NETWeek Bay Area
October 5-10, 2026
A Continuation of the Pilot Series and A Return to The Bay
This Fall, NET is returning to the BAY AREA for our NETWeek series! A continuation of the NETWeek Pilot started in Chicago, we are bringing the celebrated programming to the Bay. Join us for On Record, Ground Floor, and Federation Table, along with Bay Area-specific programming and events. We are currently in deep conversation with existing and new partners in the Bay, and are looking to connect more broadly with you all. If you’d like to connect and help shape our week of rooted programming, please use our scheduling link to set up a meeting.
Overview
Gathering is our medium. It is how we build, how we fight, how we stay alive.
In the Bay, gathering has a sharper name: solidarity. This is the region where liberation refuses to stay single-issue. Indigenous, Black, and Palestinian struggle held as one image on one Oakland wall. Land moving back into Indigenous hands. Restaurants owned by the people who cook in them. NETWeek Bay Area is a week of building infrastructure between movements: cultural workers, artists, and organizers at the same tables, on the same land, in the same street.
We are not visiting the Bay. We are returning to the Bay. And we are staying for a residency in collaboration with the vibrant work that has been alive for so long.
The week, as you'll live it
Tuesday night we begin with moving the knowledge out. Wednesday, hands tend to rematriated soil. Thursday we gather at an iconic mural site that has held three liberations as one image for two years. Friday we double down on infrastructure as we experiment a new series pairing front line workers and community organizations with with artist facilitators to fortify and equip their work with the power of imagination. Saturday we witness Black women put their legacy on the permanent record in the revolutionary Black Arts Movement Business District. We close in celebration, in joy, and in movement.
Let’s move from isolated to organized.
Let’s get audaciously shameless about building collective power.
Step into the portals.
All event registrations can be found here. Money should never be the thing that keeps you out of the room. Waivers are one email away: info@ensembletheaters.net.
NETWeek Bay Area
〰️
NETWeek Bay Area 〰️
The Portals
The Federation Table: Collective Practice, Cooperative Power
Tuesday, October 6 | 1:00–4:00 PM PT | By invitation Only
At Understory, a worker-owned cooperative restaurant in Fruitvale.
The way people practice being together determines what they can accomplish together.
NET is piloting national cooperative infrastructure for cultural workers: pooled benefits, mutual aid protocols, portable healthcare, and shared purchasing, in partnership with labor organizations. This three-hour working lunch is part of a larger design phase that brings co-ops, labor, solidarity networks, and artmakers together at one table in cities across the US. In the Bay, we gather at a restaurant owned by the same people cooking. The federation finds its builders here.
On the menu: breaking down what’s working on the ground, what's being dreamed up, and co-creating the structures directly. El Teatro Campesino made theater on the picket line. We're bringing the picket line a benefits package.
When we stop checking the horizon and start checking in on each other we are returning to how everything worthwhile has ever been built: by the ones who need it, together, without asking for permission.
Ground Floor: Move the Knowledge Out
Tuesday, October 6 | 7:00–9:00 PM PT
Let's move the knowledge out!
An evening of exchange for the Bay's ensemble makers, cultural workers, organizers, and the artists building what comes next, held the way knowledge actually travels: as a kickback. NET invites local artists to take the floor answering one question: "What do you know that no one asks you about, and who needs it next?" We invite the room to answer, push back, and offer the wisdom it has. We seek to kick off our week with intergenerational makers and leaders in the same conversation; lineage in one direction, future in the other.
The invitation is to come with a real practice question and one thing you need from someone else in the room. Leave with collaborators, sharper questions, and relationships that spiral.
Support Understory, a worker-owned restaurant | Bites + Bar | Come Ready To Get Down.
Sogorea Te' Service Day: Right Relationship Is a Work Day
Wednesday, October 7 | 10:00 AM–2:00 PM PT | By invitation, capped
You can't say LANDBACK with clean hands.
Everything we build this week gets built on land we are guests on, and good guests bring care, contribution and service. On Wednesday, a small invited crew joins Sogorea Te' Land Trust, at the Pinnantak Site in so-called Berkeley. This urban, Indigenous, women-led organization is years deep into returning East Bay land to the people it was taken from. As a Network dreaming about shared land, shared power, and shared futures we have everything to learn from the people who never stopped practicing all three. Wednesday we come in right relationship; a shared meal closes the day.
AT THE WALL
Thursday, October 8 | 5:00–9:00 PM PT
There's a wall in Oakland that's been holding it down for two years. Thursday night, the collective holds it up.
It stands on 26th Street, painted across a working auto body shop parking lot: Indigenous, Black, and Palestinian liberation as interdependent. Sumud is Arabic for steadfastness: staying rooted to your land and your people when everything around you is built to remove you from both.
We begin in circles on the concrete, small groups devising and building performances from their own stories underscored by live music from local artists. Circles of grief, belonging, power, and pain bring us together, because solidarity is a thing we make with our bodies in spaces where nothing is meant to grow.
Live music, art shares, street food, vendors. Bring your people, stay for the celebration and the dancing. Learn more about SUMUD: Resistance Until Liberation here.
Rehearsing for the Real Thing: Theater Tools for Frontline Workers
Friday, October 9 | 2:00–5:00 PM PT | By invitation, capped
Some introductions are infrastructure.
Friday at EastSide Arts Alliance, Hénia Belalia and Rad Pereira bring Theater of the Oppressed to the people holding this region's front lines. Augusto Boal built this methodology for people confronting power, and fifty years of movements on every continent have carried it since, because it works. By engaging in this workshop, frontline workers receive new breath for their bodies, work image and forum techniques on the real conflicts that keep us trapped in the old world. Participants will leave with artists and cultural workers as collaborators in breaking open a new paradigm.
This first time matchmaking for NET is an experiment. We are seeding partnerships between the people who hold the line and the culture makers who tell their stories. Because the most powerful visions for a just future require an infrastructure that begins from below, through connections just as strong as the ground under our feet.
On Record | Bay Area: Black Women Directors, Makers + Leaders
Saturday, October 10 | 2:00–5:00 PM PT
These conversations are powerful; we’re bringing the group chat out in the open.
On Record is NET's national conversation series, dedicated to Black women directors, makers, and leaders. This live, public roundtable is facilitated by Lauren Turner Hines, Founding Envisionist and Executive Lead of the André Cailloux Center For Justice + The Performing Arts on historic Bayou Road in New Orleans. This event takes place at BAM House, the Black Arts Movement Business District home that Dr. Ayodele Nzinga (Featured Speaker) built. Livestreamed in partnership with HowlRound, let’s witness what the field will get as a living archive forever. Black women direct, devise, produce, and lead at extraordinary levels, and the ecosystem fails them. Every time. This is NET’s ongoing commitment to a collective reimagining of this systemic failure. On Record puts that gap on the table and asks you what you want on ON RECORD for The Bay.
Closing Party: Turn the Music Up
Saturday, October 10 | 5:00–7:00 PM PT
Five days of building. Two hours to let it sing. Come toast the Bay. Let’s find out what you're building next, and with whom.
Still landing
A celebration of legacy. The Bay's ensemble lineage is alive, working, and planning its own next transformations. A gathering to honor icons whose practice built the ground this week stands on.
Create + Activate practice shares. NET's direct investment in ensemble artists steps into the open: shares directly from the C+A cohort.
PAA in the Bay. The week also holds the fall gathering of the Performing Arts Alliance, the national service organizations of the performing arts, hosted by NET.
Why the Bay
NET has been in conversation with the Bay for over 30 years. Our gatherings, our national convenings, our deepest organizational relationships were informed by the people who root here. Bay Area member theaters helped shape what NET is today.
The Bay is one of a handful of regions where NET is now building long-term, on-the-ground presence with and for ensemble artists and collectives. This week is the beginning of a multi-year commitment to grow what already exists here and to build what we all deserve. Isolation is the weapon. Relationship is the resource. Proximity is the practice.
Register Now For All Events
About NET
The Network of Ensemble Theaters is a national solidarity network of ensembles, collectives, practitioners, and cultural workers distributed across urban, rural, and tribal communities. For three decades we have been the connective tissue for a field that the world keeps trying to scatter. After thirty years we are shifting from convening to building.
The NET Federation pilots cooperative infrastructure for cultural workers: pooled benefits, mutual aid, and shared governance built in partnership with labor and solidarity economy organizations.
The Ensemble Practice Story and Legacy Project is building a living archive of ensemble practitioners and their methodologies, centering historically marginalized communities whose collaborative traditions have been systematically excluded from the American art canon. Ensemble practice is civic technology. We are making the root system visible.
Create + Activate invests directly in BIPOC ensemble artists through 18-month leadership arcs that pair financial resource with deep peer exchange.
Relationship is the resource. Isolation is the weapon. Proximity is the practice.
Stay Connected
Want to be in the loop as details come together? Have a question about the week? Want to explore partnership or participation?
Email: info@ensembletheaters.net
In the practice of us,
Team NET