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[0:02] Christine Toy Johnson: Welcome back to Talk Back, the Dramatists Guild podcast about building the theater we want to see.

[0:07] Christine Toy Johnson: I'm your host, Christine Toy Johnson.

[0:10] Christine Toy Johnson: This season is all about collaboration.

[0:13] Christine Toy Johnson: In this episode, we'll talk about connecting, working, and writing as immigrants of the United States.

[0:19] Christine Toy Johnson: Our guests are playwright Saviana Stanescu, Caridad Svich, and Daniel Gallant of the New Rican Poets Cafe.

[0:28] Christine Toy Johnson: Each share from their own experiences in creating space to specifically highlight immigrant voices.

[0:35] Christine Toy Johnson: I'm so happy to welcome my guests today. Would you please introduce yourselves to our listeners?

[0:40] Christine Toy Johnson: Let's start with Saviana.

[0:42] Saviana Stanescu: Hi, everyone. I'm Saviana Stanescu. I'm a playwright, poet, and artivist based in New York. I consider myself a global playwright or a playwright without borders, but definitely an immigrant playwright in the US.

[0:56] Saviana Stanescu: Thank you.

[0:57] Christine Toy Johnson: Thank you. Caridad.

[1:00] Caridad Svich: Hi, my name is Caridad Svich. I'm a playwright, translator, essayist, and artivist. I'm also the founder of No Passport Theatre Alliance and Press, and I am a child of immigrants, but I was born in the United States.

[1:16] Caridad Svich: Thank you.

[1:17] Christine Toy Johnson: Daniel.

[1:18] Daniel Gallant: Hi, this is Daniel Gallant. I'm a writer, teacher, and the executive director of the New Rican Poets Cafe. I am not an immigrant, but the New Rican Poets Cafe serves immigrants and artists from a range of backgrounds through poetry, music, theater, education, and a variety of other events.

[1:36] Daniel Gallant: Thank you so much. I wonder if you could tell us a little more about the programs that you've been hosting there, especially pertaining to immigrants and immigrant artists.

[1:49] Daniel Gallant: Certainly. Well, a little bit of background on the cafe. Since 1973, the New Rican Poets Cafe has championed artists who exist outside the mainstream, in particular Latino, Black, immigrant, indigenous, and LGBT artists who have not yet found consistent havens for their literary, theatrical, or musical work.

[2:13] Daniel Gallant: Each year before COVID, of course, we served more than 70,000 spectators, the majority of whom are young people of color, and our performances, classes, and workshops feature spoken word, theater, Latin jazz, dance, film, and literacy and writing workshops.

[2:31] Daniel Gallant: Most of them take place in the former tenement building on East Third Street that the cafe owns and operates, but also in schools, city parks, museums, and lots of other venues around the greater New York City area.

[2:44] Daniel Gallant: The cafe has been an incubator and launching pad for hundreds of plays and musicals, including works by Ishmael Reed, Miguel Piñero, Bazuki Sean Gay, Sarah Jones, Elaine del Valle, and many more.

[3:00] Daniel Gallant: We recently concluded our first online short play and monologue contest, which featured world premieres of work by both established and emerging artists, including Reggie Gaines and Katy Dyes Fitch, who's on this podcast.

[3:15] Daniel Gallant: We've been proud to partner with Caridad Svich on her events under the No Passport Series as well as with Saviana on the Liberties Daughters series.

[3:25] Daniel Gallant: Since March of 2020, like so many arts organizations across New York City and across the country, we've been closed for on-site programming due to COVID, but we developed dozens of digital versions of our arts programs, including twice weekly open mics, which are very popular, poetry workshops, live stream performances, and panel discussions.

[3:50] Daniel Gallant: Among these series are Liberties Daughters, which we partner with Saviana on, the Indigenous Voices Showcase series, which is curated by and centers the voice of indigenous artists, the online translation slam, digital verse, an ongoing poetic collaboration with WNYC, the ASL SLAM, and a whole bunch of others.

[4:12] Daniel Gallant: We are keeping very busy online and we are also cautiously but excitedly looking forward to the day when we can reopen in person.

[4:21] Christine Toy Johnson: Thank you. Saviana, I'd love to hear about the programs you've been putting in place specifically to illuminate immigrant playwrights and multidisciplinary artists and how collaborating with the New Rican Poets Cafe came about.

[4:37] Saviana Stanescu: Thank you, Christine. Yes, I founded Immigrant Artists and Scholars in New York, YES, in 2010 as an alliance or a platform for immigrant artists to be heard. We work with immigrant playwrights, actors, all kinds of multidisciplinary artists, and we showcase their work.

[4:37] Saviana Stanescu: We started to work with the New Rican back in 2010 actually when we did our first show, so I've always been very fond of the New Rican Poets Cafe. Unfortunately, of course, the pandemic had us stop all our events. We had planned a Liberties Daughters event for March 14, the year of the pandemic, so it was so sad to stop and cancel that particular live event.

[5:32] Saviana Stanescu: But Daniel asked us to do it online. Daniel Gallant asked us to do Liberties Daughters, immigrant women's monologues almost every other month, I think. I found that there were advantages in doing these online events because they did reach more people globally.

[5:51] Saviana Stanescu: I found it actually very fulfilling to have these immigrant women's monologues every other month and invite different immigrant playwrights or second-generation immigrant playwrights or actors or multidisciplinary artists. I'm open to these different forms because, you know, as immigrant artists, as hyphenated artists, we do wear multiple hats, and I do like to work and encourage the work on these multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary platforms.

[6:23] Saviana Stanescu: Yes, the New Rican has been for us a great platform during the pandemic to have our voices heard. I am an immigrant who came to the US in my early 30s, and I'm actually, I will be celebrating 20 years since I arrived in New York in August this year. I consider myself a 20-year-old American.

[6:48] Saviana Stanescu: That's wonderful. I also want to add that I got inspired by Caridad Svich. No Passport has been one of the artists that I admire the most, and I have presented with Caridad Svich in different events and different conferences. No Passport Press published two of my books, The New York Place and For the Barbarian Woman, so I'm a big fan and I hope friend of Caridad Svich.

[7:10] Christine Toy Johnson: Thank you so much. Well, fortunately for us, we have Caridad in the room with us, the virtual podcast room, so I'd love to welcome you in and ask you about your experiences curating No Passport and working with New Rican Poets Cafe and your friend Saviana. Anything you want to share with us?

[7:10] Caridad Svich: Thank you, Christine. First of all, delighted to be in the presence of all these wonderful people. No Passport Theatre Alliance and Press was founded in 2003 as a collective of 12 artists dedicated to exploring the boundaries and intersections between actually words and music from an experimental point of view, and it's sort of mushroomed into a global alliance looking primarily at human and environmental rights and also looking at works, the promotion, advocacy, and publication of works devoted to aesthetic diversity and ethnic and racial diversity.

[7:10] Caridad Svich: It's been a long journey with No Passport. We've held several conferences at the New Rican Poets Cafe, and I'm very grateful that the conferences were archived by HowlRound. So if you're ever curious to take a walk into the past, into the recent past, you can go to the HowlRound archives and you can see some of our conferences that were archived there.

[8:57] Caridad Svich: I've been very interested in focusing on publication exclusively, only because I feel like that's a legacy. You know, like that's gonna stay behind. And I feel like it's really important to get work out there. So right now I'm copy editing five different books. We launched several books this summer, including Saviana's For Barbarian Woman and Other Plays, Lana Joffrey's Valiant, Stacey Chakens' Looking for Louie, and several others.

[8:57] Caridad Svich: I feel like that's where I feel like the legacy will be. We've also collaborated extensively with Chantal Bilodeau on Climate Change Theater Action, which we actually initiated in 2013.

[9:37] Christine Toy Johnson: So wonderful to hear about No Passport. Thank you, Caridad. I also have a question for you about how you find your collaborators. How do they find you, or how do you go about bringing people in?

[9:51] Caridad Svich: How do I find the collaborators? This is an exciting question. Sometimes I just walk up to people and say, "Hey, you want to be part of this?" I admire their work or I've been following their work and I'm a super fan. Sometimes there are people emailing me and saying, "Hey, you know, I've heard about what you all are doing. I'm interested." Sometimes it's just, yeah, like word of mouth, like other people in the global collectives, about 600 of us in this collective.

[10:16] Caridad Svich: It's interesting because we've been talking, obviously, about the pandemic a little bit and online collaborations and so forth. But, you know, No Passport started and has been almost virtual for its entire existence. You know, I haven't met like all the 600 people; I haven't physically met all the 600 people that are part of the alliance.

[10:33] Caridad Svich: I feel very comfortable in the virtual environment. I feel like it's my second home. I think also because I feel like the input is around No Passport, once it started to mushroom beyond the initial 12 people that sort of shook hands and said we're gonna do this, is that it's always been devoted, as the title sort of states, to international exchange sort of built into its vibe.

[11:05] Caridad Svich: That means you have to work virtually, you know what I mean? Because we can't log all those miles, we can't jump on a plane, we can't all do that, but also environmentally, as we know, we need to be thinking more and more about that because I think remote work is in order to save the environment; more remote work is where we'll need to be.

[11:26] Christine Toy Johnson: We'll be back in just a minute with more from today's panel.

[11:33] Christine Toy Johnson: Welcome back to Talkback.

[11:35] Christine Toy Johnson: Today we're talking about collaborating to amplify the voices of immigrant playwrights.

[11:40] Christine Toy Johnson: I asked our guests how else they've been gathering their communities.

[11:46] Saviana Stanescu: So, uh yeah, the virtual environment has been great because we have been able to do so many, uh great events and have so many people listening to us, precisely because, um, I feel that many times, you know, unfortunately, people, um, patronize, um, uh immigrant artists.

[12:05] Saviana Stanescu: So my strategy and my desire is to show that they can learn something from immigrant artists as well. You know, it's a give and take. So I'd like us to be able to express some of our voices and say what we have to say in a way that gives people more insight into what it means to be an immigrant artist, a multicultural artist, an artist without borders. So I'm trying very hard, and I've been trying for all my life here in the US to fight stereotypes and to challenge the stereotypical way of putting people into small boxes. My entire work is about opening up doors and opening up minds as much as I can. We have things to share, we have stories to tell, and I also believe, of course, that the US audiences can learn a lot from what immigrant artists have to share.

Of course, there are different immigrant artists; there are people who came here as children, there are people who came here as adults, as myself, and there are different sets of challenges for different immigrant artists. We do what we can to amplify immigrant voices in any way we can. Even with my own plays, all my American plays are about the immigrant experience. You know, I guess you cannot escape that, especially when you are an immigrant like me. I was a playwright, I was a poet in Romania, I was an established artist in Romania, and I had to start from scratch here in the US. These different challenges, of course, impact the way immigrant voices write or express themselves, and again we need to hear them.

I'm gonna say that again and again: pay attention to immigrant artists because people can learn from what happens in other countries. People can learn from multicultural people who navigate across borders and have intercultural stories to tell.

[14:13] Christine Toy Johnson: Yes, of course. The idea of having a global perspective is so exciting, and I'm so thrilled with the work that you all are doing. Daniel, I would love to know from you how it's been where you sit to see so many different communities coming together. How meaningful has that been?

[14:33] Daniel Gallant: Fortunately, we found ways to bring a lot of the programming, open mics, performances, panels, education events that the cafe is known for, and for which audiences have flocked to. We were able to bring a lot of those online via Zoom, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. And those virtual performances have increased access to our events for many people from around the country and across the world who had wanted to visit and participate in these events, who wanted to share their voices during our open mics, who wanted to try out their monologues or spoken word pieces at our events, but just who couldn't reach us otherwise. Our events, more now than they ever have before, feature and engage artists, students, and spectators from across the country and around the world.

We are hearing from more voices than ever before, including some artists from overseas who wake up at two or three or four in the morning to join our programs. But on our virtual stage, as before on our bricks and mortar stage, we encourage artists to take creative risks, to address challenging and controversial topics, to be honest and direct, to share their personal narratives, and to be willing to fail and to learn from failure and to learn from the reaction of audiences. And although the audience-artist interaction is different on Zoom, different on Facebook than in the physical space, we've seen a lot of innovation as the artists who we work with adjust to that sort of give and take, that sort of feedback.

Because feedback loops are a huge part of the work that we do at the cafe. There's a lot of direct interaction between artists and audience. And so artists learn very quickly what part of their work really resonates with an audience and what part doesn't. And that dynamic has shifted online, but in a way, some of the response has been more real-time and more detailed. And that has allowed some artists to sort of craft, update, and revise their work. We have seen some artists who might not have been able to hear each other's work otherwise or might not have been able to collaborate on a theater piece or spoken word piece, who, because they live in different cities, because they had just never encountered each other, through the magic of online programming, have been able to create cross-disciplinary works and partnerships and collaborations.

And many artists who perform at our events, both online and in person, view US popular culture and US pop politics as outsiders through a lens of difference or alienation. And sometimes this is because those artists are immigrants, and sometimes it's because they're from communities of color that have experienced repression and discrimination throughout this country. And it's always been true that we aim to entertain audiences, but also to challenge the assumptions of our audiences and to give them opportunities to learn from perspectives and voices they might not otherwise have heard. Saviana's and Caridad's work as writers, curators, publishers, and producers resonates very strongly with our mission and our aesthetic.

[17:54] Christine Toy Johnson: Thank you. Wonderful. Caridad, I wonder if you have anything to add about how it has been to gather in your community in new or old ways.

[18:04] Caridad Svich: Well, first of all, beautiful, incredibly well-articulated sentiment from both my colleagues. I think to add, I would just say I feel like during the pandemic, when the pandemic hit, I personally found, you know, basically, as most of us did in the arts, all the work stopped in its tracks. And so I launched into a series of collaborations with different organizations, mostly scrappy folks doing work across the country who decided to really embrace the digital medium. And that's been a blessing, I have to say. I got to work with people that some of whom I never got to work with before. Others amplified work that otherwise perhaps we may not have intersected. But I have found that there's something about tossing down doors and going against gatekeeping that is something I've always believed in. So I feel like this moment, as people say, has actually put that to the fore and made that more necessary.

[19:10] Christine Toy Johnson: Right, right, right. Well, just to follow up on that, Caridad, I wonder if you feel like people are hearing and receiving your stories differently after the events of this past year.

[19:22] Caridad Svich: That's an intriguing question. I felt like I've actually had direct contact with audiences in a very kind of thrilling way, including doing a show where most of our technology broke down, sadly. And you know, suddenly we were all in the chat room together and just talking to one another. And I felt like that was the most blessed, beautiful thing. But also hearing so much from the disability arts community that has felt completely left out for years and years and years. And suddenly feeling like, oh, this is a space we can share. So I feel like those would have been the intersections that have been the most rewarding.

[20:04] Christine Toy Johnson: So to wrap up our conversation, I'd love to give you each an opportunity to tell our listeners where they can find your work and where they can engage with it and learn more about your stories. I'll start with Saviana.

[20:19] Saviana Stanescu: Thank you, Christine. So, yes, we have a Facebook group called Immigrant Artists and Scholars in New York, Yasni. The website page is on my own website, Saviana.com and SavianaStanescu.com. You can also find us, of course, on the Nuyorican Poet's Cafe schedule. And also you can find us on Fractured Atlas if you want to donate any money. And the last thing that I like to say is I feel that it is our responsibility as immigrant artists, as revolutionary artists, to continuously push our limits and push the borders of understanding here in the US and worldwide. I do feel that during the pandemic, Black Lives Matter and the voices of Black artists, Latinx artists, and other people of color are leading the new revolution here in the US. So I do want to be part of it, and I like to make all of you part of this. Let's be revolutionary artists and push the boundary of understanding and be the new revolution in the arts.

[21:32] Christine Toy Johnson: Thank you. Daniel, how can our listeners find your work and engage with it?

[21:38] Daniel Gallant: Thank you, Christine. First of all, I second everything that Saviana said. You can find most of our events from the past year and a half since the start of COVID on our YouTube page, on our Facebook page, and there are links to a lot of those programs also on our website. So our website is www.nuyorican.org, N-U-Y-O-R-I-C-A-N dot org. And our YouTube channel is youtube.com slash NuyoricanPoetsCafe, all one word. You'll find on our website and on our YouTube and Facebook page most of the videos from our recent collaborations with Saviana as well as with Caridad. And also those listeners who are interested in joining our events can sign up for our twice weekly online open mics on Monday nights and on Thursday nights. The sign-up sheets are always posted the night before on our website, nuyorican.org. And we look forward to hopefully being able to welcome back live audiences to our venue sometime in fall or the latest winter of 2021.

[22:48] Christine Toy Johnson: Wonderful. Thank you so much. And Caridad, how can people find you and engage with your work?

[22:55] Caridad Svich: You can find my work, stuff about my work at CaridadSvich.com. That's C-A-R-I-D-A-D-S-V-I-C-H dot com. And NoPassport.org. And also, I'm sort of on YouTube in different places. So you can find me on YouTube as well if you just keep in my name.

[23:13] Christine Toy Johnson: Thank you to our guests today for sharing their expertise and experience. Talkback is a production of the Dramatists Guild of America. It's produced by Amy Von Masick, Sarah Storm, and me, Christine Toy Johnson. Robert Delaney Pruyn mixes our show. Our theme music is by Andrea Daly. Our guest producer for this episode is Saviana Stanescu. The Dramatists Guild presents Talkback is distributed by the Broadway Podcast Network. Join the conversation online by using hashtag #DGTALKBACK. As always, to be continued.