(jaunty music) - [Announcer] Welcome everyone to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

(audience applauding) - [Patrick] Hi everyone.

Wow, great, good start.

- [Milton] Cool.

- [Patrick] Thank you so much for being here.

My name is Patrick.

- My name is Milton.

- And as Christina said, we are Canadian.

(audience cheering) This is a very particular time to be Canadian on a stage south of the border.

Thank you so much to everybody at UMS, Penny Stamps for having us here.

(lively music) Anything else you wanna add?

- We just wanna thank also the Canada Council for the Arts.

- Oh yeah.

- For all the support of the show.

- Public funding.

- For the show.

We have shows on Saturday and Sunday, so please come out.

And we also want- - We wanna let you know, some people say it's fantastic.

- Astounding even.

- But we'll let you decide.

We really hope to see you there.

We've got other talks tomorrow with some students at the university, but we're always around, we're always happy to engage with people who are interested in the stuff that we're doing.

So to start talking about what we're gonna be talking about tonight, Theater, Games, Democracy and Donkeys, we wanna just get a sense of who's in the room.

The lights are really bright, so we can't really see you.

So Greg, if you're in the back, could you bring up the lights on the audience for us?

- So we've introduced ourselves already.

We'd like to give you the opportunity to introduce yourselves to each other.

So we'd like you to turn to the person next to you, look at them directly in the eyes and just say hi.

Tell them your name.

- Tell them your name.

(audience chatting indistinctly) If you're not near someone and you see them alone, move.

Everybody's welcome here.

- And if there's someone who is sitting by themselves, please go up to them, say hi.

- Come on down.

If you're in the way back, I see all these people in the way back.

I'm not really sure why you're so far away.

Again, we're Canadian, we're really nice.

We try to be welcoming.

Everyone's welcome.

All right, so hopefully you know at least the name of this person.

We don't know all your names, but we're gonna call that person you just met your comrade and we're gonna come back to them a little bit later.

Just so that we understand a little bit more about who's in the room, we would like to do by a show of hands, who here goes to theater?

You consider yourself a theater goer.

- Okay.

Not bad, not bad.

- If you aren't raising your hand, maybe take a look around and be like, "Wow, they go to theater.

That's cool."

They still do that.

- Next question.

Who here knows someone that goes to the theater?

More hands.

- Okay, so you're like one degree of separation, right?

- Okay.

Okay.

- Next question.

Who here plays games?

- Oh yeah.

- Take a look around.

- Oh yeah.

- Take a look around.

Is there anybody, maybe you're surprised?

No way, they play games?

Crazy.

- Okay.

And also, who here knows somebody who plays games?

That's good.

Okay.

- All right, cool.

That's our census to start us off.

So a little bit of context about who we are.

We are theater makers who have started making games.

And to provide a bit of extra context about what we're gonna be talking about today, we wanna share two pieces of information with you.

One is that in 2024, Zocalo Square, a publication in the United States, reported that 2024 was the biggest year for democratic elections in the history of our world.

There was something like 4.2 billion people going to elections that year.

And we wanted to sort of keep that in the back of our minds as we go into the things that we're talking about and how we're going to explore the relationship between theater, games, and democracy.

- A year prior to that, Patrick and I are in Sao Paulo.

We're in the midst of doing a residency.

We're meeting lots of people.

Someone after an artist talk very similar to this comes up to us and says, "Oh, your work is very democratic."

- And we paused and we were like, "What do you mean by that?"

And so we're gonna be unpacking that with a bit of your help today.

And continuing to wonder about if what we do is democratic, then what's everybody else doing?

So speaking of the things that we've done, this is culturecapital.

It is a card game, a real card game that is played on stage by the public.

- [Milton] And it uses public funding information.

So in Canada, all of our funding is publicly available, it's in spreadsheets.

Sometimes provincially, municipally, and federally.

It's not always the same.

And so we've had to go through and we've aggregated all of that information into one crazy big spreadsheet.

- So you could see a bit of this, it's too small, but if you go onto our website, culturecapital.cards, you can see how much money everyone in the arts actually gets in different regions in Canada.

So we aggregated all of those numbers and we took those numbers to rank individual arts organizations in the country in these different regions, and then we pit those companies against each other on stage to compete for communities.

- We do that specifically because we don't believe it's trying to be mean.

We think that actually it's trying to illuminate a very real shared reality that we have, which is that we, especially in Canada, are competing with each other for very scarce, relatively scarce arts funding.

- So what happens is, as we can see in this previous image, we make this card game, people play in a tournament, and they make their way to the epic finals on a stage where they compete yet again to win public money.

So if you're like, "How does public money work?"

I think National Endowment for the Humanities would be a good example, say a company got money from that organization and then you made people play a game to try to win that money.

That's what it's like for us in Canada as artists to get funding to make more projects.

So in this game you play companies, you roll a dice to get grants, you then use those grants to make projects, and then you compete project against project for the attention of the public.

- And for many people in the not-for-profit sector, especially the arts, that should sound very familiar as to how things actually play out.

And you'll see this quite consistently through a lot of our projects, which is that we have taken a system and then we've translated it into the most applicable game that makes sense for what that system is trying to do.

And we'd like to see how it plays out.

And how it intersects with performance you'll see is that in culturecapital, people are not necessarily just sitting there in the dark, not saying anything, idly just kind of standing by, waiting for characters to have exposition.

But instead for us, they are yelling out, they're cheering for their favorite companies, and these are real companies, and then they're cheering for their favorite players to try and find out, oh, okay, well, what's an example?

Say someone's like, "I'm gonna play 'White People the Musical.'"

And so that might be a very powerful card in certain context- - Maybe powerful, maybe not.

- Maybe not powerful, you know.

But then someone might say, strategy card, you have an all male cast and that's not so good.

- Not so good these days.

- But then it might have won an award.

And so all these things are in concert to have a very complex idea of how the arts ecosystem functions.

- Which is to say when we started to think about how we could use games in theatrical spaces, we started from home, we started writing about what we know, about the issues that were around us in our community as artists.

And this project gave way to a sister project, which is called Farce, which is a tabletop role playing game.

If you're familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, for example, where people take on the personas of artists, producers, or presenters to try to solve the real world challenges that this sector is facing.

- Importantly, we were asked to do this project for a conference.

And they said at first, "Can you make a think tank about how to sell art in the future?"

- We said no.

- And instead we said, "Can we create a tabletop role playing game that's going to disrupt power hierarchies in the room?"

And they said yes.

- Great.

(laughs) So in this game, we play this game over four days in sort of spotlight sessions where players have to confront these issues.

These are in French.

It was in Canada.

And you can see for example, we've got in the top right corner, one of the most difficult challenges of young people finding entertainment and enjoyment elsewhere, not in the arts.

And what was great about this game and what's so much fun is that on the spot, our participants, our players have to solve it in some way.

Whether the idea is terrible or whether the idea is great, is kind of up to debate for how important that is, but we have to live with the consequences.

And as every single time a challenge is attempted to be solved, the consequences of their actions build on each other and build on each other and build on each other.

- So if you're familiar with improvisation, it's a little bit like a yes and, but that and is there to stay.

And so we have these maps in which everyone's playing on top of.

And on those maps we will put a post-it note, we'll put something down on the ground itself to say well now there's this underwater theater venue, and we asked players to be quite zany with their responses.

And that was a response for us because so many of these conferences have people regurgitating the same information over and over again and we were finding this in the game, actually.

People would come often and say, "Well, the answer obviously is..." - More money or something that wasn't really, you know, they couldn't grasp a tangible outcome to, for example, the general decline of mental health in the arts community.

Or that the lack of accessible housing is pushing artists outside of urban areas, or the public denunciations on social media are causing internal strife or divisions in our community.

We ask people to say hey, maybe you have the ability to put an idea forward.

You actually have the capacity as an individual to put an idea forward and play out its consequences.

That muscle is what we were interested in cultivating here.

- And in essence, one thing that disrupts a little bit of our training, especially as theater makers, was that from anyone who has played D&D, or Dungeons and Dragons, you know that players can kind of take it in whatever directions.

And you can try and railroad, as they say, players into making the decisions that you want, but a game feels most alive when actually everyone's working in concert.

And so as we made this game, we kept reflecting on our theater practice saying well, actually a lot of those things are very fixed.

A play, a script is incredibly fixed.

It has the same ending every single time.

And here we wanted to stretch the imagination, as Patrick is saying, where people can put an idea on the table and we don't know how it's gonna end.

And we try to figure that out together.

- We just came back from Germany, from Berlin working on a project called Funfug Forum.

Does anyone here speak German?

Anybody?

- One.

- Anybody?

Yeah?

Okay, cool.

Hey, one, yeah.

Halo, velkommen.

"Unfug" in German means horse play or nonsense.

We added an extra F just to make it more fun.

So this is Funfug Forum.

It's a terrible pun.

Don't worry about it.

We know.

And in this very fancy Berlin Museum called the Humboldt Forum, we decided to make an escape room about rules.

You are maybe laughing because you think, "Ah, Germans love rules."

And we were working with a bunch of teenagers from the Thomas-Mann Gymnasium and teenagers also have opinions about rules.

(children cheering) And so what we ended up coming up with was a 60 minute escape room scavenger hunt where 60 players must self-organize and collaborate to free 14 plungers from, you can see a plunger in this person's hands.

Plungers from cages that are dispersed throughout this museum.

A little bit of context, the Humboldt Forum is where the Benin bronzes are, where all the colonial artifacts are that are under serious debate as to how do we repatriate them in Germany.

So it is quite a controversial site.

- [Milton] And so all of these rules that we're playing against, because yes, to be a bit reductive, Germans love rules, but they also love games.

- It's true.

- And so for us, we were like, well, how do we change these rules into games?

And so that manifested in quite a few, again, some zany ideas around perhaps some young people in the historic cellar of the Humboldt Forum dressed as chickens, trying to guard eggs in which players are asked to go in there and also pretend to be chickens trying to get those eggs which had puzzle pieces, which will then unveil a plunger.

- And why plungers, you might be thinking.

Are these two really so interested in high concept art, but really lowbrow humor?

Absolutely.

- Mm-hmm.

- So yes, we used these plungers because we felt like there was something stuck in the scene there.

There was something kind of clogged in the cultural institution and that we maybe could be a bit of help there.

So you see things like people running through the museum.

Oh, you have a question?

- I do have a question.

Raise of hand.

How many people have visited a museum in the last month?

- [Patrick] Yeah.

Wow.

- Okay.

Actually quite a lot.

- Okay, cool.

Nevermind, moving on.

No, I'm kidding.

- I bring that up because of the thing that we talked about, which is that there's a very particular way of moving through a museum.

- Yeah, it's like this pace.

No, I'm still going.

It's like there's a slowness to it.

So seeing someone running down an escalator with a pink plunger in order to get it to the stage that we had built definitely turned a few heads.

That's the plunger sound by the way when they put it on the pedestal.

We also put a plunger on the top of a building.

I just want everybody to know, this is a great privilege because this image isn't allowed to be public, although I guess this is being filmed and it's gonna be disseminated, sorry, Humboldt Forum.

But apparently it was a problem to put a giant plunger on the top of the museum.

They felt like it was a misrepresentation of their values.

And it actually covers up a very controversial Christian cross that's on the top of the building.

And so in order to avoid further, to quote in German, shit storms, they asked us not to release these images.

But this is from a game called Fork Knife, a video game called Fork Knife.

You might have heard of it.

You get attacked by a fork and a knife and that's it, that's the premise of the game.

Boo, yes.

Thank you very much.

But basically all of these ideas, we were extending our questions around theater, the rules of theater and what could we put on stage to change the behavior that we have traditionally associated with theater, we're applying those also to a museum 'cause we felt like they were equally rigid, in some ways a lot more rigid.

And Funfug Forum became a very popcorn filled, very loud.

You know, people are shouting, really turning, exploring other modes of being inside of an otherwise kind of imperially starchy place.

- And you'll see this again and again in our works.

But we are continuously fascinated by that question, what should and should not be allowed in a space?

And so culturecapital, a card game on a theatrical stage for a long time, many, many years, we didn't get funding.

And people kept telling us, "That doesn't make sense.

Why would you do that?

That's not theater."

And then over here in Funfug, we have these games where someone's dressed up as a pirate doing a dance routine and then feeding you a smelly sandwich with cheese.

- Oh yeah, we should point out.

Has anyone eaten Limburger cheese?

Limburger cheese?

- Yeah!

- Yeah!

- You love it?

Great.

It's the stinkiest cheese.

I highly recommend you go and buy it just to try it.

We asked to make a sandwich that was about a foot and a half in diameter- - Big sandwich.

- Of Limburger cheese.

It cost about a hundred euros to produce each sandwich.

We weren't aware of the costs when we asked to do that, but we weren't allowed to break that rule.

So you could see in the top right people having to eat an entire Limburger sandwich and work together in order to achieve the goal.

So they could cut the pieces into smaller pieces so that it was easier to stomach.

Some people really loved the sandwich, so they took on the responsibility to eat as much as possible.

And they were held up as heroes by others.

This young woman, I'm not sure if those in the back can see, but her expression possibly says it all.

- So again, things that shouldn't really belong in that space.

We were finding as we did all these works, people were actually very surprised.

And they said, "Well, actually why isn't this here?"

Why do we walk through museums in that consistent pace just kind of looking through things, consuming culture in the same kind of repeated method over and over again?

And so we were very excited to introduce other ideas of how else culture can be created, reflected upon, consumed and shared with everyone else so that we're not just passive spectators to something that's happening, but instead that we have an active role to play inside of the space, which we'll come back to in asses.masses.

- So asses.masses, we hope to see all of you there.

(donkey bellowing) Woo!

- That's right.

Asses.masses is a video game.

It's actually the second project that we started working on.

We don't want to give any spoilers, but basically there is one controller on the stage, there is an audience full of people and they must self-organize and decide who will play when in order to complete the game.

In all of these pieces except Funfug which was time-based, the audience is in control of time.

And that is really important to us, that a match of culturecapital could be 30 minutes, could be three and a half hours.

It depends on how it gets played.

Asses.masses on Saturday and Sunday, could be one length, could be another length.

It depends on how we're gonna play it, how long we're gonna take our meals together because there's food.

This is a minor promo for asses.masses.

There's food.

Just making sure everybody knows.

Four times.

Food.

- And to be honest, it's also a great place to see how else can we reflect upon theater and the theater space.

I don't know the last time that everyone's gone to the theater and had a seven hour experience with food and getting to know other people.

We often say that theater's a space of gathering.

There's many other ways to gather than just sitting in the dark looking in one direction, not saying anything at all.

But you know, we have certain ideas and perceptions.

- So we're gonna talk about some of these philosophical underpinnings that we're discovering through doing this work, right?

If you're an artist in the audience and you might think, "Oh, did they decide that they wanted to do this and they set out with this project?"

Not at all.

We like being shit disturbers.

Sure.

We like putting things on stage that don't belong there.

But it's mostly out of a curiosity of how we can be in this space.

We're in this space right now together and you know, hopefully there's a bit of a, there's a lot of different ways to occupy this space and to share this space together, right?

- So to come back to defining democracy, we have to admit that it is one, two, three- - [Both] Complicated.

- It's obviously not a great, it's a complicated time to talk about democracy.

Are we living in one or are we not?

Have we been told that we live in one by people who clearly have seized the means of production, the power from us.

And if we only vote once every four years, what are we doing the rest of the time?

So these moments, these flashes of democracy that we feel like, when are we doing it and when are we not?

And are we able to understand a complex layering or sort of Russian dolling of our relationship between multiple political systems at the same time?

You know, would you say that your family was very democratic when you were younger, when you were a child?

Maybe not.

Maybe like your parents could say, "No, you can't do that."

Hey, there's a vote.

You know, if you've got two brothers and sisters and there's a vote, three kids against two parents, it usually doesn't actually work out that way, right?

- And there are many different layers of how democratic is it.

So if I have one vote and my vote actually does something, you know, there's one perception that that's more democratic than the representational democracy that many of us participate in, which is my vote will go to someone else, and that based on everyone else in that area, might also lead to that one person having another vote somewhere else.

- So that delegated labor, when you come to asses.masses, one of the things that we're really interested in is, yes, there's someone with a controller, but we all grew up playing video games in the basement and it was quite clear that sometimes the person on the couch at the back yelling the instructions kind of had a lot more power over what was happening than the person who had the controller.

- I realize we're making an assumption that people are around our age, but there might be some younger people in the audience.

- There might be those who didn't have basements.

- Housing costs.

No.

- Housing crisis.

- But also because a lot of contemporary video games don't really do couch co-op very easily anymore.

Things went online and then people started playing behind their computer screens and with kind of networked social spaces.

And the times that we were growing up, oftentimes one person had the video game controller, just to kind of paint the picture a little bit.

One person had the video game controller.

My parents' family friend's son Jason, in my case.

He was a little bit mean.

We were playing "Final Fantasy VII."

I asked, "Can I play?"

He said, "No, you can just watch."

And so I was like, "Well what is this, theater?"

Boom.

I'm kidding.

But in all actuality, that was my relationship to watching something from the back and then being able to shout, "Oh, you missed that one spot over there."

Or like, "Hey, maybe you should make this other decision."

And I felt like I was playing along with Jason even though he wasn't letting me have the controller.

- So what we're trying to get at at this point is really understanding how to look at something that was so familiar to us as theater geeks.

You know, we've both been in musicals.

We've been there.

Hey, we've been there and now we do this stuff.

It's crazy.

But we're trying to understand what are the political structures of the things that we're experiencing and then how do we understand the relationship between these microcosms?

We all come together into a room like this one.

We do this thing and we go home.

What happened in that room?

Did anything happen in that room to an extent that it could have a greater impact on things that happen outside of this room?

These are really sort of the driving force behind our understanding of the forms that we're choosing and why as we'll talk about it in a bit, why we keep turning towards games.

So we need your help now because we would like you to, remember your comrade?

Remember your comrade?

You met them not that long ago.

Deliberate use of choice of names.

We'd love you to turn back to your comrade and just talk about the last piece of theater you saw or if you're fancy, you programmed or maybe you are in, if you're a performative type.

- So we're gonna give you about two and a half minutes just to do this.

And we'd be curious to talk about it afterwards.

But two and a half minutes, just talk with your comrades about the last piece of theater that you saw, produced, or took part in and go.

- And go.

(bright playful music) - Okay, we're gonna add a layer here.

We're gonna add a layer.

Thank you so much.

Now that you've got that piece of experience fresh in your brain, is that a plunger?

- That's a plunger.

- Are we unclogging things?

Now we want you to think, don't worry, you're gonna talk to your comrade again in just a few seconds, but we want you to ask a very specific question of yourself about that piece that you saw.

And that question is, in what ways did that piece foster a stronger democracy in your community?

To help you, we've got some categories that you could use.

Does it foster a stronger democracy?

You could talk about its process if you were a part of it, its content, what was it about, and its form.

What are the properties and aesthetics of the performance itself?

- [Milton] So hello comrade, turning back, and digging into these deeper, deeper questions now.

Asking the question, did this piece of performance help foster a strong sense of democracy through its process, its content, its form, or a fourth option, et cetera.

All right?

And go.

- Two and a half more minutes.

(playful music) - Okay.

You know what time it is.

You might have learned from seeing some of our examples that we're not afraid of participation in so many ways.

So now we need your help because we're gonna build a little manifesto together.

It's gonna be called, yay!

It's gonna be called the Democratic Performance Manifesto.

You've all discussed these things that you've seen.

Do you wanna go first?

No?

Okay.

So we need help.

We wanna know what are the things that you just talked about with your comrades, what are the elements of this theatrical experience that you've recently experienced that make it so good at fostering a stronger democracy?

Does anybody, over here.

Sorry, I'm gonna have to sneak through.

Could we share our microphone space here?

- Well, we were talking about "Hadestown" and "Murder on the Orient Express."

And we were talking about how "Murder on the Orient Express" might not have as much democratic potential, but "Hadestown" was based, it's like class consciousness and stuff is like a big piece of it and like how we could be treating each other better.

But also how a lot of the times there's the ceiling to how much theater can reach people because of geography and class that is often requisite to access it.

- Okay, thank you so much.

Can I say this back to you, themes of class consciousness?

- Yeah.

- And also treating each other better.

- Nice.

- Thank you.

Okay, over here.

Yes.

What can we add to the Democratic Performance Manifesto?

- [Audience Member] Yeah, building a sense of community is really important in theater spaces.

The last show that I saw was a high school production of "Mean Girls," which is not a show that should be a high school production.

And my stepbrother got bullied out of that for actively telling people that there shouldn't be twerking choreography.

- Okay.

Yeah.

(people booing) So just to be specific 'cause we gotta be specific here.

So building community.

Do you feel like there are particular strategies that we can use and that theater or performance is particularly able to use in order to do that?

- Yeah, building inclusiveness is especially important.

Making everyone feel heard and equal and making voices matter.

- Okay, thank you very much.

Anybody else?

I'm coming up this side here.

Yes.

Hello, welcome.

What's your name?

- Hi, I'm Jane.

- Hi Jane.

- [Jane] We were actually also talking about "Murder on the Orient Express."

- Did it just happen recently in this region or?

- [Audience Member] Yeah, I should remember what university, like organization put it on, but it was a student run production and it happened, I don't know, a couple of months ago.

So we were talking about that.

- [Patrick] Okay, so what would you add to our manifesto please?

- [Jane] Okay, we decided that it was very democratic, "Murder on the Orient Express."

- [Patrick] Why is that?

- [Jane] Because it's about people working together to take justice into their own hands.

- [Patrick] Okay.

- Spoilers.

- [Patrick] Spoilers, spoilers, but okay, themes of people working together particularly for determining justice.

Okay, we'll use that for now.

Thank you very much.

Continue on in the back over here.

Yes, hello.

- Hi, I honestly was thinking that it's more democratic in recent years than anything else.

'Cause historically, the theater has always been loved by the aristocracy.

But the more we progress as a society as a whole, I think it becomes more democratic but it hasn't always been.

- I'm gonna challenge you to be specific.

How recently do you feel like it has become more democratic?

- Personal opinion, like last 50 years.

- No, no, not when, but what is it that you see happening right now?

Is it just because the aristocracy has found another form of medium to indulge in?

Or what is it that you see specifically about theater right now, like where do you feel like this feeling comes from?

What are you observing in the world?

- Honestly, a lot of it comes from being accepting more LGBTQ+ people.

Because when you get people who are oppressed involved in these things, they go, "Man, I really don't wanna be oppressed."

- Totally.

- Crazy how that works.

So in seeing that, I think it can make a lot of their views more democratic because typically, it aligns more with libertarian views where everyone should be able to do as they please.

- Okay, great.

Milton, do you got that?

- Yep.

- Awesome.

Thank you very much.

Moving up the line here or I can hop over to here.

Yes?

Okay.

We've got eagerness.

Oh my god, there's only stairs on one side.

People in the front row, feet watch out.

- I'm giving you a sound effect.

- Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Here.

Hello.

- Hi.

So I was watching an episode of "House, M.D."

and- - Like here?

- Yeah, yeah.

And it's where House moves in with his friend Alvie but Alvie gets deported and House fakes medical evidence saying Alvie is a US born citizen so that he can stay in the US.

- Go on.

- Okay.

Well, I thought it was really, I thought a lot about it and I thought it was about fighting unjust systems in unorthodox ways.

- Okay.

So just so I understand, "House" is a TV show.

And in a democratic performance kind of way, do you feel like the theme of that you're talking about, representing the issues of borders and threats of deportation that are all too real right now, is something that you feel like is important to have in performance that we could call it democratic?

- Well, if you're gonna have democracy, you're gonna have to fight for democracy too.

So you have to know how to fight for it.

- Okay, so possibly even taking representations of democracy as a subject matter in and of itself of the form.

Thank you very much.

Yes, here.

- I was also gonna add, my comrade and I went to the screening of "Laapataa Ladies" at the Michigan Theater yesterday and we were speaking about how it's accessible, it's free for everybody, just the idea of theater being accessible and it's sponsored by the university, like the Center for South Asian Studies.

And were speaking about the democracy that goes into that, about deciding funding and picking these movies and you know, what's accessible to the community and taking these stories to the community I guess.

- Great, thank you very much.

Milton.

So accessibility.

- Yep.

- Low barriers to entry.

Financially, economically.

Okay, yes.

Hello, hi.

- Got it.

- Hi.

So something that I also think needs to be on the manifesto is challenging the views of those in power and mobilizing those who are not in power.

My senior year of high school I saw "Robin Hood," it was at my rival school.

And it caused a bit of a uproar because the lead was a female and I don't know, parents in the community said, "Oh, you're trying to push LGBTQ onto people because of it."

But largely the student population were like, "Y'all are kind of tripping."

So it ended up forming a bit of like online protest, in-person protest, and people even stormed school board meetings 'cause they were trying to make a rule about censorship with that type of stuff so that's what it resulted in.

- If I can say that back to you.

So the idea, I mean, it's a bit of a shifting target, right?

That we are constantly having to challenge the views of those in power.

But obviously every couple years, those views are changing and we have to keep up and keep challenging.

Okay, we're in the right column now and I'm in the left side.

Hi.

You're way in the middle.

How are we gonna do this?

Do you wanna, I'm gonna come around.

- Maybe while you do that, I'm gonna share an anecdote.

I saw a show called "The Newsies" once and yeah, and there was a cast of young really talented performers performing and there's that one piece of dialogue where I knew they were not getting paid for their performance because of a particular community theater thing.

And the line is, "Who needs money when you got fame?"

And I just thought that resonated so deeply with what was happening on stage.

And I thought conceptually, like that was unfortunately brilliant.

- Is what you're trying to say is that, is it possible to have democratic theater when people are exploited for their labors?

- [Milton] Question.

- Can we do theater for free and it be just?

Question mark.

- Hi, my name is Tyler and with my comrade we saw "Elf the Musical" and I thought it was good 'cause you know, Elf, Buddy shows everybody what he likes to do with Christmas and like the culture, you know?

He kind of shows him the, he puts the syrup on the pan- What's it called?

The spaghetti and stuff.

So I don't know, I thought it was pretty cool.

You know, he kinda shows everyone what he's about and people are pretty accepting of Buddy, some people aren't, but you know, it's pretty cool.

- I forgot his name was Buddy and that you weren't just saying you know, "Hey buddy, my buddy Elf."

So wait, I'm gonna need you to be a bit more specific, that you feel like "Elf the Musical," you were like hey, there is this wonderfully democrat, like this work of art that fosters democracy in America right now.

And if "Elf" could be in every single theater across the country, there would be good change that would be brought about and because why again?

- I just feel like it'd be good because Buddy shows everyone about his, like what's it called?

You know, his elf culture and what he likes to do.

And not everyone's about it at first but then they kind of get into it and it's nice 'cause, I don't know, it's a little weird but.

- [Milton] So that suggests to me a little bit of modeling, you know, like I'm gonna be a good example of things to share back into the world.

Understandable.

- [Patrick] Okay.

Okay.

- Just recently I saw The Neo-Futurists in Chicago do 30 plays in 60 Minutes where the audience members actually choose which play is gonna happen.

So that's definitely a huge democratic thing.

And sorry, each play is based off of real events in the performers' lives and it just kind of allows authentic, unjudgmental existence for everyone.

- Ah, that's a very interesting point.

This idea of authenticity and how when we think about being visible, being made visible, having a voice, it often means that we feel seen for who we are by the systems that be.

And so telling perhaps authentic stories carries some additional weight.

Possibly, possibly, possibly.

This side over here.

Anybody in the back?

Hey back.

I haven't been in the back of the room.

- [Milton] Room for maybe two more.

Two more.

- Two more.

Okay, okay.

We got one and we got two.

Are you ready?

It's your turn.

- Yeah, a show.

Oh shit, okay, cool.

- [Milton] Oh shit!

- A show I watched recently was "What the Constitution Means to Me."

It's a one woman, one act show.

It's fantastic.

It's on Amazon Prime.

But the whole point about it is the conversation of what the Constitution actually does, who it protects, who it can benefit and the nuances of it.

And I think it's very democratic because especially with the conversation of the Constitution even now, it's this developing conversation of why we need it and how we can go about using it to the people's benefit, so yeah.

- Thank you very much.

Right here.

- [Audience Member] So I recently saw "Le Mis" in Detroit, which goes into a lot of discussion about corrupt justice systems and prison systems but then kind of the point at the end, which follows the revolution of 1832 which fails is even if you do fail in your struggle, you should always try and push forward and hope that people in the future will continue to struggle and just kind of inspiring those so that even if you're unsuccessful, maybe it's not an impossible dream.

- Way to work in the title there, by the way.

That was very well done.

- Very good, very good.

- Okay, this is our manifesto here.

Let's do a bit of a recap.

- So on the left hand side we have being aware of class, treating each other better, building inclusive communities, people working to take justice into their own hands, LGBTQ+ content, fighting unfair systems as a theme, focusing on access or accessibility with low barriers to entry, and challenging the views of those in power.

On the right hand side.

- [Patrick] We've got modeling, cultural sharing and acceptance, audience members choosing, let's say choosing the content, choosing what gets played on stage, furthering the literacy of political histories and important documents, as well as looking to the past to look to the future.

You got that from Les Miss?

- Yes.

- Oh.

- Well, as we were discussing it.

Maybe I'm bad at listening.

- I think in some ways the "Les Mis" question is about process, right?

That there was a process of failure, it is a failed revolution.

And so what I hear a lot about is when we think about democratic performance, at least by those who were brave enough to share what they and their comrade had spoken about, there is a focus on the content, about what stories we're telling as one of the primary ways of broadcasting the values and importance of a democratic life.

We could do a show of hands 'cause I think there's gonna be some like, "Well, I've got different opinions."

But that is a big question for us about how those stories are being received and experienced.

Let's wonder for a moment.

Well actually, go back for a second.

Let's imagine one play that is all of these things.

- Just one.

- Just one.

It's gonna be all these things 'cause this is what we need to do in order to make democratic performance according to this fine audience in Ann Arbor.

- I actually think it's very doable.

- It's probably very doable.

It's true, yeah.

If you haven't written the next great American play, there it is, I guess for you, for the taking.

But the question I think we have is if this is what we believe democratic performance to entail, and I know it's a bit of a syllogism, right?

And so it's a bit reductive, but let's wonder for a moment if this is what we consider democratic, why do we give that adjective to this sphere and no political descriptions for other works that don't fit this category?

Which is to say, if it's not democratic, if we aren't gonna call it the theater that we're seeing democratic, then what are we gonna call it?

And is it fair to call some of the theater that we see things like autocratic, or oligarchic, the word of the year, possibly.

Democratic, plutocratic, aristocratic.

We've got all of these wonderful ideas handed down from Socrates and Aristotle to be honest, where Milton and I, as we are looking at the pieces that we're making, we're trying to understand how the political systems that are embedded or behind the works of art that are being made today might have influence on their communities and spheres of action.

- And this is important because not all of the works that we've made are inherently democratic as the practice.

In fact, if you look at culturecapital, not everyone is going up onto the stage at the end and not everyone is having that conversation.

Obviously yes you can have it from inside of the audience, but as we look through these other formats, you can actually kind of map and you can understand actually outside of its political systems and how we're looking at these in terms of governance powers, how do they socially play out inside of our friend groups, inside of our families, inside of our schools.

Each of these has a very specific kind of resonance with the different spaces in which we encounter them.

And so democracy is not always going to be, "I'm only participating in democratic spaces."

In fact, we can look and see, well actually there are many times in my life where only a select few have agency.

And that may be for a very particular reason.

Maybe I don't actually have the expertise to be able to contribute that way.

When we think about only the rich having agency, that's a problem.

That's a problem.

- But this is something that we're trying, spoilers, today doesn't have a lot of answers for you on, well what should I make and how should we make it?

Because we recognize that there is a constant shifting between spheres that are differently organized.

And again, there are family units that are organized more autocratically or more democratically or more aristocratically because maybe your sibling is deemed the best and they get to make their decisions or inputs have more value than yours.

I'm not unearthing some kind of trauma about my sibling this evening, but all to say is that what we're trying to ask here is a question about the balance.

Because we do believe that we need democratic performance.

And the Democratic Performance Manifesto that we have made tonight isn't so dissimilar than one that maybe Milton and I would make ourselves.

We might emphasize a few more things about form, like participation, like modalities of time.

But you know, we were talking about access, like where theater actually happens.

And so having flexibility and understanding that sometimes theater needs to come to you, it needs to not be such a ivory tower kind of structure.

All that is to say that we are looking for a nuanced understanding of how we might be able to justify going between these different modalities, political organizing structures.

- Yeah, and especially when we think about the present moment and how many different systems we move between and we occupy differently at different times.

As we were saying before, am I participating in democracy only when I'm at the voting station or am I also participating in it actively when I'm outside in the world going about my daily life, buying bread, going to see my friends?

Like all of these are questions for how do we occupy space, how do we elect to spend our time together, and also how do we participate together as a society and negotiate those powers together?

- So we've called this the words behind us right now, literacy of the present.

And the question for us is whether or not the art forms that we're making give us tools to identify when and or how the current situation is organized.

Is theater giving us the tools that we need to be able to say, "Hey, the current moment has shifted, it is no longer democratic, but actually it's oligarchic.

Only those who have an accrued amount of wealth are making decisions."

Are we able to feel that every single time we go to the theater?

Does it have to only exist in the stories we tell on the stage or are there other modes of storytelling that we can use to communicate that information?

- Now, I've said a few things today which seem to be a little bit doubtful of the power of theater.

- Shocking.

- I don't mean to be doubtful because in fact, I do believe that theater is good at doing many things, but sometimes those things don't often get the spotlight.

And so we ask this question, what is theater good for?

And we ask that question, what is democracy good for as well.

We know that democracy represents the voice of the people.

It represents the ability to have your voice heard.

But at the same time, we also know democracy takes time.

It's really inefficient and it's slow.

And actually, theater is really slow.

It takes a lot of time to produce, it's a lot of person power, and it's really expensive.

And at the end of the day, you can maybe see it for like a week of a run, two weeks, three weeks if you're lucky.

If you live in New York, maybe that's different.

But also, theater itself is very well aligned with a lot of democratic practice because of its ability to slow things down and for us to be able to see things in nuanced and very specific negotiations.

- So we always come back to the theater.

You know, as we've gone off and started making new things, we really understand the theater in the most expanded sense of the term.

We're not just talking about things that look like this stage.

A theater can happen anywhere.

It can happen on a grassy plains, outside in a park.

It can pop up for a moment inside of an autobody shop.

It can pop up for a moment inside of a government building.

It's a very, very adaptable structure.

But inside that structure, we hear a yearning for certain principles of today, namely inclusivity, namely time, and having the ability to take time to tell stories, to do that in the right way, to take ourselves accountable for the decisions that we're all putting onto the table in order to create the work.

One of the reasons why we've turned to games is because in many ways, by bringing games into the theater, not only are we trying to recognize that games have become a major principle form of gathering for people worldwide, but they also kind of fuck up all of those rules that theater's failing to adhere to, right?

That they allow us to introduce principles of, for example, time, taking the time.

When you're playing a game of, I don't know, let's think of a board game.

Like any board game I guess you can play like- - Monopoly.

- Lets not talk about Monopoly.

Let's say you're playing Code Names, say you're playing Catan, say you're playing Monopoly.

Actually, all of these games are kind of coated with unsavory elements, but you have the ability to walk away and come back.

We have been endlessly fascinated by the idea of right now we live in a distracted era where, you know, how many of you checked your phone during this conversation?

Does theater allow that?

Does it allow for this kind of coming in and out of a moment and being able to pick up the story and continue on?

- And two big things are that games, especially video game technology, has been engaging directly with the technological premises of efficiency, of trying to disseminate quicker to more audiences.

And we think that actually, a lot of the theater community hasn't been able to do that.

Sometimes it's technophobia, sometimes it's because it's too expensive.

And we think it's really important actually to demonstrate that we have the capacity to enter into those conversations.

And when we don't do that as performing arts people, we actually feel like we're missing a big component of what it means to participate in the 21st century as citizens of socially engaged people.

And so in asking what games are good for, we also have to look at the fact that so many of contemporary games ask us to behave in certain ways.

And a lot of society, especially in some places in the world, things are increasingly becoming gamified.

And so if you think about our social media platforms, you think about algorithmic systems that dictate what we listen to and what we watch, what metaphors we participate in, we find that it's really important, actually, to encounter these things and especially for artists to have a seat at the table and something to say about it and actually maybe to insert ourselves and to kind of weave ourselves a little bit more agency inside of that space.

And we often call that systems literacy.

Like can we actually see the game that's being played?

- So by way of conclusion, as you go out of this theater tonight and maybe you play a game with your friends, maybe you sit around a table.

What we're excited about is the possibility of understanding those moments as theater and then bringing those moments back into the theater.

There is something special about a space where a bunch of strangers come together and can see each other eye to eye and experience some kind of transformation.

Right, that is what we hope when we tell those stories that you've all named as being so important inside of something like a Democratic Performance Manifesto, that those stories, when you see them, it's not just about confirming your beliefs, it's about changing your beliefs to keep up with, as the comrade in the audience over here said, the shifting values of the contemporary moment, right?

Our values are always transforming and progressing and we're always in a process of trying to keep up and keep expanding and redefining who's allowed inside.

Who's allowed inside of this space, what is allowed to fall within the category of theater.

You know, we hope that there is a day where maybe asses.masses plays one night, the next week, you've got Shakespeare for the Shakespeare lovers who are still out there.

The next next week, you've got D&D.

Right?

There is a version where that's normal.

And that process of normalization and transformation of who's allowed inside is very much, I would hope, you know, in my understanding, they're aligned with the values of around inclusivity that were named this evening as well.

- And largely it is happening.

We are seeing it happen, but oftentimes it's not called art.

And that's one question that we have of like, well, why not?

And has art become a little bit dirtied or made overly intellectual or perhaps seen as something like an extracurricular?

And often there are things that point us towards that.

Our education systems often say, oh, art's on the side and you've gotta focus on other things.

But for us, we want to see culture interwoven with the fabric of society, we'd like to see us all as culturally engaged citizens, but also people who, for us, democracy is not something that we do once in a while, but it's something that we think about.

And maybe not even democracy, but how do we want to spend our time together and how do we want to make society better together at the same time?

- So we leave that question with you as you head out.

We suppose there's probably one more question that maybe you're asking yourselves given the title of this conversation, which is the question of what does all this have to do with donkeys?

(donkey bellowing) And to be honest, we're kind of out of time.

So you'll have to come to asses.masses on Saturday and Sunday.

We will be there, we will be talking with you and are available.

An important thing is that while we might not be doing a Q&A right now, we are here and we are interested in talking to all of you who want to talk to us and ask us more questions.

We can't really see you eye to eye in these lights, so we're gonna come down and we'll be available.

- Thank you so much everyone.

- Thank you all so much for being here.

(audience applauding) (playful music) (audience speaking indistinctly)