What if anything is possible?

What if our home is in the theatre? What if these dark rooms have allowed us to be free from the tyranny of the mundane?  Have cleared our minds and opened our hearts?  What if these dark rooms of waiting where our friendships formed, our drinks overflowed, and our open hearts broke became suddenly dangerous? What if the way that we cared and created empathy vanished in an instant? Would we find it in a Zoom waiting room? Would we recreate it in our streets in protest marches and banners? Or would we simply crawl further into ourselves and away from one another?

What if anything is possible?

Performance lives for so many of us in the moments where we see and are seen, where we feel and are felt. We have created, we have observed, we have waited. Yet. We are, in this waiting, reckoning with the realities of when, where, and how our curated performance palaces have been blind and unfeeling—where our intentions have been wholly separate from our impact.

What if anything is possible?

What if you have never felt cared for or seen by live performance? What if our cutting-edge curation, our form-destroying festivals, our seasons of brave new work, our bridge-building concerts, have never spoken to you or about you but instead made it clear that we don’t want you around? Made it clear by the signals of our unspoken rules, our drink minimums, our ticket prices, and our inability to imagine a world that could include your story? What if that exclusion was the point? What if?

Anything is possible.

So much lost in this waiting. So much revealed. So much undone. So much planted.

What beckons us from this stage? What must we create in this present to take care of one another in a new way? Can theatre not be dragged down by its logistics, its unending waste, its determination to prioritize a singular narrative, its partnership with white supremacy? Can theatre move into a moment, a movement? Someday the curtain will rise and who we were in this present will be on full display. What did we make? For whom?  As we redefine space and time as a human collective, can we reimagine how to create a sustainable artistic community that understands how to build care for one another into the process and make that process of creation a sacred breath?

In and out. Up and down. Flexible. Necessary. Rooted in relationship.

Anything is possible.