What Lives Long Enough to Be Passed On

January 2026

I watched a family make music together in a black box theater in Brooklyn and I have been obsessed with everything I experienced there ever since.

The HawtPlates are a Bronx-based trio. Two siblings and a spouse. They formed in a one-bedroom apartment, singing as a way of communicating with each other. Their mother was always singing, always making instruments. Jade says she still hears her mother's voice in her own voice every day. They call Dream Feed an electroacoustic song cycle about "generational dreaming," about what it means to carry on a dream from your ancestors, about investigating your aspirations while asleep and awake.

What I experienced was something closer to inheritance made audible. A family producing their soul sound in the spirit of a family heirloom. Three people who have clearly been making things together for so long that the practice lives in their bodies, passes between them without explanation. Check out this WYNC interview and song excerpt from the performance here.

I keep circling back to what the work was made of, not what it is about. I wonder how many moments of shared and individual experiences it took to build a container that could hold it.

I saw Dahlak Brathwaite's Try/Step/Trip at Under the Radar. Rhythm as both container and content. Someone encoding their whole inheritance into ninety minutes of theater. I saw Reconstructing by The TEAM and felt twenty years of ensemble methodology in every choice. That's what longevity in collective creation looks like when you keep sharpening instead of calcifying. (Shout out to Kate’s projection work on this piece!)

Three shows. Three different forms. The same question underneath: What does it take to sustain a practice long enough for it to become transformative for both maker and viewer? What disappears when we can’t sustain the people who hold this?

The Wrong Question

As I shared in a recent post, I am fully committed to the idea that Ensemble practice is civic technology. The rehearsal room is where democracy actually gets practiced. The skills we build in collective creation, the ones BIPOC and Indigenous communities have been developing and protecting and passing down despite every system designed to erase them, are the skills this country claims to value but refuses to fund.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph closed APAP with a version of this articulation that feels even clearer.

“People ask all the time, what can art do to help create an equitable society? That's the wrong question. It puts the onus on the wrong people. The actual question: Why aren't our health care systems more like music? Why doesn't our political apparatus operate more like the flow of a poem? Why isn't inspiration thought of as part of the civic infrastructure, just like roads or telecommunications?”

That's it. The knowledge we need already exists. It lives in the way The HawtPlates pass sound between generations. In the methodology The TEAM has been refining for two decades. The question isn't how to make art useful to democracy. The question is why we keep ignoring the democratic practices artists have already built.

Another Bamuthi question endlessly on replya in my brain cavity: “Can you be an American if you don't have access to the impulse of creativity?”

And then came this mic drop: “We can incarcerate people better than anyone in the world. Our systems of deportation are beautifully, insidiously designed. But can we design freedom?”

Exploding Brain Emoji.

Ensemble practices work. I've seen rooms transform. I've watched ensembles build decision-making cultures that put most institutions to shame. The methodology is real. It's rigorous. It produces results. But…

We can not sustain the people who hold, iterate, and share these practices.

And worse yet, it doesn’t feel like the majority of the field is even trying to.

As I sat in the theater at HereArts, I thought about the New York Times story about regional theaters "defying the odds." The theaters they celebrated? $80 million buildings. "White Christmas." "Come From Away." An artistic director whose programming mantra is "up and known" because, she said, "there's a lot of poke-you-in-the-eye theater" and she won't do it.

Nataki Garrett responded directly: "What the article actually offers is a case study in how comfort becomes policy — aesthetic, institutional, and ideological." She names what the article avoids naming: "The art we remember, the artists we remember, and the theaters we remember are not the ones that reassured us that nothing was at stake. They are the ones that asked something of us."

Kelundra Smith, continuing the conversation, pushed further: "The real question is, whose escapism and entertainment are we talking about?" One person's comfort is another person's erasure. "We must resist false dichotomy and toxic nostalgia, and get to the root, which is about who wants to share space and decision-making power with whom."

And when I heard Bamuthi at APAP, it all started to come together: Bamuthi asked why inspiration isn't treated as civic infrastructure. The answer is in that Times article. The field isn't designing freedom. It's designing comfort for people who already have it. And the artists who hold the practices that could actually help this country, the ones who know how to build collective decision-making, how to hold complexity, how to pass methodology between generations, are the ones being systematically starved.

The pipeline flows one direction. Regional and commercial theaters extract from experimental, ensemble, and BIPOC theater. The ideas. The artists. The innovations. But the resources don't flow back. The reciprocity is broken. And until that changes, or until we stop pretending these are separate fields with separate economies, the work that carries fire will keep dying while $80 million goes to buildings that program comfort.

We don't have a crisis of attendance. We have a crisis of imagination. And a crisis of resource distribution. And we don't have to keep participating in our own erasure.

The Field Is Moving

I'm not the only one thinking about this.

HowlRound just announced that Jamie Gahlon is stepping down after fifteen years. Ramona Rose King and Julia Schachnik are stepping into co-leadership. King said something that hit me: "We are building the field that we need."

Art.coop announced that co-founders Caroline Woolard and Nati Linares are transitioning out after five years of growing what started as the Solidarity Not Charity report into a living experiment in cooperative network building. They're not ending, they said, just shifting orbit: "It's time for us to tend and water other parts of the artist liberation ecosystem." Art.coop continues, now governed by a team of co-stewards.

Under the Radar has restructured around rotating co-creative directors. The festival now lives across more than twenty venues, produced through partnerships instead of consolidation.

Daniel Alexander Jones delivered the keynote at the Under the Radar Symposium. He kept returning to memory. To remembrance. To what we carry and what we lose when we stop passing it on.

Everywhere I look, organizations are redistributing power, rethinking leadership, asking what it would mean to build structures that don't depend on burning out the people who hold them.

What We're Building

At NET, we've been calling this the Federation. Collective infrastructure. Pooled resources. The shift from service organization to solidarity network.

As Fatima Khadijah named it in our last blog post: "Federation is a spiritual-civic framework designed to hold pluralism, non-extractive economies, and living ritual cultures inside a legal structure that can be replicated anywhere life is ready to reorganize."

It isn’t dreaming; many orgs and individuals can build what none of us can build alone. Healthcare access. Retirement pathways. The material conditions that let someone stay in this work long enough to develop a practice worth passing down. The HawtPlates didn't become The HawtPlates in three years on project grants. That kind of intergenerational transmission requires decades. Requires people being able to stay.

Why share this thinking with you today? Because it is embedded in all of our choices at NET right now. This fall we launch NETRoots in the Bay Area, the first gathering in our five-year Story + Legacy Project. This project exists because I watched what disappeared when we lost Diane Rodriguez, my mentor of 12 years. Not just a person. Practices. Relationships. A way of moving through institutions that she spent decades developing. I kept thinking we had time to document it. We didn't. I'm done waiting.

We're building the archive we wish existed when we were coming up. And we're asking hard questions about what we're willing to pool, what we're willing to let go of, what we're willing to build together that we can't build alone.

The Lingerers

Bamuthi was speaking to the people who stayed past the deal-making. The ones still in the room after the transactions were done.

That's who I'm writing to.

What would it take for the artists in your community to stay? Not just survive another year but stay long enough to build something. Pass something on.

What are you willing to pool? What would you give up controlling so something bigger could exist?

The HawtPlates lend us a profound wisdom with this lyric, “everything is intricately wrapped in simplicity”. So I turn it around to myself and ask: Who are you waiting on? What happens if you stop?

I want to hear what you're thinking. info@ensembletheaters.net.

In the practice of us,

Alexandra Meda

Co-Producing Director, Network of Ensemble Theaters