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HNY’s Struggle to Create an Inclusive Community

In the spring of 2020, as the global pandemic forced us into lockdown and new ways of running programs, HNY staff members including Director of Programs Michael Washburn corresponded with Pamela Conley, a Deaf professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf, about how best to accommodate her participation in our Zoom-based online Community Conversations.  It took a few tries, some of them frantic, but it worked quite well in the end to use Zoom’s ASL services, and ultimately, Pam’s perspective in the group discussions was extremely valuable and welcomed.  We invited Pam to write about this experience for the blog because we think it contained lessons not just for HNY, but might also be relevant to our various partners’ thinking on the issues of deaf and hard-of-hearing access and participation.  –Sara Ogger

As a culturally Deaf American, I have been dealing with the many inequities in our  society all my life, but the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed many of these to the  forefront. This public health crisis altered my life, personal and professional, overnight. I had to build new virtual environments, aiming for optimal access. While the transition to the virtual was difficult, I also discovered that my access to public events is in some ways  more equitable. For example, I unexpectedly acquired the tools and techniques for full participation in  Humanities New York’s programming. I was able to participate in last year’s online conversations, hosted by HNY, along with my fellow New Yorkers who were also struggling with the pandemic. Hearing the COVID-19 stories of New Yorkers through American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters was eye-opening. While access to its programming for deaf and hard-of-hearing New Yorkers is now widely available, HNY needs to employ a more concerted outreach effort to ensure that deaf and hard-of-hearing communities across New York are provided with opportunities for  effective participation in its humanities programming. 

Throughout 2020, deaf and hard-of-hearing Americans negotiated unexpected paths  through COVID-19, continuing to deal with the many inequities and injustices exacerbated by  the federal government’s insufficient response to the pandemic. Average Americans have long assumed that America’s institutions are fully accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing people, and that they are included in crucial conversations about national, state, and local issues. It took a pandemic to expose the longstanding illusion that deaf and hard-of-hearing Americans live in an equitable society. The culture is finally changing with more and more ASL interpreters appearing in video boxes within televised press conference briefings. Even the White House includes ASL interpretations of its regular press briefings.  

We are fortunate that leaders at HNY have also acknowledged the need for deaf and  hard-of-hearing communities across New York State that have been historically underserved  to be included in its humanities programming. I was able to participate in difficult  conversations during the peak of the pandemic. Through ASL interpreters in Zoom, I was  able to learn from my fellow New Yorkers the daily challenges they faced in dealing with  COVID-19. I wanted to connect with my neighbors for useful strategies for dealing with the  unknowns of the pandemic. These conversations also provided me some respite from the  suffering of fatigue and worry.  

With COVID cases declining in New York, HNY as a venerable institution has rebuilt and newly transformed, reaching out to historically underserved groups to be part of mainstream programming, including its conversations. Perhaps now more than any other  time in the history of New York State, HNY has an unprecedented opportunity to reach out to  New Yorkers who are deaf and hard-of-hearing. Interestingly from a humanities point of view, schools for the deaf are safe-keepers of artifacts associated with the deaf and hard-of-hearing experience, and are critically needed for the retelling of their stories as part of our state’s more complete historical collections. HNY needs to do more to involve and sustain its efforts to include deaf and hard-of-hearing New Yorkers in order to share their knowledge in ways that inspire all New Yorkers to value inclusion and empathy.  

How can HNY, and other institutions in New York for that matter, expand their  community engagement work for greater inclusion of deaf and hard-of-hearing New Yorkers?  A place I’d like to propose as a starting point is the  Empire State Association of the Deaf, the oldest civil rights association for the deaf in the United States. ESAD is a statewide community of deaf and hard-of-hearing New York  leaders and volunteers who have knowledge to share about their neighborhoods, workplaces,  and schools. This organization is a hidden gem for institutions that, like HNY, are interested in mining for information about Deaf culture, stories, and local history specific to deaf and hard-of-hearing people living in New York. For example, a story that should be shared more widely is that of the tireless efforts by the trailblazing deaf New Yorker Dr. Robert Panara to persuade the National Baseball Hall of Fame to induct William  Ellsworth “Dummy” Hoy.  

In these rapidly changing and challenging times, it is critical for HNY to expand and  sustain its role in sharing the untold stories of deaf and hard-of-hearing New Yorkers with its  mainstream audience. Currently, while ASL accessibility to its programming is easy to set  up, HNY consists of leaders who are hearing, which is hardly conducive to promoting inclusion for New Yorkers who are not. Therefore, HNY should work with ESAD leaders for finding, documenting and sharing memories and stories of deaf and hard-of-hearing New Yorkers. It should also learn from these communities about how it can serve them better in the future. HNY is now strongly positioned to be more welcoming and equitable for deaf and hard-of-hearing  New Yorkers who have historically been excluded from its programming. 

Pamela Conley (BA in English and Education, MS in Deaf Education, MA in English Literature, working towards a PhD in Humanities and Culture with an interdisciplinary focus) Associate Professor, Rochester Institute of Technology/National Technical Institute for the Deaf, writing consultant in the University Writing Program, coordinator of academic support for deaf and hard of hearing students in the College of Liberal Arts; coordinator of the associate in science (AS) degree in applied liberal arts program for deaf and hard-of-hearing students; areas of specialization in literary representations of deaf people and interdisciplinary studies of deaf people.

Preserving LGBT Historic Sites

How do we preserve a sense of place when its context is constantly changing? We continue our Stonewall 50 blog series by discussing the importance of preserving place-based LBGTQ history. HNY interviewed Ken Lustbader, one of the Project Directors of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, who discusses how digital preservation can be an effective tool for passing stories intergenerationally, particularly when some of the most important historical spaces were illegal, transient, or have since been renovated.

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HNY: Let’s start with Stonewall. Stonewall has arguably become as much a symbol as a brick-and-mortar institution in the popular imagination. Yet it is a concrete place and arguably the centerpiece of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project. What is the importance of place to LGBT history and to the LGBT rights movement today?

KL: We’re using the Stonewall Inn and other places to demonstrate that LGBT history is all around New York City, and that LGBT history is American history. Three historic preservationists started the project, and our team now includes an employee who is also a preservationist.  As place-based historians, we look at sites and try to embed histories into them, creating visceral connections and narratives that people to see, physically touch, and experience, making a concrete connection to history. People go to places like the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, or Mount Vernon and Mount Rushmore, because those sites speak to a cultural current, a historic moment, a regional or national identity. It’s really important that LGBT history is considered in the same terms: people can go to Stonewall and have a visceral experience at this location of a key turning point in the LGBT rights movement. People read history in books or listen to history podcasts, and share historic narratives from one generation to the next. Places, by contrast, have a different cognitive connection for people, allowing them to travel in time at a specific location. That’s what’s so effective about, say, Gettysburg or other Civil War battlefields. In a similar sense, people come to Stonewall to experience the building and streets where the uprising took place. 


“In 1969, Stonewall was mafia-run. It was pathetic on the inside, painted black, with no running water; it served watered-down drinks and was constantly under threat of police raids. But it was the only game in town!”


It’s important that we view Stonewall in light of its historic associations. The bar’s history reflects the shift from oppression to liberation and eventual memorialization. Bars were central to LGBT identification. They were the primary spaces where people could meet, mingle, make connections, have a sense of community and develop an identity. They were also the launching point for job opportunities and politicization, through connections and conversations. From the 1930s through the late 1970s, LGBT bars were mainly run by the mafia due to the discriminatory policies of the New York State Liquor Authority. In 1969, Stonewall was mafia-run. It was pathetic on the inside, painted black, with no running water; it served watered-down drinks and was constantly under threat of police raids. But it was the only game in town! It had a big dance floor and played popular music. The 1969 uprising came in response to a routine raid. What happened over six days and nights was a cat-and-mouse game of resistance in the streets of Greenwich Village.

Christopher Park, photo by Christopher D. Brazee/NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, 2016.

Today, people can walk around and get a sense of why Christopher Park [situated across from the Stonewall Inn] and Christopher Street directly in front of Stonewall are such important symbols for memorializing this history. It also creates a space of reflection for tragedies like the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting, or celebrations like Pride Month.

HNY: How does the Stonewall rebellion influence our understanding of LGBT life in New York City before 1969? How do those earlier sites complicate the Stonewall-centered narrative?

KL: LGBT history is a relatively new inquiry dating from the 1970s. The study of LGBT placed-based history is an even more recent inquiry dating from the 1990s. It’s a new field that is really important to understand. We’re looking at places beyond the Stonewall Inn, that reflect the community’s political and oppositional issues and discrimination. Bars like Stonewall embody that in many cases. But beyond them, we’re looking at sites that convey the community’s influence on American culture. It might be a performance venue, such as the Winter Garden Theater, where West Side Story–a collaboration of a gay man, a lesbian, and some bisexual men–premiered. It could be the residences of notable individuals, places where important literature or architectural works were produced. By looking at NYC through an LGBT lens, we’re illuminating the rich history of LGBT New Yorkers before Stonewall, from the nineteenth century to today. There’s an erasure of this history, and we’re trying to recover that history and make it visible in a concrete way, using extant buildings throughout the city to change people’s perceptions. That history is at your fingertips through our recently launched app as you’re walking down the streets.

Caffe Cino Storefront, May 1965 Photo: James D. Gossage, courtesy of New York Public Library

There is also this sense of before Stonewall and after Stonewall. Most people think gay history starts after Stonewall, and we really try to dispel that myth. There was a rich cultural life and political activism in NYC pre-Stonewall, especially with the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society, two “homophile” organizations that were effective in advancing LGBT issues in the 1950s and 60s. We like to identify sites that reflect the community’s influence throughout this city and yet were shaped by LGBT oppression and discrimination. Take Caffe Cino, the birthplace of Off-Off Broadway theater. In the decade from 1958 to 1968, Caffe Cino was an incubator space for gay playwrights and actors. It was also an alternative to the bars as a meeting place. Or consider the community centers where LGBT people appropriated the space to discuss oppression and discrimination. We’re trying to recover all the myriad ways LGBT people lived their lives pre-Stonewall.

Po, previously Caffe Cino. Christopher D. Brazee/NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, 2016.

The impact of Stonewall is profound: it did change the trajectory. Immediately after Stonewall, there were new groups forming in NYC like the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance. Many of their members were already activists in some way or another, either with the Mattachine Society or Daughters of Bilitis, or were involved in the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, the hippie and yippie and other anti-war movements. So people were already activated in some way and were raising consciousness about broader issues in the 1960s. Stonewall became the armature that allowed those people to react and say, “It’s our turn now! We’re going to take advantage of this moment!” Stonewall may not have been the birth of the modern gay rights movement, but it was a crucial turning point–the moment that people became more visible and vocal about LGBT rights and began protesting and organizing in a very direct way.

What is remarkable is that the advance of LGBT rights has sometimes outpaced historical documentation of the movement. [Laughter]. Writing our history has taken a backseat, so to speak, to wonderful advances in employment opportunities, marriage equality, and visibility–all happening intertwined with the AIDS epidemic. But it’s so important to know one’s past and understand the battles, struggles, bravery, and personal losses of the activists who came before us. In the 1960s, if you were a gay man or a lesbian, or a gender-nonconforming person, and you found yourself in a bar, you could at any moment be arrested, lose your job, lose access to your family, your religion, and the whole trajectory of your life would be forever changed. 

Without knowledge of past activism, there is the danger of history repeating itself. Younger activists today need to know that history, especially the movement’s development over time. An example are the street theater tactics and “zaps” that AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP) modeled from the earlier Gay Activists Alliance(GAA). GAA was probably the most important LGBT activist group operating in the 1970s. Its primary innovation were “zaps”, which were public disruptions targeting public figures that were quite effective in calling attention to discrimination against gay people. ACT UP adapted the zaps to a new context shortly after it was formed in 1987, drawing attention to the AIDS epidemic. What we’re doing is using buildings, actual brick-and-mortar locations, to tell those stories.

HNY: Stonewall is a touchstone even internationally. But what are some of the legacies of Stonewall right here in New York City?

KL: The immediate legacy of Stonewall is its role in the expansion of activism and quest for liberation here in New York. Stonewall was an uprising that took place over six nights in June 1969. The main reason it was so effective was that activists were already in place who understood that this was an important moment to seize on. Because of its concentration of activists and LGBT people, NYC was an incubator space that fed off the energy and power and diversity of its people. There were a diverse range of individuals, including people like Craig Rodwell, Martha Shelly, Slyvia Rivera, and Marsha P. Johnson, who, contributed to a collective energy and idealism helped promote this huge groundswell of activism.

In fact Rivera and Johnson formed an activist group called STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), which was especially ahead of its time. Talk about discrimination within the community: they were completely cast aside and looked down on because of their gender-nonconforming presentation while other parts of the movement wished to normalize, secure employment opportunities and equal rights and things like that.

Starting point of the first NYC Pride March. Christopher D. Brazee/NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, 2017.

After Stonewall, with this rise of radical activists, the older East Coast homophile leagues agreed that the following year they’d gather in NYC to commemorate Stonewall with a march. The “Christopher Street Day March” took place on the last Sunday in June of 1970. That first march has transformed into what it is, the current pride parade. It was shrewd branding, seized on by people who had the foresight and organizational abilities to think, “Now’s the time to do it!” The commemoration was based in New York City, but they coordinated with activists across the country. It was a collective effort of disparate individuals, all with the same cause.


“If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture you would be pretty much left with ‘Let’s Make a Deal.'”


HNY: The NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project app reaches audiences well beyond New York City, particularly LGBT youth. Why is it important to connect LGBT youth to this history?

KL: Gay people are everywhere, but their stories aren’t passed-down in an intergenerational sense, through family members or through religious affiliations or other traditional oral histories. That poses a distinct challenge. Earlier generations grew up knowing well the force of anti-gay rhetoric and the lack of attention paid to the AIDS epidemic. Nowadays, a younger, post-Will & Grace generation has been fortunate to grow up with visibility, opportunities, more integrated gay lives. For many, the closet is not a central theme, or at least it’s not a very large closet.

There’s a great quote from Fran Lebowitz that I think neatly summarizes the LGBT community’s contribution to the humanities: “If you take out all the homosexuality from American culture, you’d be left with the old television game show ‘Let’s Make A Deal.’”[Laughter].

HNY: How does the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project reflect the diversity of LBTQ history in New York City? 

KL: Quite frankly, it’s a challenge. We try to identify sites that reflect the full diversity of the community, in race, class, creed, gender identity and geography. But the nature of LGBT research is inherently challenging. We’re a bottom-up research project. Many of our sites are commercial establishments; others are associated with individuals with limited documentation. Yet there are so many sites that are not reflected in our project, either because there are no written records or because people claimed space in the most transient way possible. For instance, trans people could take over the back of a restaurant for a dinner hour. Women of color, who couldn’t afford to open their own bars, or weren’t welcome at majority-white bars, went to people’s houses and had potluck suppers–it’s hard to identify and research these important narratives that aren’t often recognized.

Mt. Morris exterior sign, 1980s. Photographer unknown.

The flip side is that we’ve documented spaces that we’re hoping touch on diversity in the community. Take, for instance, the Mount Morris Baths in Harlem, which opened in the early 20th century as a traditional bathhouse but was appropriated as a gay male bathhouse and later re-appropriated by men of color, who were often excluded from other bathhouses. There are so many other locations that convey the full array of sites in the LGBT community of people of color: Lorraine Hansberry’s apartment on Bleecker Street; Langston Hughes’s home in Harlem; or the recently-demolished Paradise Garage, which was instrumental in the making of garage music.

What we do know and talk about is the very real discrimination that took place within the LGBT community. For example, the Bagatelle, a lesbian bar in the Village with a clientele of mostly middle-class white women, was not very welcoming of people of color. Audre Lorde writes about going there with white friends and being the only one carded.

Mt. Morris Baths former location Christopher D. Brazee/NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, 2016.

HNY: Sites listed on the app include homes, cemeteries, and beaches. What insights can such locations offer about the balance of personal and political motivations for New York City’s LGBT community?

KL: Yes. A great example is the Continental Baths in the basement of Ansonia Hotel in Manhattan. It opened in 1968, just before Stonewall, as a clean and lavish bath house catering primarily to white gay men. But it was also a place where socializing and political discussion took place, a little of everything. I spoke once with Dick Liesch, the late president of the Mattachine Society, who said, “Oh, yeah, we would sit in our towels and chat with each other. That’s where we had some of our best political discussions ever!” So in that case the personal was certainly political. Also, beaches have historically served as cruising grounds and socializing places. Jacob Riis Beach in Queens – or “Screech Beach,” as it came to be known, that was accessible by public transportation – was so popular among LGBT groups by the early 1970s that the Gay Activists Alliance set up tables there to raise people’s political awareness. These types of social spaces provide opportunities for people to come together and be informed about politics.

We include cemeteries because it’s an interesting tool to convey LGBT history by recognizing the final resting places of LGBT individuals from the 19th and 20th centuries. We recently did tours at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx and Green Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. It’s incredibly informative and meaningful to visit the grave sites of, for example, Emma Stebbins, the nineteenth-century sculptor of the “Angel of the Waters” statue at Central Park’s Bethesda Terrace, who was in a same-sex relationship with Charlotte Cushman, a leading actress of the day. Or the graves of Emery Hetrick and Damien Martin, who together who founded wehat is today named the Hetrick-Martin Institute in Manhattan [the nation’s largest LGBT youth services organization], more commonly known as the Harvey Milk High School. We visit the gravesites of a range of composers, from the sublime — Leonard Bernstein – to the most popular – Paul Jabara, author of “It’s Raining Men,” one of the most iconic gay songs of all time.

HNY: How are the Stonewall 50 commemorations being received?

KL: I’m thrilled to see people’s interest in the LGBT history and how it connects to the Stonewall Uprising and that earlier history of LGBT life in NYC. I’m excited to see people in search of a personal connection to stories about Stonewall 50. I get great satisfaction from this, whether I’m doing a presentation for middle and high school school students or leading a walking tour of sites on the Upper West Side. It’s wonderful to see people’s eyes open wide, knowing that they’re walking amidst a history they didn’t really know beforehand. I get to see people realize in real time that they’re part of this broad trajectory of humanity and activism that relates to both their own identity and LGBT visibility and rights today. And that it wasn’t a ‘walk in the park’ to get here: so many people’s lives were sacrificed and hurt because of discrimination. With Stonewall 50, it’s an opportunity to engender an appreciation of history, not just for this year or month, but for the future as well.

The LGBT Sites Project was supported in part by an HNY Action Grant. Learn more  and download the app at www.nyclgbtsites.org.

Interview by Joseph Murphy, Interim Grants Associate.

Ken Lustbader is a historic preservation consultant based in New York City. Between 2007 and 2015, he served as Historic Preservation Program Director at the J.M. Kaplan Fund where he was responsible for developing and implementing US and international grant initiatives. Prior to that he was lead consultant for the Lower Manhattan Emergency Preservation Fund, a coalition of five preservation organizations that was formed in response to the September 11 attacks. In that capacity he developed and implemented a comprehensive preservation strategy that included the conservation of in situ elements of the World Trade Center that are now integral components of the National 9/11 Memorial Museum. Between 1994 and 2002, he was the Director of the New York Landmarks Conservancy’s Sacred Sites Program.

NYC LGBT Sites Project Staff, from left to right: Andrew Dolkart, Jay Shockley, Amanda David, and Ken Lustbader.

Virtual Reality Immerses Visitors at Albany History Fair 2018

Participatory experiences top the list of expectations for today’s visitors to historic house museums and other cultural institutions, which presents both challenges and opportunities for the field. One new avenue for audience engagement is the incorporation of Virtual Reality (VR) technology. Humanities New York spoke with Deborah Emmons-Andarawis, Acting Director of Historic Cherry Hill, and Krysta Dennis and Michael Lounello from Siena College’s Creative Arts Department to discuss the debut of VR at the Albany History Fair in May 2018.

Historic Cherry Hill and the college’s Creative Arts Department laid the groundwork for this VR experiment through last year’s celebration of the New York State Women’s Suffrage Centennial. Krysta wrote Votes for Women, an immersive promenade performance that highlights key moments from suffrage history. The Creative Arts Department received an Action Grant to stage the play at Siena College and Ten Broeck Mansion. Based on the success of Votes for Women, Historic Cherry Hill invited Krysta to write a one-act play about Emily Rankin, a resident of Cherry Hill who opposed the 1917 women’s suffrage legislation. The Burden of the Ballot was a popular element of the 2017 Albany History Fair, which was funded in part by an Action Grant. This year, the organizations continued their collaboration with Action Grants for the 2018 fair. Dutch, a play that traces the WWI experiences of a member of the Rankin family through both an in-person and a VR component, premiered at the fair.

HNY: What was the focus for this year’s fair, and what made it distinctive from previous years?

Deborah: This was our nineteenth annual Albany History Fair. Every year we choose a theme relevant to Albany’s history. This year our theme was “WWI: The Albany Home Front.” We chose that because of the centennial of the end of WWI and also the anniversary of the death of Herbert Rankin of Cherry Hill. Herbert enlisted in spring of 1917 and was commissioned as a captain. To the Rankin family, Herbert was continuing a family tradition of patriotism and leadership that went all the way back to his great-great grandfather Philip Van Rensselaer, who built Cherry Hill and who served in the Revolutionary War. They were extraordinarily proud of him—but, as fate would have it, Herbert never saw action; he died of influenza on board the SS Euripides before he ever reached France.

The History Fair has evolved in recent years from a day of traditional talks and presentations to becoming a truly immersive experience. I think this year was a particular accomplishment in that regard because of Dutch and the VR experience, but also because of the WWI music played on period devices and the WWI food economy pre

sentation with its samples of what people were cooking and eating during WWI. Whether or not that food was enjoyable is another story! But it was a very sensory fair.

 

HNY: How does Virtual Reality fit into the larger goals of Historic Cherry Hill’s interpretive mission?

Deborah: Virtual Reality has an amazing power to bring the past to life. It allows a type of exploration that might not otherwise might be possible. It also makes the experience of a historical object more meaningful. In a sense you have a broadened understanding of it when you encounter it.

What really makes Cherry Hill such an amazing place is that we have the real thing. Our collection of 70,000 artifacts and manuscripts is the basis for all of our programming. Compared to many other historic sites, there’s very little guesswork. We know what the family said. Those words came to life in Krysta’s play, both with live actors and the VR experience. Then visitors could go upstairs to see the actual artifacts that defined the family’s WWI experience, from Herbert Rankin’s uniform and the personal effects that were sent back to the family after he died, to Catherine Rankin’s black dress that she probably wore while in mourning. That encounter with the past is almost a spiritual experience. It’s very different from the Virtual Reality experience, but they feed one another.

Part of our angle on interpretation is that we want visitors to emotionally connect with the family. We want them to see the family as real people and to sympathize with, or even like them. But also we want to establish critical distance so that visitors can examine the perspectives of the family members and the choices that they made. The play was really effective in forging that emotional connection. So many people commented that they were almost moved to tears during the play. Being able to establish that emotional connection with these historic characters enables people to not simply write them off or villanize them for some of their shocking views. That’s valuable even in navigating our relationships in our world today.

HNY: Putting people into a digital world with a headset offers lots of possibilities for creating a unique educational experience. It also requires a different perspective than traditional exhibition design; instead of directing a visitor’s attention you have to create an environment that gives them choices for how they want to interact. For many organizations this can be daunting. What inspired the Creative Arts Department to propose the use of VR at the History Fair, and how did you approach this technology?

Mike: When I first met Krysta, she would tell me that there’s no educational value to video games and these sorts of things. I own a VR headset, and I brought it to school and said, “Try this. Tell me it can’t be educational.” She fell in love with it. There are pieces of gaming in general–whether it’s video games or board games–that are theatrical, and tell a story, and can revolve around history and a multitude of different things

Krysta: I still hate games. I have no interest in any of that. But as soon as Mike put me in that headset–he put me in this under-the-sea thing–you’re going down in a cage as if you were scuba diving and seeing all of these things all around you. I went, “Oh my God!” What a wonderful tool for theatre-making, what a wonderful tool for accessing the past and historical moments. I am an early embracer of all things technological in theatre because I know that Mike can do them. The moment I put on that headset, I saw infinite possibilities for historic spaces, for interpretation and curation, and theatre-making.

 

HNY: How does Virtual Reality change the relationship between the audience and the theatrical performance?

Mike: What Krysta is doing is constantly reinventing the notion of what is theatre. It’s not going, getting a ticket, getting a pre-assigned seat, watching a show, having an intermission, seeing the second act, and then leaving. She’s bringing people into it or transporting them to another land.

Krysta: We live in a multimedia world. In order to make theatre relevant and function in our multimedia world, we have to let it coexist with other forms and find different ways to combine them–not impose them upon theatre but let them organically function together. I think we got there with Dutch. It was scary to do it for the first time!

 

 

HNY: You knew you were going to tell the story of Herbert Rankin. You knew he was on a boat to France. Out of that premise, how did you create the play and the virtual environment?

Krysta: With the script, I look at archival materials and the story tells itself. I cram and shepherd it into a coherent narrative. I use some elements of the preexisting text. I mix and mash it up.

The Rankins find out all of the information about Herbert via letter. Obviously that is not interesting, theatrically. We had to bring Sergeant Hennessy to the Rankin household to tell them about Herbert’s story. I created the two worlds: the live one and the virtual one in such a way that you could see the live performance or the Virtual Reality installment first and it would still be coherent and make sense. I don’t like everybody to get the same story all the time. It’s slightly different depending on how you do it.

HNY: So in the VR component, the viewer is seated between two beds in the infirmary of a ship bound for France. The scene depicts a conversation between Herbert Rankin and a comrade who are suffering from influenza, and Sergeant Hennessy, who is checking on the sick men. How did you stage and film this?

Krysta: My first thought was that the USS Slater [docked and preserved in Albany at the waterfront] would be perfect. I knew that they had a space. Even though it’s a WWII ship, the officers quarters would be extremely similar. I started pestering the fine people at the Slater to see if we could get in there and film in that space with a 360-degree camera. When you’re filming VR, you have to make sure every tiny little piece of the environment is perfect. It’s not a stage.

Mike: In Virtual Reality, you see everything all the time. There’s no way to tell the person in the headset, “you can’t turn around and look at what’s behind you.” The story might be in front of you, but you can still turn around and look at the picture of Emily Rankin on the desk. There’s nothing telling you you can’t, and in fact we want you to. In turn, we have to make sure every nook and cranny in the whole room is exactly how we want it.

In the movies or in the theatre, you’re so far away from the action. With this, we put you in a seat at a desk between two beds. A lot of people were reaching to help the sick person in the bed.

Krysta: Although we considered filming in some of the larger spaces, the smaller environment ended up being fantastic because you are there being coughed on by people dying of influenza. The size of the environment was wonderful in the end. I think that was part of the experimental aspect of it.

 

HNY: What were visitor responses to the Virtual Reality technology?

Mike: Going into it, I thought that young kids were going to be super excited and that it was going to be like pulling teeth to get someone over fifty to even consider it. It wasn’t that whatsoever. Everybody wanted to do it. The challenge will lie in keeping the young kids entertained with it, because they are so much more used to it.

Older participants had really interesting responses. Some went as far as reaching to console the person who was dying, and really trying to embrace them. There were people who were talking to the characters. Because it was a video that was done ahead of time, the characters were obviously not responding. But participants still felt the need to talk them and give them advice. There were people who, once the headset came off, they were frozen in time.

Krysta: There is the simple fact that Virtual Reality is pretty new. It’s exciting and people want to do it. It’s a great way to drag people who don’t know how interested they’re going to be in history to historic spaces. People do say what a cool experience it is to be in the virtual world, but what I hear more is that they want to talk about the people and what happened. They want to talk about the Spanish Flu epidemic. Great! You are talking about history. It’s a trick. It’s smoke and mirrors to make people care about history. It is a gateway drug to historic places.

 

HNY: Now that Siena College has the VR technology, what’s next?

Mike: The startup investment—which is getting the headsets and getting the computers that can support that kind of material, which is not your average computer—is now leading into this great future. Now the sky’s the limit because the pieces are in place. It’s now about creating more content.

The Computer Science department on campus, with Robin Flatland, they’re doing the actual virtual content without a camera and creating it from scratch. That takes animation skill sets. They are actually coming to us for the theatrical elements: how to set the scene, what do your operators do. They’re coming to us for that. It’s a really good thing that they’re also at our school.

Krysta: We’ll certainly be integrating it into the classes, into the creative arts. I’ve got it on my syllabus. To look at the artistic possibilities. People need to look at these things not as just games, but as a tool to understand other places, other times that we can’t visit otherwise.

Mike: A lot of our next focus is to make it even more interactive and to incorporate more of the hands-on virtual stuff. It’s one thing to transport someone to a different time period in a different location and put them in the environment. It’s another thing to be able to pick up a pill bottle and hand it to Sergeant Hennessy to give to the guys.

Krysta: It gives you agency in the space in a way that makes you a part of it in a way that nothing else can really allow you to be a part of history. Once we get the hands moving, we can give people roles. Are you a servant being asked to do something? Are you a guest being offered something? That is where I want to go next–making the spectator more significant and giving them more agency in the VR experience.

 

HNY: What resources, partnerships, and infrastructure does an organization need to have in place in order to develop a Virtual Reality experience?

Mike: For other organizations that want to try VR, you definitely need the people to do it. You need someone who understands video, video editing, computers, and at least an understanding of the VR technology to get it up and running. Also, having someone who understands theatre and who can set the stage is extremely important. To really do it right, the theatrical aspect of it is not just what happens in the headset but the first thing you see when you walk in the door, it’s how you’re greeted, it’s the people who are putting you in the headset. To have the operator play a character and engage with you, and to keep you occupied if you were early for your time slot, adds to the whole experience.

Krysta: We worked with the operators for a long time on basically bedside manner– or VR-side manner. They were embodying these two WWI characters that they worked on. We talked to Kimberly LaMay, a history professor here, about the era so that they could ad lib in context and always make sure that people felt comfortable in the space. I think that’s really important.

The curation of the whole environment, not just the virtual environment, is vital. That’s the most important thing that I would share with any organization that wants to do some work with Virtual Reality: do not spend all of your time and energy and resources on only the virtual environment, but take the time to think carefully about the live environment around the VR.

Deborah: We could not have done it without the partnership with Siena. Our resources are very limited, from financial to human. Developing this relationship with Krysta, with Siena, and with Humanities New York was absolutely critical to making this happen.

Krysta: The Virtual Reality would have been impossible without the grant. In the Creative Arts Department, we are fairly rich in human resources, but poor in the other kind. It would not have happened without Humanities New York.

 

HNY: What role might technology play in museums and cultural spaces over the next few years? How might it change these spaces?

Deborah: This is anecdotal, but during the fall semester I taught an intro to public history class. My students were tasked with evaluating a museum experience. There were two themes that kept coming up. One was the students emphasizing technology and the need for more technology, many of them imagining visiting historic house museums and having a hologram giving a tour. But what I found really interesting was there was also a strong emphasis on the importance of human interaction and the extraordinary value of discussion. This is one more opportunity to say that it’s not either or, thankfully. Technology and these virtual experiences can add so much to the museum experience. At the same time, there is also this need to step away from the virtual experience and talk to the person next to you and share reactions to it. So many students discussed the value of that human exchange. Having the opportunity to have both of them part of the museum experience is a wonderful thing that we’ve been able to begin exploring.

Mike: I would agree. In history, I don’t think Virtual Reality will stand on its own. You still need the historian, someone to interact with, even a friend to bounce ideas off of and think about the past.

Krysta: I think in many cases VR will be useful for layering the key information in museums. You might be sitting in someone’s living room and engaging with that space as you find out they were involved in a military campaign, or something more sinister like the slave trade. We can have that juxtaposition of the comfortable living room, and have visitors put on this virtual headset and go see where the money came from to build all of this. I think that is going to be a really interesting use, putting different places in dialogue with one another.

There’s not a whole lot to fear, but there’s only a lot of augmentation that can be done in spaces. It doesn’t kill the conversation; it creates more fodder for that conversation: What experience did you have? Where did you look? Why? All of these things can be explored. Technology moves so quickly that the implications for historic spaces within the next 20 years are beyond our wildest dreams, which I find incredibly exciting.

 

HNY: Why do the humanities matter to you?

Krysta: Our postmodern world is a mire of multiple and competing narratives. The only way to understand the perspective of the “other” is through their stories. The humanities give us control over language and rhetoric, which in turn allows us to communicate our emotion and make sense of our actions as empathetic beings. Science may teach us how to build things, but the humanities teach us what to build and why.

Deborah: Humanities are the study of what is means to be human—and that is pretty elemental. In the case of history, the study of past human experiences gives context to our lives today. As we look at our forebears and consider their responses to the circumstances that surrounded them, we are empowered to examine our own responses to the structural forces that comprise our “moment” in history, and that–one would hope–can make us better citizens of the global community.

Interview by Scarlett Rebman, Grants Officer

Photography by Ron Schubin

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  • To plan your visit to Historic Cherry Hill, visit their website.
  • Learn more about Siena College’s Creative Arts Department here.

Krysta Dennis: Dr. Krysta Dennis works as a theatre-maker and director in the US and internationally, and teaches at Siena College. Krysta holds a dual PhD from the University of Kent in the UK and the Sorbonne in Paris, and trained as a performer at L’Ecole Jacques Lecoq. She is the author of three plays, Votes for Women, The Burden of the Ballot, and Dutch, which have been produced at Siena College, Arts Letters & Numbers, the New York State Attorney General’s Office, the Arkell Museum, Historic Cherry Hill, Ten Broeck Mansion, and the New York State Museum. She has received several Humanities NY Grants for her work. Krysta enjoys employing innovative theatre technology in her work, utilizing video mapping technology in her production of Arcadia at Siena College, and Virtual Reality technology mixed with live performance for Dutch at Historic Cherry Hill.

Deborah Emmons-Andarawis: A native of New York City, Deborah Emmons-Andarawis received her bachelor’s degree from Barnard College, Columbia University, and continued her studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York, receiving a master’s in Public History in 2009.  Deborah has been at Historic Cherry Hill since 2008, serving as Curator and Collections Manager and, since December of 2017, as Acting Director. Over her tenure, Deborah has helped to oversee a major restoration project, collaborated on numerous interpretive programs, and enhanced the profile of Historic Cherry Hill’s Edward Frisbee Center for Collections & Research. When not “working,” Deborah can be found running after her toddler or, on a very good day, sitting by the pond with her husband and son listening to the peepers.

Michael Lounello: Michael is a native of the Capital District and the theatre technology manager at Siena College. Michael has spent most of his professional career as a concert lighting designer. Michael enjoys implementing innovative technologies in his theatre design practice such as video mapping, virtual reality, mixed media, and augmented reality. Michael enjoys turning artists’ visions into reality, by implementing and augmenting existing technology. In Michael’s free time, he can be found rewiring his house to make it an automated smart home, and taking landscape photography.