Welcome. Bienvenidos. My name is Karen Zacarias and I am so excited to see everybody here. I know everybody's very busy and this is a long trip for a lot of people, so I want to thank you from the Latino Theater Commons and from artists and everybody coming all the way out here to sit down and have this conversation. This came out, I am the resident playwright at Arena Stage. I was the first person to get one of the Mellon grants. I don't know if you know about it, but it's a three-year residency where you get paid and you get money to develop your work. And I don't know if it's... I always wanted, there's always that feeling when you get something like that, like what did I do to deserve this? I don't know why I got so lucky and how can I find a way to give back? And at first I thought I would do something for local playwrights, but that didn't seem to be the right fit. And as time was progressing and I was working on work, a couple of events happened in Washington, D.C. that brought me into contact with a number of different people. One of them was the Shakespeare Theater. Was it much ado? Had a, what do you call it, a snafu with what they call two of their characters? Tell them what happened. Well, the production concept was set in Cuba, but all but one of the actors in the production were Anglo. And two of the clown characters were renamed Juan Arroz and José Frigoles, which I found kind of randomly as I was looking, as I was sort of researching the production, I was kind of curious what they were going to do with it. And then I saw the cast list and the characters and I thought that was unusual. And then when I tried to find out more information about it, there wasn't any response from the theater. So I immediately, I started contacting members of the Latino community across the country to get their thoughts and opinions better perceived. And then came like this, a direct campaign. I did this direct appeal to Michael Kahn and then the press started picking up on it and there was an immediate sort of groundswell of support. And responses from Latinos from all over the country. And then Peter Marks from the Washington Post wrote about it. And then soon after that, Michael Kahn apologized publicly and restored the names. And he said he had never sort of encountered this and he wasn't around for the production. That was the problem. He wasn't, the director was sort of left to their own devices to create a board, which was fine, but at the same time it was very culturally insensitive to the Latinos in the community of Washington, DC. But it wound up to be kind of a catalyst for a lot of other things. And there was a connection between that and the Anglo-Castee, the motherfucker with the hat. And then there was another incident with Gala Hispanic Theater who was doing a play by Matthew Olmos. And then he found out through the press that they weren't doing his play because it was too... Anyway, what was really interesting is this virtual world where Gala had reached out to me because I lived in DC about what happened at Shakespeare. And I knew Ann and Juliet. I felt that there's a lot of Latinos doing really interesting work and starting to get activated, but we had not been in a room together in a long time. I had met Ann and Juliet and HPP, which had been a big, big culminating event for a lot of Latinos. But with the death of that and the work of the tapered floor, I didn't know when the last time there were a lot of people together to talk about the state of theater. And at TCG, it's always a small little meeting that's held. And I thought this was the time and there were people really wanting to do it. And I had access to space and people who would support. So I reached out to Polly and David Dower at Arena Stage. And I said, you know what I'd really like to do? I'd really like to have the funds to fly in eight or ten Latino artists, hopefully independent, and from all parts of the country just to be in a room and dream up what it is that we can do. That was the initial idea. There was no huge agenda. I just knew that if we put eight or ten people in a room together, something fruitful would come out of it. And something did. Anne came and we all talked about our need to be together, our need to kind of, you know, redefine the narrative of Latinos in theater and to really stop being second class citizens on so many different levels and take ownership of our work and not expecting necessarily other institutions to carve out room for us but to make the room for ourselves. It was a really dynamic and interesting meeting and out of that came a constant paper that Anne wrote that talked about all our views, et cetera, and then Gladlock held great grant writing. And this was with the help of everybody else, which we applied to the Doris Duke Foundation and got $60,000 for it. We knew immediately that from eight people that this would have to grow, but we needed to make it grow in a systematic and responsible way that made people feel included but also made people feel they had responsibility for helping shoulder something that we could bring people in. So right away we kind of created a steering committee of which you were a part. Thank you so much for that. And that's where we are. That's where it came. It was a spark and a great opportunity at the time and people were willing to play and I think it really is a time for us to really help this energy and make something big out of it and that's what the National Conference is for.  It's our work and our voice and there's a lot of different voices in that. So starting with voices, I would love it if everyone could just introduce themselves to each other and say a little bit of where you're from and what you do and I don't know, your favorite dessert is something personal. Tony? My name is Tony Senera or Antonio Senera from Portland, Oregon. I spent a lot of years at the Miracle Theater Group or Milagro and then for some strange idea I decided to start my own theater company this last year called Badass Theater Company and I don't tell anybody to start a theater company at the age of 46. So that's me. Hello, my name is Kenan Valdes. I'm from San Juan Bautista, California. I'm the Producing Artistic Director of the Indiana Company. That's my current position but I'm a lifetime long member. I grew up on the foot of the stage so to speak. And so my favorite dessert I think stems from those early days of being around the get-together service was chocolate mousse and it's because when I was a kid there was this restaurant in San Juan Bautista and the company members would go over afterwards and my father and mother asked me would you like some chocolate mousse and I said I'd love a chocolate mousse. So we had a meal and then the chocolatey syrup became cake. And then I said it's time to go. I said well where's my chocolate mousse? My name is Clyde Van Ving Bounty. I'm the Executive Director of the Hip Hop Theater Festival and I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. We just opened a space in East Harlem in Baguio on 100 Street over Second Avenue. We're called the High Arts Center for Hip Hop Theater Dance and Music and Art. We're very excited to have a little studio space of our own that we get to do whatever we want with. So far so good. My favorite dessert I would have to say is I haven't had it in a really, really long time but I won't have it ever again. But you know my grandmother's cuisine was phenomenal. Best cuisine I ever ate in my life. So yes, Publix in Florida comes at 12 seconds. I have a pudding in the oven in Florida. If you want a pudding that's good. I'll start with dessert. I'm Christopher Sibo. I am a set and costume designer who grew up in California and has been a recent transplant to the state of Oregon where I am the Associate Artistic Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I'm Enrique with What That. I'm a playwright. I grew up in Virginia, spent a good number of years in San Francisco and just moved to New York. Oh, dessert. Oh, deep fried red velvet cake with chocolate. Where did you get that? No, I'm from the south. That's how we roll. Wow.  Yes, chocolate pan and whipped cream on top of the deep fried velvet cake. That's what my arteries describe me. Hi, I'm José Luis Valenzuela. I'm the Artistic Director of the Latino Theater Company in Los Angeles. I'm a professor. I'm head of the MFA Directorate Program at UCLA. And my favorite dessert is flat. I never knew what's Cuban. I always thought what's Mexican. I don't know what's Cuban. It's a gift. It's a gift. It's a gift. I can do everything. After my mother. I'm crashing this gathering. So I'm really honored to be included. I'm only here for this first part. I'm Melia Ben-Susan. Hola. Years we've known each other but never met. I'm originally from Mexico. I'm a translator director. And when I moved to New York, I worked with Hola and did a lot of HPPs. That was still in existence. And worked for years at Festival Latino. So I really date myself with my Festival Latino experiences. I'm from Cuba. And working for René, Repertorio, etc. And now I'm here because I'm chair of the theater program at Emerson. Right? So I've become a teacher. Not brave enough to do an MFA Directorate. But was just hearing that you were all gathering. And thanks to the wonderful people at HowlRound. Was just really honored to get to at least come. Say hello. Welcome you. And to say that in addition to having sort of the melancholy of missing these connections in my last 12 years since I've been in Boston. I also feel a little now in my chair life that I need all of you to infuse our department. And the theater scene. Right?  And really wish this were longer so that I could. I'm glad you get to meet a couple of our wonderful kids. But we really need this energy in the department and in the culture of Boston. So just really honored your here. You've asked me that. It's like having a family again. You know? I'm Patricia Ibarra. I'm a professor down at Bruce. You're going to hear yourself the whole time. They built this.  So you're going to hear so much about it. Great. This is what my life is up in the office. Right. I'm obviously out in Browning and Providence now. But I'm a dessert. Yeah. It probably is fun. You know what? The best fun I ever had was made. Don't hate me for that. It's really the best fun. Yeah, sure. Cool. My name is Lalo Carrivas. I'm a translator, adapter, director. I'm currently assistant professor of directing at the University of Iowa. I've led a parapetite career. I founded a theater company when I was an undergrad at UC Santa Cruz called Chicano Theater Works. Which I launched for a couple years and then I went to graduate school. I've lived in Seattle, Dallas, Philadelphia, New York, St. Louis, and now I'm in Iowa City. So in terms of the balancing act, I've been directing professionally for now 20 years. But now I have the support of a theater department, which is nice. And it allows me to be here today with all of you to start this really ambitious, I don't know what to call it yet, comments. So I'm really excited to have you all here. Thank you. I forgot my dessert. I'm sorry. I make a really good Mexican chocolate pecan pie. Ooh. That is now my dessert. Wow. You're cooking tonight. Yes, exactly. My name is Garcia Romero. I'm a playwright and a translator. I'm also a theater studies scholar, a professor of theater at University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. And I'm with Paula, the co-chair of our esteemed gathering today. And essentially we decided to be co-chair and she helped facilitate the success of this group. I'm in sort of a volunteer position that we wanted to help all of us kind of organize. So I'm really pleased and I'm grateful to be part of this today. Oh, dessert. Well, I love flan. I love chocolate. And carrot cake. My name is Karen Sacarias. I'm a Mexican immigrant. I moved here when I was 10. My father was a pedi-emologist and gay men were dying in San Francisco and Haiti and nobody knew what that was. And that kind of changed the course of our life and we ended up living in Atlanta, the CDC. So I was the only... My sister and I were the only two Latina girls in our high school. So we were not allowed to speak English at home. So that kept the roots alive. I am a playwright and I'm the founder of Young Playwrights Theater in Washington, D.C. I started teaching playwriting in the school system of Washington, mostly to Latino students in English and Spanish as a form of comfort resolution and arts empowerment and producing the play the kids were writing and touring with them. So I've been on the other end as an artistic director and fundraiser and all of that. And now I get to playwright more full-time. I'm just on the board and very excited to be here, very excited to be part of this community and really proud that we're really setting things in motion. So thank you for being here. My name is Juliette Carrillo. I'm from LA. I'm part of Cornerstone Theater on Topple and I'm also freelance director. And I'm... I'm definitely in an altered state right now. I... A very close cousin of mine has passed away suddenly and unfortunately I'm going to have to leave probably about 5.30 tonight. He's in Paris. So I have to fly to Paris. So it's... I'm not myself. So I'm going to do my best to be absolutely present as much as I can today. I'm so honored to be amongst such incredible people. Many of you... I have such strong ties to many of you and Claudette was my assistant years ago. It's so, so... So I'm really... I think this is the place to be today. I absolutely feel like the best place to be today and I just don't know what's going to happen. So I'm just letting you guys know that I'm just not myself today. But I do know my dessert. I'll give you that. Chocolate hazelnut ice cream. I forgot mine. Arroz con leche. The dessert we had in Washington, D.C. the last time we got together with the passion fruit. That's my favorite. It's this passion fruit thing.  Juliet, do you want us to run each piece? I read that this is Fana Clara's project years ago after Jose Gonzalez. And we talked on the phone when you first came there. I mean, that's one of these memories that you just started. Yeah, and many of you were part of that. But Chris and I have known each other forever and working together, not seeing them. So it's... Yeah, this is a good place to be. I'm thrilled that this is happening. I'm really... I just feel so zeitgeisty. that it's happening. Hi, I'm Kevin Becerra. I am the National New Play Network Producer and Residence at Actors Express in Atlanta right now. But last year I was a New Play Cruising fellow at Arena and I produced the original meeting in May. So happy to be back and seeing the conversation as it evolves. And I'm Holly Carl and I'm Jamie Glew and also from HowlRound. I'm Noel Vines. My parents are like Vines. And I'm the staff assistant at HowlRound. I'm Stefan Martin and I'm a staff assistant at ArtsEmerson. And I'm Vijay Mathew, Associate Director of HowlRound. So this is it. I think there was two desserts that were not mentioned, Tony. Oh, that one. Oh, you took them. Now I want every one.  I'll eat all the desserts but if there's more salt on the table, I'll do that. A few top-of-the-day logistical items for you. First thing is we're going to be in this room for the whole meeting. So tomorrow comes the same place. You'll notice as you came in, there's security downstairs. They have a list of names of everyone in this room. Tomorrow or today, if you go in and out of the building, just make sure you have your name tag and then you shouldn't have to sign in again with any form of ID. Bathrooms are located on this floor. If you go out the doors and take a left, you'll see them on your left. Oh, your folders have a whole bunch of information in them and a lot of the documents are sort of working documents that you'll be using during the sessions today and tomorrow. So please bring them back with you tomorrow. Make sure you have them with you. If you didn't request a ticket to emergency, the Daniel Baby show tomorrow night, but you decide you want to go, just let me know and I can definitely get you one. Quick reminder, as you may have noticed with the camera, we are live-streaming right now just until 3 p.m. So just heads up. Let me just say a word about the live-streaming, just one quick word about that, one of the things we try to do, one of our highest values in the work that we do is to try to make the work accessible and transparent of the sort of many years in the American theater of things happening behind closed doors and people wondering why they weren't invited and who gets to participate and who doesn't. And so we know that some of this meeting, it'd be great for you to have some private time, but we felt like some of the intro stuff was stuff that other people who are invested in this conversation might want to have access to and we just value that above everything. So just these first kind of introductory things would be live until 3 p.m. and then the rest of the gathering will take place without live-streaming. So thank you for your openness to that. I know how much it means to the people who are invested but can't be here. Certainly. And along with that, we do have some committee members who weren't able to join us, who are going to be Skyping in. So today starting at 1.30 p.m. we'll have Olga, we'll also have Anthony Rodriguez, and we'll also have Lisa at various points throughout the weekend and they will be on this monitor right here. And Tanya Serracho is watching now because she just tweeted me and she'll be here tomorrow. Lights on now. And just a few other things. So you'll notice that we're pretty tightly scheduled throughout the weekend, so Stefan is going to be timekeeper for us, so please be nice to him. You may find moments when he says, hey, there's 10 minutes left, or hey, you're over time. That's his job. And we're happy that he's doing it. And just a few more things. So we're doing our best to take notes, like we're not aiming to be antisocial over here, but we're going to take pretty comprehensive notes of this whole gathering. A, to share with the steering committee members who aren't here, but more importantly, like as we move forward, to have really concrete documentation of what was decided this weekend, what the action steps are, and how we're all going to move forward. So if you hear us clacking away, that's what we're up to. If you have any logistical questions throughout the weekend, you can talk to me, you can talk to Noelle, Stefan or Vijay, pretty much any of us. You'll also note that on the back of your name tags, you have my cell phone number and Noelle's cell phone number. So if you get lost or need to call us at any point, please do. And last but not least, there's one thing that wasn't on your scheduled tomorrow night at 6 p.m. for those of you who are staying. David Dower has offered to give an optional tour of Emerson. So if you want to get a sense of what this space is, some of which we'll be in next fall, everyone is welcome to join him there. He will also be joining us later today at 2.30 and will be here all day tomorrow.  That's all. Thanks. I'll just end with a little bit more about this video. Karen gave us a wonderful introduction about why we're here and how we got here and said previously. So out of that initial meeting and that paper that I wrote for HowlRound Based on All Our Conversations, we came up with four initiatives initially as a group. The first is to create a festival of new work at LATC. Next is to do a gathering at DePaul University, which would be sort of a festival not too unlike HVP of new work. Next is Cafe Onda, which is going to be an online presence that is going to be editing. We'll talk about that more as the day goes on, but that's another initiative, the online presence. And then fourth is to continue to connect across the country all of the communities, initiatives, companies. And Karen mentioned that we were applied for the Storistic Foundation Grant, which we received. And that is to plan a national gathering this year, 2013 for artists to help us take it to the next level. So to help us envision these festivals, the future of computer commons. And so our charge this weekend is to help organize and plan that fall gathering in 2013. We also have to fundraise additional $50,000 to match and support the festival in the fall. And so we'll spend time over the next few days talking all about that, talking about how to plan that, your ideas, your vision. And one thing I was struck by what Karen said is it's really an amazing collection of people we have here and it's all about what we want this group to be. It's about inclusion, it's about transparency, it's about community. And I've had a chance to be in LA last week with Lalo to meet some folks who could be here today and I was really struck by the amazing work that's happening across the country that the Zeitgeist that Juliet mentioned I think is so apropos that now someone should be organized, to reconnect and to really, in my mind, this is a group to advocate for the field and to move the field forward. And so as our support in being here we have the amazing HowlRound and Pauli Carlson mentioned a few words about how HowlRound functions and how they've been our physical receiver and our support and our amazing kind of network to help us create this theater province. I'm not going to spend very much time talking at all this weekend but I am grateful to have an opportunity to just share with you a little bit about how we're working. If you guys, maybe just for this one moment I'll be presentational and then we'll stop that behavior shortly thereafter. Anyway I have a question for the table, the round conversation. But it feels to me like there were a lot of questions, there's been a lot of questions around the work we've been doing at HowlRound within the field in general. All good questions partly because we haven't actually known, we've had a hunch about things and we've gone on those hunches and we just keep kind of moving hunch by hunch. When we gathered a group of you based on being asked by Karen there was also a sense of and I think all well intentioned but who did we think we were leading a conversation about the Latino theater commons and mostly to articulate we weren't actually leading any conversation. You all were meeting the conversation but because of how we were organizationally in the theater that can be a confusing thing to understand and so I felt like it was really important to take 20 minutes right now to just say here's how we work and that the group the sort of initial group that came in has kind of agreed to work within these sorts of principles around questions of access, transparency who's included, how we invite people. And so I just wanted to spend some time clarifying kind of our role in this and then sit quietly at my table over there. So before I do that I want to say the amount of work it takes in the smallest gallery together is sort of mind boggling to me and the only way we could ever do it is because we have Jamie Balloon who works with us and so I just want to say Jamie is the queen of logistics and also the queen of generous organizing and so I have such gratitude and then Kevin who's been a part of this all along and then Noelle and Stefan stepping in and then Jay Matthew and the skills that he brings to making things accessible and transparent. Everything we do is just a team effort I often stand up like I run things but really I just watch people run circles around me and that's kind of the strength of us. So I want to talk briefly about what a commons is to begin and one of the things that happened when we moved to Emerson College was we were originally this thing called the American Voices New Play Institute at Arena Stage. Our focus there was much more a focus on the resident playwrights and then we had this little tiny bit of money and this little charge for a thing called documentation and dissemination which sounds boring and it could have been but we decided not to make it boring mostly on the kind of inventive spirit of the people in this room and Jay stepped in and said what if we had a new play map and we could see all the new play activity in the country and we could really tell truer stories about how we perceive our field and where the resources really live and who's really doing the work and so they just went to work on their own and started to make a map with some really cool developers I was not at Arena Stage and I said God what if we had a transparent conversation and they gave me a little bit of money to start a journal and so it's kind of like it kind of has worked like that and it's already more integrated but in the making of it when we left Arena Stage and came to Boston we decided because we were working on these in the world of the principles of what we call the commons and there is kind of a larger movement around this notion of what belongs to all of us when we got to Boston the first time we visited David and I were like oh my god we will be working off the Boston Common and we wanted to put commons in our name and it was a well-mentioned effort on our part to bring the idea of practice into the name the problem with it was by doing so inadvertently claimed some kind of ownership to the commons and so some very smart people if you work and think about this kind of thing came to us and said but how can you be the commons and where is the invitation in that if you own it and we were like oh well we weren't owning it you know but all good and so we really have shifted now and centered for the theater commons and what we like to say is we are remodeling commons based practice and we're supporting others who are doing that as well we are not the commons and so I think that's a really important shift for us and it took learning and listening which is mostly what we do in this work and so when I say commons all I'm talking about are commons that are resources owned and common or shared among communities for the benefit of the entire community and really the idea is that from our vantage point we got involved it's very much a kind of not-for-profit enterprise in that we got involved in the not-for-profit because we believe that the not-for-profit was saying we want to have some kind of impact on civilization we don't you know if we wanted to make commercial theater we could sell tickets and if we were good enough at it we would make money on it and if we weren't we'd get out of the commercial business but in the not-for-profit theater there's something deeper and so our focus is really trying to figure out what is it in the American theater that belongs to all of us and how can we make what belongs to all of us accessible so there will always be the thing called the market there will always be a need to sell tickets but in a commitment to building this thing called civilization we wanted to go what is all of ours and how can we make that accessible I think about environmental movements and the idea of air belonging to all of us what happens when people pollute it and you know this whole idea of your carbon footprint paying to use the air and the space and so we're trying to think in that model of like an environmental movement some things on the earth should belong to all of us so I'll take you to my next so our purpose is that our purposes we are modeling a common space approach to advancing the health and the impact of the not-for-profit theater and the way we do that is we develop online knowledge platforms which I'll show you most of you know some of them but I'll make sure you know what they are we do in-person gatherings with the hope of illuminating the breadth of the diversity and the impact of a common space approach to theater practice so what has happened in this being articulated as our purpose is we have become overwhelmed by the breadth and diversity of our field when you just say when you open yourself to saying hey anybody can live-stream on our TV channel or anyone can contribute to howl around you realize how little you know about what constitutes the American theater and that's sort of been the shock for us in the best way that there's so much breadth and diversity and we couldn't even begin to touch it but our goal is to really foster it takes me to our statement of principles when the not-for-profit theater you know when we got not-for-profit status in the theater from you know because of really smart people like Zell, Chandler and others they were all having a conversation about theater as an instrument of civilization that the theaters were like libraries and museums and spaces that belong to everyone and as such a core organizing principle is the belief that these institutions our communities, our artists are an instrument of civilization and I feel like that's kind of what we think about all the time what's the relationship between making a play and why and how that contributes to something larger and bigger our next statement of principles we use a common-grace approach to our work really important to note that we use a kind of a peer-to-peer process and community source knowledge what that means is is that we work almost completely opposite of how a kind of typical artistic institution might work so in a typical institution you have an artistic director at the top with a vision, an admission and then the goal becomes as an institution is to figure out how to that vision and that mission and it really comes from the idea of the vision and mission of the institution coming from the institution out to the community it's kind of the typical way that we've operated within institutions and the idea is that we choose the plays, we pick the aesthetic and we decide at the level of I mean I've been in these meetings and I've picked seasons we sort of decide what we think is the best thing for the community it's not well informed it doesn't mean that it's not an important practice and we're not saying anything against that practice but it's mostly saying it's not how we work so we don't actually have a vision and this is, gathering is a perfect example of that we actually have a set of principles and values but we don't actually have a vision for how it will be articulated so we had no vision last year that we would lead in any way, shape or form a gathering of Latino theater artists with what they feel are the issues in our field or the questions and we listen and then if we can do something happen we do and in this case we had a small amount of money we could invite eight artists in and then the questions and action plans that were articulated were completely those of the people in the room so to say everything that comes to us comes to us from the community and it comes because people nominate themselves I often get asked well how come you haven't asked me to write the call around because I actually don't ask people I mean I do, like if we're sitting having a meal or something and you say something cool I mean you should write that so the invitation is always there but actually everything that comes to us comes to us because people nominate themselves and the belief in that is that people want to participate and people that have important things to say they put their hands up the part that has shocked me personally about that is the breath of talent and insight and skill in our profession I mean if you had said I was going to edit a crowd source journal I would have just said no way I'm too huge a snob I could never do that it would never be good enough and the truth is we have so much talent in our field that the stuff that comes we do some rigorous editing but the ideas, the energy, the enthusiasm that all comes from the community that contributes and so it's pretty mind blowing it kind of ruined my whole sense of what my contribution to the world is so I don't understand it we embrace the concept of open innovation and we really believe that the theater field will only be advanced through the pooling and sharing of knowledge and resources we're really looking at we have so much infrastructure in our field and this principle is based on the idea a lot of work that David Dower has done in this arena which is we have an abundance of resources there's actually a ton of money in the theater but how their pool and share distributed access that's a whole other question and so we work in a scarcity model in our field and our argument would be that that scarcity is about how it's shaped not about what's actually there and so we're really looking at how to pool and share and how do we create more people access and the ability to participate oh yeah I love this one because it just says what it means we thus strive to be a space where people can bring the knowledge and resources they are able to share and to use the knowledge and resources they need so exactly what it says what it means which is we really welcome people bringing their ideas and their resources and we'll try to figure out a way to put the knowledge in the community and we value you taking anything from us that you need so for example we use a Creative Commons license you can take any article and you can reprint it you can use our new play TV channel by just volunteering that you want to put yourself on the calendar so we try to give you with as easy access as possible the knowledge and resources you need and we try to be welcome to you sharing those and finding ways to do it and then we engage our role as global citizens we participate in international efforts that align with our commas base thinking our work actually has had a lot of traction internationally we have more than 100 countries are reading HowlRound believe it or not several reading it pretty regularly and our hope is that we will expand that reaching in further as possible then just quickly I'm going to go through the knowledge platforms if I've seen completely exhausted because our knowledge platforms are going through a migration this week and we took all of our work on HowlRound and we put it in a new web platform called Drupal that has been no one told us when we did that that all 700 posts in HowlRound would need to be reformatted I started three days ago reformatting I have slept about three hours in those four days and we just went live yesterday and it's there are a ton of bugs and it's all very stressful and the outcome will be it will all be better eventually So HowlRound Community Source Journal again you pitch ideas we hire guest curators all the time so last week we did a week on Black Theater we didn't do again we didn't say we should do a week on Black Theater instead Jonathan McCrory emails me and says I want to curate a week on Black Theater we pay him a little bit of money he finds all the people to write for it he works with us in the process of editing and you know getting information and then and we pay fortunate to have some resources to pay people we pay small amounts 150 bucks for a journal article we usually pay 250 for somebody to curate something and we pay $50 for a blog post just on principle I cannot pay artists so that you know is kind of a principal thing and then but regularly we see expertise to the field and consistently the field brings expertise to the journal we've had 360 contributors to date since we started the site two years ago we've had 200,000 visitors unique visitors and that works to about 25,000 people reading it monthly that means that when I say regular readers that monthly readership means those people have been to the site at least 200 times so that's you know pretty substantial you know sort of commitment to the site and then this is our the journalism page we do in-depth journal articles those are rigorously edited by my wonderful wife Lynette D'Amico who's a professional editor and those they have a much longer gestation period it takes three or four months it takes just an idea and we say yes by the time we get your first draft and publication is a three or four month thing then we have a blog over here which we create it so we could be more responsive so when people name characters I don't know freeholase or something we could just whip out a blog post and say oh why did they do that and so we have that that's more responsive it requires less editing and less you know you can just leave thought there you can just say some stuff and then we just we just are launching this month we want to see if it's possible in humanity to revive criticism as an art form we're certain we're likely to fail but we're going to try anyway and so we put out a call for haul-around critics and these new critics we got a million wonderful applications we're going to hire about six or seven people we're going to hire a couple more and they're going to be writing about theater around the country and when I've seen their proposals of what they're going to write you immediately see what's missing from haul-around as we really plan I think to have the conversation about the work on the site we had purposely avoided talking about the work initially because we wanted not to scare people off but I don't know I never wanted to playwright to wake up and go to haul-around and see a bad review and so we were really thinking long and hard about how to do criticism and we're going to give it a go so that's kind of the core of the haul-around platform then we have this thing called the new play map this is a Wikipedia based it's a community produced database it maps the development of new plays from conception to production it works exactly like Wikipedia you put yourself on it you put the information in people update the information and then the more people that contribute the more information you have so the stronger the map is is completely related to the community that participates had pretty good response we have a lot more work to do around getting people on the map and getting people to put themselves on the map but so far we have 2700 new play events over 1200 organizations and 1400 artists and you can this is an example we like to show just so you get a feel for how it works we use this because it's such a great it's such a great visual of how a play has a life and what it takes to make a play have a life and all the participants and how they think about it so you can see that 23 organizations have been involved and all the places have workshops or productions or readings what we're now doing with this section which I'm super excited about we hired a person who does technology based journalism he created a prototype for us of how we could begin to pull out the stories of this map so and we did it with Endaze and what he did was he basically tracks things that happened at each site and told various stories around the marketing the audience reception so think of you were going to do a play and you wanted to know what do we know about that play in the 20 other productions it's had or what do we know about it in the 3 other productions it's had you could go to the map and that story could be told so we're now trying to write a grant where we hire a dramaturg this journalist and we also have to do a little bit of development on the map to make this possible but then we hire people to begin to really create the stories of the map so we're trying to figure out how to mine the data to be meaningful and then new play TV which will soon be called HowlRound TV we have a grant in for new play TV and so we're leaving it that until the grant is decided so we don't confuse anybody but because it's not actually new play TV anymore it's really HowlRound TV it really covers more than new play and again I kind of explained that it's pure produced anybody can put themselves on the counter we only have one channel right now so the only limitation is that we're not, you know, overlapping with another event 60 organizations put their hand up to live stream things last year I cannot tell you in fact since we started live streaming this several people putting their favorite desserts on my face in the wall I've had a stream of people saying thank you, we wanted to know participating, we hear that all the time you know, if you can't afford travel if you can't get to a conference, if you can't hear a panel you can do that and then everything the minute we are done streaming we spool it into an archive and then you can watch it anytime so 19,000 hours of spooling so far in the last few years and then oh yeah, and then that's Susan Lori Parks Susan Lori Parks has a thing with us people love this, she sits in the lobby of the public theater and she writes and then playwrights write along with her and then every once in a while she breaks and takes questions via Twitter it could be like paint drawing for some and it could be really inspiring for others so kind of how new play TV roles and just to say new play TV the level of excellence of the camera angles and the sort of recording is totally not on our end, it's, whoever using it it's as good as the people on the end their end producing it and then we regularly gather people to talk about issues in the field and those conversations are always documented and reported out and or live streamed or, you know, we try to find always a way to make them transparent to others and then this is the last this kind of file pool thing we're trying to see how it works but again kind of working in the reverse of how you would normally work so Mellon Foundation came to us and said we want to do this initiative to do what ended up being 14 playwright residencies in 11 different cities 14 different theaters and we want to track it as it's happening you know, how can we do that so what often happens is somebody like Mellon comes along and they make a $3 million investment but then we never know like what happened to that money or, you know, and then there's a report and then that report nobody ever really sees and then we reinvent the wheel and I was struck by that in this conversation I was thinking about the work, as a matter of fact, Julia a lot of conversation was had about the work you did at South Coast and how important that work was and then where did that work go and then, you know, like and how do we not lose track of what you learned like what went wrong, what went right and so we're really trying to think about that all the time and so what we decided to do so Mellon said we had many months of conversations with them about how we would do it and at first we were going to hire a staff person because that's how you do things you get grant money, you hire a staff person and you pay someone to track your grant for you and suddenly we were like, oh you know, such a missed opportunity one is when these residencies happen, the community around those residencies gets psyched the other playwrights in the community the other young theater artists, they want to have access to it and you know, we're in Boston, these are happening in 11 other cities so we, instead of hiring one position, we hired we hired 13 commas producers 13 commas producers in those 11 different cities to track these residencies, to work with the playwright and the theater, to work with us to live stream to work with us to tell the stories and then more even most importantly to connect that residency with the community that it's in and so we we just hired all these folks they're coming for May in May to hang out with us for a couple days and we'll see how this goes and just to reiterate because I like to do that now we're modeling at commons, we're not the commons theater commons if it is to be manifested, we'll need to be co-created by others committed to its existence so that is as fast as I want to do that alright, I appreciate that we'll let you guys hear me if you can come to the play I just want to say the new play map I think is probably at the very essence of its birth right now and the things that I see in my mind about what it could and will look like eventually is going to change the movie theater and so on I just want to say, that's what we see about it like you suddenly go, oh my god the amount of things we could do to stop us all doing it individually you see the potential it's kind of mind blowing and we know we're just nearly scratching at the surface and part of what we do is we don't want to have much infrastructure we don't want to take resources out of the field we really want the field where the resources are to contribute and make that happen and so it is a little engine of three and then David pops in periodically and we get some cool students to help us it's kind of an engine of three 25,000 people we're not always as fast as we'd like to be but I feel like, so what I'm hoping with the map for example is somebody is going to scratch that surface for us and come along which is kind of what this journalist we hired did, we were talking and we gave you 500 bucks what could you come up with he came up with something super cool that's kind of what we try to get other people to do the work and that seems to be working yeah, thanks you guys and how Rob provided the infrastructure we needed a fiscal agent to help us and help us organize, I mean that was really a huge backbone to helping this group kind of am I up? I am okay, I'm going to stand for this because cool so hi audience virtual world I only bring this up because there are many people following us right now on Twitter as we speak and they are contributing to the conversation so I do want to acknowledge them right now the only thing I ask is that they don't send jokes that make me laugh because I will laugh quite easily and somebody asked the question how many of you are new to HowlRound the first time one, two, sort of other people have contributed essays or had conversations or been part of previous meetings which is good alright cool so our goals today and I'm not going to spend 15 minutes talking about the goals because I really wanted to start diving in and jump into the deep end of the conversation which I hope will I encourage and I hope we all can embrace debate that we respectful of one another that we engage in really thoughtful conversation that we're really here to listen to our different perspectives this is already a very powerful room a very powerful circle with so many great intelligent individuals with people that I admire people that I've worked with people that I've never met which is really exciting this is really an extraordinary opportunity for us to connect and it's only going to multiply tenfold once we have this national gathering in the fall which is essentially what we're trying to organize to coalesce to really brainstorm about and we'll have an action plan by the end of tomorrow to really make this happen I know many of us are working hard behind the scenes to make this happen through fundraising, through different conversations that are happening already which is great and we want to connect all of it in some way and I'll talk a little bit about the goals but before I jump into that I just want to say a couple of things that that may be important to acknowledge to one another and to those of you who are listening on UplayTV and who are following us on Twitter which is I think the first thing that I want to tell people about the Latino comments is what we're not going to do we're not trying to shame the status quo we're not here to berate demean or to ignore the state of American theater we're not here to complain about why we're not getting produced more often in the back of our minds in our hearts and it's really easy it's really easy for us to devolve into that conversation but I don't think it's worth it and part of that first conversation we have was that we're here to build not to find a place at the table but to build our own table and that was a really meaningful comment that came out of that conversation the second thing we're not going to do today is that we're not here to appropriate many of the disparate conversations that are already happening and that means that Kinan and Olga Sanchez from Miracle Theater Jose Luis and many others have been having these conversations around the country regionally in Portland in Seattle in Los Angeles in Dallas we want to be able to access that we want to hear those voices and we want to be able to bring it all together and coalesce into a hub which is essentially what the Latino Commons is we really want to bring it all together and we really want to make a platform that can be accessible and transparent to everyone from across the country from Latinos in South Florida to Dallas to the Midwest from all four corners and in between the United States we also want to make sure that we're clear about that we're not producers we're not here to we are talking about presenting work curating work facilitating workshops but we're not producers so we're not here to we're not going to be producing like a major festival so please don't send us script submissions or anything like that I only say this because there's a lot of ground work and a lot of territory to cover before we can get to that ideally we would love in our hearts we would love to come back to this idea of having a rebirth of the HPP having a national Latino theater festival having this great sort of encuentros that used to happen in the past amongst Latino theaters in the 60s and 70s but we're not there yet this is the very beginning of that conversation and I know there are many of us especially those of you who are the younger generation who are listening who are hungry for this who really want a way, a means to have your work done have it validated and what I'm going to tell you today is that we're here for you we're here to listen we're here to make sure that you're getting the resources you need informationally or if we can share it in some way in terms of training in terms of how we can disseminate that information we're here for you I think that's really important to say in terms of the work because it really is about updating and this is one of the big things that came from the first conversation which is to update the Latino narrative in the United States when I say that it means that for many of us we feel that the stories that are being told in a different way they're not really reflective of the diversity of who we are and we want to change that we want to change that by reclaiming it we want to change it by empowering our artists to work together to share information to be really strong dramaturg advocates for our work our intention is that we need to be able to talk about in such a way that can be so that our work can be properly evaluated in the popular media in the mainstream because the theater is the gateway to other forms of storytelling visual written and if it can start here it can go into film it can go into television other resources multidisciplinary work so that's why we're here today so the goals for the meeting are to come up with a concrete plan and action steps to move forward with the Latino Theater Commons and to have this national gathering in the fall of 2013 ideally we'll walk out of this meeting with confirmed dates with an invitee list so who's going to show up and really brainstorm this idea of a big festival a fundraising action plan which I know sounds horrible the F word is fundraising in this context but I think we're it's not hard to fundraise I believe fundraising is about telling the story we can tell our story we can articulate what we want we can get what we want I certainly believe that and obviously it came to fruition with the Doris Duke grant so we will continue to talk about that that happens tomorrow but we will come up with an outreach plan and we'll come up with a basic design for the gathering itself we have some those who couldn't come with Diane Rodriguez the outreach plan the basic design for the gathering itself we're basically trying to we're going to come up with some ideas about cribbing from other sources what do we take away what are the best things we can what are the best things we take away from conferences what are the best things we take away from meetings and gatherings such as this other than we love to eat we love to sit together and talk all night but some of those ideas are going to come forth and are really exciting in terms of how we create video essays how can we create a conference where we have a morning afternoon session of TED Talks which is one by one, ten minutes and then in the afternoon we have workshops and in the evening we have presentations of our work so those ideas are going to come up and I hope they will but it's our hope to be inclusive of all the efforts that are happening in the country and whether or not they are tied to those in this room or on the steering committee for those of you who are watching or listening or tweeting I want to hear your ideas I'll be taking a lot of notes I don't want to be able to respond on my phone but there are people here who are following actively so use the hashtag New Play or Cafe Onda which is going to be the website where all of this is going to land eventually and be an online resource because I believe the access to that information is going to be important for the next generation though that you know artists to understand our history to know where we come from and to know where we're going and you can also use if you want a shorter hashtag you can use LTC that's fine too not too many hashtags you'll run out of space I think that's it those are the goals so anybody have any questions? alright alright so we should launch thank you we should launch into what's next in a week that's going to moderate our next session alright so Jose Luis is going to moderate our next session on the different initiatives that are going on around the country a little bit about that and then also about what each person is going to have five minutes to talk about what they're currently working on personally and their institutions to kind of get a sense of who's in their room and what kind of work they're doing right okay okay where am I working I just opened Melancholia open last Friday Saturday that's so nice right now and I'm working on a new play called Habitat which is actually a Canadian play can you speak a little louder sorry I'm working on Habitat which is a Canadian play which is about homeless children who get refused it's a very very interesting play and then I'm working at Pierguin which I kept to start and I'm doing it and also in Norway beginning in May that's what I'm working on right now in taking a sabbatical from the University before anything I wanted to say it's so interesting to me every time I come to this meeting you know because I get the first time I get so inspired by the idea and I get so challenged by the ideas because it totally it questions everything that I think and that I know about structure and organization and how to do this do it the right way it's so interesting to me and it's interesting because I'm even dealing with vocabulary you know how we express ourselves or what words do we use that I'm trying to learn not to I'm having this fight with curators in my mind it's a museum World Cancer Museum and it's a very important book and it talks about how curators in the American Museum try to decide what the art was and who were the artists and so now we all this idea of comments and quotes the word I'm having a struggle with that word just to be a curator or to curate a festival because it's in contradictions in my mind of one of the stuff because that sets up an agenda you know for me which is very interesting that I'm trying to struggle with but what are the initiatives I mean I try to do a little research what Latino initiatives are in the country really happening and you know more than anything I think people trying to their company initiatives between the Latino community I think the most important one is the alliance right now the nine theater companies who got together and now they decided to create their own alliance how to share resources a relationship to produce their own work and a relationship to what they're doing after I mean there's a lot of other things going around the country but I must say that honestly a lot of it were inspired by the first meeting with Karen Arena I think that I'm sorry the first meeting we went to that we had at the arena out of this and 2011 because that was 2012 and 2011 just because the conference, the DCG conference was in Los Angeles and I'm based in LA and I was you know I don't know anybody I really don't know anybody in around the country what are they doing you know we haven't sat down and talk so we are some people to stay one extra day so we can have a gathering in my theater yes to see what we will do and we got together but really nothing happened for a whole year so we had this meeting I believe it was in June and May last year and then we decided to have a launch during the DCG conference in Boston that year and you guys attended and a lot of people attended and it was like so magnificent because then you know Kinnan and Olga and everybody to get upon themselves to create this national conversation so there will be millions you know in Los Angeles and I'm going to talk about that we've been meeting every month for since that every meeting is 40-50 people which is really amazing to me I had seen five Latino plays in LA in the last two months which I hardly do not because I want to but now because I'm committed to go see all the Latino plays then I make an effort to see them because of my skills you know what I mean the only one that I think we need to do is Chicago that's the only group that we haven't connected with that we talk about but you know Texans and the Northwest the East Coast and the Southwest all of these places have had meetings now which to me that's the most fascinating part to find out how many Latino companies they are or how many Latinos are doing theater around the country and what the type of theater they're doing because honestly even though just because we're Latinos we're supposed to know this we don't and I think that has been inspirational for for us I guess and the company and also it has created a great movement because people want to be involved and we need to know what they're doing meaning we did an evaluation that Kinan has that is going to I resisted the time to present it or you know what we did we met for nine months and what we did at the last meeting we said what do we learn from these nine meetings that it was very heavy that it was good for us as the commons to know where you know what we found out in nine months meeting every month around the country because like that part of it this idea has fascinated me you know that we don't have an agenda and that we will be open to creating a agenda for what we find you know to me that that's really fantastic so those are the initiatives that I think are happening is really what bring you and we're assuming to what we knew about initiatives for Latinos and the regional theaters I'm unaware of anyone that's happening right now in that sense focusing on Latinos meaning we used to have you know the SGP we used to have the Latino Theater Initiative and the TAPER when I was at the LATC before we used to have the Latino the All Global San Diego I mean most theaters used to have initiatives like that they're all gone for what I understand so this is a whole new thing and a new way of looking at us which I think is much more valid and much more important to me you know those are the initiatives that we found out and you know can be more we can use some of this time to talk about if you want to what we found but in that case the report I can actually email it to everybody so you can see our initial assessment at the last meeting we'll talk about different things but we knew that it was necessary to be able to learn something from this process and so this small group is formed to be able to evaluate over the next month some of those lessons to be able to learn to evaluate this experiment properly and so that was lessons being formed future gatherings not just for Los Angeles but perhaps some of the other regions that have started organizing so they'll have this shared experience you know those notes are phenomenal but I mean we've got notes about so many of these sessions and those conversations are so fascinating to read and really great resources thank you for doing that you're right I think that's the most valuable thing that has happened in the last nine months yeah did you send us the last one the one you were working on last night? just finished the preliminary presentation but things important is that we didn't allay because just to tell you if we all came around I'm interested in the art world and the artistic part and one thing that I like about our meeting and the comments that we had that it focused on that it focused on the world and it focused on the marketing or the audience how to make more money and it focused on the world that to me was the most interesting part of our gathering what you said we don't want to be finding to be produced and working what we're doing to me that's really inspirational so but also how do we talk about the world it's a big question because really we talk about criticism and reviews to me that's not talking about the world we have lost it since with critics like when I came into the theater early in the sixties in European theater it's a different relationship critics played a role in talking about the intellectual ability and the artistic ability of the world and that is what's happening I don't feel it's not the type of journalism that exists that we can as an artist have a dialogue with the critic and being able to make your world better every time because you really have a relationship and that's what's happening so this idea of how now we talk about the world and for us it's really difficult in Southern California because it's all levels of work from community work from regional theaters to talk about so what it was done we created committees like we put you know, academics and actors and we decided we're going to go see nine places of Latinos you know and we have a direct community and acting and what we're going to do and it's not a pretty system really we wanted it to be a dialogue so we wanted to have our own because we don't want to call it a conference and in that we will talk about the world from the point of view of what we saw what we saw in this world what do we feel it was important or not, was it achievable or not, what were the goals that you have set up do you want to have a relationship and dialogue with the community is this really creating a dialogue and it's a really dialogue I assume through the inner community it's really fantastic because you know because all the levels of Latino theater that's going on and at least in Los Angeles it's important and it's pretty sizing the world in a way that I like or at least like it it's about a dialogue of the goals that we set up as our own companies to create the world that needs to be done and if we're achieving it and if not why and what resources do we have to be able to make that work to succeed or not, not only not only intellectual resources but also you know physical resources you know do we have rehearsal spaces, do we have theater do we have designers, do we have sets, do we have costume you know I mean that all the companies can use all of those type of things I think it's a very important part of what we came up and I must say it's difficult it's difficult because we're so used to this structure meaning we're so used to this structure that we're all going to be the leaders we're all going to play this role you know what I mean it's a very difficult it's a challenge it's a challenge to come out with a new way of looking at our work and figure out how to move it forward you know and resist them and find your own agendas that we all have you know honestly and I think that to me is going to be important to resist today for the National Gallery because I think that's going to be really important thank you Jose Luis should we continue to go around each person talk about what they're doing individually and then their own initiatives and their institutions or their communities that address these issues cool we'll go that way well at the moment I'm just just moved to New York so at the moment I'm just working and getting settled so once I get settled I can focus on that are you just finished working on plays recently oh I'm working on rewrites of Learn to be Latino which is getting another production next season where I can't see until announcements go out we can't say well thanks for giving it away we can't we wrote it here first we can't yeah we can't technically we can't say it but I guess you can put two into it together yeah and working on a new play so I can send something else out in the fall but other than that I am really interested in transgender issues with respect to theater and the complicated intersections that transgender theater artists who want to be theater artists encounter with respect to the field and so I've been I've had a number of conversations with other theater artists who are I've had conversations with a number of theater artists individually and we've started having conversations collectively about what we can do sort of in the vein of this model but on a smaller scale initially to begin to talk about issues of of actor training and how that's impacted by gender and writing competitions just how the strictures of gender and discrimination on the basis of gender impacts those artists in the field that a lot of people aren't cognizant of because they don't accept on a daily basis so trying to work with them and figuring out how to concretely work on starting an actor training program and a playwriting workshop to start with so this is interesting I don't work as I've been thinking about it I'm doing four plays this year King Lear Street Cardinian Desire both set designs for those plays a costume design for a new Tanja Saraccio play called 10th Muse that we have been in process with for a year and a half now it's really exciting that we'll start rehearsals at the end of May and open in August at OSF and then all the way which is a play that I also did at OSF is going to be done here in Boston at the American Repertory Theater also in September in the last few years my own personal creative artistic life has intersected in my work at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and prior to that as a company member ensemble member of Cornerstone and what OSF has been doing in the last six years since I moved there with Bill Rauch as the artistic director has been a really extraordinary moment for me as far as the work that we are continuing to do especially as it speaks to people of color and even more specifically as it speaks to the Latino community I'm really proud that we have in the last in seven years produced and played by Latino writers at OSF five of which have been world premiers and very recently through the Mellon Foundation we have we have a playwright in residence who is going to be joining us at OSF to build a community and to build plays and to become integrated into the organization in a really profound way his play Breakfast Lunch and Dinner was done in our first season and he planted seeds that as most of you know just continue to blossom in those communities that he impacts so we are really thrilled to have him back both as a writer and now so as an advocate in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest this year we also applied for Oregon Arts Commission grant called an ABC grant which is Arts Builds Community which we we did get a small grant to explore the possibility of another large regional theater housing a specific Latino playwright festival or a work as an HPP or LTI it's called LPP because it's the combinations of both those things called Latino playwright projects also again a who knows what it will eventually be called but that was just the granting referencing but the goal is to create a space for Latino artists and for our own audience development to bring in more Latino in Southern Oregon to see place and in the Pacific Northwest we plan on having something this fall as well or at least that's what's in the goals of the grant and really interested to continue the conversation with all the other conversations that have been going on it's a pilot for us it's both an exploration for us to see if you know our interest is there it started as a a rekindling if you will Armando Durán who is an actor in the company who had grown up through LPP LTI and HPP and really felt that that was for him the launching pad for his career as an actor and certainly someone who also benefited from both of those programs coming out of grad school how important those things were to have that network to have those communities to have those conversations and to even as someone coming out of grad school like hey look at me you know I really want to be a part of a community and I really want to work in this community and it was such a wonderful place to be and so it's an attempt to both for us to see if it's something viable and also for the community to see if it's something like is the idea of a regional theater holding a very specific community still viable both in terms of what we can offer and does the community itself want that anymore or do we want something different so as I said it's a pilot program and we're starting very small this year to see how it happens and hopefully we're in the very early stages of planning that as well but those are two of a few of the things that we're doing I also think it's important to say that as far as OSEF is concerned it's obviously about the work that we produce and the planning of how we're going to continue but it's also about integrating the entire company in understanding of the work of not just Latinos but other people of color in the work so from our audience development in all of our administrative offices and just being very conscious of the people that we're hiring and the people that we're bringing in that they are that they do in fact represent the America they represent what this country is about it's a reflection of that country and it's fair to have it's not only fair it's important to have those voices that are sitting around the table in these theaters, in these organizations and it's all it happens because we have an artistic director who believes in that vision and is believed in that vision for I think most of his life so it's really I feel very grateful and very lucky to be and to be here thank you and I also think just some of that Chris it's very kind of you to talk about Bill in that way Bill Rausch because I know that many of us it would be really easy to kind of exclude those who are allies those who really believe in us in cultural diversity and inclusion in the American theater and so I think it's important that that we say thank you to them folks like Jack Ruehler and Barclay Goldsmith and others who are champions for our work we want them also to be part of this full and to continue to be champions for our work and so that's I think it's great thanks for bringing that up so what's going on where as I mentioned earlier we're opening we just moved into the space we haven't even been there a year but we literally like built out of space raw, ratifested storefront that the building developers which is a local community development corporation thought that they would eventually use as an office but they never did so it's that empty for well over 10 years prior to the renovations of the building it was a candy store and some of our neighbors have reminded us on the block they sold all sorts of candy in fact there's a sign right above the door that said drugs you know so you know it's kind of interesting because where I'm not far from it and I've always been very conscious about being an interloper and I think one of the things I've described to you is you give respect to get respect so we've been very conscientious about being a good neighbor as we kind of settle into the space and we're in it for the long haul about developing our relationship so that community as we continue to do our work across the city and nationally so that's like really big for us it isn't necessarily a new play but it is a new story for the institution we're working on some really cool things coming out of the space where getting ready to do our 12th DC hip-hop data festival in early July New York City Festival will be a first week of October mostly developmental work stuff that's kind of in process or in progress and the way we curate the festivals is we really respond to what's going on immediately around us that year we're also developing some things that I cannot also talk about at the moment unfortunately although I'm pretty excited by all of them you know the one thing that we're really stoked about and it goes back to the block actually I had a local neighbor reminding me about what used to happen back in the days and that his family was a driving force behind a lot of that stuff and he said it was a million dollar block right and there's a project that we're looking at talking with at a columbia's architecture and design school called million dollar blocks which maps the for about 20 states the relationship that particular communities have with the corrections system in that particular state so they're mapping data in a way that new plays mapping data but you know amongst two being affected by these issues and there's all sorts of statistics that you can measure so in our zip code 10029 you know the 8% of the people that are incarcerated from that community make less than 25,000 miles a year that's just one statistic so basically poor people other ones who get end up going to jail or prison so we're interested in finding stories behind that data is what it is it tells you what you know what's going on but obviously stories aren't visceral and I don't have to tell anybody hear the power of them so that's one project that we're working on at the moment I always love listening to Jose Luis talk but when he said about the convening and what he found refreshing about it I also want to reiterate I think is the core of you know talking about the art how do we talk about it I think that's definitely a a sign of the times and not just for us as Latino theater makers but for the field and I'm interested in ensuring that these conversations resonate across the field because I think they're all relevant and we can serve as leaders not only for our respective communities but for the community at large in that context so we're kind of in an interesting moment it's a fantastic moment actually because we're two years away from celebrating our 50th anniversary and so that has provoked and prompted this whole period of assessment and re-evaluation and that trajectory since that Yathru Gattesina represents ground zero for modern Chicano theater and definitely parallel to development of modern Latin theater and so that is something that we're heavily engaged with we're talking about transitioning to become an elder of the field as opposed to always having to wear the shirt of the up and coming radical revolutionary and so that that's how the culture of the company has always stayed on that particular level and so that is a nice moment for us to engage with so part of that what we're doing in modest ways is that we've had what we term internally as our theater lab which is an opportunity for those of us who have been ensemble members of the company to be able to push the boundaries of what is known as the work of Yathru Gattesina but we've now begun to reposition that to be able to allow other artists to come in and develop their work using the resources of the Yathru as part of this commitment to building new voices and so right now we have an artist in residence, his name is Joe Lucivi, who is working on his piece so we have different levels in this laboratory but it's somewhere between a full production and a workshop production is the model that we're working with not a reading and not a world premiere but somewhere along that spectrum just so that they have resources so that's one another artist by the name of Javier Hurtado developed a piece earlier this year under that program as well so that's one front one of the conversations that we're having is to take the methodology of Yathru Gattesina which is known as theater of the sphere which was the internal training method so ensemble generation it was creation methods when we're still known as collective creation and taking a look at how we can make accessible and as part of the larger methodology that certain companies have employed and so we're going to be starting that as known as the theater of the sphere institute and so that's one of the programs or some entity that we're having conversations this year over the next few years that we hopefully will be accessible in time for the company's 50th anniversary in 2015 in terms of our artistic work my father is developing his new show called Valley of the Heart through the Yathru Gattesina which is the first time in a long time that he's actually done a show in this company he's usually commissioned by others but it was important to bring him home so to speak and now we have the ability and the resources to be able to do that so that'll be a two-year development that's already begun, he's writing now and we'll have the first incarnation of that show this summer in San Juan Are you directing? No I'm not and so what has happened is that for me as an individual I've had to transition from being in artist mode to being sort of a facilitator in general because I couldn't be an artist and shepherd this transition or to be outside while we're painting in the trenches and that has been a great thing for me personally but I miss being in the trenches as well and everybody, there's cycles for everything so this whole idea of assessing and engaging part of that is my commitment is because I see myself as definitely a product of this particular field I grew up in it on the edges, I've been around it I've seen the different methodologies that people have approached I've seen the experiments in the regional theaters I've seen smaller companies transition to adapt that model and suddenly have problems the institutional apparatus was put on top of a company that didn't fit and so my commitment is just to the field at large these days because I love it this is my life it's my larger community and so part of that is having those conversations with people it's just to see what's happening and that is also connected to the theater's tradition the Theater Campesina is one of the initiators as well as among the original Theater Chicanos and so that is an important moment that history is important and it shouldn't be lost either that there is this we have this legacy of coming together every decade or so to see what's happening and the other thing I should say is a term that I heard most recently is the we all know about grassroots and then there's the grass tops and so one of the things that I want to make sure that we address in these conversations is that we're looking at the whole stem the grass tops and the grassroots and seeing that as an active relationship between those two I've said this before I found out that I was a Latino in 1991 because I grew up in Portland, Oregon there was not such a word until I came upon the Miracle Theater Group where I worked on and on for 20 years so I'll be directing a show for them that's not to be named in the spring of 2014 starring Olga Sanchez just getting that out there all day I want to talk about so I started a new theater company but my work has been informed through Latino Theater and like having Juliet here in the room who embraced me 13 years ago to come and assist and direct references to Salvador Adali making me hot and she's like who's this kid from Portland coming, why is he coming but she did and through that I created some great relationships and one of the people that I met during that his name is Victor Mack and he's now one of the core members of the theater company that I started in Portland Badass Theater Company I'm going to read this because it's better if I read it than try to remember it Badass Theater Company is an artist driven, diverse and collaborative theater company whose artists are dedicated to fierce honest, fearless and authentic theater making that explores and celebrates stories of otherness our mission is to engage diverse artists and audiences in new and inclusive stories in order to expand the boundaries of mainstream theater and to accurately reflect the many voices of our community I think I'm taking a few ideas from how around when I decided to start a theater company, Daniel Banks if any of you know him he met with me in Chicago at the end of my TCG fellowship and I was telling him I think I should be an associate artistic director of a big theater company or an artistic director of a small theater company and told him my story and he said do you know, do you want my opinion and I said yes very much do I want your opinion he said you should do your own thing and I thought are you kidding me I'm in my forties and he said no you should do your own thing and so I toyed with that for a while then talked to my mentor, Jose Gonzalez who said yeah I think the same thing you should do your own thing and so through lots of meditation and contemplation I created Badass Theater Company with the idea that I wanted to change something about the way theater is done in Portland and that's to be inclusive a lot of theater companies there are not inclusive or they don't feel inclusive and so we started this with three Latinos two African Americans and a bunch of women who are part of Badass and that's the way we want to have it there our first show is a play by a Tunisian Swedish guy named Jonas his play is called Invasion we'll be doing that first in June we're doing the 9 minute plays which is 9 9 minute plays we had 203 submissions from around the country and 7 other countries from around the world and we narrowed it down from 203 to 9 we are committed to giving away we're only going to be performing out of a space like people and we're committed to giving away there's Lisa Portes hi Lisa good how are you we can't hear you yet but we'll get that we'll get some shortly oh the juice dance hi good to see you good to see you let's see who's there I see Juliet we're live streaming say hello to America I regret America Lisa Portes is from Canada is that correct that's correct I'm up here at the Stratford Festival lucky you Tony was wrapping up this little artistic sharing discussion of an artistic circle what we're doing we're committed to in this small space giving away 20 tickets to people who cannot afford theater we're actually actively looking in our community for those people who can't afford to see theater and if the 21st or 22nd or 23rd person comes in and can't afford a ticket we're going to give that to them as well as far as I'm concerned we'll give every house ticket away for free just to get people to come and see the work that we're going to do I was inspired by a woman on Ted TV her name she's the punk rock Amanda Palmer and how she gave her music away and then made the ask we're kind of looking to do that we might become a theater company that just gets our art away and then asks for the money afterwards right now we're committed to keeping our ticket prices $20 and under and we're not about big productions not in the high level producing there's a table in the chair and some fierce actors and I'm excited about it and we're also committed to those stories of otherness including Latino playwrights African American playwrights women playwrights because that's the otherness that those are the stories that we're going to do that's what I'm working on hi Lisa hi so great to see you so I'm going to try to be as cohesive as possible given my strange state I guess I was going to say I'm in a transition but I kind of feel like I'm always in a transition I'm for the first time just to talk about my where I'm at personally as an artist for the first time I've been commissioned to write a play I'm writing for Cornerstone Theater Company it's being produced this summer our community is East Salinas and we're doing an institute in East Salinas so we should definitely talk yeah and it's been a mind-blowing experience for me first of all just you all know the Cornerstone process I'm assuming everybody knows that process so I've been to East Salinas four or five times now and doing my story circles and I've written my first draft and so just the process the Cornerstone process and getting inside of that community which is primarily a farm-working community of course has been incredible but also for me to embrace my writer self has been really empowering and it's just kind of opened up a whole other part of my artist-ness that I didn't expect to be as powering as I thought I feel like I have some writer roots in me that I haven't really accessed so that's been super exciting I want to do more and I've been so lucky to work with some amazing writers and in my lifetime it's just really it's been a wonderful education that I didn't really realize that I was getting so that's happening and I think also one of the things that's happening now is that I'm just as a director I'm I'm just getting clear about the kind of work that I want to do and the great thing about that is just that I feel like the work that I do when I'm directing it's like so pure and connected and right but the hard part about it is that I'm having to turn down work because I don't feel connected to it and that's hard just as a freelance director so just how do you make your way in the world as a freelance artist and not take those gigs just because they're gigs but just take the gigs that you've got to do so that's kind of going on I have always prided myself in being able to identify myself as a Latina director but also not just do Latino theater and that's been kind of an interesting balance because I don't want to be pigeonholed but at the same time I'm so proud and honored to do work so to have that as my identification is great but also I don't want to limit myself so that's been part of my struggle throughout and I still struggle with that but since HPP HPP was really from my understanding from where it started with Jose as well as I think when they first started HPP they had a hard time casting they had a hard time finding directors the talent wasn't out there and I think partly through the evolution of just our field and people working but also partly due to HPP the the artist got stronger the artist got better at what they did and so by the time I got in there just through those summer workshops when we all come together it was an education for everybody I mean everybody got better at what they did so of course it was really sad to see that as we all know but I'm so grateful that South Coast gave at the time 19 years and really gave me a lot of freedom and empowered me as a kind of mini artistic director to foster the work so I'm grateful for that but we're ready for the next step but what I want to say just in terms of my life and kind of where I'm at in terms of pushing things forward is to me it has to do with getting in the mainstream just how do we make the work resonate on a universal level so that we can keep reaching out and touching everybody you know I have a film that's been in financial development for a million years but that's kind of for me it's about reaching it's for teens, it's for Latino teens but it's like getting in on that ground level it's really about it's about empowerment it's about empowering young people so that they can join the force you know so I'm sure there's more to talk about but that's kind of personally where I'm at I think part of this meeting was the idea that there was no HPP that I told people I met Juliet and Ann and Lisa who directed a couple of years ago but the idea that I couldn't tell other younger people oh you'll meet an HPP or that will give you an opportunity there just was no place for that to happen so that was part of the inspiration behind bringing people together I am like Juliet trying to look at my work in a kind of cohesive way as a playwright as a Latina, as a mother as a member of the community and trying to see where it intersects and where it feeds me and where I can give something back I have the book club play going on at Jiva Theater in Rochester and extended that's great but it was really great to go up there they have something called prologue where people talk to the audience every night they have an artist talk to the audience and I was very proud even though you wouldn't necessarily know from the play that it's been written by a Latina writer but I thought it was kind of exciting to go up there and talk about my past and growing up in Mexico and connecting this idea that Latina is very diverse and a lot of different things can be generated from us in a very different type of way and I'm going to Cincinnati Playhouse on Sunday for the book club play as well and they just commissioned they want a Latina themed family play for them and I'm very excited I'm going to do it between two families a Mexican family and an immigrant Russian family living next door to each other and what that promotes and yes it is based on something that happened and then I just did a project I'm adapting an unadaptable book called The Age of Innocence which is written very white very about New York but what I wanted to do with that was to kind of talk with the audience about how you create theater so what we did was we opened the rehearsals for everybody and we had open rehearsal in the evening for full audiences and what I wanted to do was could I create 1870s upper class New York with 11 actors 11 chairs and one table I was interested in the process and the answer is yes but it's hard but what I was interested is the dialogue we had with people afterwards in the audience I really want the accessibility in how we create theater to be more accessible and for people to see many different types of people generating many different types of theater and that comes to my new big project which I'm very excited about and also terrified the Denver Center commissioned me to adapt a book a nonfiction book called Just Like Us written by Helen Thorpe the wife of the governor of Colorado it's a book about immigration and chronicles the life of four teenage girls four Mexican teenage girls two who are papers and two have not behind the backdrop of a murder of Denver police officer an undocumented immigrant and how all of that the vagaries of immigration law the anti-immigrant sentiment the changing of the law it's a book that is about real life events it's about how hard immigration law is to understand and it's very Colorado based and they are I'm very excited Kent Thompson is one of those heroes who is a theater that produces Latino work every single year commissions work they're putting it in their main stage in the fall which is six months earlier but the immigration debate is taking on such force that we kind of have to keep ahead of events and it's very interesting to see a theater reacting to present day events and the changing law and how that is changing the book and it's a book written by a white woman but adapted by a Mexican immigrant and that tension that's going on and where does it become a piece of politics can it change people's opinion will there be will there be people what is it, protesting the play I don't know but it's the first time that it's married so many of my interest in one place I've worked with young people, teenagers politics art and it's a big holy mess but I'm very excited about it and the pressure is real and it's so many different things coming on that I just as a piece of art I'm worried about it, as a piece of politics I'm worried about it, in many different levels but I really am excited and honored that the Denver Center would give me this opportunity but I feel a lot of weight on my shoulders as an immigrant who had lots of trouble getting her green card to stay in this country and from many different levels and then meeting, having all the people who came to the reading of the play the real girls the wife of the police officer who was murdered they were all in the audience so it suddenly takes politics and theater to a whole different level and I don't really sure how to navigate it but I could sure use everybody's help and support that is my big project so anyway, immigration on stage why not so I am, I think I mentioned a playwright, a translator and a theater study scholar so I'm doing things in all three areas my two plays Paloma and Providence recently had readings, one in Chicago, Providence and Paloma in LA, recently actually I was at the theater last weekend at LATC and I translated a play called The Grown-Home Method, it's a Spanish playwright named Jordi Galferan from Barcelona and it was produced in LA last summer and it was nominated for an LA Jumper Critics Award we didn't win but it was still fun to go and that's been it's taken about four years and really in my work I'm really committed to building bridges between English and Spanish between Latino and Angolan bicultural so I really, in my plays I explore a lot about how these two worlds coexist how they collide linguistically, thematically, spiritually theatrically and then I'm also a theater study scholar and so I'm writing a book and it's called The Different Latina Theater Transcultural Voices and it's looking at five Latina playwrights this is one of them Coussi Kram, Kari Dots-Fitch Kira Udes and Elaine Romero and looking at how as playwrights in the 21st century they examine culture, identity, spirituality and it's that diversity and so I'm thrilled about the project they've been very generous over the years and so right now it's being considered for publications so knock on wood it'll be it'll be in people's hands in about three years so for me this thing here I'm thrilled because I feel like my work has led me to be a part of this organization where I've really been working with Julien over the years in the past and so Luis being inspired by his work as a young person at LATC when I was just out of college really I've been inspired by looking at theater artists all my good artistic life and I feel that being here for me is about helping to get back to contribute what I can contribute and to really like I said, fill bridges for my as an educator I've been about helping my students understand what the field looks like and many times my students I've never read a Latino play before I've never read Latino plays before and so for me it's been about helping educate them what's out there and even my colleagues in the field of Latino theater studies often aren't aware of what's happening right now so for me it's a thrill to be here and thank you Hi, I'm Tlaloc again Can you hear me okay Lisa? I can hear you I couldn't hear Julien I couldn't hear your name but I care and I hear you You won't have any problem hearing me I am a professional freelance director I work in new play development and I'm also assistant professor of directing at the University of Iowa That journey has been interesting in terms of the past several months I can condense the work that I've done in the last six months into the journey that has led me to where I am today Last summer I worked with the Shakespeare Festival of St. Louis on a project called Shakespeare in the Streets which was an inaugural project We essentially did a community based work in the Latino community of Cherokee streets and created an adaptation of The Tempest called The New World Happy to say that it was one of the most one of the best artistic experiences I've ever had and at the same time it was recognized as the most ambitious production of the year in St. Louis which is great That led to Iowa where I'm currently teaching directing in the MFA and undergraduate levels I'm going to say the next thing with bitter sweetness and pride but also sadness in that I'm the first Chicano to be teaching directing at a accredited school in the United States and N-A-S-T NAST It's a National Association of Schools of Theater Is that correct? It's an accredited institution for theater So what's happening? I have not been directing for the last several months because I've been settling into Iowa but in the meantime I've been getting ready for what will be an intense six months of activity starting with I'm directing at the Iowa New Play Festival I'm directing Two Plays There with two of our MFA playwrights It's a great program As I mentioned, José Luis Joe Lewis went to University of Iowa I just saw the whale Sam Hunter is a University of Iowa graduate I'm seeing Christian Greenwich's work tomorrow night so Iowans are kind of everywhere in the country which is kind of a great place to be I'm developing a new play at New Harmony Project this summer I am going to take part in the Summer Institute in East Salinas which is 15 minutes from my hometown of Watsonville, California I've currently started a project in the local prison in Iowa, the Coralville Prison working with inmates in theater and drama and that's the next thing I'm doing Oh, and I'm directing in the fall Water by the Spoonful for our MFA actors at the University in October So based on that snapshot you can take away about two or three things from that A, I am passionate about Latino work I always have been Second, I've been grounded in the classics through my undergraduate studies at Shakespeare Santa Cruz which is also where Julia went to school She's ahead of me and just a little bit but where I assisted her on the promise by José Rivera and it was through and I've always been passionate about new work which the Latino new work has always been kind of intertwined by my founding of Chicano Theater Works when I was in college which led to working at HPP with José Cruz Gonzalez which led to all kinds of great things like grad school working at the group theater in Seattle before it shuttered we're doing work at Venture Theater which was a multicultural theater company in Philadelphia before it shuttered and then that led into teaching opportunities in academia adjuncting work and I started to direct a lot in colleges and universities and I found my footing there and little by little I didn't realize that I was building up this portfolio of working and teaching and I was in New York and then decided that maybe I should put my foot in the water in terms of mentoring the next generation of artists teaching directing, teaching acting teaching ensemble devised work community based work which is where I am now which is really exciting it's a great place to be and I'm really grateful for where I am now so that's who I am the little secret and maybe it's not a secret to those who are close to me but I did not settle I didn't I didn't envision going into the theater at all I grew up with a father who was a community organizer who founded a night school for migrant farm workers in Vista, California and I was assistant teaching American citizen in English to those who wanted to to become Americans to have a better life and raise their children in America to educate them to have them succeed beyond what they were doing and and I thought I was going to enter into a world of politics I've always identified as a Chicano that has never wavered and still I encounter people who find that to be an unusual term to designate oneself but I'm proud to be that I have kept my name which is ASTEC and that has maybe caused a little trepidation amongst artistic directors to hire me because maybe they don't want to say my name on the phone but don't worry it's cool at the same time I'm proud of who I am and I have never wavered in my belief in myself in my entrepreneurship in my wanting to make sure that I am paving the way for Latino artists to follow me to be inspired by the work that I do to raise all the boats all the ships so to speak and yeah I continue to do that I'm grateful and I'm honored and I'm I feel blessed at this moment and at the same time it's great to be in the same room with all of you because being in Iowa is also very isolating but there are Latinos in Iowa who want to do this work who want to share this story so I feel like I'm in the right place right now and maybe there's a little bit of wanderlust in my career because of traveling I kind of think of myself as the migrant director but I want to give voice to the voiceless and I think that's where I am now for some reason I don't have sort of like this I don't believe it's like divine in any way but there is something kind of there is a hand that's guiding that not because I don't want to be in LA amongst my brethren or New York where I've been but there's something that's calling to me to reach out to those who want to tell their stories in a different and unique way that embraces all of our disciplines in terms of music and movement and literature and writing and storytelling and it's there, it's inherent in all of us so that's I want to be able to contribute to that in some way so that's where I am in the Midwest who knows where I'll be in two years but we'll see you're going to get tender unless you don't want to no, it's a commitment so I'm Patricia Ybar, I'm at Brown University I try to make Brown a more Brown University and I think I would probably say that I'm a scholar teacher director dramaturg and I put those things last because they're a smaller part of what I do now so as a scholar I'm also writing a book on Latina and Latino theater about neoliberalism and how Latino and Latino writers are really dealing with globalization and neoliberalism and dealing with structural inequalities so that's what I'm doing now I have a lead I'm writing a book about theater and neoliberalism right now primarily looking at Latino and Latina playwrights who are really dealing with a lot of the issues of structural inequality that have come with accelerated globalization and capitalism so there's a lot of big words but I basically think that Latino writers are writing incredibly well about increased inequalities in the U.S. and throughout Latin America so that's my scholarly project that I'm going to be on leave in 2014 so hopefully that will be a book sometime after that as a teacher I think my job is to teach people how to read Latino plays actually and so I spend a lot of time often with Latino students or students of color equally with students who would not identify in that way trying to teach and to think with students about how to read a Latino play differently and not to make certain kinds of assumptions I think I'm particularly dedicated to having people learn how to read Latino plays that don't work primarily in realism and to not impose certain frames on that work I'm proud to say that in the Browning of Brown of the five plays that we're producing next season two are by Latinas so I will also be directing Water by the Spoonpool in the fall I think the rights pending you're watching Chiara, please give me the rights and we'll be producing McDalia Cruises El Prito del Bronx in the spring which it took me nine years but I finally got McDalia a place on our season actually so I'm really really happy that we're going to be doing that work in my other life and this is how I know Ann and Lelov but this is how I actually met Ann I worked a lot with the Latino focus group of APA and so I continue to work with them so I hope we can have some conversations about how we can bring that conversation together but also I just think it's a good networking site for us so we've done a few pre-cons and this year I think that McDalia Cruises actually going to come and teach before the APA conference for a day but I think that's a place in which for me I think that's a really great dialogue for academia and artists to come together and it's fun and we find places to help each other out so that's what I do I think I just read one of your articles about the new Latino or historiography of Latino theater the piece I wrote with John Rossini who we've been writing together a lot actually he's at UC Davis so truly trying to make a claim for this long history of Latino theater in a different way and this always emerging always becoming I'm just like no actually you know what I mean the other kind of scene is Olivia and me so please stop with that narrative now you know something interesting that we found out in that launch meeting or in the that they were fifth we found like most of the Latino companies in the country had survived the fifth and not only that most of them had their own theater you know like even if it's a small house but they have their own space for many years because it doesn't happen with the African American companies which is really interesting and that was a realization that most companies had survived 40-50 years with the same members which doesn't usually happen in many other companies you know I thought that was a very what you're talking about how we always emerging we always had to be recognized or something like that and someone has to rewrite the report that Joanne Potlister did in 87 where she actually did this report of all the Latino theaters like I know she was trying to get money to actually write another report and I don't know that we won an NEA sponsored report again but it seems to me that there's a way to 25 years later to think about that every place almost every place I've ever lived except for Lawrence Kansas actually has had a Latino theater when I got there and we had found each other within a month so you know and where can we find your article that you and John... it's in radical history it's from a it's from a conference paper that we worked on the reception of but yeah you can definitely it's in radical history review it's an issue on neoliberalism so it's not a journal that usually publishes anything necessarily with Latino content or even artistic content but we convinced them to let us write these articles so do you want to hear what Lisa's doing? oh yes! hi Lisa hi I'm so sorry I have such terrible I've only heard snippets of every oh no! frozen! I know it always happens whenever you get your moment it goes down so while we get before we get Lisa back we we have about 15 maybe 20 minutes to talk because we still have this time a lot to talk about yeah go for it a little bit what's happening with the festival okay ready? Jose Luis take it away LATC because of what's happening with the LATC this idea is not concerned about not being in the room with everybody else and when this happened I think we had a proposal to do a Latino festival and I thought this national gathering this national gathering and the Latino festival and the gathering at Dupont for some reason I feel like foundations and grantees and corporations for an initiative that it has you know where it's going so what we did with honestly what it is how can we get 50 artists for longer than three weeks or four weeks together in the room where they're presenting their work where we can talk about their work where we can learn from each other do work in four weeks you know what I mean in the same room and to me because I'm so interested in their study and the artistic work you know how did you arrive to that or why did you arrive to that can we experiment for weeks during the day when you play as we perform and you have to be here with the actors and the director you know how can we work in some other things and talk about where we're going as Latinos which is to me a follow up of the national competition you know and then when we get to the poll and the poll the idea to me is you know so are there projects that have out that we can develop and see at the poll you know so that really because we're talking about the narrative of you know only by the work only by the work if the work is great we're going you know it's going to change the narrative so it's how to infuse that that knowledge, those ideas so that's where we try to do the festival it's actually a very ambitious festival of course because it's asking people to be in a city for four to six weeks most of the money that we're raising will be mean trying to be for housing and per diems and flights you know what I mean stuff like that it's really like people can only be there for three weeks fine then we can use but we have to plan it as a festival for the community and then plan it as a festival to continue the dialogue to another level it's really like an intensive workshop European festival I went to the Warsaw Festival it was a month we performed and then we got people from different countries and they divided us and we created a piece that we performed on the streets at the end of the month you know what I mean something like that that I want to think about our festival will be that we do our work and perform it to the audience but on the day we are creators and working together and really having a dialogue about the state you know it still has to come yes from the screen can we you know when I had great ideas can I commission template rights to work with companies who they will never work with and do the play from scratch with the company you know what I mean not to come with a preconceived idea you know with a directive that they will never work with to me it's like to me it's less revolutionized our own theater in that way our own way of creating because like you say meaning we are non-realistic our place at non-realistic which americans didn't understand and the economy in general so fine but let's do it together that explosiveness that we can do it how do we are right to the images that we are creating you know why and how the text and the movement and the dialogue work together and document all of these you know and have a real dialogue that's really what I'm thinking that the festival should be so right now we got money from the NEA you know we set the learning of intent to the Duke Foundation and now they want us to do the full proposal I had a conversation with them it's going to cost like around a million two hundred but I really think that I have conversations for around six or seven hundred thousand dollars which you know the rest of it I can raise I'm sure you know what I mean I just have to do a lot of fundraising but I think that I'm very very excited meaning who the to me that's why this meeting is so important this conversation meaning to me it's a dialogue to accumulate with dialogue to accumulate with results you know what I mean I want to have the dialogue and have something that say this is where we're going and hopefully something will happen and our theater is not about think itself because it's not about we try to raise the money to create the work and if people come and see it fantastic but it's really you know it's more about that this play that I'm doing in my gallery space with sixty five people in the audience because I want to experiment with it I don't want to deal with you know I have to do the play in my big theater because my budget it has to be on principle for that and I want to have that dialogue with all of us in that way so so the idea is I want to know how you know who the company is and how am I going to I want to make a a collective conversation for the creation of the festival I mean at the end of the day we have to talk to the companies that they have resources you know but at least between all of us can talk about all this will be exciting if we do this this is an element of the theater that it's not in a dialogue can we bring it to the festival and talk about it you know I mean I love I was talking to Diane last night which she sent us the notes about what we thought which are somewhere you know what you know and it's all about my own taste you know and my students that I and the directing program I don't have Latinos this year who is from Venezuela which I'm very excited about but they don't come to my program but you know they do internships with you know Robert LaPage and Robert Wilson and you know and you know people like that and so they all go into these incredible careers which are my Latino directors don't have that access because they don't do that you know and my own personal taste there's you know of course the elevators with curts you know it's not what I teach I don't teach Latino theater in UCLA you know I do a lecture class and I want to see how we as Latinos that we are and how we are going to bring our own intellectual knowledge I mean everybody knows that that's not a question but my work because I work in Europe so much has been about classical theater of putting you know carrying in a bathtub or something doing things like that so that's what I teach at UCLA and that's what I want to bring part of into our conversation so much I'm going to bring Robert LaPaz to give a workshop from ourselves because we have a history of what we have done and how we're going to do it to have a real artistic aesthetic dialogue if we really want to change if we want to alter the narrative of the American theater it's just a small tangent I'm doing the libredo of the Sonoso Rises with the Washington Ballet and the head of the Washington Ballet and I'm Mexican and we're taking this American book and doing it and it's interesting because we're creating a bowl out of the 12 dancers and I think that's a Latino a Latino perspective on the most American book there is and it wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been I don't know and I think that's a conversation and that's what people don't know and you don't have to stop being Mexican to do that work but that's not what it's known you just bring it with you of course but I think in this type of that's what the festival that's a dialogue that I want the festival to be because it really brings us all together which is the art form so this Latino that you're you're Mexican and you're Cuban and Puerto Rican it's not even about that anymore it's about we are going to work together and change the narrative because this is what we know and what we do that's my think hopefully we can I can raise the rest of the money I think I will I have to raise the rest of the money because I think that's what's important to you know so that's really what the festival would be so we have to bring the companies and like I said anybody has work that wants to do in the gallery yes yes I mean right now the target is the festival should happen between April and the end of June 2014 which is very quick it's tomorrow which is tomorrow it's a challenge to understand and the reason so important is to have all these national meetings because we see what's in the field right and are these people willing to have a dialogue with us about this from the regional establishment World Make Play to the most community Peter Peace you know to bring him into the room and try to have a dialogue I find it fascinating and important but are they willing to without an agenda and that's the point only about the world that's why I have this problem with curating because if I curate curators they taste a taste you know then I would have to curate the most avant-garde that's what I like theater Latino, avant-garde theater in the country but I'm not really having a dialogue about the film so that's the big issue because then I'm saying this is the theater that it should be but it's really not it should have all the breath from community theater to the regional theater how we dialogue about that that's why this is so important and the national community is important because then the theater can reflect a little bit of that I think that's my ideal I'm very excited about it but with all your help I'm sure we can make it after reading you said you want the coverage to know we're coming yeah that's great we're coming that's great I just want to ask one question so you're inviting the ten companies to be in residence for the four to six weeks and bringing work that they've made or to create work there the idea is that if we do it the idea is most plays don't do a four week run in another play in another city so let's say your play opens in the fall at the Denver Center so how can I get that play as an example to come to the festival and have a whole run in LA for four weeks but because those actors have to be in residence they have to live there part of their commitment is not only to the play but to participate during the day and the rest of the dialogue you selected those companies? no that's why we're here we're here to talk about that we're here to talk about what's out there how can we do it together and who are we interested in putting in the room again to have this dialogue which is not only dictated by my taste but by us what do we want to dialogue with I think that's what it is thank you for providing your theater company as a vessel for that it's a lot of work but I think it's for all of us and for young people to participate wow how can this is really exciting thank you guys because you guys started the dialogue for me really you and the commons that they brought us here I think we're in a great time a great time in history a great time for Latino artists right now and we have to take advantage of it yeah we're going to Lisa I don't need a dollar but we just want to come in to join us so glad you're all here next step also just to note we have 10 minutes left so we should probably get to Lisa before that happens hi Lisa, we got you back hi can you hear me now? yes I am so I am so okay great we hear you go ahead I'm sorry what I have is I have you guys I have you guys on the new play tv feed don't look at the hang on yeah get rid of that okay good oh yeah now I see me okay great so I'm supposed to talk about a little bit of what I'm doing is that correct? yeah absolutely hang on I'm going to take myself off new play tv now I'm going to turn you up now this technology is a little flawed just a second okay hi can everybody hear me now? okay great so what I'm up to and then we'll talk about DePaul that's great I am a director and an educator I had the MFA directing program at the theater school at DePaul University I direct primarily work from really I'm interested in work that clashes cultures so I direct right now my current play is Concerning Strange Devices by the from the distant west by Naomi Azuka running a timeline theater I just did a piece by Adriana Savon Nichols called Night Over Erzinga which is about the Armenian Genocide and kind of three generations of an Armenian family I'm about to work with KJ Sanchez on her piece Highway 47 at here which we also did at the Yosodo Festival in Chicago so I kind of am doing work in many different cultures I am Cuban American myself and you know I'm so interested in so many other things that have come up particularly as an educator and recruiting young artists of many ethnicities currently at DePaul we have Mark Pinate who is Chicano we have a lovely woman named LaVina Jabwani who is Indian we have Kelvin Wong who is Malaysian but I'm really interested in developing a leadership that is as multicultural as our country is in terms of DePaul we have this fantastic new building I think you may have pictures or I sent some pictures but we're going to be able to host a conference very soon I don't know if 2014 is going to work out it might be 2015 we have to see how it goes but what I really am interested in is picking up where Juliet left off with HPP and trying to find a biannual festival of new work new Latino work in Chicago which has so many fantastic Latino theater companies there's just kind of great stuff going on in Chicago so I'm hoping that we can host a biannual theater festival in Chicago of course that will require fundraising too so when I hear the post say Luis talking I nod I agree and so that's why I think 2014 looks 2015 looks more feasible in terms of fundraising to make such an event happen I hope that's all clear great I wanted to for the rest of the members of the group just wanted to tell you some of the questions that came up and in my conversations with Luis Alvaro with Jorge Huerta with Diane Rodriguez and this is just a condensation of questions that I think we should answer in the next chapter of this meeting which is I think Luis Alvaro wanted to make sure that maybe what we need to do is ask what is the one big question for the fall gathering what is the one thing that we really want to hone in on because I think that will give us a particular focus for the larger gathering and that the whole gathering needs to speak to that question as a focus and the other thing that relates to aesthetic that you were talking about how to evaluate the work of Latino work Samba work is the question this came from Diane who is the audience for this gathering who will be our investors our patrons, our artists, our champions how can we be critical of the work in the supportive environment so that the work continue to grow and evolve how can we advise a critical process so we can respond what feels like what is being rewarded in the theater are people that are pushing the form and leading an innovation and are we going to be a convening of work that is playwright driven or playwright and ensemble because even form and aesthetics even form and aesthetics we have to decide what we want who we are that was one of the big things that came up so one of the other things that came up in the discussion was from Tanya I don't know if she's with us still or not but she just tweeted something she has an alliance in Chicago called Alta the artistic director of Tiatro Vista and she started it and right now the main thing that they have is a giant database where we can access online the problem she sees at the moment is that we have great playwrights and directors but the directors never get hired for non-Latino things the same for designers so we want they're creating a database that helps people get in contact with them including Step Wolf and Goodman who are also offering training workshops and as an access point in the networking way so the database is becoming very important she really feels that we really need to nurture Latino directors she says that as a playwright I'm not a Latino director for my plays at regional theaters they don't have enough regional experience yet she really believes that there's three different levels of directors apprentices journeymen and those of us who are professional and right now they're certainly I could speak to that in terms of being a journeyman for the last 20 years like how do we get the work held by us in such a way how do we get connected to the work because that in itself has been a very frustrating experience and I agree with Tanya that I think we can facilitate that in some way at these convenings, at these gatherings at these new play festivals and so on and of course like Lisa and I we've been chatting about the training of the next generation of Latina and Latino directors we really want to make that happen of where we are in terms of the universities so that's I just wanted to get that in before we broke thank you guys thank you guys this is great thank you guys goodbye live TV thank you thank you for being here bye Lisa bye hi Lisa hi Lisa hi hi