NETWeek Bay Area
October 4-11, 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.
NET is spending a week in Bay Area this fall. Multiple events. Multiple conversations. Real time in a city where so much of what drives this network was forged. We are bringing the full scope of what we are building nationally into Bay Area rooms, with Bay Area artists, and we want you there.
Registration Fee: $45
Your registration fee gets you access to ALL NETWeek public events. If you are experiencing financial hardship and need support attending this event, OR if you would like to sponsor the registration for another attendee, please email info@ensembletheaters.net.
NETWeek Bay Area
〰️
NETWeek Bay Area 〰️
Featured NETWeek Events
The Federation Table: Collective Practice, Cooperative Power
Friday, October 9th | 10:00 AM–12:00 PM CT
The way people practice being together determines what they can accomplish together. For thirty years, ensemble artists have been rehearsing collective governance, shared resource management, and mutual accountability inside their companies. The NET Federation takes that rehearsal to scale.
We are piloting a national cooperative infrastructure for cultural workers: pooled benefits, mutual aid protocols, portable healthcare, and shared purchasing, in partnership with labor organizations including the United Steelworkers. We are learning as we build. The federation is community infrastructure. What serves cultural workers serves the communities they are embedded in.
This working breakfast is where we share what we are building, where we listen to what the Bay already knows, and where we begin to imagine together what this infrastructure could look like, together. Ensemble leaders, solidarity economy practitioners, cooperative organizers, and culture workers at one table. We want to hear how you want to be involved.
Ground Floor
Let’s Move The Knowledge Out.
The Bay’s storefront theaters and ensemble companies in direct exchange: sharing practice, sparking co-producing partnerships, and doing what ensemble makers do best: build from the room. Bring your ideas and be ready to ask for what you need. Isolation is a weapon, Relationship Is The Resource.
On Record | Bay Area: Black Women Directors, Makers + Leaders on Brilliance, Glass Ceilings + What's Next
On Record is a national conversation series produced by the Network of Ensemble Theaters (NET) that puts critical questions about power, practice, and survival in the performing arts on the record, literally, through live public dialogue archived and accessible to the field.
This event will feature live human captioning and ASL interpretation. The archived video will include post-production captions. For additional accessibility needs, contact info@ensembletheaters.net.
Black women in the Bay direct, devise, produce, and lead at extraordinary levels. And the ecosystem doesn't match it. Directors without health insurance. Leaders building institutions with no safety net underneath them. Brilliance that the city celebrates and then fails to sustain. On Record puts that gap on the table.
These leaders have shaped Bay Area theater across generations and institutions. Together they hold founding vision, ensemble practice, institutional transformation, and artistic risk as lived experience. We are asking them to speak plainly about what it actually takes to build legacy inside a city and an industry that was not designed to hold what they are building.
We are examining the real architecture: what sustains the work, what threatens it, and what comes next.
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
Why The Bay.
The Bay Area provides the ground (venue, local partnerships, hospitality infrastructure) while participant selection prioritizes national, field-wide representation. Bay Area practitioners serve as a significant anchor presence, with the gathering being in the Bay Area and of the Bay Area, while serving the broader field. This is one site in a multi-regional initiative.
#DropTheLink
You know your city better than we ever will. Before we arrive, help us build a living map of who and what matters in The Bay.
We've created an open, interactive board where you can add the people and places that make The Bay’s creative ecosystem run. Add names, links, and love for:
Artists and ensembles doing the work
BIPOC-owned restaurants and gathering spaces
Performance venues
Community organizations rooted in solidarity economy and mutual aid
Honor them. Name them. Drop the link.
Add yours to the board here.