Anti racist Strategies in Dramaturgy — Dramaturgs' Network UK on Saturday 20 November 2021

(soft calming music) Hello and welcome everyone to the "Anti-racist Strategies in Dramaturgy" round table. I wanna start with a few thanks and acknowledgements before we begin. I wanna say thank you to The Society for Theater Research for their generous support in making this event happen. Thank you to HowlRound for partnering with us to platform this round table, and thank you to my colleagues at the Dramatists Network, including Tommoh, Sarah, and Katelyn for helping to make this happen. And o

f course, thank you to the audience and participants without whom this event wouldn't be possible. My name is Lee, I am one of the organizers of this year's Dramaturg's Network events. I'm a writer, dramaturg, and educator, and I mostly work in a freelance capacity across organizations and companies to support the development of new work. I also wanna briefly introduce, you can't see them necessarily, but I want to introduce Adam, our technical wizard who's gonna be working away in the backgroun

d to make sure things run smoothly. And I also want to briefly introduce our panelists, although they will obviously introduce themselves in more detail shortly. We have Lynette Godard, Kane Husbands, Samantha Ellis, and Sudha Bhuchar joining the session this evening. I wanna give some really brief context for the audience and listeners who perhaps happened, who are perhaps not familiar with the starting point for this session where it first began. So this event was organized to help build up a

dialogue started in an open letter circulated in March, 2021, by over 140 artists from the global majority. This was titled, "We Need To Talk About Dramaturgy". The signatories addressed 11 key points about dramaturgical practice and what they defined in the letter as quotes patterns of injury unquote. Experienced by artists of color whose work had come into contact with Eurocentric dramaturgical practices. The letter went on to address several topics including accountability, dramaturgical proc

esses in script and new work development, the commissioning process, the predominance of so-called objective criteria or universal criteria for what makes a great play. And all of these aspects of the letter are what we will be covering this evening in this discussion. So this round table really is about bringing together writers, artists, scholars and theatre makers from the global majority to consider the question, how do we collectively move beyond the narratives and forms of Eurocentric dram

aturgy and towards a decolonized model of creating and developing work collectively? We want to ask the question as well. What does change look like and how can dramaturgical practice new or established help shape this change? Before the panelists introduce themselves I should say, just a few reminders. This round table is 90 minutes in length. There'll be a 15, 20 minutes section for questions and answers, and it will be archived and recorded as well. So if you know of anybody who can't be here

this evening to watch it live, then there will be a version of this available on the DN website, following broadcast. And that's everything from me. I'm gonna hand over now to Lynette Goddard who is our chair. I'm gonna bring them in so just give me a moment. Lynette, over to you. Hi Lee, thank you. Hello everybody. Thank you and welcome again to everybody who's watching this event. I'll be your chair for this evening. Yes, I'm Professor Lynette Goddard, and I'm a professor of Black Theater and

Performance at the Department of Drama, Theater and Dance at Royal Holloway, University of London. And my research interests are really around Black British. For most years, it's been play writing so Black British playwriting, looking at questions like identity politics in the plays and questions around kind of race representation and performance, and also looking at black and adaptations of European dramas as well. And I'm currently working on a project that's specifically focused on how we ca

pture the careers of Black British directors. It's particularly about Paulette Randall, but also Black British directors. How do we capture their careers? And I'm joined by three speakers, three panelists who I'll now invite each to introduce themselves. So we have, first of all, Sudha Bhuchar formerly of Tamasha Theater Company. Hi Lynette and everyone, thank you so much for inviting me to be here. Yes I'm Sudha Bhuchar and I am an actor, playwright, what I call a slasher, having to do everythi

ng that's required to put on theater. I am the co-founder of Tamasha Theater Company with Kristine Landon-Smith, and I've set up my company, Bhuchar Boulevard, in 2017 in my post Tamasha freelance career. And as a dramaturg, although I find it really difficult to sort of own that term, but I have sort of helped and steered writers often, all actually writers of color and mostly during their debut plays. So I'm sure we'll talk about that as the discussion goes. Great, thank you, thank you Sudha.

And then we have Kane Husbands. Hello everyone, and hi Lynette and Lee. Hi. Thanks for having us. I'm really excited to be here and grateful for this space. And that this conversation is even happening really. I am a lecturer in Performance Design and Practice in Central Saint Martins and also I'm the founder of a theater company called The PappyShow. The PappyShow is an ensemble company. We focus on training and the majority of our work really that we've performed has been around identity, gend

er, race. Our next show is called, "What do you see". So we're just at the minute kind of about to go to rehearsals and that's just part of the Mind Festival to be on in January. And that's all about difference and thinking about how do we hold spaces that allow many identities to thrive. And what does that look like? So right in the belly of the beast at the moment of thinking about dramaturgy in that show. So it's great to be zooming out and hearing what you think. Thanks Lynette. Great, thank

you very much. And then our third panelist today is Samantha Ellis. If you just introduce yourself, thanks Samantha. Hi, thanks Lynette and hi everyone. Thanks very much for having me. Yes, I'm well, mostly a playwright and I've written a lot of plays that have sprung I suppose out of my experience of my parents are refugees and they are refugees from Baghdad. So a lot of my work centers on that. I also write books and I work a little bit on film. I work a little bit sometimes as a script edito

r for film. So I guess I sort of had the dramaturgy from both angles a little bit. Great, thank you. Thank you so much. So yes, so just as Lee has given in his brief introduction, the session is really in first part and in the large part, our response to the open letter. We need to talk about dramaturgy, we're focusing on kind of yeah, what is the problem? Let's identify some of the issues, let's reflect again upon some of the challenges that were outlined in the letter. And then we'll move on a

fter that to kind of think about the question of change. What does change look like? What needs to happen? Do we have some ideas about how we might decolonize dramaturgy. It is both inside and outside of kind of institutional context. And then lastly, we'll think about dramaturgical practices. So what practices are there that are currently within dramaturgy that might help or, and what practices can we devise? How might those practices need to be remodeled and reshaped so that they can really em

brace this question of anti-racism and change. And then there'll be about 15, at least 15, possibly a little bit more minutes, time for questions from people that are watching. So if you have questions, please post them up in the chat and we'll try and get through as many of them as we can. So if we can have all panelists visible and we'll open up this discussion and welcome you. It's good to see your faces again. So I think, I mean, I guess, I think we'll start really with this question of Euro

centric dramaturgy. This idea of dramaturgs as helping a writer to get to the best possible play and the kind of question that's in the letter around, well, what is the criteria for the best, right? Who's best, is the best? Where do we learn what is the best? What kind of values and assumptions are we bringing in? Where have they come from and how might we start to challenge them? How we will... I was really interested in the thing saying we're all trained through the Eurocentric gaze. So no mat

ter whether you're, let's say a white dramaturg or a person of the global majority, you're trained through the same structures around what is the best play. So I just wanted to kind of open up first of all, with whether any one on the panel has any responses to this question of the best and how it's either shaped your work, or, yeah. So I just wonder if anyone has got any thoughts? Kane, you could go first. Yeah, I could go. It's interesting, this idea of best, because it makes me think of like,

Ethan Foreman's style and to go like... My family are Caribbean, so to think of ideas of performance over there, it's not a style of like my auntie is sitting around a table telling stories, it's performance. That is where I learnt performance. And to think that they now need to make it a little bit more authentic or to tone it down a little bit, or it's like, but in a way that's becoming less authentic in performance style. So the idea of best it's like by who's gaze? Who's quantifying this co

ncept of best? When we started the PappyShow, and our first show "Boys", I guess we're not from a writer-led practice. That's not how we make our work necessarily, but we do work with dramaturgs, visual dramaturgs, and to think about how we can bring meaning for an audience. And we didn't really have anywhere to take our work because it's not a play so you can't put it on in our theater and it's not a dance, so you can't put it here. So really I'm so glad I held tight to the form that we found a

nd that it's found and carved it's space because actually we would have adapted and changed and squashed and cut out and made it more words and break it all down and lost the identity of what we were effectively trying to say to appeal to somebody else's best. And so do you think then the fact that you said not writer-led, so the fact that your work is within a, maybe movement forms or forms that maybe the European gaze might not be able to call it down, do you think that that's helped you to be

freer then in your- I think so, I think having our work is devised and we mainly really play ourselves. We're not really that often playing characters. We've really recognized that our oral histories, that's how they got passed down. You won't go to the library and hear about our people, the people that we make work of. So for me, us being ourselves and voicing our stories, our histories, our futures of what we want our worlds to be, our utopias is in a way saying that our lives matter, that ou

r stories are important. I always come back to this idea that you could walk around my grandma's house and you would see a museum, a black curated museum, an art gallery that is photos that she's taken and put up, and it's gonna be very different to walking around one of the museums in London. You won't see it and it's her specialist. So I often think of our work in that same way. That it's been curated by these artists in a different way, and it might not appeal to everybody. So interesting. 'C

ause there was also something in the letter around the kind of the dramaturg's experience. And if you're a dramaturg, that is not of the cultural experience for the work, that your dramaturging, what does it mean when you try to kind of shift that work towards something that maybe you're more familiar with? So I don't know if Samantha or Sudha, you have anything just to say at this point? I mean, we can also form... Oh, sorry Samantha. I'll come to you after Samantha. A lot of what you're saying

Kane, completely resonates. I mean, I think for me the journey of running Tamasha we've absolutely had to navigate the gatekeepers at Pages, doing work that in a sense in context might be Eurocentric in shape, but in content it's exactly us making our own work, wanting our own voice. And a lot of the time what we realized, there's a sort of disparity of details coming from audiences. Like if you say for example, we did a play called, "Strictly Dandia", which was about the Gujarati community dur

ing the festival of Navratri, the constituency audiences was full of Gujarati people who had been part of the engagement. And yet the show gets written about and badly reviewed by Charlie Spencer in the Telegraph who sat in the audience with 500 Gujaratis who loved it and said you captured us, But the who's judging what's best is not from that, you know? So in a sense that climate is changing and it's great to see. That's just one example, but if I could just say a little bit, like what I've now

come to in my journey, my personal journey is I'm making a lot of work like co-creating within communities. And so during lockdown, I did a project around the theme of "Touch", which was at "Revolution" and "Welcome Collection". And actually all of that work was exactly what you say, Kane. It's like, I work a lot from Vertam. I put myself in it. So it's very explicit that this is the voice of real people talking to the writer Sudha, who is in that work and that's the gaze, but we're doing it to

gether as it were and that similarly the recent show I did with Tara, which is "Final Farewell" where people share their stories of loss during COVID. So where's the dramaturg and where's the writer, in a sense they're all intermingled, but anyway, that's probably enough at the moment. Mm, thank you. we have so much to talk about. I'm gonna come back to the question of gatekeeping straight after and Samantha has spoken actually, yeah. Mine sort of touches on gatekeeping a bit. I mean, I've had s

o many experiences. For example, I had a meeting with a dramaturg who we were trying to schedule a reading of a play about Orthodox Jews and it was December and he wanted to do it at 5:00 PM on a Friday. And I said, well, we can't, can we do any other day? I mean, I'm not religious, but I go to my mom's. So I was like, it'll be even awkward for me, but we're not going to get the people to come. And he was not Jewish. And he said, no, but I know the Jewish Sabbath is on a Saturday. And I was like

, hmm, in that situation, would you really question a Jewish person in front of you? Anyway, so a lot of situations like that I've had, and also that was not about the content of the play, but then you're getting notes from the same person on the play and you start going, well, you don't even know you haven't even gone on Wikipedia. And when I corrected you about, I mean, honestly, I'm not religious. So if you came up with any more complex, I wouldn't dare to correct anyone, but I know when the

Sabbath is when I corrected you on a very basic fact. You contradicted me. So really am I gonna take your notes then later into the play? That I find difficult because in terms of the structure of the play, I was helped a lot in these meetings, but it put me massively on the back foot to start a meeting like that, where I had sort of justify these basic facts that I felt I shouldn't. Someone should just go, oh, sorry, I made a mistake as I would, because I've mistakes of course, with other cultu

res. And then this question of, yes, I mean, as a playwright working in a more, I suppose, traditional way than anyone, Sudha and Kane, I mean, I am what... My plays are sort of going through the literature system, and I don't make my own work with my own company. So yes, the dramaturgs are usually the gatekeepers and sometimes that's amazing 'cause you start your conversations on a very creative level about your idea with someone who is really interested in the literacy side of what you're doin

g. But sometimes then you do feel dismayed, I think. If it's not working out and I often feel this question of authenticity is very difficult. And so the same play that I wrote about Orthodox Jews, I was pushed quite hard to have a white person in the play who people could explain. So people could say things like, oh, and by the way, it's about to be Friday night. I put someone in. Actually, I don't regret that 'cause it was a good character, and I gave him a massive journey and an arc. And they

said, "oh, he's taken over the play". I said, well, I don't think he has, he's got the same... I don't think he did, but I think they just wanted him there just to kind of go and now is it Friday night? And I was like, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. If he's gonna ask questions and be there, then he has to have an arc. I'm not having someone to sit like a tool onstage. Like you can't ask an actor to do that as much as anything else. It's embarrassing. And then just, there's

lots of sort of, I suppose, what is authentic. So during the first Iraq war I was asked in quite a few meetings, and I think I could have quite easily got a commission to write a play about the Iraq and Jewish community relations at war if they had been anti war, but much of the community, I mean most of us have changed our minds now. And I was not in favor at the time, but it was the case that most of my community were pro war. They had suffered under Sadam. They wanted him out. They felt very,

on a very personal visceral level that it was on balance, a good thing. And I said, well, I can't really write that play that's of them all sitting around the anti war because I have to make it up. It wouldn't be authentic. And it was very tricky conversation 'cause I said, well, what about these other ideas I have that they didn't want those. That kind of speaks into the idea that there's an expectation. Yes. That people. Yes. Of the global majority, wherever you're from that you will write th

e play, that is responding to your specific community. I wanna just go back to the gatekeeping thing actually, because until I wrote that letter, I had not thought about the dramaturg as the gatekeeper. I think of the gatekeeper as the person who reads the play and decides whether it's gonna go on in this venue or not go on in this venue, right? And for me, that was the point where the gatekeeping happens, right? That there's an expectation of the kinds of plays that people will write, and someo

ne will decide we will put this play on, or we won't put this play on. So I just wanna tease out a bit more this idea with the dramaturg as a gatekeeper in the way that you're talking about there, you were talking about they came and you spoken also that you're talking about now, Samantha. Tell me a little bit more about, I know you're giving some examples of course. Yeah, I mean. You're already giving some examples. But let's hear some more. I'd be very interested to hear how it worked at Tamas

ha because I haven't... I've worked mainly with sort of the more traditional building where yes, my first contact as a playwright will normally be the literary manager and the literacy manager will be doing a lot of the dramaturgy. And I mean, I'm often in a situation where I'm having a lovely time with the literary manager, dramaturging my play, and I love them. And then the artistic director will come in and not like it. And either it won't get programmed. And so often the final decision is so

mewhere else, but sometimes they put me in a situation where I'm having an unsatisfactory relationship that I should manage. But I think if I just get past you, maybe they could tell me they like it or not. So it's gone either way. It's gone either way. And I have had amazing relationships, but yes, I mean, in terms of your first contact and the person you work with most, in my experience in more traditional buildings, that's been the way it's worked for me. And Sudha, would you like to chime in

? In terms of Tamasha, I mean that company came organically from my friendship with Kristine Landon-Smith and we sort of we wanted to make work for ourselves and then it grew and grew. And eventually, like it took 10 years for us to say, oh, this is much bigger than us. let's be a full-time company, blah, blah, blah. And so in terms of, for us there was levels of gatekeeping people could say we were gatekeepers because initially we were trying to just find opportunities for ourselves, and then i

t grew from that. But every time we nurtured new writers, new writing, we really believed in them they would come up with the play that only they could write. You still have to still have to find a space to put it on. And that's where we often had the what are we calling it? The patterns of injury we had so many patterns of injury. And one of them which happened lots of times and it would be the mainstream companies like the Royal Court where they might go, ooh, like you found all these writers,

or we love that person's voice, but that play that you have spent carefully nurturing them for 18 months is not quite what we want, you know? So why don't you introduce them to us and why don't we take it over? Because you don't know how to dramaturg. I mean, I'm being crude but that happens most of the times, we'll have the right to thank you and that play that they're writing in their authentic voice which has their dialect it's got sort of Kashmiri, Punjabi, English. Mm, it's not quite... It

's not a proper play. So that would happen a lot. Yeah, thank you for that. And then would sort of go and luckily sometimes the right... And you felt like, oh, that writer, do you want to just say, look, please go to the Royal Court or go to wherever and leave us out of it, or actually let's help you because you're already vulnerable. Let Tamasha be on your first play because that's gonna be a more sort of satisfying experience. Thank you for that. 'Cause actually it's nice lead to my next discu

ssion point that I've got, because it's around this question of Jew audiences and of course like... So that writer may well want to, people want to get their play on the Royal Court. People aspire towards that venue, not everybody, but people aspire towards that venue. And I remember, I think it was when I was doing one of my recent books. I came across an article by Paul Gilroy, where he was talking about black writers who aspire to having their place put on in the mainstream, have to learn how

to appeal to jeweled audiences. So they have to learn how to appeal to the, let's say predominantly white audience of a venue like the Royal Court or Mainstream Venue while also doing the job of bringing in the new black audiences and appealing to those audiences as well. So I was very struck by the open letter, kind of talking about this question of plays needing to appeal to jeweled audiences. And I guess I'm wondering about what the dramaturg can do or not do really not to do in order to hel

p the plays or the performances to have this jeweled appeal. I just wonder if you have any thoughts, Kane, You've been- Yeah, I think it's about asking the right questions as a dramaturg to be thinking, and even that question who is the audience for this? It's like often doesn't get asked. It's often that we've already started to work on the piece or we start to restructure and you're like, oh wait, one of the fundamental questions of who is this voice in this? Like I was thinking recently that

the tragedy of George Floyd, what happened, that video became a performance. And it's like, who needs to see that video? Because none of my black friends, like, we didn't need to see that, it's trauma. It was for maybe there are other audiences who did need to see that. And that's how I was trying to talk about work. But to just assume work is for everybody, it's not the right thing. Actually we make different choices. I make different choices if I'm making a children's show to if I'm making ano

ther show. Like I really curate and direct in a very different way. And it's the same with our audiences. So I don't think it's wrong for us but it shouldn't be a scary question to think who is the audience? Who do I wanna bring in here? And that's where it's so frustrating when it's like you get these people with louder voices and they take up space, right in reviews, the big publications and you go, but you weren't my audience. You weren't the person that this was intended to, but you've got t

his platform that speaks to a much larger audience. When we were making our first show, and it was quite tricky for us to get a space for it that we performed in the Volt Festival in London. It was like, you kind of hire that venue for a week and you perform it there. And it was hard at first, but it was a gift in the end because it made me think we would do this in the middle of Hyde Park and people would come and make a circle around us and come and watch the performance. But it meant that we

got to make the art that we wanted, and that we weren't necessarily shape-shifting from the beginning to try and occupy a space that performed to an audience that was of somebody else's venue. So important and I hadn't thought about that. Like, 'cause I think there's a thing where there's an assumed sense of who the audience is for X venue or Y venue. And that's maybe how then the dramaturg tries to work with the writer to develop the work without saying, well, actually, yeah. Who were you writi

ng for? So really important point to reiterate. And Samantha, I realize I cut you. Oh, I had a wonderful experience a few years ago. I was writing a children's play about an Iraqi girl who wants to go back to Iraq and can't, well to get to her mother's country. And eventually went on to Polka. But this workshop is with the Birmingham rap and they just took me to a primary school in Birmingham. And there was about 60 kids, it was quite daunting. And we did this amazing exercise where I said, okay

, what are your assumptions about Iraq? What are your assumptions about things like flying carpets? I had various things I wanted to put in the show. Some were sort of fantasy, some are real and I wrote them all down and it was so interesting 'Cause you never get to ask. And if I asked an adult, they might think, I can't say, 'cause one kid was going, "dust, that's mine". So I was like, okay, 'cause an adult wouldn't say that, but I knew I was gonna be having an audience of six and seven year ol

ds. So it's useful to know that they think it's going to be dusty. Either, I can make it dusty. I can not like it dusty. I can do something with the dust. it was so useful and they were absolutely forthright. And I thought, oh my God, imagine if you could do that with adults. But people are too polite, it's tricky. And it was just a really interesting... 'cause then like the whole show we had those notes, we had the notes on the board in rehearsal. I mean, it was amazing, it was so useful. We pl

ayed to and against these cliche stereotypes assumptions all the way through and it was so much fun and it was so easy because kids were so open to having their minds changed as well. And some of the conversations afterwards were phenomenal. But yeah, I mean, another thing on this question of who is it for, is I often feel like I've been asked him, will you be able to get an audience in from your community? And I often think, well, I'm not the marketing person and maybe I won't, but maybe I don'

t have to, maybe it will be an audience of lots of different people. Maybe it will be a very diverse audience. I love going to see a play about a culture that isn't my own 'cause you feel like you've been invited to someone's house. You might not know anyone from Sri Lanka. You go and see Sri Lankan play and you feel like you'd like suddenly like been able to go behind the curtain and you can see. And it's amazing thing. And I feel like I don't mind if people don't get everything, if they don't

understand every single word, if I use a word in Arabic or I use the word in Yiddish, fine. Fine, they'd get the sense of it, won't they? I mean I feel like I don't like to think of yes, maybe sometimes you'll have jokes that will land. You can sometimes hear a laugh in one half the audience and not the other it's okay. I think that's okay. Yeah. You might find things funny that someone else in this room doesn't, that's okay. It might not be cultural. It might just be, 'cause you find that funny

, but it's sometimes it is cultural and I think that's all right. I don't think everyone has to laugh every line if it's supposed to be a funny line So I don't know, I try and kind of free myself a bit from this idea that I have to either attract just one audience and get everything right for them or be everything for everyone. Like it can be a bit in the middle. I think it was, was it Tabby Tucker Green or someone years ago kind of responding to this kind of question of well, are there gonna be

enough black people for example, to come and see the show? And I think pretty sure it was Debbie Tucker Green who said, "if the marketing do their job well enough, then they will be", it could be her, it could be Winsome Pinnock, I'm not 100% on that. Somebody said that, and it was like, yeah. And also in terms of going to a show and not getting it all, I went to see Depo Aguilaje's, "Iyawo ile" the first wife. And there were jokes. It was very much based within Yoruba culture. In Nigeria is a

culture that as a British Caribbean person, I don't know that culture. And so the audience who... And some of the jokes were in Yoruba as well. And the audience then would get the joke and then it ripped them, and I'd almost be checking with the person next to me, there were some jokes that I got because they were in jokes for black British, black people. And I kind of recognize that as a black person, but some were very much, I didn't get them. That was okay. I get them by the person next to me

that gets them. I think the wider question on the marketing person bringing in the audience is much broader than that. It's like, but is your venue accessible? Let's talk about the structures that are in your venue for why these people don't come here. You know what I mean? It's not just to put the show on and we'll come. It doesn't necessarily work like that. I mean, for me everything I've done, you know you're trying to get constituency audiences who are reflected in the work that you... And

one of the things we've had to kind of deal with so much over the years was the audience of Tamasha was, oh the work speaks white writers can say my work speaks. I don't have to think about my audience. I mean, I was always amazed as actually really well-known playwrights, they never think about who it's for, but then you have to and that becomes one of those things of whose benchmark, because your work obviously doesn't speak because you're only speaking to your tribes. We literally had people

who are actually people I would consider as allies, in fact it was about my local adaptation, "The House of Bilquis Bibi", which was "The House of Bernarda Alba" transposed to Pakistan. And I had a little bit of Punjabi in it. And if you were open, it was literally the servant is cussing the beggar in Punjabi. Like I'm not trying to disengage white audiences, but I had to go on Radio 4 and I was on the back foot to try and explain why my work was not indecipherable because it had a bit of Punjab

i in it, you know? And I mean, literally this kind of trope of if your work will transcend and endure, because it will speak well, it's taken me a long time to have that confidence, to know my work speaks. If it doesn't speak to you, it's because you haven't lent in and opened your ears, you know? Exactly, 'cause you're not listening or yeah, allowing it in. Thank you, this is all moving quite nicely. So I have two things. One thing is around universality, but that might build into actually the

next area, actually, that I've not quite formulated, but I'm gonna jump ahead and maybe we'll come back to this question of universality. 'Cause it's a slight bug bear in my mind sometimes, when a black playwright for example says, well, my play is universal. And sometimes I think, does it have to be? What are you doing by trying to assert that? And I wanna tie that in somehow as Sudha just mentioned adaptation. And as I said before we went live, I was a big fan of Tamasha. Yes, I used to do str

ictly Dan Derry as well. I saw that as well. And I saw "Ghost Dancing", which was adapted from Terence McCann and "A Yearning", which was adapted from Yammer. I was in high "The House of Bilquis Bibi". And then of course there was adaptations from, "A Fine Balance" for example, that's adapted from- Indian work. Indian work already. So you've got the adaptation of European plays but also the adaptation from Indian plays. And in the open letter, oh yeah, "14 songs, Two Weddings, and a Funeral" fro

m the... I used to teach my students that the Bollywood Film, which had no English in it at all, but they have to watch it. And then the adaptation against it which was in English. I didn't even know, this was happening. I'm so delighted to hear this. So I love that work. So in the open letter I was quite pleased that it sort of talks about adaptations and critics of adaptations and how we kind of... So you say we're gonna adapt something from an Indian novel, but a white critic is gonna be the

person that judges its value. I just wonder if you want to just open up a little bit on this question adaptation for us, Sudha. Yes, I mean, I think you've sort of listed the kind of range of adaptations in the way that I've been involved with and I think for us it's always an artistic impulse that makes you want to do something. So it's not like you're scenically trying to say, oh, this will be great for audiences. First of all you love the book and then you know that it will make a really good

stage play. And then you know that, as I said, audience development my sister Suman, we have just always, it's always hand in hand, so that's always been the case, but this thing in the letter about don't always assume that people of color want to place adaptations and the countries are their supposedly countries of origin, but I can also say the converse is that when they do want to do that like let them don't try to be a barrier either. So I think it has to come from your artistic impulse, I'

m married to a Pakistani and I've been to Pakistan a few times. And when I traveled to a small town, there's a small town called Jang in Punjab where the sort of Romeo and Juliet story, that Punjabi story of Heer Ranjha. So the tragic heroine Heer, what her sort of mausoleum is there and people go to sort of pray for their wishes to come true. And I sort of thought of locals play, right there because I also noticed through immigration, how there were a lot of single girls and families who were w

aiting for brothers and the men who were abroad to find matches for them. And actually, they didn't have that agency and somehow that play in that setting, it just spoke to me, and that's how it started. But it's very problematic because you do have, you really do have so-called white experts saying who are you to do local? That isn't local, and then you've got to navigate all that. And yet all Indian audiences, Pakistani audiences came and for them it was like a new place in Pakistan. They didn

't have to know local. There's also something about choice isn't there? So again, this is just from the research that I did before and from how I used to teach the play. So I used to kind of teach on the one hand, (indistinct) approach and all the work that he did around kind of English Theater and how we might remake classics with a particular kind of British, English, Asian, Caribbean kind of fusion. And also then I think is Yvonne Brewster from teller at the time kind of said, actually, if I

do an adaptation of Shakespeare, I'm from Jamaica, which was a colony, a British colony, I grew up with Shakespeare, I have the right to do it straight. I don't need to have to adapt it. I need to have the choice to do it as I want to do it, rather than there being an expectation that I'm gonna adapt it 'cause actually after all, I was educated in your colony. Well, I think there is an expectation all the time, Samantha, you were saying about will your communities come, well, I've always had lik

e Esther Marsha. It's like, oh, let's book them because they will come with, but then that is quite a thing to carry 'cause if they don't then... So you know not naively, but I did think, oh, the local lovers will come Yes. And we've worked really hard to get. But actually again two sort of lukewarm reviews by white critics who said this isn't local and that audience is gone, but actually then you have a huge audience from your own backyard, but it's as if it didn't happen in the theater. Great.

And then just on that, just wanna try and tie in the universality and I'm gonna to come to you Kane because what I sort of said, universality, even though I hadn't really formed anything, you sort of went um, (panelists laughing) what was in that um? (Samantha laughs) I guess, so that's what you mean by universality, either way I understood it was maybe something around appealing to everybody, which made me think that therefore, my job is to make my work clear and appeal to everyone. And actual

ly I'm not quite sure. And do you think that, I think I often wanna divide the audience, so I actually want everybody to leave feeling different things, so I wanna sit in the complications or the difficulty that I love when like four people laugh in the audience and nobody else does and it's complex and we go, oh, what does that mean? And so this idea of like, we're not trying to just make entertaining work. You know what I mean? I wanna reflect that, the complex world we live in, I wanna presen

t relationships that are difficult. But I think it's that, that's the thing. So I think from my sense of it is that people say, well, you might read my play through the relationships that are difficult and think about that in a political way. Or you might just go, actually, it's a difficult relationship between a father and their child or mother and their child, or a brother and a sister. And it's the looking at it in terms of the brother and the sister, the father and the child, the mother and

the child, or the parent and the child. But that's the kind of universal, universal. Whereas the kind of specifics is, well, it's about a parent and a child and the issue of X, whatever that issue might be. And that the playwrights would say, well, although we've got these issues, some of the playwrights, although we've got these issues in our plays, actually they're about parents and their children and the parents wanting the best for their children and everyone can tune into that. And so that

means that they're universal. Whereas I was always like, yeah, but they're also specific. Yeah, very specific. Is there about a Black parent in there? Black child, you know? So Yeah. Yeah, Samantha. I was gonna say, I think there's this pressure on particular characters as well. Like, I mean, I've never written, almost never written a Jewish character without being asked. Why do they have to be Jewish? Or why not? And I think that assumption is that the default is white and probably CV and maybe

male, I don't know. Whereas for me the easiest character for me to write, is an Iraqi Jewish woman. Obviously I'm not gonna write every single play with that. I would say when I write anyone, they're gonna be infused with my sensibility. And so I wrote a play that "Wolves in Scotland", Wolves being returned to Scotland's and I thought, this is the one where I'm just literally not putting myself in at all. There's not gonna be any of me in it. And a friend of mine read it and was just like, "oka

y, this is the bit that sky rocks". And I was like, oh yeah, busted. But I mean you didn't need to know that, you didn't need to know that if you sort of play. So I think what I'm saying is every play I write is about the Iraqi Jewish. But if I happen to write, if I think that the best way of getting across this story and the person is the story I want to tell is a Jewish woman or an Iraqi woman, or someone who is Iraqi Jewish. I think there's no way I could suddenly kind of make them a differen

t ethnicity just because, and I find this question very difficult. to answer because if you say to someone that suggests that you think the default is a white person, that's very aggressive way of starting the conversation, but I've never found a good way of having the conversation. I always just go, well, why not? And sometimes I go, well, I find it easier to write these people, which I think makes me look like I can't write anyone else, which like, arguably it's true, but why should I have to

be doing myself down here in these conversations. So I find that difficult, but also I so agree with what you've all been saying about talking about specificity, because actually I think the more specific someone is about their own experience, actually, weirdly, the more it lets you in. And I think it's the same in memoir there's very specific memoirs where you think, well, I'm not gonna be able to read this. I've not been an alcoholic and lived on Orkney and had a farm. Oh, actually I feel like

, I've got more out of this book that I had about the one that was written by someone in my community because something about it spoke to me. I think if you sort of make it, if you try and make it universal, you end up writing these bland, nothingy characters. And I have been there, I've been there where I've taken the specifics out. they've just become so boring. And specifics don't have to be personal to the writer or the maker there to make it. But I think they have to be specific in some way

whether you give someone a love of chess or a fondness for cheese or whatever happens to be, it doesn't have to be ethnicity, but it does have to be now, I think. And the minute you sort of go, they just like all foods, just go, well, that's not a character, is it? It's like, I don't know why you would do that in terms of culture and ethnicity, why you would sort of go, it's fine for them to just go. I just thought everything. I'm just universal. Mm, thank you for that. That again, chimes in qu

ite nicely with the kind of, I guess the last point that I wanted to kind of bring up and before just inviting, you all to have a response and it goes back again to this thing of as possible play, which kept coming up over and over again. And somewhere in the letter, it kind of talks about, well, actually, as a dramaturg, one of the things that you must do is that you must trust the person of the global majority to know what the limits are for how they want to write their play, right? 'Cause I t

hink there was something where it says don't be reverential. So if we want to send out our communities, then we want to be able to do that. And we don't want you as a person who's not of those communities potentially to be pulling us back from that if it's something that we want to do. And I guess, yeah, trust us as writers that we know what we're doing. And I guess if we're gonna say that, what does that mean for the role of the dramaturg then? Because in a way it would be like, well, I'll just

do what I want. And what role would the dramaturg have? What would be there? How would we see their role or perceive their role, to kind of, I guess, give enough space for us to do what we want, but also still doing their role of dramaturging. And what's been requested, I guess when we're saying trust us. And. I think I can feel from sort of when I, as I say mostly dramaturged young writers who are writing the debut play, and they've been sort of writers of color and essentially the thing I kee

p coming across is people having this default position because they think they need to of leaving aspects of themselves outside the door, 'cause they think they won't be able to translate it to a bigger universal audience. So my job has always been to sort of say, write the play, and this is not one of the wonderful dramaturg Lynn Cochlan and Phillip Osman that I've worked with one of the things that I've taken away is that write the play or the piece of theater, which might not be, play that on

ly you can do that you've brought your full self to, that you can hand on heart, look at that and go, actually, no one else could have done that, because that is me and that doesn't mean that you've kind of made yourself vulnerable and scavenged yourself and wrung yourself dry on stage, but it does mean that you've brought your full self. And what I find is that's been my job. And a lot of it is actually it's like a pastoral job as well. It's not just you come there or you're gonna be there for

six weeks to dramaturg your play. I mean, I have worked with writers over six years so Tuyen Do who wrote her first play "Summer Rolls", she first came to Tamasha Acting Workshop, Writing Workshop. And actually what she was encouraged to do in drama school is to kind of keep her Vietnamese side outside the door. And my job was really to bring that right in. And if you're gonna write about that community, and actually there's a vulnerability and I feel that myself I give advice to people that I c

an't take myself, that I will build my well, because a lot of it is to do with, we are standing there such a vulnerable place, because you're trying to write something really personal. You feel the responsibility of the communities, you have language that's the other big thing. You're writing characters who don't speak English. So if you're gonna write them in English, how do you do that? My job is being very much like really, really holding the hands and postural as well as being the person who

questions when it comes of the practice is the story coming through Right. Where dramatic arcs what language are you gonna use? all of that. Yeah. I'm not sure if I've answered your question. Yeah, no, it's interesting though, 'cause it's this idea of that, the kind of craft the question of craft, I think, I guess you've just speaking about, but also the questions of the kind of content in terms of maybe the politics or the narrative or something else. That's just- And also craft is. And also w

hat I wanted to say was that we're not divorced from the people centric toolbox as it were. So the question of what you want to take, what serves you, what doesn't, you know. Yeah. I really agree with that idea of the pastoral role is in the idea of holding the hands of people. It's like, I'm working with... Like we're going into a relationship, like if we're gonna work together, and it's delicate and fragile and bold and stern, it's like it has all of that, but we kind of have to set it up in t

he right way. And I think I'm often asking, what are you trying to say? And then I can reflect on thinking, is that coming through? It might not be to me, it might be to other people, but I'm really curious about what do you have to say and what you're trying to say. And then I'm also wanting to know why now? Llike why now? Why now? Like, why are you making this work now? And often that's a deeply personal, and it might not appear in any way in the performance, but it's fueling the making in som

e way to know why I'm making this work. And I think when we answer that question, it gives such a focus to the direction we're going in. That's wonderful, what's driving you. So just... Oh, are you gonna speak? 'Cause otherwise I'll just move on a little bit 'cause I'm just quite aware of time as well. Let's kind of have a moment really to think about change and this question of change. And there were a few things in the letter. So one thing was the for Eurocentric dramaturgy to change everythin

g that's changed. Inclusion must happen everywhere. So I'm interested in kind of what might we need to happen there? But there were some ideas and there were a couple of things, a list that I mentioned in the letter. What is in the response to the open letter where the dramaturg network talks about we want to be good allies. So allies as a response, and the other was kind of in recognizing that European or Eurocentric dramaturgy is just one model. That's what Kane was talking about right at the

beginning, right? With your grandmother, I think you were saying that the house, that archives, the stories, the way that she tells stories, right? And so the Eurocentric model is one model, but there were other models. And I just wonder whether you've got any thoughts there about, or ideas about what needs to change so that we can lock those in this recording that we're making. Specific things, couple of things. I think I'm actually just picking up on what you guys were both saying about trust.

I think the relationship being delicate, I was gonna say another, sorry, another thing that as a playwright, I've had a lot of dramaturgy from directors. That's often where it happens and from actors as well. And so in the room when the work's actually being made, I should say that it's not just purely with dramaturg it's your managers of course. And, I think if there is going to be change, I think often as a playwright, you feel like you have to please the person you're with, I mean I think so

me of this is reflected in the structures. For example, in rehearsal, when you might be doing major rewrites, you might be doing your biggest rewrite yet in rehearsal. You're paid an attendance fee as though you're just sitting there attending. as you're an audience member to the rehearsal. And I don't say this because I want more money particularly. I'm just saying it in terms of like, let's not call it that. Let's say that the person, if you... I mean, you may not be touching it. You may have

dotted every I, and it's all done, but actually I've never been in a rehearsal room where I haven't been going, okay, let's do something massive here as a result of the brilliant questions I'm getting asked the provocation, watching the actors work it's a very, very important time in my process and I'm going home at night and I'm rewriting and I'm bringing stuff in and I'm on the phone with the director and it's a huge thing to me. That's probably the busiest time of my epic whenever I have a pl

ay. And yeah, I just think if we're gonna be constantly feeling like we're not really there, we're just watching, like we have to please people to get to the next stage. I don't think any change is going to happen then because you have to be very bold to fight against that. And I haven't been, and I know younger playwrights much exposed than me when I was starting out as well. And like you wanna say to them you've got to fight that, but actually that doesn't always work. Sometimes it means you d

on't get the commission or people don't wanna work with you. So I didn't know, there's something to do with the status of the, if you are working with writers, the status of the writer in these conversations and sorry, one last thing is, I think you have to have the freedom to be stupid. I just kind of feel like there's a point in theater where I felt, if I said, I'm really sorry, I don't understand any of this. 'Cause you just, sorry, I don't understand what you said. Could you explain to me th

at, you couldn't say that people would just go, she's an idiot. We're not going to work with her. See sometimes it's very useful to say, to ask the stupid question sometimes you need to ask a stupid question. And so I don't know. I feel like often I'm in a position where I both have to like please and help do everything right. And also can't say, I really don't understand what you said. can you rephrase it for me? Can you help me actually? So I can't ask for help either. So if I want help, I can

't get it. there's something about that relationship that just in those individual relationships that I think... And when I have worked with people who are great, oh my God, it's great. It's like, as Kane says, like a good relationship, you just feel like anywhere, it's like going round to dinner at your best friends. And you know where the wine is, you know where the corkscrew is, you can relax. You know they're not gonna laugh at you if you say something stupid, but they might laugh at you if

you fail those things and that's fine. You can laugh at them and then you can make good work. And I just feel like, obviously that's hard to make, and it's not all on the director of the dramaturg set up. The writer has to bring something to the table. But yeah, I mean, I have to say when I've been feeling like I'm sitting on the back of a rehearsal room, making my notes and not part of it, that's not made for a good situation. So there's a few things there, great, freedom. Thank you very much.

No, not at all. Freedom. I've got a bad habit of not knowing when people are stopping. So freedom, trust, the idea of co-creation. So that comes back to something that was already said earlier. Kind of co-creating the work again, like you're saying, working with the playwrights, the, oh yeah. The recognizing of the playwright as active in the rehearsal room. That's something really important. Working with the playwright with the director, but also with the people, the actors, the people that are

performing the show. Kane, Sudha do you do you have any ideas of what change? I love change. Change is so important. It's like every time we do one of our shows, we'll bring it back. It's like, we've got to change it all. It has to change 'cause the world's changed. We're six months later, if we thinks adaptive, like how are we gonna make it relevant now? How's it relevant in this space in comparison to that space, we've changed cast. Like we've changed identities. How are we gonna do that now?

Putting this body there, instead of that one tells a totally different meaning. So I'm so open to change. I might hate it, and wrestle with it at times, it'd be like, I need to go and have a walk around the car park 'cause this is really difficult, but I really embrace it. And I think it's necessary because like, how are we gonna make a better future if we stick with the same, it's like we have to in our rooms in our small ways we can try to embrace the change. Right. I think it's so... I mean,

when I've also 'cause I've literally almost always had to produce my own work whether at Tamasha or now at Bhuchar Boulevard. So I guess that's the kind of lived experience that I kind of encourage as well. So for younger writers well actually Nyla Levy who does my bond book in this and with some of the roles, but the most recent people are dramaturgs. they applied for Arts Council Funding I helped mentor that like, okay, don't wait for the building to commission you or the company to commissio

n you because it might not happen. So curate your own voice. So just encouraging people to be, yes, to see their work in terms of content and context, because actually, that's the way forward because if you want more agency in a sense, you have to have it, I mean, I've never had it given to me it has to be something that you're sort of shaping yourself in terms of change. Thank you, thank you all for this discussion. We're starting to get questions through the chat. So I think I'll start to invi

te you to respond to some of those questions. And then hopefully about 15 minutes time, there'd just be time for a few final comments if you have any. So we've got a question from Holly and it says, are there any aspects of operating performance, which can be universalized? Can we all agree on clarity of intention as being important for the best version of the play, for example. So I'll read it again. Are there any aspects of creating performance which can be universalized? Would we all agree on

clarity of intention as being important to create the best version of a play? For example. Can I ask clarity of intention when? I mean when the play opens? Yes, it's I think it's quite good to be clear then, but what I struggle with is I go in with a weird idea that I'm gonna jam onto another weird idea and it may not work. And I want to be able to be unclear and mess about and fail. But sometimes if I'm writing a play about my community that I know better than the dramaturg, perhaps they're li

ke, is this correct? Is this authentic. And I'm like, well, I mean, this isn't how it's gonna end up, but this is where I'm starting. So I think we need the freedom maybe to be unclear at the beginning. I know I have to be- I think I want- Sorry, go ahead with all those questions from the beginning, sorry, Kane. Oh sorry, if interrupted you. I think I want there to be a space of big feelings. I wanna go to the theater and feel in the audience. Like, so I also, like often I leave feeling sometime

s not much. And I'm like, oh, so I'd say for me, one of the things in performance that I'd be looking for is trying to at least create feelings in the audience, big feelings somehow. I mean, it is hard to sort of be prescriptive, isn't it? In terms of have a manifesto of what performance and what we all agree is a universal way of making performance, 'cause I would go back to bring your full selves. I'm now doing like a one-woman monologue, which I've been developing for more than two years, whi

ch is inspired by my conversations with my sons and it's called "Evening Conversations" and it's not a play and it's me talking to my sons, playing my sons every time I do it, I do have to change it because as you say, Kane the world has changed since the last time I did it. So I did it like a week before lockdown and then it wasn't until this summer that I did it again. So I had to think about my conversations with my sons in the context of lockdown. But it was still a performance, you know? Ye

ah, I think that, like, for me, that's where performance is special because performance has existed always, whether it has been, like I said earlier, sitting around the table telling stories or whether it's been performing on a massive stage, it's like it exists in all cultures. It's like often theater is quite centralized and has a more narrow way of viewing what it could be. But performance has always been there. Just coming back to this question, the idea of creating performance, I think I've

been in many rooms, which might lead them to another question around bad practice. You know what I mean? When we've seen it done badly, the creating is not done wholeheartedly, holistically. We haven't embraced, like it's felt hierarchical. Let's say I see much bad practice. So I'd say to at least to some values in the creating stage that are kind, involve listening, embrace the outside world and kind of just be this things like, I'd say in the creating I'd like some of those values to be unive

rsalized. Yeah. That also goes back to the idea of there being different models of different ways of creating performance. And that we don't all have to do it the same way, which is the trained way let's say let's allow space for people to find their way, I suppose, as well. So, there's a question from Sarah in the chat, which is about allies. So returning us back to this thing around allies and Sarah's asking, what can dramaturgs do to be an ally to artists of the global majority in both instit

utional and freelance contexts? Yeah. What can dramaturgs do good allies? 'Cause that was definitely one thing that was in the response was we want to be good allies and now it's inviting us to say, well, what might that mean, from the perspective of people who are making performance or working as dramaturgs. I think on the outset when I think about, what I've been through both as an artist myself, who's written the work and trying to be an ally I think interrogating somebody's work from your ow

n perspective, when you haven't been reflective about where you're coming from. I mean, I have so often been on the back foot, like one of the things I wrote, which is called "My Name Is", based on a true story, on testimonies, which was very delicate I won't sort of, it'll take forever to describe it all, but the journey to that took six years because of this constant, like I had testimony and I was ostensibly sending it to receptive people who kept saying we're so receptive to unfinished work.

we're so receptive to this story and then quickly solving it for it not being, and then saying we love verbatim, but actually oh, it's verbatim. And we don't want to do verbatim, you know? So I think in a way, yeah, just being open to where have you come from? what do you bring into the room? And so not interrogating the writers to a point where they lose confidence in what they're doing, but to understand from their point of view, what they're trying to do, whether they want to include languag

e, is it in a form? What are they doing? And therefore supporting them in the best way that you can. Yeah, there was something in the letter as well about, if you don't know, know what you don't know, and then maybe bring someone in who does know that they, they didn't quite put it like that, but like maybe you might need some help from someone who might know a little bit different stuff to what you know. And maybe just being aware of that. So, yeah. I think I agree. I come from that probably th

erapeutic approach of like the more I understand myself the safer I am to being in the world. And I really believe that like, so know where my limitations are, my boundaries, where my unconscious bias is. It's like, where I'll trip myself up or can start to make me think, am I the right person for this? And I think we have to always be aware of power who has the power here? If we're walking into a big institution and you are HR on the tech in that space, it's like to know that it's not an equal

relationship. And what could you do to take yourself off the pedestal almost to make sure you're listening as much as offering. Yeah, wonderful. Goes back to your Friday night person, doesn't it? Your Friday nights, Saturday person? (Samantha laughs) What are you talking about I think it's really nice if he... I'm sort of echoing what everyone was saying, but I think I like to work with someone who is another person, rather than someone who is like the decider and who is the person who's telling

me, oh, this is wrong in craft terms. Or you can't do X or you can't do Y. Like, it's really nice when a dramaturg will say, okay, so this is my cultural backgrounds, and this is why I'm finding this bit tricky to get. And they can be vulnerable too, because as a writer, you are so vulnerable, especially if it's personal, and especially when I've done stuff that's based on my own family and my own work. I mean, it's very difficult sending an email where you're attaching a play in which you've t

alked about family experiences, for example, or community experiences that you may not have been able to really talk about to anyone and because it's work in progress and you send it to a dramaturg and if you feel like they are sort of this sort of authority figure who has never kind of, shared any vulnerability or something, you have to share all your vulnerability all day, but who's just been the sort of authority figure. It's very frightening. Then you feel very sort of skinless in a way. And

I also think you have to be thin-skinned to make good work. So if you're gonna ask someone to sort of peel themselves, and then you'll have to be a bit unpeeled yourself, you're a bit gentle cause it goes both ways. I think the writer has to also allow the dramaturg to make mistakes. That's fine too, but that's not often how it feels in the room, you know? So it's personal as well as role, isn't it, you're a person as well as a role that you're in. Yeah, sorry Sudha. No, I mean, in fact, I'm so

rt of mentoring a young writer at the moment and actually like, she's really, really keen on starting with form, experimenting with form and I had to be really like honest and say that I've always, the way I make work. It always start with the content and the voice. And like, I don't have that. I actually don't have that parameters of helping you with like, or how do you start with form first? Because that's just not my instinct, you know. Actually my instinct is to say to you, like, bring your

full self, 'cause she's also really like wanting to almost disguise herself before she has actually, brought herself. Do you see what I mean? But then I'm conscious that I love where you said to take yourself off the pedestal because I actually might not be the right person because there are people out there, who start with form and they're brilliant at what they do and I'm not that person. Yeah. But it's also, maybe it sounds like you were talking about kind of dramaturgy as conversation. A con

versation between makers, right. Rather than the dramaturgy as a hierarch fear. Again, something that struck me in the open letter and it was something around the best and it talks about the objective best or something. And my immediate thing was what objective, right? And I'd written objective, it's subjective. And I'd added subjective, right? So maybe there's something there around, yeah. Knowing what your positionality is, the places from which you're speaking and bringing your positionality

together with the unexperienced together, with the person that you're working with. And therefore there's a conversation to be heard rather than a hierarch and say, can I try and squeeze in one more question and time is going to ask, this might build for what we were just talking about. And it's a question from Tommo and it says, can we decolonize theater whilst it remains an extractive capitalist enterprise question mark. Who wants to take that on first? Let me just go. Go. You do that one. My

first think as this question comes up or the concept of de-colonization comes up so much. And I just think we need to start talking about colonization. What are the colonial practices that we see, the behaviors that we see as colonial that we want to dismantle, but often we kind of jumped straight in to decolonizing and I'm like, whoa, let's just actually start to list all of these things that we go, I see this every day happening. And let's now begin to change them. But yeah. And one of those i

s objectivity. Another is hierarchy and power. Anybody else wants to come in on theater as a capitalist? An extractive capitalist enterprise. How can we dismantle that? I suppose, can we dismantle that? I mean, I think I always, I mean, I'm sort of, I believe in sort of small cumulative acts that people can make the change that you can see yourself doing. I mean, I find quite fun on a personal level if I think about how I'm going to decolonize theater, it's just, it seems too huge but I can look

at like theater doesn't have to be the well-made British play that people pay £60 or more to go and see. And I have long given up, I went through my own thing of wanting to be in the mainstream and have been, and have not been. And I constantly look at articles about people's body of work and I'm never even in those sort of footnotes and actually you do what you can yourself in spaces that are open for you and that you open yourself. I mean, that for me is decolonizing instead of trying to take

on the whole big shebang, which I can't sort of. There's a wonderful image that I've kept with me for years and years and years. And I think it was about feminist theater. And it was about like when you're in the image of a lawn, a perfectly laid lawn, and that if you're a feminist, you think of yourself as a mole. So the perfectly laid lawn, just, you just pop up and you create another perfectly laid lawn, has a little hill and you're just running shoe in it. And your presence in the room, you

r presence in the dialogue, if you like, will just create those little ruptures just to unsettle. So it's not about completely annihilating but just starting to create the rupture so that people will have to look differently because you have to look slightly differently or walk differently, move through the lawn differently when they were little hills in it compared to it being perfectly laid. So it's quite a nice image that I've had. Samantha, do come on. Yeah, I actually really inspired by tha

t image. Yeah, I mean, I think like I said, I have mostly whites in buildings, but I've also worked for example with a miniaturists. And that was an idea that the playwrights didn't shock, he came around to dinner actually. And we were all having a big moment we were four playwrights around the table, and then he called up and they come to their mind because I've got an idea. He was like, okay. And he said, let's just put some stuff on and we wouldn't have to talk to buildings. And the idea of t

hat was that the writers would, assemble the team. So you'd actually contact the writer you want to work with in an act and you often would cast it, the writer would assemble the scene. So instead of being sort of the person, the team was sort of given to. Unlike just doing some 15 minute plays with them, really revved up my confidence. I'm not saying they were particularly good and they might have been... I might have chosen the wrong director for them, but just being able to go, okay, let's ju

st try it and on this one with this person who I really like, and see what that does and the fact of them being 15 minutes long, just really there's this just on my on my personal level really helped me because I didn't have to go, okay, I'm gonna completely change the way I write and then send in my new play in Samantha 2.0, send that in to the Royal Court and see if they'll take it. I just did one over weekends. And saw what happens? And so, yeah, I think in terms of making these changes, some

of it is going to have to be people just doing things and seeing what that does to their own practice and to the theater environment as a whole. And I mean, smasher is a huge, brilliant example of that sort of landmark example really that, but lots of people have done it in much smaller, more short time ways. And I think that's viable too, people just popping up, the other pop up shows or pop up ways of working. And short plays as well as you're saying that they can be quite raw, right? They ca

n be just response things or it doesn't need maybe all of the dramaturgical input that maybe people think we need for the two hour play or whatever it might be. The wrong taking charge. I mean, I belong to a writer's group called The Plot and we are mid career writers, middle aged, mid career, and we meet and we read each other's staff and dramaturg each other, somebody might've written the whole play, somebody might be feeling we've done anything. And actually it's a really brilliant sort of (i

ndistinct). Great, so again, kind of collaboration coming in there co-created work. So, we've only got a few minutes left, maybe two or three minutes left. And I just wanna just give you each of you an opportunity to just say a few closing words and all that you want to say that comes out of the discussion or any point maybe that hasn't been raised yet that you think actually, I just wanna make sure that that's heard in this discussion, just a few words, of about 30 seconds, 30 seconds in each o

r something. Samantha, you're smiling, I'll invite you first. I'm smiling 'cause I'm trying to think. I just want to say it's really good to actually have the chance to talk about these things. And maybe it would be amazing if a writer-dramaturg relationship began with a conversation like this with the dramaturg about what's worked and what's not worked for you before on both sides and what's made you anxious? What are you worried about? what are you excited about for both, for the dramaturg to

tell you as well, and they can say, we're really worried you're not gonna deliver until the night before and it's gonna be a nightmare. I mean, that's fine. I'd like to, that's something useful for me to hear that. And I can say maybe, and this is kind of conversation about specifically how it's impacted on your work, in terms of universality, in terms of trying to translate to different audiences or across different audiences. I'd love to start working relationship with this kind of conversatio

n. I don't think I ever had, so maybe we start to specific. Thank you very much. Sudha. Yeah, I think it would be also interesting that writers, I mean, I didn't have that much experience of being the writer commissioned by mainstream theater, but if writers are asked who would be their ideal, dramaturg like actually whose work do I love? And who I would love to. I think that would be quite something as a way of starting, but also just, I mean, I am very much for also making theater, which isn't

necessarily commissioned plays from a single voice as well though. Yeah, who do you want to work with and Kane? Yeah. I think I'm thinking in similar ways, it's really like, I always come back to this I'm asking in my friendships really as well. What does support look like for you? I think it's such a great question. I'm always going to, I wanna be supportive and what do you need? Like that helps me also, I really run with the one that is, the story I'm making up in my head is there. And it mea

ns that I'm my own rubbish sometimes, so I realize what I'm bringing to it. I think when I work as a movement director or a choreographer now I'm so not talking about the content of the work, but I'm talking about who we are as people and to go before I can even say for work together, it's like, I wanna know what you stand for, why are you making, what your values are and all of this stuff. And I think working well could embrace that a little bit better rather than it just being about the conten

t of the play, because we're gonna be in relationship for like potentially three months or three years making something together. Yeah, great. Oh, six years, I think it was mentioned earlier as well. So thank you so much to all of you for this discussion. I never thought that much in my work about dramaturgy before. I mean, I look at kind of finished plays and I analyze finished plays. So I hadn't really thought about the dramaturgy practice. So it's been really interesting to kind of listen to

it, I'd written down four things and think about dramaturgy as therapeutic, as friendly, as kind, I'm doing a lot of stuff in my mind at the moment about kindness and kindness with people. So that it's been really nice to have this discussion and to kind of hear kindness come up so much. And then the fourth thing I wrote down was kind of personable kind of recognize that we are people, and we are responding to each other as people and connecting as people and yeah. And the space to kind of liste

n to us. So before I hand over to Lee for an outro, just thank you all again, Sudha, Samantha and Kane. Thank you. It's been a really Thank you so much. enjoyable discussion and thank you to everyone that's listening in and for the questions that have come in and I'll just hand back over then to Lee. Thank you so much. I just wanna say very briefly, I thank you so much for the compassion and how incisive this conversation has been and for holding space for each other. It's been incredible. And I

just wanna say a few things before we leave you all. I also wanna thank the creators and signatories of the open letter actually. The open letter, we need to talk about dramaturgy because without that intervention and I hope many of you are in the audience watching and listening to this conversation as well. But without that intervention, we wouldn't be having this fantastic conversation. And so you made that happen. And so thank you for that. Thank you Lynette, Kane, Samantha and Sudha for bei

ng so insightful and generous and forthright in your discussion and also for bringing so much of your own lived experiences as artists to this and how you navigate these very unequal power structures in making work. So thank you for that. If you have data gifts, and this goes for all of the audience watching as well, these are valid for the remainder of the day's events. So if you do have the rest of the evening free, we will be reconvening in one hour for the Kenneth Tynan Award ceremony. So do

join us for that, if you can. And yeah, thank you to the organizers, Kathleen, Sarah, David, Tommo all of the team for helping me coordinate this and get you all together to have this amazing conversation. Yeah, thank you so much. And that's all from me. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, see you soon. Thank you. Okay, see you soon everyone. Take care. Bye bye. Bye. Bye bye.