Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the Athletes in the Arts podcast, hosted by Steven Karaginas and Yasi Ansari.
Speaker: Howdy, y'all, and welcome to the Athletes in the Arts podcast. From my co-host, Yossi Ansari, I'm Stephen Karaginas, and so good to have you listening in today. Find out more about us at athletesinthearts.com for more information and resources that can help you with performing arts medicine.
Speaker: If you like our show, feel free to leave a review and tell everyone about us. So, our show today is about whisper networks in the theater world. So what is a whisper network, you may ask?
Speaker: Well, it's essentially the rumor mill, the grapevine, the word of mouth that we are all familiar with. But then again, it's also an effective form of communication, particularly in situations of taboo subjects or professional misconduct.
Speaker: It's how many women who are subjected to abuse survive in the theater world. Now, this is something that has not been well researched, but one doctor from Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, has a dissertation examining this phenomenon in the theater world.
Speaker: So joining us to talk about his work is Dr. Ted Carter. Ted, thank you so much for being on our show today. are you doing today? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Great. so um So first off, I just want get a little bit of background on your training and how you got into your position at Bellarmine University. So how did you get involved with simulation training and technology?
Speaker: Sure, so I originally went to graduate school thinking that I wanted to be a theater professor. And so I got a Master of Fine Arts in Theater Education, Theater Pedagogy.
Speaker: And towards the end of my time there, a couple of my professors pulled me aside and they said, Ted, we're worried that you're not going to be able to get a job because you're too much of a generalist.
Speaker: You just do too, a little too much of everything and you're not really great at anything. And so, uh, but they said, however, we may have a job for you. And, uh,
Speaker: The theater department at Virginia Commonwealth university where i attended graduate school had been approached by the medical school to create a standardized patient program. And so for people who don't know, standardized patients are actors who pretend to be patients so that they can interact in simulations with medical students, nursing students, all kinds of healthcare care students.
Speaker: a lot of people's jumping on point for this when I would tell people what I do. A lot of people say, oh, like that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer is ah is a patient. and i' Right. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's funny. I was going to say, is it also similar to like Grey's Anatomy, where someone has to learn how to navigate a medical situation?
Speaker: So ah it's it's a little different from that because the standardized patients are acting But the script is not linear and it's not predictable because it's all based off of what the learner does in the moment.
Speaker: Right. So as a standardized patient, generally you have a script of sorts that has information about your patient. When you you when do, when did you start feeling sick? Where does it hurt? Do you feel nauseous? My hand is blue, whatever it is. Uh, but you don't know what questions you're going to be asked just.
Speaker: Like a real patient. Right. So in in that way, it's brilliant. I never thought about this going through my training of having like actual like performing artists be involved in medical training. That's brilliant. It was a very intentional thing on the part of Virginia Commonwealth university. And it was something that I was really fortunate to step into because I'd never heard of this before I started doing it. I mean, neither. That's awesome.
Speaker: Yeah. I, before I went to graduate school, I was in the army. And so, my faculty thought of me because they said we need someone with management experience but we also want someone who knows how to speak to actors and so it was a really great fit for me and i did that for about seven years then i decided to go and get a doctorate in health communication because i found that was something that i ended up spending a lot of time on ah that sort of interpersonal patient provider communication and those really subtle nuanced moments were something that I thought I could spend a lot of time studying. And and it's so true.
Speaker: After leaving graduate school, I went to work at Bellarmine university where I'm a simulation educator in their simulation center. And that's what I do now. So with your, um, getting your degree in theater and am master a master's in fine arts, so you got an MFA. Yes. MFA. Right. So were you a performer?
Speaker: Yeah, I was an actor and a fight choreographer for a little while in my 20s. Yeah. Oh, wow. Okay, fun. Did you say a fight choreographer? Yes. yeah what is so what is What is that?
Speaker: So fight choreographer, you study swords and knives and guns and hand-to-hand combat and you study how to do it in a way that looks cool, that looks real, that tells a story, but first and foremost, it's safe.
Speaker: And then when you get hired to do Romeo and Juliet, you go in there and do your swords and everything like that and choreograph the sword fighting and make sure everybody's safe, make sure everyone knows how to make it look real and make it look authentic if that's a goal of yours.
Speaker: ah i had envisioned that I would be hired to do sword fights in Shakespeare plays, things like that. And what I found more often was that I would get cast as an actor, often in sort of minor roles. And I would think, gosh, i don't know if I'm even right for this role. really didn't expect to get cast.
Speaker: And after I was cast, the director would say to me, so Ted, we noticed that you're a fight choreographer. There's a push in this play or there's a slap in this play. you were hoping that in addition to acting, you could also choreograph that little a bit of violence that I'd say. Yeah, sure.
Speaker: Trying to save some money by hiring two roles. Just get you to doing both of them. I you. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Tales all this time. Yeah. Yeah. A lot fun, though, it sounds like. did you still Do you still do any of that kind of work now? you ever go to the Renaissance Fairs? and i don't do a lot of it. And I have to be honest with you. I really avoid the sort of Renaissance Faire. There are a lot of people in the fight world and Renaissance Faire world who love the...
Speaker: ah the minutiae of the historical weaponry and historical fighting styles and things like that. And that's never been my interest. I just like it as a ah vehicle for telling stories. Look at this mace. This is from my 13th century. yeah Yes. Whenever i but I lived in Richmond, Richmond, Virginia, which is where I used to live and where I used to act a lot,
Speaker: I did a couple of plays that were based in that were set in the Civil War. And you would inevitably have people come up to you afterwards who were clearly Civil War reenactors who would want critique you on the historical accuracy of your costume. Oh, man. everybody Everyone's a critic these days. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So how did you get into acting and theater? Does did this begin when you were younger, like a lot younger? Yeah, when I was in high school, i had very little talent or ability in sports or athletics or interest, frankly. and My mother said, Ted, you need to do something after school. You can't just come home and sit around. And she said, tomorrow you're going to do something. And so I thought, well, maybe I can run track. i mean, that seems like that's kind of straightforward.
Speaker: And I went to the track coach at my high school and I said, can I try out for the track team? And he said, no, that was two weeks ago. You're too late. And I thought, oh my gosh, my mother's going so mad at me when I get home.
Speaker: I was walking through the hall and I saw this sign for auditions for the theater company. And i went to the teacher who taught that and I said, I saw that auditions were yesterday.
Speaker: ah Is it too late for me to audition? And he said, normally I would say yes, but... We're auditioning for a series of one act plays and we have, uh, 12 roles for males and only six males auditioned.
Speaker: And we're having callbacks today. So come on over and, uh, and audition. And, uh, I said, well, do you have enough, uh, females for the female parts? they said, oh, we've got 30 females. who audition i thought this is going to be a great fit for me.
Speaker: Um, and so that was initially my, uh, interest in theater was quite honestly, as a high school guy, finding a way to be girls, uh, turned out to be yeah great for that.
Speaker: I mean, your journey sounds so interesting, you know, from fight choreographer to navigating medical simulations. Like I, i guess, Something that I'm curious about is if someone who is an actor in high school wants to go into choreography of fighters, how does one do that?
Speaker: Sure. There's a number of organizations that are professional organizations that credential fight choreographers to make sure that people who are doing this are being safe and know what they're talking about.
Speaker: And they hold lots of workshops all over the country. They'll have weekend workshops, week-long workshops, and looking and researching those workshops is a great way to yeah go do something fun for a weekend, learn how to fall down safely, learn how to throw a punch, slap, do things like that and in a way that's safe and looks authentic. and And that's a great way to figure out if it's something that you'd be interested in.
Speaker: And sorry, I'm just diving in deep here, but did fight choreography come before after the Army? Fight choreography came before. I started getting interested in that in in college. I did a show where we had a fight choreographer come in and work on the show with us. And I thought, this is so cool. This is a really, I didn't, I had no idea there was a job like this. And, um,
Speaker: And i I also had an instinct that I liked directing, but I didn't necessarily want to direct a whole play. That seemed like a big ordeal, but this was a chance to direct just a little piece of something and really fine tune it and and do something that I thought was interesting. And and it's also really about telling storytelling to me yeah because fights and violence in theater To me, it it it speaks to this moment of when emotions get so high that the dialogue will no longer suffice.
Speaker: And so now you've got to tell this other story in ah in a physical way. Right, the intentionality of the conflict being manifested, right? Right, right, yeah. I mean, even in Romeo and Juliet, I saw a ballet version of it and a theater version of it, and I just found it so interesting that you knew when people were fighting. you know There was definitely differences in the choreography for the fights, but it was the parts that stand out to me, actually, the most. so
Speaker: Sure, sure. I mean, violence is exciting, it is. Mm-hmm. It does sell. um So you're doing the simulation work with the nursing school. um So tell us what that's like, because just to go back to like when I was trained, um our training in medical school is simply we had you know human models that came in. We talked to them. We they'd have a script but for yeah a very simple script.
Speaker: um We would do stuff on them as far as basic physical exam. And then that was pretty much it until the hospitals. But it sounds like things are different now. And you're kind of at the forefront of that. So Steve, I don't know exactly what your training was like, but what I hear from a lot of physicians is that, especially ones who were went to medical school, maybe in the eighties or even some of the nineties is that when they learned to do pelvic exams, for example, that they had a clinical instructor who would take them into a patient's room who was essentially in a coma.
Speaker: And they would demonstrate on a comatose patient how to conduct a pelvic exam. And by today's standards, that's kind of terrifying. But right for a while, that was the norm.
Speaker: And what simulation allows us to do is give students a chance to take what they've learned in the classroom and bridge the gap between the classroom and putting it into practice so that they can practice these skills that they read about or saw videos about or heard about the class, practice them in a safe environment where they can get feedback from a qualified, experienced professional and reflect on what they're doing and reflect on their decision-making process and then take all that experience as well as the learned knowledge into their clinical experience.
Speaker: So what would that be like for, let's say, um, you know, like some of the simulations for, I, there's like, you know, low level type stuff. There's high level type of relations. So like, give us a little bit a picture of that.
Speaker: Sure. So at the basic level, you can practice a simple psychomotor skill, like how to insert an IV. And we, at our simulation center and most simulation centers will have an arm that is just a fake arm, but it has skin that feels, feels pretty real or real enough. And certainly reacts well to a needle the way that normal skin does. And it'll have plastic veins underneath and just can practice puncturing those veins and inserting an IV and they don't have to worry about hurting anybody.
Speaker: And they can practice it over and over and over again and get feedback as they do it. There are even some models that are computerized. And a computer will tell you, you used the correct amount of pressure or the, you need, when you insert the needle, you want to adjust the pitch or yaw of during that insertion.
Speaker: That's a ah really basic skill. We can do much more complex simulations with high fidelity mannequins. And these are mannequins that are full of computers and can cough, cry, vomit, have convulsions, their chest will rise and fall, their' um they can ah blink, they're ah their pupils will dilate in in a lot of circumstances, their mouths will turn blue, their tongues will inflate, and you can practice just an infinite variety
Speaker: of techniques and create scenarios around these patients where you can have them behave as a real patient and have them set so that their vital signs will change based on what the learner does in the moment. So that if the learner gives them a medicine, ah oftentimes the mannequins are set up so that if they yeah deliver a simulated medicine through an IV, the Mannequin will automatically change the vital signs to react in a way that a real patient would.
Speaker: We have pediatric patients, we have neonatal patients that are simulators, and we have obstetric patients. Simulators as well, where there's a fetus inside the mother's belly and there's actually a piston that will push out the baby. you can practice catching a baby. Wow. And then we also have standardized patients who are the actors that will be the patients that will be the family members.
Speaker: And so we frequently do what we call hybrid simulations where. you have a patient who is a mannequin, but then you have an actor in the room who's the family member. And so you have to navigate a much more complicated situation than if you just had one or the other.
Speaker: Very nice. That's some that's amazing stuff. so what is what role would you say ai is playing now and in the near future for the simulations? That's a great question. I was just at a conference in January for the It's a big international conference about simulation and healthcare care and AI is what everyone is talking about. Right. AI and virtual reality.
Speaker: um And I might have a different take on AI than some people. At this point, AI is not quite at the level of creating what we in the term we use in simulation a lot is fidelity. When we talk about how real something is, right.
Speaker: And the fidelity that AI creates is just not at the same level as an as a human can create at this point. There's a ah lag oftentimes in terms of ah response and speaking.
Speaker: the responses sometimes seem a little unnatural or it can even seem like total non sequiturs. It is much better than it was six or seven years ago, I'll say that.
Speaker: But ah I'm a little critical of the tact that AI is taking in terms of replicating human emotion because i think they are basing a lot of that off of social science.
Speaker: in terms of using descriptors for emotions, using linguistic descriptors, descriptors for emotions. So for example, you'll have an AI avatar and you can say, i want this to be angry.
Speaker: But what does angry mean? Angry can mean a lot of different things. That is a huge umbrella term f for an enormous range of human behavior. Wide spectrum, right?
Speaker: Yeah. And social science doesn't quite have a way to describe human emotion. It's certainly not in the nuanced way that, frankly, the arts describes human emotion.
Speaker: um You know, you can look at ah the way that an actor trains to deal with emotion. Most actors now ah are not, don't practice being angry.
Speaker: and being sad and being happy, you get to that emotion in other ways so that the emotion is really tailored to the context and the circumstances in which that emotion is occurring.
Speaker: Right, because obviously the hardest part about everything we're talking about is having that response be an organic response to a certain situation or stimulus. Exactly. Right, so that's where you get, like, know, a bad actor is a person who just...
Speaker: shows the physical manifestations of anger without any sort of justification, right? That's exactly right. that's Right, exactly. so your thinking So I'm sure that's where it seems to be holding up because I know the the uncanny valley as far as visuals and as far as responses.
Speaker: But I guess the idea then, so where in five or 10 years, where do they see all this going right now? what What is their, like, I guess, short to midterm goal as far as like AI and medical training?
Speaker: So there's a big push for it. based on logistics, because the fact of the matter is high fidelity simulators, those mannequins, they're expensive.
Speaker: right They, they, uh, because you're doing things to them, they get damaged, they get worn out, they break, you have to replace them. Right. Hiring people as actors, that's expensive too.
Speaker: um And the simulation centers that are being built now to contain these, they're really expensive because you're building ah whole operating room to train people on how to behave in an operating room.
Speaker: With virtual reality and augmented reality, you can do a simulation in a in any space you want, in an empty classroom. And in fact, many ways that's ideal and all you have to pay for is a few headsets and the license to to run these simulations.
Speaker: So there's a huge financial incentive for academic institutions to really embrace. VR and AI in their simulation education, unfortunately,
Speaker: you miss out on some things there because VR is not at the place where you can replicate the same kind of psychomotor skills that you can in an actual, uh, interaction. So most of the time VR, you have these sort of paddle controllers that you're controlling with your hand. And you, if you pick up a syringe, you click a button and the syringe gets injected. And that's obviously not real.
Speaker: And, uh, And you don't get the same kind of haptic feedback that you would um when you're when you're doing things. So um there's really a loss that and it it will take in five or 10 years, VR and AI is not going to be able to bridge that because, I mean, you're not going to be able to create the full body haptic feedback that you experience when you're doing a physical examination of a patient.
Speaker: Sure. ah Unless someone's wearing an entire suit and nobody's doing that right now. Right. Yeah. It seems the expense of all this stuff would make it cost prohibitive versus just having an actor or a person to to examine.
Speaker: That's what seems to be such a, you know, as the things you just mentioned about, you know, $8,000 machines breaking down. so Yeah. Yeah. it's It's expensive. Medical education is expensive. But in in ways, it it kind of has to be.
Speaker: So then you did some work recently that we were very interested in. The dissertation you you did about whisper networks in the theater world. And this was an interesting concept because I never heard that phrase before in describing something that we all know exists.
Speaker: so um So first off, his tell us a little bit about like what the... how a whisper network works in an environment like the performing arts. Sure. So the first time that I had really heard about whisper networks was at the beginning of the Me Too movement a few years back. ah I heard about it in a couple of articles. And one article there was was about Harvey Weinstein and some of the just really horrific abuses that
Speaker: he had conducted on women who had auditioned for him or women who ah had had worked on some of the movies that he had produced. And in several of these articles, actors around Los Angeles would say things like, we knew for years that this was happening.
Speaker: And um someone would come to you and say oh i got an audition with harvey weinstein isn't this exciting and people would say to me okay don't go into a room alone with him yeah if he asks you to meet him at a hotel don't go ah there was this sort of underground knowledge being passed around between these women And they were sharing that to protect one another, but they were being very judicious judicious in how they wanted to share that information because they were also scared of repercussions to their own careers.
Speaker: And this was referred to in a couple of these articles as a whisper network. And ah as someone who was studying communication at the time that this was happening, i was interested in learning more about whisper networks and started looking up whisper networks in academic journals and academic textbooks and found that the term did not exist in any of those places. And so I started doing my own research on it.
Speaker: Was whisper networks only in like ah when you bring up Harvey Weinstein, is that was it only in the film world at the time or was it also in the theater world?
Speaker: So that was the first time I heard about it was in, was there. Um, there was another place that I started hearing about it, which was actually in the athletic world that I'm blanking on the, the man's name right now, but i think he was the doctor for the gymnastics team. Larry Nassar. Yep. Yes. Nassar. Thank you. and Michigan or Michigan state. And, and,
Speaker: and and you some of the longer pieces about this where reporters interviewed a lot of the teammates and former athletes you heard similar things people would say yeah we all kind of knew and people knew to be careful there was another story that i read recently wasn't too recently i guess but about uh andrew cuomo former governor of new york who um ah a lot of his former staffers said we all warned each other about him
Speaker: I've heard even heard this about there was a doctor at University of Michigan in the late 60s, early 70s that was doing inappropriate physical exams to the male football players. So they're the first ah program to really have like physicals as part of the screening process for athletics.
Speaker: um The whole concept of the pre participation physical exam was kind of started there, but he was always doing like rectal exams and genital exams way longer and more excessively. So it's fascinating to have ah a term put to this concept because that's where a lot of folks are always saying to themselves, wait minute, if all these folks knew, then why didn't anything, anybody do anything about it?
Speaker: Right. And I should say, i also don't think that is exclusive to sexually predatory behavior. Um, I think that any group of people who feels that they can not take advantage of existing systems of justice,
Speaker: but are being persecuted or abused or exploited in some way, oftentimes those groups are going to ah create whisper networks.
Speaker: The Underground Railroad during slavery was essentially built upon whisper networks. If you think it, it must have been right Somehow these enslaved people were telling each other there's a a place you can go, you can if you can escape and get to this place at this time, surely there was some kind of communication there. And I would certainly define that as a whisper network.
Speaker: So for those who don't know exactly what whisper networks are, i'm just looking up the kind of like the background a little bit right now. But I'm just curious, like, is it like a note that's passed ah around? is it just like great question underground meetings?
Speaker: So it can oftentimes it is verbal. Oftentimes it is literally whispers. Um, it is it is moments that people share frequently in interpersonal exchanges in in person. Uh, sometimes it is phone calls. Sometimes it's text messages.
Speaker: Interestingly, the internet has, i think really grown whisper networks and has allowed for them to grow. who So in my dissertation, I interviewed ah women actors and a number of them told me about facebook groups that are built by women actors in various cities around the country and they said when they would go to they would get a job in another city they would look at those facebook groups and sometimes people would post in those facebook groups this director has a habit of doing this this director is known for this there is um
Speaker: a, uh, I don't know if I'm allowed to use a use profanity. Sure. Okay. There's a, um, at the, during the time of me too, one of the other big events that occurred, uh, big scandals that occurred was what was called the shitty men in media list.
Speaker: And this was a Google doc and it was a spreadsheet And it just listed the names of men and who they worked for and what were some of the things that they had been accused of doing. And women could anonymously post to this Google document.
Speaker: And it had dozens and dozens of names on it. It's so funny you say that. And not to devalue that and you can cut this out, Steve. But um they have dating...
Speaker: Like on Facebook, they have on Facebook groups. They have red flag groups for men and they post men who have treated women inappropriately in the dating world, too.
Speaker: So depending on where you live, you can post about a guy that you went on a date with and everyone knows all the information about him. Similar to that. Yeah. In India, a few years ago, there was a scandal called Losha L-O-S-H-A.
Speaker: And it was a massive scandal in India, and it had to do with students reporting abusive, predatory academics. and And that was all spread online.
Speaker: So it seems like these whisper networks developed because of a need for safety that they feel they can't ah safety warnings looking out for others ah because they can't turn to other more official sources of authority or justice.
Speaker: Exactly. That's exactly what it is. Yes. So then what is your um your research do that in this realm? So initially, some of the people that I talked to were other were college undergrads. And I spoke to female undergrads at University of Kentucky who are in sororities and asked that some of them if what was their experience like with whisper networks? Did they hear about ah other men. And the consensus was that there were certainly whisper networks.
Speaker: But what I did not expect to hear from them, and this was just sort of post the kind of big explosion of Me Too, they were oftentimes reticent to share information because they were worried that if they said something,
Speaker: it could have a real effect on these young men, that it could really damage their reputation. And so they had a sense that their voices had real power to them, which was in absolute conflict with what I had heard from so many older women as to why they would often not share information because, uh, or would not publicly share information was because they thought no one would listen to that.
Speaker: Right. And they, they worried that it, their complaints would be dismissed as he said, she said, and, but interestingly, a lot of these younger women, and I don't know if it's because they were seeing the effects of the me too movement or if it was naivete, um, or if it was,
Speaker: idealism or optimism, but they really believe that if they publicly accused um a young man of doing something inappropriate, that it could really damage his life and really damage his future. And so they felt that they had to be very, very judicious and telling other women about their experience with, with men.
Speaker: So they're worried that the punishment wasn't fitting the crime. So that it could be too harsh, right? Too harsh. Exactly. And youth this is what they're saying as far as like reporting on a whisper network or why they went to a whisper network in the first place to be able to share this without hurting the PR. Okay. It sounds like a whisper network would have an effect on that person.
Speaker: but so So both. Yeah. so So both why they would not share this, share information publicly, but also why they might not share information, even in a whisper network.
Speaker: yeah They were worried that even in even telling other women who they trusted, ah that information might harm these men in ways that they did not intend for them to be harmed.
Speaker: So what kind of conclusions did you make about whisper networks in general? Because I'm sure that as the, I mean, whisper networks are, are meant to be whispers. So they're more secretive. So if the secret's out, then they become, you know, if infiltrated by people of authority. They could be, yeah know, there could be a lot of other negative, uh, you know, blowback.
Speaker: So what kind of findings did you discover in your dissertation? So, well, in my dissertation, one of the things that I discovered was that I think that whisper networks, my dissertation was really about women actors. And what i one of the things that I really came to believe is that whisper networks occur because there is abuse because there are abusive people, there are predatory people.
Speaker: hu And those people are allowed to exist in certain environments where certain conditions occur. And in theater, one of the conditions is that you don't have the same standards of professionalism that you do in, say, your typical office environment.
Speaker: Sure. um People in theater are often feel, especially if you are a person in power, a director or a producer or an artistic director,
Speaker: those people often feel entitled to behave eccentrically, ah to behave in ways that feel like they're sort of cutting against the grain or but outside of society. yeah there yeah They feel trans they're they're rewarded for being transgressive. off Right.
Speaker: Right. and And that it's seen as being ah just part of their creative process. That's part of their creative genius. And another aspect of the the theater world is it has to do with physical space and and the way that people are often in close proximity to one another. And they're they're often touching each other.
Speaker: Some of the actors that I spoke to talked about how in the theater world, when you meet people, there's an expectation that you go up and you hug them. That it's a very big hugging culture.
Speaker: And if you're someone who's not necessarily a hugger, you are looked at askance. um But that, you know, that can create a lot of gray area. And people talked about how there would be directors who would give a hug and hug always seemed to linger a little too long, or they would come up behind someone and put their arm around them and touch the small, the woman's back and even reach a little bit under their shirt just a little bit. And all these things that in a professional office environment would be instantly recognizable as inappropriate in the theater world.
Speaker: A lot of people get a pass on it ah People are also in the theater world. They're often working at night. ah They're rehearsing at night. Sometimes they are rehearsing one on one, especially if it's not in ah an environment that's ah monitored by Actors' Equity, the union.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: they Oftentimes there's alcohol that sort of surrounds the world of theater, whether, and and drugs as well, where maybe they're not doing that in during productions and maybe they're not doing that during rehearsals, but after rehearsal, everyone goes out and gets a drink.
Speaker: And so these, all of these sorts of lines of professionalism get very, very blurry in the theater world. And it makes it in an environment where if you are a predator, if you want to, if you're someone who is inclined to exploit, to abuse people, it's a safer place for you to do that.
Speaker: So what then happens if someone of authority, and I don't know like what what kind of information you gathered at from like the authority perspective. So for example, if they find out they have that information in their hand. Are there policies at all that are put in place now that someone like what someone needs to do next if they understand or are given some sort of information about a faculty member as part of the whisper networks?
Speaker: What do you do with that information after you know it? Sure. So, Yasi, that's a great question. So let me let me talk first about professional and then I'll talk about academic. Yeah. um In the professional theater world,
Speaker: for decades, centuries, really, there was no accountability ah because most theater companies, theater troops, they were really very autonomous in a lot of ways. And so the people who were directors who were who are in authority had enormous, ah enormous autonomy and had very little accountability.
Speaker: And, um, Now, if it was someone, a tech, someone on the crew, a tech person, an actor who is behaving badly, oftentimes those people were dealt with quickly and severely ah by people in authority. But if it was the director, if it was the artistic director, a producer, those people were often allowed and and permitted to continue their behavior for a long period of time.
Speaker: One such case happened in Chicago where there was a artistic director of a small professional theater there. was well known in the community and largely liked by members of the community, but he had been engaging in abusive and exploitive behavior for 20 years.
Speaker: twenty or so years And the acting community, the theater community in Chicago started a group called Not In Our House, where they developed their own professional standards that they wanted to get as many theater companies in the Chicago area as possible to agree to these these standards.
Speaker: And I think ah Houston, their theater community went through something similar and is is trying to institute something similar. So I think what we'll see is more and more of these kinds of sort of community actions to self-police themselves yeah come up. And I think that's a great thing.
Speaker: On the academic side, it's much spottier. Mm-hmm. and and it's it's much harder to say and and there's just so much gray area i mean i i when i was in graduate school when i was an undergrad a lot of my theater professors told stories about when they were in school in the late 60s and the 70s and things were just the crazy by our standards today in terms of uh
Speaker: students and grad students and faculty all fraternizing with each other. Right. It was a free for all. Yeah, it was really a free for all. And, uh, but today, I mean, I think with, uh, title nine, uh, that has, has made it such that a lot of those people, when whisper networks do go public or go semi-public by telling a title nine officer about what's happening, uh,
Speaker: justice can be pretty swift in those cases. There's, I'm sure, plenty of cases where Title IX has not worked the way that people had hoped and and or administrative action has not worked the way people had had hoped to.
Speaker: But I do think people, there are at least attempts to give people an outlet to, to,
Speaker: to talk about these things publicly. I'll say i i reached out to some of the people who started the Not In Our House um movement in Chicago and asked them if I could talk about them ah talk to them for my dissertation.
Speaker: And they said they did not want to talk because they did not encourage whisper networks. Because there hold really the premise of what they were doing was that we shouldn't be talking about these things in private we should be reporting things that are going wrong in know in a way that's public and in a way that people can be held accountable um and i i understand where they're coming from but i think there's if you still have people that feel that for whatever reason there would be repercussions there would be retribution against them
Speaker: Or if they don't understand like what they might actually be going through and then having others like being validated by, i don't know, peers, then you feel a little bit more confident and comfortable to speak up and report it. that that's ah That's a great point. i One of the articles I read about the some of the former Andrew Cuomo interns, I think the title of the article was, I thought I was the only one.
Speaker: And it just speaks to how whisper networks they serve. I think that primarily the function is to warn, but often they become systems of support as well.
Speaker: I mean, it's I know it's not exactly comparable, but it's it's as if there's verbal abuse in the workplace, right from a manager. If you think you're the only one that's dealing with that, and you know that you work for a company that may not take disciplinary action right away, then it takes time to build up a case. And so whisper networks can allow for a case to be put together because then you have a community of individuals who may be experiencing
Speaker: something similar, but also providing guidance as to how to navigate different situations because those in authority may not always help you navigate those next steps.
Speaker: Exactly, i couldn't agree more. Yeah, to your point, Yassi, SafeSport was created in response to the NASA situation in the Olympics. And it's been under lot of fire because a lot of their funding comes from USOC.
Speaker: And so how can you, the the complaint's been, To your point, Yasi, how can this organization actually police this kind of behavior when they're paid by the people that benefit from the behavior not being properly investigated and researched and and punished?
Speaker: And that has been ah difficult thing, mainly because of so much of it going on, so much abuse. Right. Well, if you also think about it had to take like it had to go to a very high degree for people to be like, oh, there's a problem here. Like they weren't.
Speaker: 300 women. Yeah, exactly. You know, like they weren't necessarily listening to the five or six women. Sure. So it's so complicated. i guess you could make arguments for both.
Speaker: Now, what do you want to see next? Like, do you and how do you feel like your dissertation has impacted the community? you know, where do you feel like there's still a lot of room for growth? I'm sure there's a ton of room for growth and and understanding. Yeah. I mean, I would like to see
Speaker: standards of professionalism becoming much more normalized in the theater world. I think, that this notion that people need to be
Speaker: free to behave in unusual and what some people might describe as unprofessional ways is important to the creative process. I think it's bogus, quite honestly. And I think that's an excuse that people have been using for a long time just to get away with that behavior.
Speaker: And I would like to see, um theater becoming more normalized and more professionalized and for theaters to adopt these these rules and for actors so i think steve to your point it's a great one if if all of these things are being monitored from the top level and the people at the top level have a financial incentive to protect some of the people in authority who might be the problem, who might be predators, then those protocols are not necessarily going to have the teeth and the effectiveness that you want them to.
Speaker: so really what you want is for the people, the crew, the actors to be able to police those things by saying, these are the standards that we are insisting upon.
Speaker: And we are going to hold the people in authority in these theater companies and in these theater communities, we're going to hold them accountable. And so that's what I would like to see is for to become a more professional place.
Speaker: Since Me Too, have you seen a change in the theater world? mean, have you seen... ah yeah Is it being talked about more openly now? Because I know that one of the biggest problems that these is that these problems exist in darkness, which is how these whisper networks start. So are we starting to see more light being shed in the theater world? Have you seen that happening? Is it starting at least improve a little bit?
Speaker: I would like to think it's improving. I i think certainly there have been a ah lot of characters at the national level and at smaller community levels who have gotten the message that their communities are no longer going to put up with this behavior and dave they've gotten rid of them.
Speaker: Now, there's some question as to whether those people are just moving to new communities and doing the same thing there and that could be the case. And so, um, having networks online that can address that might be a a solution to that.
Speaker: Are we seeing progress? Do you see a difference in the actors and the performers themselves? Do you see them becoming more confident in being able to call out abuse? Um, and that necessarily have to resort to a, whisper network, but actually be able to confront, you know, speak truth to power. Sure.
Speaker: So I don't have a lot of data, uh, formalized data. I just have anecdotal data and my ane anecdotally, what I would say is that I do think that actors and crew do feel more empowered to speak out.
Speaker: Now, this may not always be the right thing there. It may be that in some cases the pendulum may have swung too far, where some people are feeling entitled to complain about working conditions not being what they hope they should be.
Speaker: And perhaps those working conditions really aren't that bad or the the changes that you would need to adjust those working conditions would put the theater out of business. So i don't i don't know what direction we'll head in, but I do think that overall it's good that people feel more empowered.
Speaker: And I think that having more discussion, having more dialogue is a good thing. Yeah, I think referencing back to what Yossi said a moment ago, um it seemed like one of the biggest problems i thought we saw with the pendulum swinging back from Me Too is that people are always um saying that women don't lie about abuse.
Speaker: And so then some women were caught lying about abuse. And so but the problem was, as Yossi mentioned a minute ago about how the Nasser case, um yeah there's only five women.
Speaker: right and five women initially but actually first to start off with two people and no one paid any heed to what they're saying ah they had lots of excuses they they found out reasons to blow them off and then there's five then there's ten and they still had reasons to blow them off they thought and then it took to her point 300 350 people for it to finally become a voice so it wasn't like an issue of like every woman has to be you know, believe 100% and therefore you have to act upon any comment, but women just need to be taken seriously and need to be, you know, it needs to be addressed versus like just wholesale.
Speaker: Like that's why you're mentioning it with the whisper network. Some women didn't want to say anything because they were afraid that the repercussions would be too great what they're saying. So there's that nuance in this situation that seems very tricky to manage.
Speaker: Then you also have anonymous networks, right? Like you could report things anonymously too. So Right. It's just so, so messy. Yeah.
Speaker: Well, and in, like you said, in that case where there was sort of a threshold of once enough people came forward, then we believed it. Well, what about in a small theater company where you only have a handful of people who've even worked at that theater company?
Speaker: One of the, the industries that, is very interesting to me from the standpoint of whisper networks that, um, I haven't done any research on, uh, but I I'd like to is the restaurant community, because that's a place where restaurant managers have a, a reputation of taking advantage of particularly young women who work in, uh, as servers, as hostesses at restaurants.
Speaker: And in some of those cases, you might have a relatively small staff. And so you're never going to have 350 people at the local Italian restaurant that come forward and say, this guy was really being abusive.
Speaker: um And so if you're relying on a certain threshold number, then that really is going to be put down. the people in in smaller groups, the smaller organizations are going to be in real detriment.
Speaker: And it's a challenging topic. That's for sure. This is that's an issue that we're facing the pendulum swinging back and forth almost weekly. well and then And so I'll tell you the, the, who really benefits from this is what I call the anti-whisper network.
Speaker: And the anti-whisper network is what happens between in in these examples, the men in authority. who tell each other don't work with this person because she's a troublemaker.
Speaker: And there was documentation about this around Harvey Weinstein, where some people, some well-known directors, I think the Coen brothers, I think maybe Ron Howard said that Weinstein would tell them don't,
Speaker: don't cast this actress in your film because she can't take a joke or she has. Maris Sorvino. She was one of those actresses. Yeah. Yes. And, and so that was really, the, that anti whisper network when they only, they might hear, well, one person says that this guy's a problem, but I don't know if I really do.
Speaker: She, she might just be someone who didn't understand the situation. Mm-hmm. Well, this is amazing work because i mean, this is such a complicated topic and and such a difficult issue to deal with, especially when the issue is in front of you.
Speaker: and So the work that you're doing, Ted, I think is amazing because again, the more we talk about this, the more this is brought out, ah the more we understand these ideas and concepts. the more it gives people freedom to and and the empowerment to at least take on the situation itself and and protect themselves from abuse and help call abuse when they see it and not necessarily let it go to a full fledged 350 person case. Hopefully, ever you know, the but we don't see that kind of case ever again, hopefully.
Speaker: But kudos to you and your work. It's amazing what you're doing. So this is good. Thank Thank you very much. Thank you. So um is there anything else you want to add as far as work you're you're doing coming up here? Any new projects you're working on?
Speaker: um No. I mean, the one thing we didn't really talk about is um I also have used simulation with ah law enforcement as well. um So, yeah, so I've been working with criminal justice professor at University of Louisville and we've do law enforcement training and victim-centered interviewing.
Speaker: And so we will train actors to portray victims of sexual assault so that police investigators can practice interviewing victims, survivors of sexual assault. Because honestly, most police, if they get any training in how to do an interview, it'll be in how to train someone to interview suspect.
Speaker: ah suspect And if you approach a survivor of a traumatic sexual assault, the way that you would suspect that you risk, uh, re traumatizing that person. And at best that person is probably going to claim up and you're not going to get any useful information from them.
Speaker: And so this is paired with a week long workshop that these investigators take and, um, at the end of it, they get to simulate what they learned with a with an actor. And then they get feedback from the actor and from the course faculty as well.
Speaker: And we've had really great responses from the people who have taken that course and they've found to be valuable. We had someone who actually took the course um and he was a campus police officer at a university in Kentucky. And a week after he took the course, he had a Uh, he had a student, uh, report a sexual assault to him and he interviewed her and there was a, um, uh, a survivor advocate in the room during the interview to just make sure that she felt comfortable and that if she had any questions that that person could advocate on her behalf.
Speaker: And at the end of the interview, the the officer said the student thanked her or thanked him rather, and said, i was really apprehensive about reporting this because I didn't know if I was going to be believed. I didn't know if I was going to be accused of doing something wrong myself.
Speaker: And I really appreciate how well you listened to me. And he said, well, thanks. I'm glad I could do that. And he left the room and the advocate said to him, that was the best interview.
Speaker: I've ever seen. and he said, well, I took this course and they let us practice what we learned in the course with an actor. And the advocate said, that's amazing. Why don't they do that everywhere? Right.
Speaker: I mean, to the point that Yashka was making earlier, you know, there's, there are people now who are skeptical. Is the woman, you know, she lying about this? Is this, is this truthful? And this is a course that we do where people,
Speaker: get to ask questions and conduct interviews in in such a way that they are ah going to get the most information they can and get the most usable evidence um from from a survivor of a sexual assault.
Speaker: I wonder if that could be a research topic as to like the impact, you know, if um just law enforcement had more of this background information and training, and then being able to take that to the national level and then enforcing that amongst all different stations around the country, because that would be so great.
Speaker: our Our research that we've conducted has shown that officers really like this and want more of it. And in fact, we have just started a center for police so for simulation for police training the University of Louisville.
Speaker: Amazing. Is this mandatory for the police department now to to participate in this program? The course that we do is all volunteer. Got it. Okay.
Speaker: That's think it's a little bit of a self-selecting population. It's people that are interested in this and recognize that they want to be better at their jobs, that kind of thing. the Yeah, but it go it seems to go hand in hand with everything we're talking about as far as handling sexual abuse.
Speaker: So having people that know how to handle it when they actually hear it first is crucial. I know a lot of times police are are the ones who have to deal with those kind of claims in the first place, almost in the psychological intake part.
Speaker: as well, right? Sure. Sure. Absolutely. That's right exactly psychological safety is a huge part of it too. Yeah. Yeah. So, well, wow, it's amazing work you're doing. So keep up the good work. Thank you very much for coming on our show today. And we will talk to you very soon, Ted.
Speaker: All right. Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Yossi. course. Thank you. And that brings us to the end of another episode. Remember, if you like what you hear, please feel free to leave a review and tell your friends as well.
Speaker: For Yasi Ansari, I'm Stephen Karaginas, and this has been the Athletes and the Arts Podcast.
