Permission, appropriation or trespassing – the tricky terrain of 2 Black Dramaturgs in the current “We See You” performance landscape told through personal case studies, observations, rants, riffs and realizations. Melanie George and Talvin Wilks, friends, colleagues, and confidantes, will talk their way through the current cultural moment from their vantage points as Dramaturgs While Black (DWB). Utilizing, purposefully, a Black lens to view the American Theatre and Dance industries, the conversation seeks to navigate the concept of appropriation vs. elucidation in the choices that many BIPOC dramaturgs have made and continue to have to make in this era of reckoning, solidarity and wokeness. In it they question and challenge their own responsibility and accountability to Black artists and address some of the systemic traps and tropes in the process. Working from the inter- and intra-personal, the artists plan to rant, riff and tee hee through this tricky terrain of being Black in white spaces and living to tell the tale.