(bright music)
Narrator: Today,
you are part of an important conversation
about our shared future.
The E.N. Thompson Forum on World Issues
explores a diversity of viewpoints
on international and public policy issues
to promote understanding and encourage debate
across the university and the state of Nebraska.
Since its inception in 1988,
hundreds of distinguished speakers
have challenged and inspired us,
making this forum one of the preeminent speaker series
in higher education.
It all started when E.N. Jack Thompson
imagined a forum on global issues
that would increase Nebraskan's understanding
of cultures and events from around the world.
Jack's perspective was influenced by his travels,
his role in helping to found the United Nations,
and his work at the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace.
As president of the Cooper Foundation in Lincoln,
Jack pledged substantial funding to the Forum.
And the University of Nebraska
and Lied Center for Performing Arts agreed to co-sponsor.
Later, Jack and his wife Katie
created the Thompson Family Fund
to support the forum and other programs.
Today, major support is provided by the Cooper Foundation,
Lied Center for Performing Arts,
and University of Nebraska Lincoln.
We hope this talk sparks an exciting conversation among you.
And now on with the show.
-: Welcome to the E.N. Thompson Forum
on World Issues third event this season.
My name is Rafael Untalan.
I'm an assistant professor of practice in acting
at the Johnny Carson School of Theater and Film.
And I am delighted to welcome you
to this most important conversation on race and the arts.
We are pleased to welcome all of you,
those of you watching virtually,
as well as those of you
who could join us here this afternoon at the Lied Center.
I'd also like to mention
that there will be Lied Center event
following this discussion at 7:30 this evening,
featuring our speaker, Anna Deavere Smith,
performing her one woman piece, "Notes From the Field."
Since 1988, the Thompson Forum
has brought us critical thinkers, policymakers,
and leaders who are shaping our global society
to discuss issues that affect us all.
We are grateful to the Cooper Foundation,
which provides the major funding for the Forum,
to the late Jack Thompson, who conceived of this series,
and to the Thompson family for their continued support.
We would also like to acknowledge
the Lied Center for Performing Arts for their support,
and the University Honors Program for their partnership
on today's event with Anna Deavere Smith,
and moderator, Sandra Washington.
And finally, thank you to our media sponsor, KZUM.
I would now like to introduce Dr. Colette Yellow Robe,
an enrolled member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe,
and originally from the Winnebago Indian Reservation
here in Nebraska.
Dr. Yellow Robe holds a PhD from the teaching,
learning, and teacher education department
in the College of Education and Human Sciences at the UNL.
Dr. Yellow Robe is an active community member
committed to social justice and alleviating poverty.
As the retention specialist
for the student support services program
and instructor in the ALEC department at UNL,
her work focuses primarily on first generation,
low income, and disabled college students.
Currently, she serves as co-leader
on the chancellor's anti-racism journey at UNL,
the chancellor's commission
on the status of people of color,
and the mayor's multicultural advisory committee
for the city of Lincoln.
We are pleased to have Dr. Yellow Robe perform
a land acknowledgement ceremony before we begin.
-: Hello, thank you, Nia'ish, Professor Rafael.
Good evening, greetings, everybody.
I am joining you tonight,
this evening, from Lincoln, Nebraska.
A land acknowledgement is a formal recognition
of the indigenous tribal nations
as the original stewards of the land.
It is a sign of respect and gratitude
for the ongoing relationships
between tribal nations and the land.
So a land acknowledgement works
to undo racism throughout hundreds of years.
I would like to acknowledge
the ancestral present and future homelands
of indigenous tribal nations and peoples
upon which the University of Nebraska was founded.
The university spans across several areas.
I am honored to include our original stewards of the land,
especially as UNL works in gratitude
as it strives to develop positive,
ongoing relationships to our tribal indigenous nations
and the rich tribal diversity in the state of Nebraska.
Today, there are
four federally recognized tribes in Nebraska.
The Omaha tribe, the Ponca tribe,
Santee Sioux Nation, and the Winnebago tribe.
We also recognize the territorial lands
of the Pawnee, Otoe-Missouria, Lakota, Arapahoe,
Tsitsistas and Sutaio, and Kaw peoples,
Iowa, and Sac and Fox peoples.
Nia'ish, thank you, enjoy. (audience applauding)
-: Thank you, Dr. Yellow Robe.
This season's theme of moments of reckoning,
global calls for racial equity and action
promotes important and timely discussion
to further our understanding of the many challenges
relating to equity we still experience today.
Tonight's forum will address insights into historical
as well as current challenges relating to race and the arts.
Now I'd like to introduce our moderator, Sandra Washington.
Sandra is a city council person here in Lincoln, Nebraska,
with a focus on neighborhoods, community,
equity concerns, affordable housing,
climate resiliency, and conservation.
In 2020, Sandra worked with a team
to develop a community platform
for conversations about race and equity.
Prior to her service on Lincoln City Council,
Washington was
a Lincoln-Lancaster County Planning commissioner,
and had a long career with a national park service,
holding many different positions in planning,
environmental compliance, and congressional affairs,
as well as park superintendent, chief of planning,
and Midwest associate regional director.
Sandra is currently a trustee
for the National Parks Conservation Association,
and serves on the Lincoln Community Foundation
and the Nebraska Trails Foundation.
Much earlier, in addition to natural resources and planning,
Sandra studied dance at the Ohio State University,
worked in arts production and performance,
producing concerts, readings, and visual arts,
and touring nationally with her sister
as the Washington Sisters, performing at festivals,
marches, concert halls, and clubs.
I'd like to invite council person Sandra Washington
to the podium to introduce our keynote speaker.
(audience applauding)
-: All good planning goes awry.
They did tell me that earrings were a problem.
Thank you, Professor Untalan for the introduction.
It is my honor to introduce the woman
at the center of this afternoon's conversation.
She is an American actress,
a playwright, an author, a professor.
She is known for her roles on stage, television, and film.
She is the founding director of the Institute
of the Arts and Civic Dialogue at New York University,
and a recipient of multiple awards.
To name just a few,
she has two Tony Award nominations, an Obie,
a Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation.
She has been named the Jefferson Lecture
by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
She has a Guggenheim Fellowship,
and she has received the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize,
which is given in recognition
of her outstanding contribution to beauty in the world
and our enjoyment and understanding of life.
Anna Deavere Smith has been hailed
for her blend of theatrical arts,
social commentary, and intimate reverie.
She is one of the foremost solo theater artists of our time,
pioneering the journalistic style
of portraying multiple real life characters
with text drawn verbatim from her interviews.
She has for four decades used her art
to reveal the effects of inequality
and discord on American communities,
consciously creating opportunities
for the audience to witness multiple perspectives,
leaving us not in despair, but hopeful.
Please help me welcome Anna Deavere Smith.
(audience applauding)
-: Thank you.
Thank you so much.
-: You're welcome.
Does it ever get old
having people extol how fantastic you are?
-: No.
-: (laughs) I wouldn't think so.
Well, welcome to this hour.
It's a pleasure for me to spend it with you.
-: It's my pleasure.
-: As you heard in the introduction,
we're spending this year discussing
racial reckoning and action.
And arts and artists have always had a role
in reflecting back to ourselves our own humanity.
Or maybe actually it's refracting,
because there's a change there.
It's not absolute.
Refracting our perception of ourselves.
Artists are very good at drawing a line
and stepping right over it.
So we're gonna start with the artist.
When did you start referring to yourself as an artist?
-: That's a really great question.
I don't know the answer.
Yeah, I don't know the answer.
Because I think even in acting school,
they referred to us as actors.
I don't know the answer to that question.
-: My gosh, all right.
Did you have role models in your own family?
Were there other artists, actors, musicians?
-: No, I had an aunt where she was really,
it's a hard to, I think she was like my grandmother's niece,
but they were about the same age.
So I don't know what she was to me, maybe a cousin.
I never figured that out.
We just all called her auntie.
And she had, she was sort of a legend in the family.
I lived in Baltimore,
and she had gone to New York to be a dancer.
I think she passed, as what we would now call Latinx,
which leads me to believe there must've been room
in the profession there, but not for Black people,
Negros, colored, as they were called at the time.
And then she went to California,
and whenever she came to Baltimore,
she was so glamorous in everything.
But it just happened by an odd coincidence
that I ended up living at her house in San Francisco
when I was studying to be an actor.
And, but she wasn't really,
she'd long ago stopped being in show business.
But I think that would be the only person.
-: When you were finding your way in arts,
what do you wish someone shared with you?
-: Something I tell my students now,
confidence is overrated, give doubt a try.
-: (laughs) Yeah.
-: Doubt's fine. -: Doubt is fine, yeah.
-: I was never confident, and I'm not now.
And I think that the recent realities of the world indicate
that we really need to have a greater aptitude for doubt,
and a greater tolerance for it.
-: That's really perceptive.
I was talking with a group of people
I spend time with every week.
And one of the things
that we were practicing was trying to be confident,
but then backing up and saying, but I could be wrong.
And so we've been adding,
but I could be wrong at the end of many of our-
-: Yeah, and humility, that humility's good.
I think so much of my career
has been through decades of celebrating pride, confidence.
Those are important parts
of how we create our identity as adjusted people.
But I really think that doubt
and humility are very important.
And if you don't mind me saying
or mentioning your cousin, Nataki Garrett,
who is at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival,
and is a whole new generation of leader.
And I really hope that people like Nataki,
who are gonna make the next generation of arts institutions,
are less involved in building buildings,
and less involved in building brands,
and more involved in the human crisis, honestly.
-: I think that, yes, (audience applauding)
in just conversations that Nataki and I have,
I do hear that she is much more interested
in building communities of people
who are ready to tackle big things.
-: And I should say that my colleagues
or people my generation who built those buildings,
probably without that having happened,
we wouldn't be able to do this now.
That they built institutions.
The boards supported them building those institutions.
And they had resources.
Many of us don't feel that the resources were, excuse me,
that the resources were shared fairly or equally,
including the resource of leadership,
but they did build something.
And it's, okay, so now we have buildings,
and some of them are as big as a city block,
and so now what?
-: Well, now you fill it up.
But you have to have the space.
-: Yeah. -: Both physical space
and metaphorical space.
-: Management's good, right?
-: Yeah.
I just, I am, before we move away
from your growing up as an artist or growing as an artist,
I have to ask this question.
Why Shakespeare?
-: Well, Shakespeare was just the sort of foundation
at that time in the '70s when I became an actor.
And it's not the case now.
But then, that's kind of where you learned a discipline.
So it would be like a person who learned ballet,
then becoming Ailey dancer,
or people like Miles Davis who learned,
or Nina Simone, who, and you're a musician,
learned classical music, and then did something else.
And so I always really respected it in my training
as the place to building a foundation for discipline.
-: That makes sense.
I was just so curious by that, but thank you.
So you grew up in the '60s and the '70s.
I didn't, no, you grew up in the '50s and '60s, pardon me.
I grew up in the '60s and '70s, let's give the decades.
And my parents were, we have something else in common here.
Because my parents did something similar
to what your parents had done for you when they asked you,
when they sent you to a school in a different neighborhood
so that you could get a better education.
My parents moved us into a district
that was almost entirely White,
but that left us feeling isolated.
And of course, at five years old, seven years old,
I don't know that you hear the term isolated in your head,
but you know that you're alone.
You know that you're a, thank goodness I had a sister,
but it felt like learning to tread-
-: A twin, right? -: A twin, that's right.
I do, I have a twin sister.
She's never been to Lincoln and masqueraded as me.
That's really important.
But it left us adrift.
Like we were just thrown in the deep end.
And it's like, figure it out.
And we're here for you when you get home.
And could you talk a little bit about what that was like
for you to be in a school that was primarily White?
-: Well, there were two different versions of that,
or it evolved.
So when I was 11, I went to Garrison Junior High School,
and that was awful.
Awful (laughs), until the ninth grade,
it got a little bit better.
I had a really great history teacher,
and I met this guy named Nathaniel.
We had interesting intellectual interest.
And it was terrible.
And later in life, I met up again with two boys.
They were boys then, who like me,
were good Black kids, Negro kids, colored kids.
And they were,
they had achieved a lot more academically than me.
So the way Garrison Junior High worked was
that there was a seventh grade,
and then there was a number.
And the number indicated how smart you were.
So 7-1 was the smartest people.
I was in 7-7, and it went all the way to 7-22.
And around about 7-15 or 7-14, it started to be all Black.
And my two friends,
these young boys were like in 7-1 and 7-2.
And I just assumed that because they were
in that sort of privileged position intellectually,
that maybe they had a good time.
And later in life, well, like 15 years ago,
they told me it was just awful,
awful, awful, awful, I swear to God.
But then when I went to high school,
I had an excellent experience.
And in fact, with a new project that I'm working on,
I'm gonna go back to my high school in Baltimore.
And I sort of forgot about high school as an adult,
but now it just really opens my heart
to think about that school,
Western high school in Baltimore,
which is the oldest standing
public all girls school in the country.
And it was overcrowded at the time, old building downtown.
And we had to be on shifts.
And at that time, Black people, Negros,
colored as they were called,
thought that if you wanted your kid
to get a good public education,
you should send them to school
where there were Jewish children,
because Baltimore was very antisemitic.
And so the Jewish kids who had dough
couldn't go to the private schools.
And so my classmates were primarily Jewish,
very, very engaged intellectually.
And something that I realized in reflecting on my time
that I think was relevant about that school is
that it was a big school with this principal
who you would imagine
to be the principal of an all girls school.
She was about six foot two and skinny and scary.
Miss Kel was her name, real scary,
definitely a figurehead
like you never had anything to do with her.
And then there were two vice principles.
And one of them was a man
who was disabled named Mr. Dewolf.
He was White.
And the other was a Negro woman,
Black woman named S.E.M. Hughes.
And she had been a pivotal figure
in my mother's generation
as a teacher who was well respected.
She taught Latin.
And I, in reflecting,
I think it was really relevant that the two leaders who we,
everybody, White girls, Black girls,
Jewish girls, Christian girls, that we were,
who were taking care of us, so to speak,
were a Black woman and a disabled White man.
And it was an extraordinary,
beautiful educational experience.
-: Oh, that's wonderful.
But that is interesting that there would be two people
who would be considered-
-: They were outsiders. -: Outsiders.
-: She was the first Black person ever in a position.
Now of course, Western is all Black.
It's a Title I school.
-: That's not a surprise.
-: 'Cause even Black men class kids,
so my brother's children went to a private school.
That's what happens.
People abandon public schools.
-: They do.
They don't in Lincoln.
-: That's great.
-: Yeah. (audience applauding)
Yeah, yeah.
I feel like I should say,
I should quote Dr. Joel right now, all means all.
But we have one district in our school, in our town,
which is good because there's not the,
we didn't have White flight in Lincoln.
And there were places I've lived
where there is White, there was White flight.
1954, Brown versus Board of Education, integration.
And that usually meant move outside the district.
If you're White and you have the resources,
you've got just outside the line.
And I had a chance to be the superintendent
at Brown versus Board of Education in Topeka.
I won't go on and on about that,
but I did have some wonderful experiences
collecting oral histories of attorneys
for the state of Kansas and attorneys from the NAACP.
And I actually interviewed Charlayne Hunter-Gault.
We invited her to Topeka.
And had a chance to visit at some length
with a number of folks from the Little Rock Nine.
And then, anyway, so- -: It's great.
-: I'm so glad I had that opportunity,
because I learned so much about what it was like.
When I was growing up, we were still Negro.
I remember going from Negro to Black.
And I remember it being a radical choice,
and standing up in my elementary school
that had I think five Black kids and 400 students,
and saying, "I'm Black."
And I remember the teachers saying,
"Oh, sit down, sit down.
That's a naughty word.
Don't say Black."
And I'm like, "No, that's what I wanna be called."
And yeah, that was hard to do that.
So how did your awful experience in junior high
and your good experience in high school
prepare you for Hollywood?
An incredibly diverse, open,
and welcoming community of professionals.
(audience laughing)
-: You know,
Hollywood is like the rest of the country.
And there's no real law there.
It's wild.
And even in Black environments, except "Black-ish,"
which is truly the most diverse environment
I've been in in my life,
in so many ways, not just color.
A lot of young people around getting internship,
possibilities, size.
Physical size, not everybody is skinny and glamorous,
because for the most part,
even the behind the scenes people,
the grips and everybody's very fit usually,
the makeup, everybody's fit.
And what we call fit, "Black-ish" has room for everybody.
People I've never seen in the business.
And I congratulate them on that.
And I think it's not just the producers,
but the stars who made room for that.
But I've had not very nice experiences
with Black casting directors,
because it's all about it, it's like a series of clubs.
And the way that value is,
who's valued and who's not is not good,
but why should it be when you look at what culture was?
Or I just came across a poster of celebrated Chick Webb,
a great drummer who was from Baltimore,
and the mentor of Ella Fitzgerald,
and everything else, a genius.
And it's like, came across this last week.
It's a Black face of him, a Black man.
And so there are these traditions that are terrible,
and the tradition of how women have been treated,
and that got broken up with me too,
but also my male friends in acting school,
the things that were assumed that people could do to them.
So I guess to make it short,
the reason that I think Hollywood,
and we in Hollywood should be careful walking around
using matters of social justice as part of our brand.
Because first of all, it's an incredibly hierarchical place.
Don't care what the race of anybody is.
The person in charge is here,
and everybody else gets smaller things,
smaller space, and no permission, or rarely any permission.
Fear, it's a lot of fear.
Who wants to work in a scary environment?
This notion that if it's, you don't like it,
10 people would like your job.
So things that are the norm
in other workplace environments are
not the norm in Hollywood.
And why I think that is is because Hollywood's not,
all these other strides that we've made,
Brown versus Board of Ed, lots of other ones.
What's the one that allows us to even have public defenders?
Gideon versus something.
All those things, ways in which the law,
which also justifies misdeeds,
but that the law has been wrestling
with this thing called the reasonable man.
There's nothing reasonable about the arts.
Because the motor under the arts is desire,
and that's not reasonable.
And I don't think we'll ever be able to legislate that.
Because it will always be what is the thing that is desired
and is therefore made real in the market.
-: That's like marketing crack.
Dopamine.
It's just what you want.
-: It's what you want. -: It's what you want.
-: Who's gonna legislate that?
-: The bank, the pocketbook, the cash register,
not a very good equalizer.
-: But it's more than the pocketbook.
It's kind of like, well, they love,
words like they loved you.
Love, really? -: They don't know you,
do they? -: They don't know you.
They loved you, but.
She loves you, but.
The vocabulary itself is nuts.
It really is, I think.
But why am I there?
Because I enjoy the people,
the artists that I get to work with.
-: What drew you to acting?
-: Huh? -: What drew you to acting?
-: I don't know.
It was just a fluke that I ended up
in an acting class when I was 23.
And it was something I could do.
It wasn't hard to do.
And I was very, very interested
in watching other people do it
in that environment of the class.
And I was very interested in how teachers talked about it.
So I was interested in process.
and it turned out it was something I could do.
I hope everybody in this room trips across the thing
that they can actually do.
Because you might be geared towards going in a direction
and it's not necessarily the thing that you can do.
-: Yeah, you're very lucky.
I feel very lucky too.
I'm doing what I like.
I don't wanna do more of it.
That's not a forecast, pardon me.
As you matured as an artist,
or in your art or in your work, I know,
when I was reading this book, by the way, it's excellent.
She didn't ask me to do that.
But "Letters to a Young Artist."
(audience applauding)
You talk about art being work,
your art being work, and you work at acting,
and that artists should be working to get better,
they should.
So when you were working and maturing in your art,
how did you find your own voice?
And when were you allowed to speak your own voice?
-: You're never allowed.
You're never allowed.
-: Is that why you've gone into playwriting?
-: No, I mean, I think that it's important for, if any,
would you applaud if you're a student of any of the arts?
(audience applauding)
You're never allowed.
You have to, my friend George Wolf
would say he broke the door down.
You're never allowed.
That's not the thing here.
It's because there is already something,
even though it looks middle class,
and especially when artist are
in the newspaper or in magazines,
they look middle class with children
in strollers or whatever.
But one of my favorite things
I ever read was the French existentialist,
Jean-Paul Sartre saying,
if a actor is reading the financial pages,
it should be upside down.
So there's something that's actually basic to what we do,
which is transgressive.
And it has a history with prostitutes and pimps and thieves.
(laughs) It's history.
It's a transgressive art form.
And so, and I think that's why
we're still so ragtag and Bohemian,
particularly in the nonprofit world,
whereas I'm on the board of a museum,
and it's very dignified.
So I think that to think you're ever going to be allowed
to have a voice is wasting your time.
You're going to have to either be like George
and others and break the door down,
or you're going to have to charm your way in.
And in my case,
the theater wasn't very interested in me or my process.
And I was able to leverage relationships
with universities at a time when on the one hand,
they were beginning to realize they needed to say,
teach African American studies or teach,
they wouldn't even call it feminist studies,
the study of women and gender,
all these other euphemisms that they had to,
they felt the pressure to make the intellectual space.
But then that meant there were people there
either teaching it or studying it,
and they didn't know how to manage that.
And so that's really how my work got off the ground is
me getting commissions to go places
where there was discord,
cultural and gender discord.
And I made these plays where I played
all the parts of the people I interviewed,
sort of used the word refract,
mirroring them back to themselves,
and that allowed them to have conversations
that they otherwise wouldn't have happened.
And so that's how I built what I'm doing.
And then it just happened by luck
that I had a play in New York about a riot,
a different riot than the Los Angeles riot,
understand they did my play "Fires in the Mirror" here,
which I'm very grateful for.
And the night that that play was supposed
to first be performed was the Los Angeles riots.
Otherwise, as one of the designers said
to my face in the first rehearsal,
nobody's gonna care about this play,
"Fires in the Mirror,"
which was why I got the MacArthur.
And we always love telling those stories of rejection,
'cause it gives us all courage.
So the fact that there was a Los Angeles riot
on the day that play was supposed to start in New York
meant that people wanted to hear about race all of a sudden.
And if that hadn't happened,
I probably wouldn't be sitting here with you.
So I just really want the people
who are artists here to really, really get it,
that nobody's gonna allow you to have a voice.
Your teachers can't help you find your voice.
That it is hard won.
And it comes from in you
when you have something that you must say.
-: That's wonderful.
That's just wonderful, thank you.
(audience applauding)
I think that's important for artists to hear.
I think it's important for all of us to hear,
that we're not necessarily given
the invitation to speak our voice.
We have to make it.
We just have to make it.
We have to find a way to create the space we need to-
-: And you have speak out.
You have to endure being unheard.
You have to endure being unseen.
I was able to just check a few things about you,
and you have a life also in the outdoors and the wilderness.
And just, it's a process, right?
-: Oh, it's a huge process.
I was, if I go back a few years,
I was the only Black kid at forestry camp.
I was one of about seven girls
out of a hundred kids at forestry camp.
So you put all seven girls in one cabin, and they go,
"Oh, hi, where are you from?"
And it's like, oh (groans), you know?
And they're like, "Oh,
do you even know anything about the outdoors?
Are you afraid of spiders?"
I'm like, "Actually, I'm not afraid of spiders.
And I know quite a little bit about the outdoors.
Thank you very much."
But the constant proving.
And I tell one small thing, I lived in Ten Sleep, Wyoming.
And it was probably the second week I was there,
and I lived up on the Mesa.
So I didn't live in town.
And I came down because we could get showers.
So you could get a shower for longer than two minutes
if you went to town and you paid for it.
And I was doing my laundry and taking a long shower,
and this very perky woman comes across the lawn and says,
"Hi, I'm like the welcome wagon.
And I've been sent to ask you where you're from.
Are you from Harlem, Detroit, or what?
I said, "Those are my choices?"
And she goes, "Yeah."
-: That was aggressive on her part.
-: It was.
I was like, wow, I have three choices.
I'm not from any of those places.
But it was an interesting conversation to have.
That was a long time there.
So let's talk a little bit about,
you already started talking about your plays,
and about the fact that you play
so many different characters.
And as I was watching clips of some of the plays,
though I gotta tell you,
I did not watch this play tonight.
I really wanted to experience this play fresh.
-: By the way, so presentation.
Everybody keeps calling it a performance.
It's a presentation.
Performance requires a lot of things, like a set. (laughs)
-: Does it?
-: Yeah, or something like that.
Let's just say a considered environment.
So it's a presentation.
-: It's a presentation, okay.
But I'm curious, because I think besides the fact
that you can hold your narrative fall line very clearly
through the whole presentation,
it's the fact that you can take on,
or that you seem to embody so many different characters.
And I am curious how you're able to do that
without turning each of characters into caricature.
How do you do that?
-: Well, I hope it's not caricature.
There could be people who would feel it was.
It's discipline.
It's a discipline that did,
in my case, go back to Shakespeare,
where I assessed that
and believed that in the way that words were,
not just the content, but the way words were rhythmically
did have something to do with identity.
And so for me, it'd be well before I'm on stage.
I have talked to a lot of people.
I've interviewed a lot of people.
I've spent a lot of time listening to how they speak.
And then I'm trying to do that, which is not a sketch,
but I'm trusting, as my grandfather said when I was a girl,
if you say a word often enough, it becomes you.
And students of mine years ago,
I don't teach what I do anymore,
but years ago when I was teaching it,
one of them was a monk, or preparing to be a priest.
He was in a seminary.
And he said, "This reminds me of prayer."
And also when I had a chance to teach some young people
from the Middle East who were visiting NYU,
and I told them how I do what I do,
they said, "It's like praying."
So that what I am doing is dedicating myself
to listening to the actual, not words,
but sounds that people make, the utterances that they make,
and then trying my best to learn those utterances.
And so it's not the same as what a comic does.
Or I'm not bringing, or I'm not intending,
intention isn't enough,
but I'm not intending to project my idea
of a person on to how I'm performing them.
I'm at least dedicating myself to what they actually said.
And then because cameras became small enough
around the show that I worked on in the mid 2000s,
like 2005 to 2011, I was a able to take a video camera,
and then I worked with an Ailey dancer
to try to learn the movements that they did.
And that's much harder for me than it is for dancers.
So I would say it's not dedicated to caricature.
It's dedicated to appreciating
how spectacular it is that people can speak,
not just the language that they have learned,
but they can speak in patterns,
beautiful patterns that cause you
to know about them and to feel for them.
So it's a different project than caricatures.
You must really love people a lot,
without doing the Hollywood thing.
How do you- -: I'm interested in people.
-: You're interested.
-: By the way, nobody really talks.
I wish I had written this down.
I was going to on the plane here.
But if you listen to,
and actually I think it's kind of dangerous,
because if there was an emergency, people really,
so the pilot, let's say, if you think he's saying
we're going to land in five minutes,
what he's really probably gonna be saying,
for example, not everybody, something like,
"We're gonna land in five min."
When I was little, my mother would say enunciate,
but it's not just that.
If you really, I work with a very,
very brilliant person who helps me hear things,
and we study them, almost nobody says a whole word.
And it's just so, it's like, what I do isn't that hard.
If you really are willing to go,
if you're really willing to listen to the tape
and listen to what they really said,
it wasn't a sentence that goes across the page like my book.
And that's also where Shakespeare comes in,
'cause he played with rhythms, and people do jazz.
It's like jazz.
It's like, that's what we're doing.
We talk.
And some people are really great at it,
which has nothing to do
with education or anything like that.
In fact, the people who are very educated,
professors are not that interesting for me to do,
unless it's more like Cornel West
who's speaking in this very idiosyncratic way.
But I'm interested in the people who break up words
and break up sentences because of feeling.
That's the actor's craft has to do with feeling.
And many of us use words to cover our feelings.
-: Well, that is true.
Isn't that what political rhetoric is?
When I watch your presentation,
and I see you really embody a character
and it's no one that looks like you
or talks like you're talking now,
I feel you put that person on.
It almost feels like you yourself,
and maybe this is as you're listening to them,
you're bearing witness.
And you're ask- -: I'm what?
-: You're bearing witness.
And you're asking us in the audience
to bear witness as well.
And to give that person their due, their respect.
That's powerful.
Because not only are you telling the story,
you're really presenting them again and again
for us to respect and to give a little bit of honor to,
especially when it's not something,
a perspective that we would hold ourselves.
So it gives us a chance to practice empathy maybe
in some way to really hear.
-: But people do less and less now than when, say,
30 years ago when I did
"Fires in the Mirror" and "Twilight."
Less and less.
There was just a production of Twilight in New York.
And because I was involved in the production,
I didn't direct it,
but 'cause I was very involved in it,
I went to a lot of the shows, at least till it opened.
And people watch with a lot of judgment right now,
much more than 30 years ago.
And I don't know what that means.
What do you think it means if you experience that?
-: Oh, recently.
And I think we have less patience.
I think that it used to be,
when I did communications for the agency and they'd say,
we want you to practice, you have seven seconds,
make sure you have a period at the end
so that we can clip that and make,
and now it feels like we have two seconds.
So I don't think people hear things for as long.
There's that need to go, oh,
I'm gonna jump in, I'm gonna jump in.
So the pattern of interchange has sped up,
which means I don't think we're paying as much attention.
And I think that right now people are tense.
-: People are what? -: Tense.
There's a lot of anxiety.
So I don't think that people have the patience,
the spiritual patience to listen
as closely as we need to listen.
What do you think?
-: I don't know, but when you said that
about spiritual presence,
it made me think about being in Marrakesh.
And also in Dakar, where people are not literate.
And the boys gathered around these people
who were obviously just like on the street
or in a market who were obviously telling them stories.
And they were so enraptured by it.
And that's long gone now.
I remember being in Rome
getting a new phone, iPhone or something.
And there were these kids sitting around
with these iPads and play.
I thought, wow, would I,
they are playing with things that cost almost $1,000.
And so we can't go backwards.
But the idea of a human with nothing
being a source of rapture and awe
and fascination is long gone.
So I think the actual presence of a human
with just their human self,
which is what the theater is about is less interesting
if they're not doing something spectacular,
jumping very high, or jumping from something,
or singing a very interesting note
or doing some extraordinary spoken word.
But yeah, look, we can't go backwards.
You gotta move with it, what it is.
So I don't wanna sound like some old critic,
but I know as a teacher,
I'm teaching now and I teach on Sundays
for four or five hours straight.
And I'm old now.
And it's like I said to my assistant, I said,
"You think we should have taken longer breaks?"
And he said, "Yeah, probably,
'cause we only took a 15-minute break."
-: Take 20. -: Yeah, it's like, oh, okay.
And that I have to ask my,
I have to talk to them about, and it's not just this class.
This started 20 years ago.
I have to talk to them about paying attention
to each other's work.
And that's amazing to me.
-: It's like we should all be practicing how to be present.
-: Practicing presence, that's a good book right there.
You can write it.
I'll write the blurb.
-: Okay, all right, yeah, I'll work on that.
Yeah, 'cause we want people to show up and they show up,
but they're really too preoccupied
with the phone and a hundred other things.
-: We can't go backwards, but I do, the question would be,
and I don't have the brain to figure it out is like,
what is the value of human presence?
I will say this.
I had lunch here in a restaurant in town, here in town.
And unlike New York City, in New York,
there's people sitting across from each other
in the restaurant and they're doing this all the time.
I didn't see any of that here, I have to say.
(audience applauding)
All right, all right, that's fantastic.
We could talk for another hour.
I know that you don't have another hour,
and we don't have another hour to spend here.
And I'm gonna ask you
probably the most ridiculous question last,
but in your book, "Letters to a Young Artist,"
one it's something you said early on
really captured it for me.
And you said that art should take
what is complex and render it simply.
And America's been around for a few hundred years,
400 before 1776.
So we've been around for 400 years,
and I don't think there's anything
more complex in America than race.
How do you even begin to make that simple?
-: You don't.
Because I think the danger right now of trying
to simplify America back to the notion of the allowed voice,
the allowed, A-L-L-O-W-E-D voice,
many of us have sense enough to know
that we have to stand back.
We do have to make space,
because it's crippling us spiritually if we don't.
And so I don't think there's anything
that can be simplified.
I think in art, we can,
art isn't the world.
It's like a very small prism,
and a small refraction, to use your word before.
And so we can take a little tiny bit of it,
whether that's a whole movie or a whole exhibition.
We're basically taking
a little tiny bit of this huge tapestry.
And we're looking at it closely under a microscope
and then daring to find a space in that tapestry
to add one extra or unexpected color.
I think about my friend who had a wonderful little shop
in the village called the 13th loom.
Martha Jones was her name.
And she made these very beautiful scarves
and dresses and woven,
and Black woman who had gone to Sweden to learn weaving.
And they said, we don't have any, enough,
we don't have any space for you,
but they had this extra loom, and said, well, come on in.
And she studied there.
And what she did was to deliberately break the warp thread,
which is the thread that keeps everything together.
And by doing that,
just this beautiful, beautiful design would come.
And so I think about America's tapestry, whatever it is,
whether it's something from some Betsy Ross kind of thing,
or the Black Panthers, 10 point platform,
or something that Gloria Steinem wrote,
or if we would ever dare,
something Tony Morrison wrote to look at this thing,
like a tapestry and dare to look in a little tiny,
tiny, empty space and say, well, now,
what am I going to do
with that little tiny space in my lifetime?
And then, so we're all making our mark, our mark, tiny mark.
And if, I believe, particularly for me,
if it's with love, it's a contribution,
but there are some people
who have other ways of making that contribution,
but even the revolutionary is often caring love.
So I'm into love in terms of how we dare
to try to add something to this quite complicated story
that I don't think can be simplified.
Thank you.
We all have a place to make a mark.
We all have- -: There's plenty
of space to make a mark.
-: So we just have to- -: You never have to,
again, with this thing about aloud.
Don't be worried about, there's no space for me,
or I'm jealous of this.
There's plenty of space, if you will look to make your mark.
-: Thank you. (audience applauding)
I couldn't have crafted a better ending.
Thank you so much
for coming this afternoon. -: Thank you all for coming.
Thank you so much.
-: Thank you Anna. (audience applauding)
(bright music)