Every once in a while, someone asks me what I think the Bay Area performance scene needs. More often it’s a funder on a grant panel, a table of self-producing directors over a meal, or one of the many gaggles of performers I find myself in on any given project.
And honestly, I never know how to answer that alone.
Not because I don’t have opinions (I have too many), but because everything I long for, struggle with, or dream about isn’t mine uniquely. It’s shaped by hallway conversations, late-night decompressions, coffee catch-ups, and half-delirious tech-week ramblings we’ve all had with each other. And the truth is this: the way artists actually talk to each other is so different from the way we talk in public.
In grants, we’re polished.
In press releases, we’re inspirational.
In show postcards, we’re seductive.
In interviews, we’re careful.
On social media, we’re brands.
But privately?
We’re messy, funny, blunt, exhausted, hopeful, opinionated, and deeply, weirdly devoted to this place and to each other.
So instead of answering alone, I asked people: performers, choreographers, devised-theater makers, drag artists, directors, elders, newcomers.
What’s on your wishlist for Bay Area performance?
The responses poured in.
Imagination. Desire. The kind of world-building artists do when we stop trying to sound impressive and actually spill tea.
This piece is a curation of those longings: mine, theirs, ours. Sometimes I’m speaking as me, and sometimes I’m speaking as the “we” I gathered, a chorus stitched together from all those conversations. It’s written from inside a scene already full of magic: festivals, residencies, collectives, experiments, and long-running efforts that keep so many of us here.
Spaces like Bridge Live Arts, Queer Cultural Center’s National Queer Arts Festival, WorkMORE, FACT/SF’s Fieldwork, Crip Ecstasy, Fresh Meat Festival, Oaklash, Performance Primers/House Party, Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival, Tito Soto’s Princess, Una Productions’ Glimpse, ROT (fka Fresh Festival), Dance Mission’s wild multi-bill weekends, Gravity’s access services, Queering Dance Festival, Deb Slater’s Studio 210 residencies, Nicki Jizz’s Reparations, RAWdance’s Concept Series, Accessible Futures, SAFEhouse, Mary Vice and Glamamore’s Pillows, and affinity and peer spaces like Asian Babe Gang, Rupture, and Latinx/Hispanic Dancers United.
Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera.
This list isn’t comprehensive. It’s proof that the wishlist already has roots.
This isn’t a policy proposal.
Not a call to action.
Not a strategic plan.
Just a dream-text.
A message in a bottle.
A collective inhale.
A zhuzh.
What follows isn’t a single answer, but a loose atlas: a collection of systems, thresholds, and pressures that could shape how art gets made here. Call them cities, if you want (a la Italo Calvino). They’re already familiar to anyone who’s tried to build a life in this scene.
xo
Cities of Rooms
We dream about space.
Not just more rehearsal space, but ecosystems: studios we can afford without doing math that makes us cry; residencies whose applications don’t require more labor than the residency itself; rooms booked for weeks with people making strange, tender work that might never become a “show.”
We dream about buildings we don’t have to give back. Big warehouses. Old hotels. Former burger joints turned into performance halls. A West Coast immersive production that runs for months or years, evolving like a queer Sleep No More meets Beach Blanket Babylon meets every beloved space we’ve ever lost in the Bay.
Week-long rentals? Be gone.
We imagine multiple floors: a drag bar, a set and props workshop, dance class in a sunlight-filled room, a co-working table near a coffee pot and a fabric stash. So much storage. Places – palaces – where people rehearse, perform, teach, nap, scheme. Places we can point to and say: those are ours.
The Bay’s creative landscape has always been slippery, impermanent, shimmering. Spaces come and go, but the spirit stays. That feeling that somewhere, in a loft or borrowed corner, something unruly and brilliant is happening. We miss that density of surprise.
A constellation of infinite, secret happenings.
We dream about venues that don’t feel like we’re squeezing ourselves between corporate events. Green rooms. Heat and AC that work (I repeat: heat and AC that work). Unionized crews who are well-paid and well-slept. Buildings nurtured with possibility instead of disappearing through neglect.
We dream of civic investment in culture. Not billionaire-branded street fairs, but a city known for its actual artists and events.
Our home-grown sanctuaries deserve to be resourced enough to last. And then some.
Rooms change what’s possible simply by staying.
When a room lasts, relationships thicken. Work stacks. Memory accumulates.
xo
Cities of Mess
We dream about structures that let experimentation deepen.
Not mess that exists only to be “refined,” “tightened,” or “positioned.” Not labs that quietly pressure work toward legibility, outcomes, or a future pitch deck. We’re talking about rooms where artists are trusted to not know, and where that not-knowing is understood as labor.
No grant language required.
We want time that isn’t auditioning for its next phase. Play that doesn’t need to justify itself as research. Studios where artists can wander, repeat themselves, contradict themselves, follow impulses that go nowhere, and circle the same question for weeks because it won’t let them go.
Mess as professional development.
Mess as training.
Mess as a legitimate use of resources.
Processes that trust that flailing, wrecking, and wandering are not failures of rigor, but evidence of it.
We want mess that actually risks change — not aesthetic déjà vu dressed up as process. Not safety masquerading as experimentation. Not career maintenance disguised as curiosity.
Same piece, different name? Be gone.
Showings where half the audience is other makers scribbling notes, gasping, laughing, recognizing themselves. Rooms where people feel permission to try the thing they’re embarrassed by, the thing that doesn’t fit their “brand,” the thing that might never be seen again.
Pin-drop quiet spaces full of stuffy, homogeneous audiences? I don’t think so, honey.
We dream about a Bay-wide mixed-bill convening that isn’t hell for those involved. Something Association of Performing Arts Professionals-ish. Twenty-minute slices from as many Bay companies as possible. You go for one artist and accidentally fall in love with five.
We dream about long-term labs and intensives where the goal is to work and witness: composition for grown-ass artists, creation sprints with strangers, wrecking more frequently (shoutout Susan Rethorst), process valued as much as product. More opportunities. More auditions.
More ways of agitating insular companies, cliques, and circles — loosening their edges, interrupting sameness, and letting new people in.
Mess isn’t the opposite of rigor.
It’s one of its homes.
xo
Cities of Thousands of Bridges
We dream about actual next steps.
You do SAFEhouse. Then what?
Pilot at ODC. Then what?
Show your work at a handful of mixed-bill festivals. Then what?
Self-produce for X number of years in hopes of… something?
(I know. I’m oversimplifying.) But right now, the path kind of stops.
Right now, too many bridges lead back to the same shoreline. We want more rungs. A showing that leads to a local theater producing you. A tour exchange. A residency across the bridge. Cross-pollination with other cities. Curators swapping lineups with Minneapolis or Havana or Manila, saying: let’s share that brilliance.
xo
Cities of Masterpieces
A resounding battle cry: we dream about spaces to fail as artists.
We’ve covered this. (See: Cities of Mess, above.)
Yes, aaaaaaaaand.
May I contradict?
I’m ready for spaces to succeed as an artist. Ooooop.
We want places to finish things. Not everything — but some things.
We want rooms where a piece can be taken seriously enough to be held all the way through. Where there is time and funding to refine, deepen, structure, rehearse, tech, and polish. Where collaborators can stay with a work long enough to let it become more than a sketch — to let it become an event.
Some of us have tasted this. A residency that really held. A co-production that didn’t rush. A room that asked more of us — and gave more in return. Once you experience that kind of support, it sharpens the desire.
This matters especially for artists in the big, messy middle — no longer “emerging,” not yet anointed as legends — who are ready for rigor, scale, and commitment, but rarely offered the conditions to grow into them.
We want an ecosystem, not lone wolves. Immersive companies. Devised collectives. Drag-theater hybrids. Peers who challenge us, push us, and stay in the room long enough for something to ripen.
Rooms where artists are paid well, treated well, challenged well. Where directors can direct, performers can perform, and no one has to also be their own fundraising department, HR team, producer, strategist, influencer, and janitor.
Infrastructure that lets artists succeed, not just survive.
xo
Cities of Care
We dream about how we show up with one another.
Leadership and collaboration are being questioned. Beautiful. Challenging. You can feel the growing pains.
Hierarchy is one option. Non-hierarchy is another. Neither is inherently virtuous. Neither is inherently harmful. And neither is the only way.
What we want is a culture that balances freedom with responsibility. Saying yes actually means yes. Questions asked early, not after weeks of confusion. Discernment replacing guesswork. Entitlement named and interrupted. Rigor, roles, and structure understood as care, not control.
Those are the rooms we’re trying to build: places where people bring their full presence because they know what they’re stepping into. Where the task is clear, the structure fits the moment, and the container is chosen with intention. Empowerment and accountability side by side — not as buzzwords, but as practice.
xo
Technical Cities
We dream about robust training that reflects the work we’re actually making. We want training in devising, immersive performance, physical theater, dramaturgy, consent practices, audience care, drag, site-specific dance.
What makes a lipsync breathtaking?
How do you improvise responsibly inside free-roaming audiences?
How do you hold a five-story building in your body for a two-and-a-half-hour performance track?
University programs partnered with off-site hubs so students and non-academic artists share space. Intergenerational workshops led by lil babies and elders, where nobody is reduced to “emerging” or “legend.”
xo
Cities of Bread and Salt
We dream about time and money, obviously. Stability that doesn’t require giving up art. Regular funder checks. Recurring donations. Pattern. Predictability. General operating support.
We dream about long-running shows. Not just one Pompeii, but seven or twelve immersive beasts employing local artists for months or years. Imagine what people could make if they weren’t starting from zero every twelve months because the ecosystem rewards short cycles instead of long arcs.
We dream of rest built into the ecosystem. Stipends that let you breathe. Health insurance. Retreats not reserved for people with savings and day jobs. Universal basic income, honestly.
We don’t want “everyone self-produces” to be the Bay’s long-term business model. Artists can self-produce. We’ve proven that. But we shouldn’t have to forever.
More small grants like CA$H. Financial fluency. Budgets as creative tools. Knowledge-sharing about how people actually make it work: fiscal sponsorship, co-ops, LLCs, nonprofits. Not one path, but many, often at once.
And behind the spreadsheets is something brutally simple. We want to be able to live here. Not couch-surf indefinitely. Not move every year because rent spiked. Not watch brilliant friends pack U-Hauls because they’re done trying to make rent on inconsistent, shitty stipends.
Affordable housing is arts infrastructure.
Right now, the salt in our mouths comes from working so hard to stay. We’d love for it to start doing something else — to become seasoning, folded in over time, so The Work is irresistibly delicious.
xo
Cities of Teeth
We dream about a different relationship to impact.
We’re tired of forcing every idea into a neat social-justice elevator pitch just to get basic resources. We want grants that don’t require us to pretend we’re public health departments, superheroes, politicians, or social workers.
Let’s create work that can be legible or illegible on its own terms, without flattening itself to fit a rubric.
We want space for work that bites, purrs, lingers, echoes, is referenced years later; work that is fierce without being defensive; work that gives audiences genuinely excellent experiences; work that holds community without explaining itself; work that stretches form until it moans; work that shows its teeth and its underbelly.
Because when justice-driven work is real, you can feel it before the lights even come up — in who’s in the room, in how the crowd leans in, in the artist’s larger life and commitments. The work tells on them. It hits your body, not just your politics. Something rearranges inside you. Something unclenches. Something gets tended to. You can feel it comes from a life, a lineage, a practice — not from a grant rubric. It’s who the artist is outside the show, too.
What isn’t cute is when politics feel trendy, obligatory, or hot-glued on after the fact.
Be gone.
We want more disabled and QTBIPOC artists leading the way in philanthropy.
xo
Critical Cities
We dream about how we witness each other.
We want people to go to each other’s shows more. Not out of obligation, but because it’s alive to witness.
We imagine critics who actually see the work, understand the artists, and write from varied racial, cultural, disability, and aesthetic perspectives. Criticism with lineage and curiosity, not Yelp-style opinions.
We want more clear contracts, even between friends. More professionalism that doesn’t cancel softness.
Feedback cultures that aren’t whispers in a lobby or saved for three blocks away. Let’s normalize feedback that is specific, brave, and kind, the kind that helps a piece grow rather than just pass or fail. Let’s normalize staying in conversation even when our tastes or aesthetics don’t line up neatly.
Let’s get comfy with each other. Let’s get real with each other. Let’s lift each other while we climb.
xo
Cities of Portals
We dream about Access being baked in from the beginning.
Not retrofitted. Not last-minute. Not optional.
Rehearsal rooms with airflow, seating, quiet corners, and schedules that don’t assume superhuman stamina. Processes that center access as dramaturgy. Producers who understand sensory, mobility, and pacing needs as artistic needs.
Access as a standard, not a line item. Captions that are beautiful. Care teams as common as lighting designers.
Directors who know how to build a room where everyone can actually stay in the work. Companies that don’t treat access like a burden or branding strategy — but like creative practice. A politic. A love language.
Permission to move slowly, rest often,
and make art in ways that honor bodyminds across the spectrum. A Bay Area where disabled artists are not an afterthought, a sidebar, or an annual heritage-month feature, but central to who we are, how we work, and what we imagine.
Because Access isn’t a constraint. It’s a portal.
xo
Cities of Breath
Underneath all of this is a simple, stubborn truth.
We deserve abundance. Not because we’ve suffered enough. Not because we’re resilient. Because imagination deserves room.
So this isn’t a complaint letter. Not a to-do list. Not a manifesto.
It’s a wishlist.
A group text.
A late-night rant that turns into a prayer.
A collective inhale. A lungful of possibility.
If this wishlist sounds naïve or impossible, good. Art has always been unreasonable.
Performance lives in the tension between reality and desire. We know the struggles: vanishing venues, shrinking grants, burnout, cost of living. And we know people are still making brilliant work anyway.
This isn’t about pretending the Bay isn’t struggling. It’s about refusing to let struggle be the only story, or to forget the decades of innovation, care, and brilliance that got us here in the first place.
What does it feel like to dream boldly?
To imagine an industry shaped by abundance, not austerity?
Maybe none of it will happen like this.
Maybe all of it will.
If nothing else, consider this an offering:
a reminder that the Bay still holds a wild, collective imagination,
one that refuses to shrink to fit the moment,
one that knows the difference between weighted exhales
and inhaling with possibility.
Wishlist Contributors: Natalia Roberts, Erin Mei-Ling Stuart, Jocelyn Reyes, ChingChi Yu, Jess Bozzo, Helen Wicks, Ann DiFruscia, Mama Celeste, Jeffrey Flynn Gan, Liv Schaffer, Fuchsia, Charlie Boyd-Brown, Meat Flap, Florida Man, Bruxa/Will Power, and many anonymous folks.
