Caridad Svich
No Passport Conference
A nytheatre voices cyber-interview
NoPassport presents a one-day conference, February 22, 2008 (Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue) entitled "Dreaming the Americas--The Body Politic in Performance". NoPassport was founded by playwright Caridad Svich as a Pan-American theatre alliance and press devoted to action, advocacy, and change toward the fostering of cross-cultural diversity and difference in the arts with an emphasis on the embrace of the hemispheric spirit in US Latina/o and Latin-American theatre-making. nytheatre voices is pleased to have conducted a cyber interview about this conference with panelists Caridad Svich (playwright, translator and lyricist), Randy Gener (senior editor of American Theatre magazine, playwright, and critic), Jason Grote (playwright), Otis Ramsey-Zoe (dramaturg), and Oliver Mayer (playwright, screenwriter, and librettist).
Pictured: Jason Grote, Otis Ramsey-Zoe, Oliver Mayer, Caridad Svich
Caridad, you are the founder of NoPassport. Could you give our readers a short synopsis of its mission, some background as to how it came to be, and what you hope it will accomplish?
I founded NoPassport in 2002 initially as a 15 member-artist collective dedicated to experimenting with text, music, virtuality and creating new theatre forms. Late in 2003 NoPassport's mission and roster expanded to become what it is currently: a Pan-American theatre alliance (of now over 300 artists from across the US with international affiliates in UK and Serbia) devoted to action, advocacy and change toward the fostering of cross-cultural diversity and difference in the arts with an emphasis on the embrace of the hemispheric spirit in US Latina/o and Latin-American theatre-making.
In 2007 NoPassport held its first two-day theatre conference at the Martin E Segal Theatre Center at the CUNY Graduate Center entitled "Dreaming the Americas: Diversity and Difference in Performance." Special thanks to Frank Hentschker for hosting NoPassport!
I founded NoPassport in order to create a positive forum for artistic and civic dialogue about theatre and performance especially theatre and performance of US Latino/as and the Americas as well as to propose a living and virtual national network/coalition that could mobilize and effect change toward the languages we use to make art, cast and train actors, write about theatre and think about the effects of the works we make as practitioners and scholars. It recognizes the migrant nature of so many artists in our field and places artists at the center of the force to initiate ideas for action in artsmaking, administration and publishing. NoPassport is hard to describe because we are so many things at once: a band, a kiosk, a platform for dialogue, a networking group, an action group (social, political and artistic), a critical mass, and a coalition devoted to inclusiveness and expansiveness in the arts.
In terms of this 2nd Conference at Segal Center at CUNY: "The Body Politic in Performance" I hope that it will stir thought, promote action and demonstrate how artists can come together to bridge the languages of the arts and the academy, artmaking and public policy. More detailed information can be found here.
How did each of you become involved in NoPassport and what area of expertise do you bring to this conference?
Svich: I founded NoPassport in 2002 and am a playwright, translator, editor, scholar, lyricist, and arts journalist. I curated and organized both this conference and the 2007 conference also at the Segal.
Gener: I got involved in NoPassport through Caridad's invitation. She sent me an email announcing that she had founded this online alliance. Because of my work as the senior editor of American Theatre magazine, I guess she may have sent me this announcement for the same motives that everyone else in the theater usually does: to seek for some sort of press coverage. Mind you, I don't know for certain that this is indeed what Caridad had in mind; I could be making this up, probably a bad reflex reaction on my part. I've been going through a tough period as a playwright: I've been looking for a home. For example, I wanted to be a member of the Usual Suspects, but the folks there have discouraged me from joining — twice. There is this one Asian American theatre company, which I had hoped would be a place that could nurture my work; unfortunately, the company has since decided to change its producing mission. Now, NoPassport is not a producing organization (well, not yet), but this is just to describe my mindset at the time. I was not exactly in a good mood when I got this email from Caridad, and I guess I didn't really have my media-guy hat on properly. The idea of NoPassport deeply intrigued me, because the very form of it echoed the virtual spirit of networking groups that I respect, such as Theater Without Borders and Gay Theater listserv. And NoPassport started very much as a collective for Latino and Latina theatre artists, which is totally my vibe as a Filipino-American. (As you may know, Filipinos are the Latinos of Southeast Asia. And since then, NoPassport has expanded its embrace into a more hemispheric scope, which again is just my vibe.) So I replied to Caridad, saying, hey, I would like to become part of her group. I really did not expect her to say yes. To my surprise, she introduced me as a new member to the NoPassport listserv. And to my continuing surprise, she has continued to treat me as a valuable member of the group.
Mayer: I met Caridad all the way back in 1989 at South Coast Repertory's Hispanic Playwrights Project — wow, seems like a long time and mindset ago. A few years later, Caridad and I got to go do our new plays at the Royal Court Theatre in London. From then till now, Caridad has this amazing will to bring people together across all kinds of boundaries and time zones. NoPassport is the result of an extraordinary amount of effort and faith. I like to think that Caridad asked me to join NoPassport at the very beginning because she knows I'm also a believer when it comes to our new breed of theater.
Grote: I'm a playwright, but have been an activist on and off for many years and asked a friend working on human rights in Mexico to help me organize this panel.
Ramsey-Zoe: I’d been an advocate for Caridad’s work during my tenure at Centerstage in Baltimore where we’d presented a reading of one of her plays. A few months later, I was invited to join NoPassport. I am a dramaturg with an intense passion for new play development, and I’m on the advisory board for NoPassport Press. So, I bring a keen understanding of dramatic literature and the zeitgeist of new play development, production, and, shall we say, life, which are reasons why I’m moderating a conversation with writers.
What is your topic and why is this important?
Grote: As the hysteria against Mexican immigrants in this country reaches a fever pitch, the Mexican government — closely allied with the Bush administration — has been conducting a campaign of repression, mostly against indigenous communities in the Southern regions of the country, in Oaxaca and Chiapas. In particular, "Plan Mexico," is a branching out of the awful "Plan Colombia," in which — in the name of drug interdiction — the often-brutal military of a Latin-American country is being integrated with that of the US and used internally against its own citizens. Any American, Latin(o) or not, should be concerned about this — I for one do not want my tax dollars used for this plan.
Svich: In an election year in the US and also the anniversary year of 1968 (revolutions), it is almost inevitable to focus on the Body Politic as a theme for the conference. I recently edited a book on theatre and censorship and self-censorship entitled Out of Silence (due from Manchester University Press late 2008) and the book stemmed in great part from discussions within NoPassport. For me this is an opportunity to reflect upon the now but also look back at the ghosts of the past. How do we live with them? What decisions do we make to honor even the dishonored in our collective political body as a nation and arts community? What difference can theatre continue to make in the way we see our world?
Gener: As for the “area of expertise” I bring to this Feb. 22 conference, it is easier and saner to respond to it by discussing the topic of my presentation and panel: “Narrative Connections: Dramaturgy, Design and New Technologies.” This will be a hybrid of lecture and symposium. This past June, I presented a multimedia lecture, “Storytelling By Digital Design” at the 2007 Prague Quadrennial for World Scenography at the Czech Republic, thanks to the financial support of the Ford Foundation, through the Institute of International Education. It was a talk, geared for theatre designers, about how new technology has transformed the way we create plays with a specific focus on American and French-Canadian productions. For the Feb. 22 conference, I will give an excerpt from this talk; it will be a brief survey, a sort of introduction. Then I will segue to the meat of the event, a symposium with five significant practitioners in this interdisciplinary field of narrative, scenography and new media technologies. I invited Ping Chong, the maverick theatre artist and director; Kevin Cunningham, the executive artistic director of 3-Legged Dog Media and Theater Group; Jay Scheib, the director and associate professor of theater at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Kirby Malone, a multimedia designer and co-founder, with Gail Scott White, of Cyberbia Productions; and Sam Buntrock, an animator and stage director of Roundabout Theatre Company's Sunday in the Park with George. I think that rapid developments in animation, video games and computer technologies are profoundly affecting the domain of narrative and scenography in the theatre. And these changes have become broader and more widespread than has been originally understood and explored since the advent of multimedia. Meanwhile, there's a kind of jadedness concerning the subject, so my hope is that we will be able to fillet out what is really vanguard and what is not. For me, this panel itself is going to be more fascinating than my talk, because my hope is that, through our conversations, I will be able to pursue and deepen the research I have done thus far on this topic. It is an ever-changing field. New discoveries and experiments are happening almost everyday. I want to share with everyone what my findings have been thus far, and I want my own assumptions and conclusions to be questioned as well.
Ramsey-Zoe: The official title is "History, Memory and Transculturation: NoPassport Press Book Launch." Essentially, I am facilitating a discussion between Anne Garcia-Romero, Oliver Mayer, and Alejandro Morales about their recently published volumes of plays. The plays and these three writers are what I feel are most important. As a reader, I was given the opportunity to experience nine unique, solicitous, dissonant, brooding, and beautiful worlds that were previously unavailable to me (or at least not assembled so conveniently). Each collection asserts its own identity by its unifying themes and voice. These collections offer striking meditations on various themes including: the need for escape, the irreconstructability and ephemeralality of memory, the power of the past over the present, and addressing the body’s response to and retention of trauma. In addition, the texts are both teachable and producible, which means that the publication of these texts is a great gift to the world.
Mayer: My collection of plays is a reflection of what I bring to NoPassport — history, mystery, desires, fears, secrets and music, seen from the eyes and experiences of hyphenated Americans. It comprises the first three plays of a six play cycle I call "Where the Music Is." These plays are where my heart, mind and sense of injustice has been for a long time.
Who do you believe is the audience for an event such as this and what do you hope they will get out of attending?
Gener: For me, NoPassport conferences are really an opportunity to meet the other Nopers who I don't get to meet in real time. That's what really interests me — to go beyond our virtuality. So if the conferences are attended only by other Nopers, that's fine with me. Based on the emails I read every day, Nopers are a spectacular group of theatre artists and professionals. I am proud to be one of them. Obviously, it would be equally important for members of the general public to attend this event. For example, it would be great if a computer engineer or an architect or a multimedia designer who doesn't work in the theatre to take in what the panelists in my “Narrative Connections” panel have to say. If you read the literature on new media and new technologies, it is alarming how these people frequently make grand pronouncements about “the new digital dialectic,” and yet the contributions of the theatre in this field are almost always never taken into account, and their eyes glaze over when you even mention the historical legacies of, say, Erwin Piscator or Meredith Monk in multimedia art.
Grote: The NoPassport community is a large, progressive group of artists, and (like most of us) probably have not heard about most of this stuff. I'm hoping to use the conference as an opportunity for popular education.
Ramsey-Zoe: I believe that the audience falls into three categories: 1. confident artists and scholars who have a solid sense of their personal aesthetics, 2. the “lost souls,” who are searching for direction, and 3. the novice. At any given point, as artists, we are one, if not more, of these. In some ways, I am all three; so, I am attending to get re-energized, to engage with colleagues, to meet new people, and to feed my own artist's spirit. I have a friend who attended last year’s conference who says that the experience changed her life; so, I am going to be changed.
Svich: The conference is aimed at fellow practitioners, administrators, students, scholars, and general audience interested in theatre and performance and in the politics of telling story(ies) but also in how theatre engages with society in an active manner. I hope the people who attend the conference will be illuminated, enriched, enlightened, provoked and transformed in some way. I hope they take even just one positive idea from the conference — whether it be about the language of casting & training actors of colour, the possibilities of enabling peace through the arts, re-inventing the classics, etc. — and put it into action in their organization, workplace, community, playground, and so forth. NoPassport is launching three new books as part of the conference: three collections from Oliver Mayer, Anne Garcia-Romero and Alejandro Morales. The works have never been in print before. The fact of these plays (and many more) being in someone's hands is the act of truly passing on/passing forward. Expanding the spectrum of plays that are out there, especially US Latino/a plays by so many terrific American theatre artists which still are not readily available.
Mayer: The NOPE Conference is for anyone who loves the theatre for what it can be now, in the immediate present, reflecting who we really are and what is really going on. It's loving, inclusive, and it's not about money — and those are revolutionary prospects in this out of control time. Also, it's a chance to pick up some supercool new plays at our book launch!
How do you go about getting panel members, deciding on the exact topic, scheduling, etc. and who will each of you be working with and, if you wish to add, what makes each member different and part of the whole?
Svich: In October of 2007 I drafted initial proposed plan for the Conference. I circulated plan to all member of NoPassport and waited to hear back. Some topics for panels surfaced from this plan, others I instigated to a great degree. I approached core members of NoPassport and asked them to moderate panels; I proposed topics and panel members. Then it was a matter of who was available when. Who was interested. Who could be in NYC if they weren't from the city and so on.
Grote: I went to Rob Jereski, who is a very dedicated, NY-based activist.
Gener: I think I answered this question above. So I'll just add that, frankly, my true interest lies in narrative — how new technologies support storytelling in the theatre. My real criterion in choosing these panelists is my respect for their artistry. I also generally steered clear of dance artists who have explored multimedia. I hope this is not a mistake. And I hope to rectify this someday; perhaps the Dance Critics Association would be interested in a panel on multimedia and dance. Anyway, Ping Chong, Gail Scott White, Kirby Malone and Jay Scheib appear as case studies in the “Storytelling By Digital Design” talk I delivered in Prague. Their works, in various pioneering ways, have been deeply influential in my thinking on the subject. If I have any real sadness, it's that Gail Scott White couldn't speak alongside Kirby Malone. Because of time constraints, I requested if it was okay for Kirby to speak for both of them. Still, it is important for you to know that Cyberbia isn't just Kirby. Equally important: both Kirby and Gail are co-editors of Live Movies: A Field Guide to New Media for the Performing Arts, a seminal book on the subject. But I understand that Gail may be in the audience as well. I've known about Kevin Cunningham's 3-Legged Dog and followed his work there as a critic and writer; I've seen many shows there, although we have not met in person. As for Sam Buntrock, I really went out on a limb to grab him for the panel. I had a chance to interview him by phone when he was still in London preparing for the Roundabout production. He's an awesome guy, and the work he and his design team have done in re-imagining Sunday in the Park with George is truly mind-blowing. (Actually he will be opening that show the day before the Feb. 22 panel, so I hope I am not imposing too much.) Finally, to have Ping on the panel is really a real honor. I think I have not missed a single performance of Ping's shows in New York since Deshima. I don't have many cherished role models in the theatre, and Ping is one of them. He is a genius.
Mayer: I will be reading from my plays and answering questions at the book launch alongside Anne and Alejandro. It's an amazing moment for young dramatists of color to celebrate our generation's hard work and serious fun in these play collections.
Ramsey-Zoe: This panel came together for the purpose of a book launch, and as such, it didn’t require the same effort as a panel created from scratch. I first met the panelists on the page, through their work; so, I’ll talk about how these collections differentiate them.
In Alejandro’s work, I was rapt by the way in which time functions; he has this stunning ability to fuse, fracture, isolate, blend, and bend time and place in a way that offers a stark but refreshing yet unresolved reflection on the present. Also, I was captured by the complexities of his characters, whose central struggles are born out of personal and cultural memory.
In Anne’s collection, the pieces all present a striking exploration of identity and the struggle to reconcile contradiction. I love when art expresses something that can’t easily be put into words; Anne’s collection does just that and so much more.
Oliver’s work is infused with a rich musical tapestry that intersects time and history. He calls upon the past and mergers it with the present to create work that is as urgent as it is beautiful and political.
How much interaction is there between each of you and others in the conference as to goals, themes, publicizing the event, etc.?
Gener: There was a good deal of interaction among us. For example, when Caridad and I first spoke about the conference, she assumed I would only deliver my multimedia lecture. Then we had to discuss what the form of my presentation would be if I pursued my idea of the panel. Meanwhile, there were some artists who really wanted to participate in the conference but we didn't quite have a place for them. So that had to be discussed. Also, there was one theatre director who I invited to be a panelist, but it turned out that he was already invited to speak at another panel. So that was another issue that we had to work out among ourselves. I am a frequent speaker and panelist at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Last month, I organized and moderated an evening devoted to the Swedish playwright Lars Norén, with readings of Marita Gochman's translations of his plays and a discussion of his body of work. Frank Hentschker at the Segal Center is an amazing program director. Frank's staff (especially Ruth) is simply first-class and top-notch; I look forward to seeing them, let alone working with them.
Mayer: NoPassport is all about sharing news, events, thoughts, chisme. Interaction is what it is all about. Trouble is, we're often all over the country and even abroad, so the NOPE Conference promises a chance for us to actually share some abrazos. Also to meet some new people who we've only met previously online through their postings.
Svich: We will all be doing publicity for the event. NoPassport is grassroots, hands on, by the seat of the pants and sheer will and love. E-mail, text messages, e-vites and press releases are out. Of course the Martin E Segal Theatre Center as host of the conference will also advertise the event as part of their programming.
Ramsey-Zoe: As I am based out of DC, I’ve communicated with Caridad and the writers/ panelists via email. Thus far, everything has come together rather organically thanks to the internet, which is also my primary tool for publicizing the event.
Grote: None, really — I'm mostly just a liaison between Rob and Caridad and will do more listening than talking on the panel.
What have you gained personally from having been a part of this and do you want to do it again?
Grote: I'm kind of tired of talking about theater, and I find most of what passes for "political theater" to be boring and predictable — I'd rather just keep my plays and my teach-ins as separate events with separate goals (though my plays often contain politics, just not in a didactic way). I want to use the panel to spread the word about these human rights violations and hopefully help end them.
Ramsey-Zoe: It’s tremendously enlightening to be in the company of such amazing artists. When the opportunity arises again, I shall not hesitate to get involved again.
Mayer: NoPassport is a hero in this time of fear and paranoia. These plays are being published by a truly new entity reflecting us as we really are in 2008, picking new work that matters and means a lot to a lot of us, works that will have future lives thanks to Caridad and all of us who have the courage not only to believe but make it happen for ourselves.
Gener: I can't honestly answer this question since the conference hasn't happened yet. I can tell you what I have gained personally from having been part of the two-day NoPassport Conference we held a year ago. I was a plenary speaker for that event. It was one of the most thrilling and terrifying things I've ever done in my life. But I will tell you this: The speech I gave during that conference, “Secret History of the American Theatre,” is something that I still continue to deliver at U.S. college and European theatre festivals. In fact, I will deliver the same lecture at the 2008 Sibiu International Theatre Festival in Romania, where I was invited to speak this summer. I also received another invitation to deliver it in Montenegro this coming October at a festival for alternative theatre. Cross your fingers that Montenegro folks haven't dimmed their interest.
February 10, 2008