Our Theatres Are Facing Backlash. Here Are Ten Ways to Respond.

The ongoing backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives has a direct bearing on the lives and careers of theatre artists and academics. Its effects are felt most intensely by racialized and minoritized artists who have spoken out against racism, white supremacy, ableism, and colonialism in the theatre industry in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and beyond. As Algonquin and Irish playwright, director, and dramaturg Yvette Nolan commented in a Fall 2024 interview with the Toronto Star, “We’re in the backlash already. I’ve heard artistic directors say they can’t program Indigenous work because they’ll lose their subscribers.” Nolan’s experience is not unique. Palestinian artist-scholar Rimah Jabr adds, “Backlash. What does it really mean? Perhaps the best way to describe it is the feeling of being censored, controlled—of sensing that your very existence causes trouble, that your story is seen as provocative.” Though distressing, the current backlash is no surprise, nor is it the first time theatre artists and academics have had to contend with it.

In the wake of the “racial reckoning” following George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, artistic directors and other leaders of white-led theatres and training institutions made sober assurances that structural transformation would follow. During this intense period of reflection and reckoning, the two of us, along with several colleagues in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance at York University in Toronto, began to investigate the past, present, and future of casting practices in Canada. This five-year project, entitled (Re)Setting the Stage, involved a series of public events, a special edited issue of Canadian Theatre Review on the topic of Casting and Race, and the Shaking Up Shakespeare podcast, which examined the enduring colonial legacy of Shakespeare in Canada. In the initial stages of the project, it felt like meaningful change was underway. We saw theatre departments commit to revising their curriculum, adopting new approaches to season selection, and hiring more Indigenous, Black, and people of color (IBPOC) instructors. We saw professional theatre companies commit to programming plays by IBPOC authors, rethinking harmful casting practices, and hiring directors from minoritized communities.

By spring 2024, when the members of the (Re)Setting the Stage project team met to set goals for the final year of the study, we felt a notable “vibe shift” in the air. The momentum of the initial DEI push seemed to be slowing down or stopping altogether. This backlash was taking many forms, including, but not limited to, loud statements by politicians, public officials, and celebrities condemning DEI initiatives; reduced funding for DEI programming; accusations of bullying by parties resistant to DEI training; backsliding or movement away from DEI commitments; antiabortion legislation and other threats to reproductive rights; anti-trans legislation; and ongoing acts of aggression, intimidation, and violence against racialized groups and individuals. As the project team reflected on the many forms of this DEI backlash, we decided to dedicate our final event to confronting it. We felt an urgent need to identify the DEI promises that had been kept, broken, or abandoned and to ask why the current backlash was happening. Our previous projects had taught us that if we fail to acknowledge the colonial backbone of the theatre industry and its continued efforts to uphold white narratives, white programming, and white audiences/subscribers, we fail to see the reasoning behind the dissolution of DEI principles that many activists worked so hard to implement and uphold. We decided to host a community event to grapple with these issues.

In spring 2025, the project team assembled a group of Canadian theatre educators, professional theatre artists, and students for a symposium entitled Facing Backlash: Performance in the Age of Reactionary Politics. Held over two days at York University in Toronto, Canada, the event aimed to assess the current backlash and identify future actions to protect recent gains. The curatorial team (Jamie Robinson, Keira Loughran, Laura Levin, Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster, Marlis Schweitzer, and Mariló Núñez, supported by Celine Daaboul and Maya Fleming) invited artistic directors, playwrights, theatre critics, dramaturgs, performance artists, disability activists, artist-scholars, and educators, primarily from Ontario but also from Nova Scotia, Manitoba, and New York state. Panel topics included “Artistic Leadership in a Time of Reactionary Politics,” “Disability Justice: Lessons and Warnings,” “Gathering Strategies: Learning from Queer and Feminist Performance Art Histories,” and “Lessons from Yesterday, Tactics for Today.” Each panel concluded with a prompt for participants to offer one piece of advice to others in their position and to identify one action that those seeking to navigate these treacherous times might take. The event was by turns invigorating, sobering, provocative, challenging, and hopeful. We concluded with a Porch Sitting session inspired by Split Britches, where audience members and participants had a chance to share what resonated most with them after our time together. Participants and organizers came away with a renewed sense of collective energy, eager to do more than sit in a room together (though that sitting was crucial to all that follows).

Key Takeaways and Actions for the Future

To continue to build community and share some of the lessons we gleaned from the event, we now offer ten key takeaways and actions for the future. These are distilled from the two full days (more than eighteen hours) of lively conversation, with additional documentation available on Intermission.

1. Build Spaces Where All Artists Can Thrive.

For many racialized or minoritized artists, the backlash isn’t new. It’s something they experience daily, whether at work or simply walking down the street. These artists and academics keenly understand the importance of creating brave spaces where others can bring their full selves and thrive. For example, Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu, artistic director at Obsidian Theatre, a culturally-specific company in Toronto, shared that in developing community agreements with a company, she invites everyone in the room to share what makes them light up in the process and what shuts them down. She has found that this simple exercise does wonders to establish understanding and trust in the room.

Kimberley Rampersad, associate artistic director at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, spoke about the importance of connecting with company members by maintaining an open-door policy and taking time to visit them in their places of work, from carpentry and costume shops to the box office and green room. She has found that these regular check-ins not only strengthen her relationships with company members but also allow her to keep a clear sense of where the work is at. Rather than wait for problems to arrive at her door, she anticipates needs and works to address issues before they escalate.

Several disability artists and activists spoke about the lack of backlash in their professional environments because the conversation around equity and opportunities for artists with disabilities is in its early stages. Despite the passage of such laws as the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (2005), groundbreaking research on relaxed performances published by Re:Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice, and the ongoing work of projects such as Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life, speakers maintained that there is considerable work ahead. As one panelist provocatively put it, “Accessibility? Nobody really cares yet.” Debbie Patterson, an actor, director, playwright, and founding artistic director of Sick + Twisted Theatre in Winnipeg, Manitoba, mentioned they are still waiting for the forward momentum needed within conversations about disability and accessibility, because visibility and recognition might lead to action.

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’s As 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 value 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.

8. Deploy Anger in Service of Action.

Recognize the power of the bitch. Though many recoil at the term, we ask: How might we embrace the potential of “the bitch” as a political position? What does it mean to be angry, to express that anger, and to use it collectively and effectively in our art? Day one of the symposium concluded with a powerful presentation by performance artist and educator Karen Finley who used poetry and performance to channel her rage with the Trump administration and is oppressive policies. The audience was riveted by her expressive movements of both body and voice. It was such a clear demonstration of anger as action.

9. Embrace Joy Through Dancing.

Joy is resistance because it interrupts the capitalistic system that wants us all to stay within our designated silos. Joy gives us permission to feel, to gather, to take pleasure, even when structures are designed to constrain those capacities. By thinking of community and moving together, even if it's just dancing with strangers on a dance floor, we begin to feel joy. As several participants emphasized, dancing joy encourages us to reclaim our bodies and feel liberation, if only for a moment.

One way to use joy as resistance is to incorporate dance breaks into rehearsal: By using our presence and relationality through our dancing bodies, we refuse to be controlled or devalued. Moving together demonstrates our collective alignment with the liberation of the mind, body, and spirit by sharing music and building community through movement and togetherness.

10. Keep Fighting.

Facing backlash requires vigilance. Keep doing the work. Keep programming plays by racialized and minoritized playwrights. Keep hiring IBPOC actors, directors, designers, stage managers, and crew in spite of the backlash. Keep going, because if we stop, the powers that want to silence DEI win. Not fighting means giving up, and once we give up, we give up the right to struggle with conflicts that live within our industry: funding, audiences, the “canon,” leadership, succession, racism, and policies vs practice.

Several panelists spoke about conflict as a tool for change. As one panelist put it, to shy away from conflict holds one back from really facing the anger that can propel one forward. By engaging with and confronting the conflict(s), we create the possibility for structural change. Quoting Arundhati Roy, artist-scholar Naila Keleta-Mae said, "You pick your side and then you fight.” The “fight,” in this sense, is not simply persistence, but a commitment to working through these conflicts rather than around them.

It is impossible to respond to backlash alone. It requires a community working together—moving, singing, dancing, shouting, acting together through pain, anger, and joy.