. It's something that consumes some compute resources and exposes a set of API. In CNF, we kind of look at that as like a Lego piece that would construct a CNF. And the clients are just the people that would initiate traffic that goes through the edge node. So this is the diagram of the architecture. The operator... I'm thinking the mouse is here, right? Or not. The operator goes into the central management and defines the CNFs. That's the REST call that goes into the edge. So they manage many of these edge nodes, supposedly. The REST call goes down to the edge agent. The edge agents would request the Kubernetes API server to create deployments. So let's say in this case you define CNF 1 as making up of microservices 1, 2, and 3, and 4. They would create those pods. And then the diagram here for what extrapolates in the pod. I'll describe that later. So kind of remember this. The pod at least contains two containers. One is the microservice. The other one is an event handler. And to route traffic to MS1, in this case, with all the arrows, MS1 is the one that actually is where the traffic beginning point is. There's a Datapath manager that will be listening to Kubernetes API server, and they will program the Datapath. And that really good-looking little unicorn icon there is actually EBPF. For those who don't know, I am not going to describe a lot of EBPF. I'll basically just tell you why we choose the EBPF as the Datapath engine. But I'll talk about that later. So this is a completely event-driven model. Basically what we do is we are creating an event handler containers as a sidecar to every single pod that runs the microservice. The microservice themselves would expose a set of events and the operators on the cloud side would implement the handlers for those events. And they don't have to, because that's a default. There will be a default that does nothing. But then if they do, what they would do actually is the framework would give them a set of SDKs, and the SDA calls for them are steps. Internally, they're going to be translated into GRPC calls, and that's how you actually start chaining things together. On the programmable Datapath front, look at number two. The rules format is something like this. It's an optional IP, a port numbers. You can choose the actions, redirect, or copy to a list of labels. And as I said before, we actually utilize EBPF, more specifically I-Ovisor BCC, to low BPF code. There's two major reasons to do that. The first major reason is, as I said, we want to allow people to bring your own Datapath. And literally, I can actually allow you if you know how to write BPF code, not the bytecode, the C code. So you can write them C codes based on what BPF requirements are, and then I can load it inside your part's ingress and egress port. So that allows VNFs, the microservices to bring in their own Datapath. Because obviously I cannot design a network Datapath that would actually satisfy all the VNFs. That's just impossible. So to better describe this is actually going through a demo. So in this demo, we are going to have the operator using the portal to create a CNF. So this particular CNF, I would call it Edge Security. Even when you just do a prototype, you kind of realize that for an Edge Security system, you're more protecting the clients rather than the applications and servers. So you actually see us processing a lot more on the HTTP response than the request. So you define a CNF by including multiple microservices, which could be, in this case, it would be actually proxy, a policy manager, and a content inspect engine. And each of these microservices actually has a set of events, and the operators would have to implement, or actually they can choose to implement these events and customize them through the SDKs that we provide them. So in this case, our SDKs are all in Python. And there is a DPM code for you to... they have manager code, API for you to start routing the initial traffic to the XGB proxy. And then you deploy it on the Edge node. And then those nodes get spawned into the... those parts get spawned on the nodes. And then clients later on sends an XGB request, and then you see that they actually go through the call graph that the operator defined. And then at some point during the demo, we're going to add another microservice into the CNF antivirus, which actually is a very interesting use case for Edge, because if you think about IoT use cases, perhaps the end-user devices may not have enough power to run endpoint securities. So you may actually want to run endpoint securities directly on to the Edge node. But we add antivirus, and then we are chaining that with an antivirus-specific call to make the CNF extended, to add services to CNF basically. And then we'll see that it actually goes through antivirus. And the operators now, so this is the third step, wants to narrow what needs to be scanned. So for them, they have the ability to see, because it's actually kind of silly to scan HTML files. So instead of that, they may want to scan it only when you have embedded inside executable. So in this case, you can actually do a logic to check whether or not you have an executable embedded, and then you only run antivirus when that happens. So here's the demo. This is video recorded, not running live, not testing demo guide here. So initially, you're creating a CNF, so we have a really nice UI here for our guy. One of my teammates actually built this UI, thanks to him. And from there, you pick the set of events. So the first event you actually handle is the deploy event. The deploy events, because of time reasons, we already populate the code, the defaults. But we'll change it actually as we go. So the important thing is here. So in here, you specify the set of microservices that you're going to add into this CNF. And then each of them is basically a code. Here. So you're doing proxy.start, policy manager.start, and content inspect.start that basically creates three pods into this CNF.  So actions redirect the label to label, and then the port number is 28,000. This is just made up of port. And then you have to tell the deployment agent that this is done with deployment. And then later on, as you can see, as I said earlier, we are doing more of a user protection. So the request actually does nothing. They should be request as an event. It does nothing. The response is the beginning of the chain. So after response is received from the server side back there, fine. The first thing we'll go through is the policy manager to do a policy check. And then we'll chain that to a content inspect. And then content inspect is the end of the chain, so we do nothing. And then we deploy it. So this is a recruit demo. The way we show you that it works is by actually showing you trace logs. So hopefully you guys trust me that I'm not just sending a bunch of printfs to a web page. This is actually something happening underneath. So now you see everything get deployed. Those three microservices get deployed. And you can see here, there's a deploy agent that we dynamically load. The part that we dynamically load. When you set done, they will actually kill itself. So they're the one responsible to execute the deploy handler code. And so all the parts are up, so now we can use traffic. We generate traffic using Coral. Not because we are giving more crude demos. It's that Coral actually works better than the browser in this case, because Coral only do a one XGB request and run response back. So you'll be able to see the trace much better than using a browser, which is continuously fetching. So in this case, you are seeing. We're going to go to Google.com. And you see that it goes through XGB proxy. And when a response happens, it goes through policy manager. And then content inspect on line nine. And then the response are all coming back to the proxy. So we send it back to the client. So now let's say we want to add antivirus. So you go back to the same CNF and modify your deploy hand door by adding this SDK. So this is a good simulation of how you write something based on an SDK. You do it on web. And so now you want antivirus to start. And you want to chain it at the end of the current service chain. So that will be content inspect. And in there you make a SDK call equals to basically an SDK that antivirus that scan. And voila. You clear the trace first. And then you deploy it. From there, we actually do a complete update of deployments. So those things that has image changes will actually get terminated and respond to that. Now we see the parts coming up. Antivirus has been running. So we are using traffic again. We're sending to Google.com again. And now you can see that it goes through antivirus embedded inside content inspect and policy manager all the way down to sending a response back. So now let's say you figure you don't want to scan it indiscriminately scan all the files. You only want to scan them for if you're embedded JavaScript executable inside your HTML. So you can change that logic by first removing the antivirus scan call from content inspect. And let's say add it into policy manager. So you can wait until you get the content inspect to show you what the content actually contains. So in this case JavaScript is greater than zero. And you say get JavaScript is greater than zero. Then we only when that happens we do an antivirus scan. I mean I typed this which is very slow as you can see. And then deploy it. So now the code logic all the parts are now restarted with the new cycle. So they build, tag and push to registry. And then Kubernetes will fetch and if you do Google.com which actually contains no embedded JavaScript zero in line 10 there. It actually doesn't go through antivirus as you can see content inspect and policy manager right away. And we are fortunate to find that there's still some website that has embedded Java instead of continuously fetching JavaScript. And that would be cnn.com. In line 13 we fetch cnn.com and as you can see at line 18 we are doing antivirus. So the logic get executed. These are actually the call floats of what happens on the three scenarios that I show you. I don't think I will actually get into that too much. But the important thing is actually on the left hand side you can see the cascade number of calls and that's actually what the operators will define. When they define those calls we allow them to actually chain things so in essence we allow people to define the service graph. I will upload the slides after the presentation so if you want to read that go ahead on schedule.org you should be able to read it the PDF format of it. So this is what we have right now and then moving forward there are a couple things that we actually want to do also. One of these is actually the data collection aspects. This has been used as an edge case to definitely allow them to collect a rich set of data. That's actually the second major reason why we chose EBPF. EBPF is actually a tracing tool by nature. Particularly for IO Visor BCC it comes with a bunch of sample BPF code that you can use for kernel tracing. And I think because we're building this for any generic edge cases so we are not assuming that we're going to run some analytic engines under the edge. But at the very minimum we would want data correlations to happen on the edge. So we use the cookie field which is in this in current case we're using the five tuples the source test IP, source test port and the protocol ID. Something that both the data path and the user space can actually generate and they would all key that as one of their major keys on the tables. We want to fetch data once they become available, all the trace data and we have Redis working to which also use that as a key. You can actually fetch all data using the same cookie key. It's a string actually in the containers and it's a binary in EBPF. You can use the key to actually fetch all the data corresponding data and send it to cloud. So data collection is something we have considered. Someone will probably realize that on the first slide we actually kind of violated that policies by sending the event handlers to be CNF specific. The event handlers actually loads the CNF specific code that defined by operators and then run as a sidecar next to a microservice. So in essence your microservice cannot be reused which is a pretty bad thing. So moving forward we are thinking of using a multiple sidecar type architecture. So in essence each of them would be running CNF specific event handlers and how to distinguish how to go to which particular sidecar is actually based on the cookie again. And how we map that most likely I would imagine is the client. So you have to identify the client. The client maps to a particular CNF and then you map the sessions back to the client. So now you actually to be request have to do something. Not by the operators but actually by us inside the framework. And then that information we get propagated throughout all the event handlers for all the parts. And we may actually make that programmable. Not sure what the use case is yet. For VNF cases it will be bad if we can't support legacy VNFs. The biggest reason is there are many, many cases of VNFs that are not well NF anyway. Network services that are battle tested fully loaded and deployed for a very long time. So you can't just tell people to rewrite everything just because it's cloud native. So to really think about that how do you support legacy VNF our demands for a VNF micro surface is two things. The framework asks for them to generate events when something happens and it has the GRPC request handling interface. So obviously legacy VNF doesn't have that. But luckily for us actually Kubernetes has a really well-known design patterns for containers pod relationships that would actually try to solve this problem. It's called the adapter pattern. And I actually did that for the antivirus pod, micro service. The antivirus I use ClamAV. The ClamAV daemon actually runs in a container. I use Python. So Pi, ClamD runs on the adapters and interface to ClamAV daemon. And the adapter itself is a GRPC server that actually runs I use serial MQ for event handling. So I actually didn't mention that, sorry. It runs a serial MQ event loop. I hope to make that into a framework so people can easily just port, as long as your legacy VNF runs in one or more Linux processes you can pretty much use similar framework to port the legacy VNFs into this particular framework. This cloud-native framework. And finally, if you did all this, this is relatively it's not 100% cloud-native. It's definitely no stainless or no streaming logs or all that stuff. But it is actually good enough to take advantage of a lot of cloud-native computing ecosystem tool sets. One of this is if you want to scale up, you can use a service match, obviously. Because now I'm converting the entire interface to everything, to all the microservices through GRPC. So it naturally works with Envoy, Nginx, or LinkoD, and obviously with Istio. And particularly I love the service graph tools on Istio. So you can run traffic for a while and then it actually generates a graphical look of what the service graph looks like. Given that it's really fine service graph, it's kind of good to use it as a visibility and validation tool. As you see from the demo, I basically show you a demo by showing you results of tracing. So tracing is important. And right now we are pretty ad hoc on our tracing. Just kind of rush the demo for today. In the future, we obviously want to use open tracing APIs and probably Jega as the tracer. And finally, if you are cloud-native applications in Kubernetes, you will be able to leverage all this CICD solutions like Spinnaker. Should add tons of them actually, really. And maybe February 8th, I think, that's another one. So for information, if you like what I just said, we have the shameless plug. We have a project called Clover on the OPNV. The project was approved about a month and a half ago. The charter is really specifically investigating how to build VNF as cloud-native applications. So this is one way of filling the gaps. There will be more gaps found and there will be more prototypes being built as part of this project. So you can go into this Slack channel and you can also email me. That's the last resort. Thank you. That's it. Let me see. About 5-10 minutes. Any questions? No? Thank you.


Hello, everyone. I'm James Milan. Welcome to this episode of Talk of the Town. I say this every time, but it's really true that it's one of my favorites of our kind of regular programs that we produce here, and it is the ACA Update. ACA, of course, is the Arlington Center for the Arts, and I am joined as I always am for these updates. Thank goodness. My name is Tom Formicola, who is the head of the Arlington Center for the Arts, and Tom has brought another staff member. We've started this the last time by bringing Pam Shanley, and that worked out great, and today we have Kat Bodwin, who is the Education and Programs Director for the ACA. So, first of all, Tom, Kat, thanks so much for being here. Thank you. Thanks for having us. So, let's talk about what's going on at the ACA, and we want to have the focus, of course, with you being here, Kat. We want to take full advantage and find out about all things educational, which I know is a big part of your agenda and the service that you provide for the community. But let's start before we delve deeper into that. Let's just start with a new exhibit that I understand is just being prepared as we speak and is going to be unveiled pretty soon. Literally just being prepared. We had artists stopping in all morning long today to drop off work that we're going to be showcasing in this next show, which opens on March 3rd, I think. Do you want to tell us what it's all about, Kat? Yeah, the show's called Integrated Cycles. It's an artist's response to our changing environments. The show's major ethos is speaking about our connectedness with the systems that are around us, the animals that are around us, the species that are around us, and artists really thinking thoughtfully about our place within the environment as well as our place for generations to come. So, this current exhibit is getting installed. There's some two-dimensional pieces. There's some three-dimensional pieces, and there's some larger installations, which our camp kiddos are going to help with creating. And then also, the artists who are exhibiting are also going to have an opportunity to teach the community at large through adult classes, teen classes, kid and family classes as well. We should mention that it's being curated by our board member Emily Bells. Did I say member? Board member Emily Bells. And we're able to do this project because of a grant that we received from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, who I know have been quite active in these last couple years. Very supportive in the last couple years. And in general, of course, but especially given the circumstances we're all very familiar with. You know, I have an off-the-cuff question to ask that I didn't prepare you guys for, but what you were just saying, Kat, in describing the exhibit. I'm wondering, is this connected at all, or is it just coincidental, with the Arlington Reads program that the library is putting on, which also has to do with our connection with nature and the indigenous communities, etc. Is that just pure coincidence? As far as I know, it's pure coincidence. Yeah, it is. I mean, it's not coincidence in that everybody is interested in these issues right now. And I think lots of folks are exploring them in different ways. You know, Cecily Miller, who's our public art person over at the Arlington Commission for Arts and Culture. Like in much of her work, she's exploring issues related to environmentalism. Absolutely. So, we're in good company. Yeah, and you're right. I mean, you can't get away from thinking about this, pondering, presenting, sharing, processing, all of this stuff, obviously, in our current, in the world, the way that it is right now. And with, especially with what we worry about and what we are faced with. So, excellent to hear about that. Let's talk, let's now kind of focus really on the educational offerings that you guys have in store for us over the next little while. And that begins with the classes that you offer, which are, you know, each, as the calendar unfolds, you have new sets of classes for each new term. So, tell us about the winter and spring classes. Yeah. So, as I mentioned, the art exhibit is going to be coming into our spring offerings as well. But we still actually have some winter classes that are unfolding now. We have some color theory workshops. We actually have a workshop that's all on foraging materials and creating sculptures out of them. Pastels class, digital drawing for teens, which is blowing up at this point. I'm so thrilled. So, we still have some offerings that are starting this winter semester. And the people can sign up for and do, or these are simply underway already in your describing. They can sign up for them now. Oh, is that right? They can go right to our website. We still have the winter catalog live, and we also have the spring catalog that is now live. And now people who are not just members, but also the public at large is able to register for our spring classes. That is excellent. Let me ask you about a particular initiative that Tom had, you know, kind of clued me into as we were preparing for today's talk. And that is the teen artists on the issues. So that sounds intriguing to me. Tell me about that, especially I also want to just follow up on the fact that what you were just saying about the digital class being like, like it's blowing up, like you said, teens are responding to this. So tell us about teen artists on the issues. Teen artists on the issues. This is our second iteration of the program. The first was visual arts based in painting, drawing, some kids brought in digital media. But this time we're doing an intensive focus on documentary filmmaking, much of the part of partnership with ACMI. So thank you to everybody working in the background here. So we're thrilled because that means that teens are going to have the opportunity to work with Michael Sheridan, who is a documentary filmmaker. His work has spanned from communities in the U.S. conversations around immigration in the U.S. borders to Haiti and even Afghanistan. So he's really well respected in those communities and we're so excited to bring him in to Arlington. So our teens who are participating, we already have five who are accepted and we're really thrilled. There's still some seats available. They'll have the opportunity to use your amazing tech that you have here. Learn from somebody who's been making documentary films in communities around the world and produce a short documentary film that is specific to the issues they're passionate about that are happening in Arlington. You know, I'm curious about what kind of time commitment that that is because obviously we know a little bit around here about how long it takes to master these both the equipment and the processes that are involved. So just is the class going to be a couple of hours a week for, I don't know, five, six, seven, eight weeks? I'm not actually sure. 10. Count them. 10 weeks. So last year we piloted this program, as Kat said, and we did like an intensive weekend. So this year we're really building it out based on the success of that program. So we're doing 10 weeks and the students will meet each week on Wednesdays.  And Saturdays are opportunities for them to go out and create. And are there any age limits for that? Are you focusing more on high schoolers perhaps or? Yes, 14 to 17 is the age range for this program. That's great. And and the real exciting piece, too, is that at the end of this project, we are going to do a public screening of all of the films created at the Regent Theatre. That sounds wonderful and also mighty similar to something that we do each year, the A-Town Teen Film Festival, which we will do again this year, which we've both been a part of actually. Exactly. Last time I was here. So one of the things that really drove us on this project is so we have this teen artist on the issues program. And it is likely that every year will change up the discipline. And we had an opportunity this year to work with a great artist, which is really what drove our selection of film as a theme. But you know, one of the things that is really important to us is to provide an opportunity for for teenagers to explore social justice and community issues that they really care about, and to understand how art can help them communicate their ideas, and then to provide opportunities to educate and inform the community about what our young people are thinking about the world that they live in, and the world that they're soon going to be leading. And I know from, you know, I think I've shared with you before, Tom, perhaps, but Kat, I taught in high school for 23 years before doing this job, and I still work with high schoolers and coach high schoolers all the time. And I know that one of the big preoccupations of that time of one's life is getting your voice heard, you know, just having people pay attention to what you think is important. And this is clearly yet another vehicle that you are providing for them to acquire some really just fun and potentially super useful skills, but also to end up with with a final product that is a representative of or is representative of their voices. And that is really empowering for young people. So that's a it's a wonderful thing to be able to do. I should mention again, that like this project really wouldn't be possible without grants that we received from the Robert and Tony Bader Foundation, as well as the Arlington Cultural Council, also known as the Arlington Commission for Arts and Cultural Grants Committee, which is a local agency supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which is a state agency. So you see how terrific the MCC is. I'll tell you what, MCC is loving us right now. And as is ACMI, thank you so much for your mention of the fact that we are collaborating around this with you and it makes all the sense in the world that we would and we're really psyched about it. We can't do this work alone. No. Yeah. And as you said, the discipline will change each year with this with this particular program of teen artists on the issues. And it's just wonderful that this year, there's a nice dovetailing of what you do and what we do, such as to be able to work together. That's great stuff. All right, so we are on the cusp. We're speaking to you in early to approaching mid February now. So we're just on the cusp of the first of two school breaks coming up. You guys usually offer vacation arts camps. Doing so this year and want to talk about it. Yeah, absolutely. So we are continuing to have vacation arts camp during February and April break as well as 10 whole weeks during the summer.  And even then, there was a kind of like, yes, what are we doing? It really is funny. Like we finished this year on like September 3rd, our camp ended. And by like September 10th, we were already talking about next summer. I mean, it really is a year round. endeavor. Yeah, absolutely. It's almost hard to keep track of dates because you're already planning for the next year. But but yeah, so we still have some availability in our February and April break camps. We have an awesome Art Academy that is a more visual arts intensive program for kiddos in third grade up to fifth grade who really just want to own in on their skills. Our vacation arts camp is a solid program where we have kids involved in different disciplines. They kind of get a nice balance. Even if they don't see themselves as like a visual arts kiddo or performing arts kiddo. We also have ceramic programs and teen programs specific for painting and drawing as well as cartooning and animation. So there's still some availability in those programs. They're really robust at this point. They're they're selling nicely. So people are really ready to return to life again. It seems like I mean, it's the enrollments have been really healthy. People are are really excited to participate again. Yeah, we should we should actually it brings to mind the fact that one of the things that we spoke about with you and Pam last time was just making clear to people what the rules were in terms of masking and distancing, etc. So what's the story with the vacation arts camp and what you expect for the summer at this point? So our February and April camps will look a lot like the summer camps in the February and April camps we did last year. I mean, we're still very much, you know, aware of COVID and we're still very much taking our cues from the CDC and the state and the town. And and so we planned a camp for the winter and spring that still held close to what we had been doing. This summer will open up a little bit and the camp program will start to look a little bit more like the camp program that we did in summer's previous to COVID where the kids will have some more opportunity to like move around because they've been pretty much tied to a classroom for the last couple of years. So there will be more diversity of activities there will be like we're able to sort of re engage in some movement and theater exercises again. And so we'll be a little bit more balanced between performing arts and visual arts. But, you know, it's constantly evolving and summer is still pretty far away. But like if you right now we're still planning that, you know, if you're going to participate in camp, you've got to be fully vaccinated and you have to wear a mask. And we're taking our cues, as I said, from like the agencies out there that know best. Yeah, you know, maybe an interesting thing that you guys are going to be looking at is today's kind of big announcement from the governor that about students and masking and, you know, that the restrictions coming off at the end of February. So it'll be interesting. I mean, we were talking about that on the way on the drive here actually this afternoon.  And so it'll be interesting to see what we do in Arlington. And obviously that will have a really direct impact on what we do. Yeah, I mean, it is going to be my understanding is that it is going to be left largely to towns and school districts, etc. to decide how they how they want to to deal with this. But we know how things are here in Arlington in general and that the compliance with mass mandates and vaccination, you know, we know vaccination rates very high, etc. So I expect that people will be open to however it is that you guys are going to need to set things up to be most comfortable. You know, there's a spectrum, right?  And, you know, you know, one of the things that we've pride in on ourselves is is being as respectful as we can of everyone along that spectrum, because people have different needs and different expectations of us. And we recognize that we can't satisfy everybody. But we're trying to make decisions that that work for most people. And then we're trying to be really mindful of the folks that that for whatever reasons aren't feeling comfortable. And and, you know, we're we're not forgetting about them. Mm hmm. Yeah, I mean, your the ACA's inclusiveness is well known and well, you know, and well deserved. And, you know, and again goes with the spirit of Arlington as well. You know, I'm thinking, Kat, that you were talking about the 10 weeks of summer camp. And again, you couldn't help, but I'd go. And I'm thinking, OK, in addition to the adults, you also rely on counselors, right? On kids older, older kids usually who will function as counselors who have a really pivotal role in the camps. I'm sure the vacation camps as well as the summer ones. And my understanding is that you have internships now being offered to train camp counselors. Is that is that what that is? That's correct. Yeah. So our counselors are pivotal and pivotal. Is that the right word? Thank you. Good word. Absolutely. And I like that word. They're they're so critical in our work that we do. They're compassionate, empathetic, they're really hands on in the classroom. A lot of our campers have had increasing needs coming out of isolation in the pandemic. And so making sure that our teachers are well supported in the classrooms and that our counselors feel empowered to help out our kiddos. It's just all comes down to safety and then also having a good time in our camps. And that doesn't happen out of thin air. So we've had the great opportunity to relook at our programs since the start of the pandemic and ask what's working? What's not? And how can we better support our staff? And from that came our internship. So we're providing training not only on how to support instructors with their arts lessons, but also social emotional learning skills, nonviolent communication, how to talk with parents, how to talk with kids, resume building, conflict resolution and so things that skills that our counselors are able to not only apply in the classroom, but also skills that they can take with them in social settings in the professional settings and then onward. Yeah, I mean, what you just described sounds like a very comprehensive curriculum to really prepare kids for a lot of different kinds of circumstances and a lot of different kinds of challenges. Probably some of them moving way beyond what they'll need to call upon to, you know, to handle a rowdy bunch of ACA youngsters, I would think. So that's a that is a super valuable offering, I would say. So what are the details about it? Yeah, so there is a they're welcome to apply now. We have a link on our website under our camp programs. There is an internship page that explains a little bit more in detail about the program. It's there's going to be three different cohorts, three different weeks. So this week long, the three weeks long each. So three cohorts of six kids, three weeks each. And at the end of the summer, we hope to have trained 18 teenagers. Gotcha. So they can find all that information, including the date ranges there, what a typical day would look like because they'll be pushing into the classrooms as well as having time to learn those skills with one on one. OK, so yeah, I want to make sure I understand this. So you're offering 10 weeks of summer camp in the summer. And then in addition to that, you have these three week stints for six up to six students each. And during those stints, they will not only be getting the kind of training and education you were talking about across a bunch of areas, but they will be work kind of some part of their time is actually putting all that into practice in the classrooms. Yep. And then upon successful completion of that program, they're eligible to work for us as full fledged counselors. That sounds great. And what's the age limit on that if there is 15 to 16 for that one? OK, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, we're able to run this program. Because don't tell me because of the generosity of an anonymous donor, actually, because there's expenses associated with a project like this. You know, we have we have a teacher that will be focused on the advancement of those counselors. And and we you know, because these kids are giving us like a chunk of their summer, we're going to provide a small stipend to each of them who successfully complete the program. And so we have a community member who saw that we were doing this and was enthusiastic and said, I'd like to help you do that.  And and also because of organizations like yours really who are clearly I am very impressed by what you've just described as the curriculum for this training, because you're not that this is just doing doing a service for these youngsters that goes way beyond what they're going to do for the summer and how well they'll do it this summer or next summer or however long they, you know, on camp counselors for because these these skills, like you said, conflict or conflict resolution and other such things, they are going to be able to apply that way beyond the summer. Yeah. And I'm really grateful. ACA has also helped grow me as an individual as well and help provide some training for me. And so I went to a training for a fantastic organization called One Common Unity that already integrated a lot of these skills into their programming. So I feel like it wouldn't be wouldn't be fair not to also attribute them for their amazing work that they also do with youth and arts and social emotional learning. So we have to give them a huge thank you as well. Man, bunch of shout outs today. I have to say anybody we're forgetting.   And you know, she has a lot of experience and just a lot of, you know, a lot of good instincts around these things. And you know, I don't have a lot of experience working directly with children. And you know, as as we go through the summer, I am very often calling on cat for advice and guidance, you know, as we are trying to do the best job that we can do by all the camp families. You know, I mentioned before that we're this is kind of like the winter quarter version of the ACA update. We tend to check in with you guys once per season. And before, you know, by the time we get to the spring version, we'll have, you know, some traditional ACA sponsored events that are staples in the Arlington calendar to talk about. And I know that you don't have any, you know, great number of details about say, Blue Gene Ball, porch fest, things like that that everybody associates both with life in Arlington and the ACA. But, you know, tell us what you can. All right. Well, we haven't sent out the Save the Date card yet, but it's coming soon for the Blue Gene Ball. And it's going to happen on April 30th. And we're back to an in-person format again this year. And we are planning to be at Arlington's new community center, which is the building that we inhabit. So we're super excited. We're we're going to be among the first groups, I think, to like sort of be welcoming people into that new space. Yeah, that's beautiful. They've done a beautiful job. It's a beautiful space. And I have to say, you know, having been to a number of Blue Gene Balls in the past, having it live and having everybody in their particular Blue Gene themed costume, so to speak, or, or, you know, what they're wearing anyway, is, you know, it's something of note. And it is definitely part of the whole of the festivities, for sure. You know, we'll have music again, great music and food and drink.  So people should keep their eyes and ears open, looking for details about that. And we will look to talk to you before that point. Great. And I know also we had mentioned even last time because even in November, when we spoke last, people are interested in the upcoming porch fest, whether it's going to be June 18th, all day long. The details of that will start to roll out in March. So in March, folks that are interested in hosting a band or bands that are looking for hosts should check our w w w dot a c a r t s dot org website and and look for how they can be involved this year. Great.  So awesome. All right. Thank you both so much for joining us. Anything that we've should I check my forgotten anybody we've forgotten to thank or anything we've forgotten to mention. I think we got it all, James. All right. That's great.  I think we did. All right. Good. Excellent. And that came so we can close. I have, of course, been joined by Kat Bodewin and by Tom Formicola from the Arlington Center for the Arts for this ACA update. Thanks to you guys so much for joining us. Thanks to you for joining us as well. I'm James Milan. This is Talk of the Town. We'll see you next time.