I have spent a lot of time imagining change. In curating performance, when we talk about change, we are often looking outwards. We talk about what it looks like to diversify our audiences and diversify our artists, but our self-reflective change at an institutional level is slow-going or outrightly ignored. In the years since I joined this field in 2006, I have worked at one organization with a person of color in a position senior to mine. To say that another way, in 14 years, I have had one mentor in a full-time job who is a woman of color.

I have been on countless diversity committees, in an exhausting number of conversations about how we continue to diversify the work we are presenting, how that will allow us to reach more diverse audiences. We talk a lot about social practice, social justice, social progress. But what will it take for us to dismantle our ideas about who is allowed to make decisions at our theatres, our festivals, our residency programs? If you have not watched Rachel Chavkin’s 2019 TONY acceptance speech for Best Director of a Musical, you should. Perhaps by the time you are reading this, there will be another speech, another person using their platform making the rounds on social media, but as Chavkin accepted her award, lamenting that she was the only woman who directed a musical on Broadway that season, she reminded an industry that there are women and people of color “ready to go.” She pointed out that “this is not a pipeline issue. It is a failure of imagination by a field whose job it is to imagine the way the world could be.”

This hit me hard. This hits me hard. In my years of diversity committees and conversations, we regularly talk about the pipeline issue. We have to do better to offer arts programs in under-resourced schools. We have to do better to offer arts programs in communities of color. We have to do better in the future. But how are we doing better now? Performing arts professionals are, by design, excellent problem-solvers but we continue to push responsibility off ourselves and look to others to solve this problem. We continue to establish organizational reputations heralding our diverse programming choices with our all-white staff and our all-white boards. I have worked at these places, I have interviewed at these places. I have participated in my own marginalization in a field that validates my experience more through my identity as brown and female, and less through my work. I have still said “please” and I have still said “thank you.”

I do not have a neat way to conclude this, so consider this a call for change that is self-critical and difficult. This is a call to create safer spaces (emotionally, physically) for artists of color, curators of color, administrators of color, technical staff of color, critics and writers of color. This is a call to action less for imagining the way the world could be, and more demanding the way the world should be.