NetWeek Bay Area October 5–10, 2026 | Bay Area, California
Calling Up Justice was excited to participate in NETWeek Bay Area 2026, a week of gatherings, creative exchanges, and community building organized by the Network of Ensemble Theaters (NET). The week brought together ensemble artists, cultural workers, and community organizers to explore solidarity, collective power, and the future of collaborative theater-making. Claudia Alick serves on NET’s Board of Directors, while Jesenia and One Free Community are members of the national network. Together with Maiamama, the three participated in events throughout the week, reconnecting with longtime collaborators and building new relationships within the Bay Area ensemble theater community.
Claudia Alick was a featured speaker at Ground Floor: Move the Knowledge Out, an intergenerational gathering of artists and cultural leaders at Understory, a worker-owned cooperative restaurant in Oakland. The event invited participants to share knowledge that often goes unrecognized, exchange practices, and imagine what future generations of cultural workers need. Jesenia and Maiamama also participated in The Federation Table: Collective Practice, Cooperative Power, a working gathering exploring cooperative infrastructure for cultural workers, including mutual aid, shared resources, and collective support systems. These conversations offered opportunities to exchange powerful ideas about how artists and organizers can build the structures we need to sustain our communities.
All three attended AT THE WALL on Thursday, October 8, a gathering at Oakland’s SUMUD: Resistance Until Liberation mural celebrating the interconnected struggles for Indigenous, Black, and Palestinian liberation. The hip-hop music was fantastic, and the collective creative exchanges were especially powerful. Through shared ideation, storytelling, and conversation, participants explored important ideas for organizing, building solidarity, and taking collective action. The gathering brought together art, music, political imagination, and community celebration in a way that felt deeply rooted in the Bay Area.
One of the beautiful things about ensemble practice is that we don’t all have to be in the same place at the same time to be part of the same collective work. NETWeek included gatherings we weren’t able to attend, including Sogorea Te’ Service Day: Right Relationship Is a Work Day, where participants supported Indigenous land stewardship at Pinnantak Garden, and Rehearsing for the Real Thing: Theater Tools for Frontline Workers, which brought artists and organizers together at EastSide Arts Alliance to explore creative tools for movement building. Even when we couldn’t be present, we were excited to know that these important exchanges were happening across the Bay. Ensemble practice allows us to distribute our energy, trust one another to carry different parts of the work, and contribute to something larger than any one person’s experience. We don’t have to witness every moment to belong to the larger movement.
The spirit of collaboration continued at BAM House, where NET generously made space for another project Claudia is collaborating on: In Search of Lost Stims. The project’s Stim Drop-In Portrait Studio, led by autistic director Alexis Riley and disabled dance filmmaker Kym McDaniel, invited disabled and non-disabled artists to create personalized digital portraits celebrating their stims and repetitive movements. This was a beautiful example of different aspects of our artistic practices converging in the same space. We shared food with NET, BAM House staff joined us in the lobby, and participants created poetry using stamps to reflect on stimming while making beautiful photographic portraits. The sessions also offered participants an opportunity to contribute footage to In Search of Lost Stims, a film scheduled to premiere at the Center for Mad Culture in Chicago in March 2028. It felt like a perfect expression of what ensemble practice makes possible: artists sharing space, resources, food, creative tools, and community across different projects. Disability culture, experimental filmmaking, poetry, theater, and collective care all came together under one roof. We didn’t need to be working on the same project to be making something together.
Maiamama, who was in the Bay Area for a Quarantine residency with Calling Up Justice, was hired to livestream On Record: Black Women Directors, Makers + Leaders. This public conversation, presented at BAM House in Oakland’s Black Arts Movement Business District and livestreamed in partnership with HowlRound, brought together Black women theater leaders to discuss their experiences, contributions, and visions for the field. Maiamama’s livestream work helped extend the conversation beyond the room, making this important exchange accessible to a wider audience and contributing to its preservation as a living archive. Claudia’s Art Power Growth Liberation artwork was featured on film and installed in the BAM Art Gallery.
One of our favorite things about NETWeek was that every event felt like an ensemble theater production. Food justice was a featured element and we had BBQ and Mexican food before and after the event. The locations became stages, the participants became collaborators, and the conversations became acts of collective creation. From a cooperative restaurant to a mural-covered Oakland street, each gathering demonstrated how ensemble practices can shape not only performances, but also the ways we organize, share knowledge, and build community. All the world’s a stage, and NETWeek reminded us that theater happens wherever people come together to imagine and rehearse new possibilities. We left feeling energized by our Bay Area ensemble community and the relationships, artistry, and collective power we continue to build together.
