2. Community Conversations Require Humility, Patience, and Hours of Active Listening.
Artistic leaders hoping to engage their communities in conversation must be prepared to navigate contradictory feedback, with the awareness that it may be impossible, and possibly undesirable, to meet everyone’s needs. Sometimes, a backlash reaction can be defused by an invitation to listen. The artistic director of a large regional theatre company described how she reached out to every audience member who reacted with anger and outrage at one of the company’s more provocative shows (William Shakespeare’sAs You Like It: A Radical Retelling by Indigenous actor and playwright Cliff Cardinal) and invited them to speak directly with her. Almost forty people accepted the invitation, and the artistic director invested hours in one-on-one conversations, during which she acknowledged each person’s feelings while also sharing her artistic motivations for programming the play. In the end, all audience members who met with the artistic director returned to the theatre to see other shows, hopefully with a renewed sense of connection to the company and its purpose.
3. Be Wary of the Rush to Nationalism.
In this moment of heightened political anxiety—punctuated by fascism, xenophobia, and punishing tariffs—many Canadians feel threatened. The once simple act of crossing the Canada-United States border now provokes fear, especially among artists and academics who have built their careers in pursuit of social justice. This fear is often amplified for racialized and minoritized people. In this tense time, it is tempting to reject all things US American. Yet, as director Jordan Laffrenier made plain, this defensive move risks reinscribing dominant (i.e. white, cisgender, ableist) cultural norms and dangerous nationalist impulses. He acknowledged the importance of supporting Canadian artists but warned against adopting a nativist perspective that excludes innovative, experimental, or otherwise challenging art from elsewhere. Instead, he encouraged artists and educators to respond to the current backlash by building connections across borders and seek ways to support the most vulnerable people. Other panelists echoed this perspective, highlighting the important work of historical revolutionaries and those most active in combating authoritarian regimes today in Chile, Venezuela, the Sudan, Cameroon, Hungary, Turkey, and Iran, among others.
4. Strategize to Address Institutional Barriers and Infrastructural Incumbrances.
If the last six years have taught us anything, it’s that racism and colonialism have deep roots that are tangled up in the infrastructure of most of our academic and artistic institutions. Pulling out these roots often requires grappling with seemingly well-intentioned policies and procedures for everything from hiring practices to procurement. Left unaddressed, these policies can undermine DEI efforts, inadvertently supporting the backlash. One of our academic panelists, a professor leading several major research grants, spoke of the challenges she’s faced navigating the complicated financial protocols at her university to ensure artists receive payment in a timely manner. Another echoed this challenge, referencing the number of hours required to administer large grants aimed at addressing structural barriers, from coordinating budgets to answering emails. Such barriers not only stand in the way of minoritized artists being paid on time, they also risk damaging the relationships that are critical for the work to proceed. Despite acknowledging these challenges, the panelists expressed their commitment to using their privileged positions to amplify and elevate others and repurpose institutional tools to serve larger needs. One, admittedly prosaic, strategy involves working closely with administrators to revise existing systems. For example, York University recently introduced a Community Honorarium Form for Indigenous, First Nations, and Métis Individuals that makes it faster and easier to process payments for members of these communities. Incremental change is possible but requires vigilance and a willingness to get into the bureaucratic weeds.
5. Revisit and Revive Older Forms of Activism While Seeking New Tools to Engage Community.
One of the most delightful highlights of the symposium arose when performance artist Jess Dobkin passed a tube of scented hand cream to the audience and invited those who wished to take a little squirt from the tube and pass it along to their neighbors. This small, intimate gesture was a profound reminder of the importance of community care and the importance of gathering to raise consciousness and a collective sense of identity. It resulted in a beautiful moment of collective yet individualized action, enhanced by the aroma of the hand cream. Later, Dobkin proposed a return to the phone tree as one way to quickly call a community to action in a times of crisis. Other participants mentioned sit-ins, die-ins, and other analog actions popular during earlier periods of backlash and protest (e.g. 1970s feminism, 1980s AIDS activism) and encouraged us to consider how such actions might be redeployed to transform public space and resist government efforts to limit or interrupt protest actions.
Reviving older activist practices doesn’t mean rejecting new ones, though. Stephanie Fung—an interdisciplinary artist and theatre critic in training—spoke passionately about the potential to communicate with the theatregoing public through social media forums like Reddit, a twenty-first-century variation of the phone tree. We were left wondering how we might combine these tools in future action.
6. Forge Intergenerational Connections.
We are stronger together. By working across borders and disciplines, we avoid silos. We can imagine a brighter future and gain a clearer understanding of the outcomes we need to continue to survive and thrive as artists. One panelist, a performance artist, spoke about the challenges and loneliness of creating work in this current climate. She reflected that in the past, before the emergence of the internet or cellphones, community was built through gathering: dinner parties, symposiums, and “old school” networks like phone trees. There was a sense of connection and community that seems to be missing in today’s world.
7. Harness the Body.
The body is instrumental in performance, and through its power to express, emote, and perform, it can be the catalyst for change. Embodiment, in the sense that Diana Taylor understands it as the way the body makes meaning from physical practice and lived experience, gives us the power to be present and can allow things to happen to us in a way that no other art form does. Within this framework, presence is not abstract but rather an awareness to the body in action—being “alive” to the moment.
As performance studies artist-scholar Carla Beatriz Melo pointed out, engaging the body, whether through dance, marching together, or more intimate shared gestures like the hand cream moment described above, activates forms of embedded memory—knowledge that is stored in gesture, rhythm, and muscular response. There is a powerful link between what the body knows and cultural memory; therefore, we must be willing to connect fully with our bodies to effect change on cultural, spiritual, and physical planes. This is why performance privileges showing over telling. The body does not illustrate an idea; it activates it. In this sense, embodied practice becomes a critical tool for artists to produce meaning—and transformation—on physical, social, and material levels.
