The light is what we do together, under pressure
The following are remarks written and shared by Alexandra Meda, NET Network Director and TCG Board Co-Chair, at the 2026 TCG Conference in Puerto Rico, honoring the TCG Board past, present, and future.
On Wednesday night I put my hand into black water and it came back covered in glittering magical light; Bioluminescence.
We were floating in the bay at La Parguera, in Lajas. In what we lovingly called THE FRENCE, a convening on a boat with a group of leaders in the American Theater dreaming up how we move in deeper connection with eachother to show up in this crisis moment. This crisis moment that isn’t just a moment.
The mountains stood black against the clouds and the stars, the shore a thin line behind us, the moon laying whispers of silver on the water. I was overwhelmed with the knowing I was inside of a moment I would be grateful for the rest of my life.
The captain told us the water was alive. Two million tiny creatures in every gallon, called dinoflagellates. Too small to see, and each one able to make its own light. We slipped into the water and began to move our bodies through and the water lit up only where we touched it. Not the whole bay. Only the path my hand cut through the dark. Every place I moved, the water answered in light. Every place I held still, it stayed black. We became mermaids and our magic was made visible before us.
The captain told us these beings live almost everywhere in the ocean. Off Miami, in the Maldives, right off this island. But almost everywhere, the light is rare and brief. The current scatters them and the water goes dark. The perfect conditions for them to exist in this way only exist here. The perfect conditions got me thinking.
What are the perfect conditions for change. What could I learn about why in this bay, it never goes dark?
Captain Chiqui told me why my moving hand lit the water and my stillness did not. These creatures do not glow when they are calm. They glow from friction. From being moved, pressed, pushed against. The light is not what they do when they are safe. The light is what they make under pressure.
The tide pushes through that bay every single night. Millions of them, shoved by a force they did not choose and cannot stop. They do not fight the tide. They do not break apart in it. They move with it. Together. All of them, as one body of water. And that is why the light can hold. Not because the water is calm. But because nothing in it moves alone.
One more thing makes that bay possible. It is ringed by mangroves, and the mangroves feed the water by dying into it. The leaves fall, and rot, and that decomposition becomes the food. Nothing in that bay glows without something that came before it letting go.
Diane Rodriguez and Alex Meda
Which brings me to the gratitude. Every person who has served on the TCG board, the staff, the volunteers, the advisory circles, across decades, the ones sitting in this room and the ones who came before us, are the mangroves. They have fed us. The doors generations of us walked through, they held open first. What you built did not end when your terms did. It decomposed down into the soil and it is still feeding the light. And oh my goodness am I seeking sparks of light anywhere I can.
There is no way I can speak to you today without naming one specific board alumna who held my door specifically. Diane Rodriguez! She stewarded this board for many years. She held doors open for so many like it was a discipline, on purpose, because she knew transmission was the work.
Let me be real, she didn’t just hold open the door. She used her body. She absorbed the terrible things about our systemic inequities with a grace I can’t even fathom, so we would not have to, to the same degree.
And she did it with fabulous red lipstick and a smile that absolutely lit up entire bodies of water.
And in her leaving this realm, in her letting go, in her transition, she fed us. Her lessons. Her way of being. Her commitment to expanding all circles and collaborating fiercely. Every door I walk through, she is the mangrove. I feel she left me an imperative: no more using our bodies to absorb.
So I floated in that bay and I thought about us. All of us.
We have built a field of organizations that each know how to glow alone. Each of us on our own grant, our own board, our own audience, our own hustle. We flicker, brilliant, for a while. And then the tide shifts, a season ends, a political wind turns, and one more of us goes dark. And we have called it a resource problem. We have called it everything but what it is.
It is self perpetuating isolation problem. It’s an infrastructure problem. And friends, it’s an ego and imagination problem. And I know it from the inside. I have run rooms alone that I should have opened. I have been too tired, or known that the work will have to go slower if we truly open for the real, hard generative conflict that comes when we build deep trust
what I now know as an undeniable truth, Isolation is a weapon but Relationship is the resource.
We are Luminous people. But until we work together in the ways that feel impossible, or have been told we aren’t ready for… Until we put the how aside and focus on the what, we will never build the thing that holds the light. The infrastructure we build must let resources move like water, toward whoever is going dark, instead of pooling where it is already bright just because it’s what makes us think we are healthy.
Too many of us are holding on to resource we should be letting flow out. Too many of us are letting fear for our individual organizational survival supersede moving together. What if that performance of protection is actually what keeps resource and opportunity stagnant? What if we instead agreed that none of us goes under alone. That there is actually more than enough for all of us.
TCG says it leads for a just and thriving theatre ecology. An ecology is a bay. It is the tide, and the mangroves, and two million creatures, and not one of them survives alone. I think of TCG as the shape of the land. It is the narrow mouth that has pulled us back into the same water since 1961. It is the civic technology that turns a crowd of us into one glowing bay.
And I want to say the scary thing. The bay can go dark too.
The thing that holds the field is not invincible. It needs tending, the same as anything alive. The next generation and all of us not only need TCG to keep us moving together— TCG needs us. I believe a new era of TCG is calling us all to usher it in.
So here is what I cannot stop thinking, in this year,, in the moment everyone keeps calling the worst yet. What if?
In the words of Sunni Patterson, as often quoted to me by the inimitable brilliant light in this field, Lauren Turner Hines: good is the opposite of right.
What if these are not the good conditions we want, but they are the right conditions for fundamental massive transformation?
Change hurts, but it also liberates. The models don’t need to be built from scratch. They exist everywhere around us. Ancient technology as innovation is here with us at this conference. I feel the stress and urgency of this moment in my body the same as you. But I now can remember the light was never made by calm water.
What if this hard, narrow, frightening moment is the disturbance. The pressure that finally makes us reach for each other. The tide that, if we move through it together, becomes the brightest thing we have ever made.
So this is my charge to you. Every person in this room.
You cannot stop the tide. None of us can. It is going to move you.
The only question left is whether it scatters you, or whether we move through it together. And I don’t mean casually together. I mean in deep interdependent ways that forge us closer than comfortable.
When you fly home, do not go back to glowing alone. Let’s find the others in the dark. Let’s move with them.
Because the light is not what we do when it is easy.
The light is what we do together, under pressure.
Thank you TCG humans. Thank you artists. Thank you elders, the next generation, the thinkers, the disrupters, the land stewards, the frontline workers. Thank you to all of you here. Thank you to Borikén. Thank you to the water. The water holds it all.