Seize the Means of Audience Outreach

On 7 February 2025, the new Trump administration ousted the Kennedy Center’s bipartisan board of directors and began installing MAGA-friendly replacements—a move no former president has ever taken regarding the United States’s long-standing nonpartisan center for performance and creative works. Since the initial takeover, the executive branch has fired several Kennedy Center workers in waves of layoffs. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has also been dismantled after numerous changes to grant application policy and all the staff being laid off.

As this takeover occurred in the United States, parliamentarians in Australia forced the nonpartisan, independent organization Creative Australia to make drastic changes in their artistic support. In early February, Creative Australia chose multimedia artist Khaled Sabsabi to represent the nation in the prestigious Venice Biennale 2026. However, in violation of their own establishing legislation, Creative Australia ousted Sabsabi from his award after allegations about his earlier work surfaced in Parliament during Senate Question Time. Sabsabi and his co-producer, Michael Dagostino, had their placement for the Biennale revoked. There were fears that the Australia pavilion at the Biennale would stand empty for the first time since the 1970s.

Artistic freedom is under threat from institutions that formerly supported expression or, at minimum, attempted to avoid censorship. Creative and aesthetic expression has intimate ties with political messages. How can artists create and perform work in this hostile environment? Can artists still reach an audience outside of institutional support? What are possible networks or distribution platforms that might help?

Information Is Not Free

At the first Hackers’ Conference in 1984, Stewart Brand told the audience, “Information wants to be free.” His quote paraphrased an even more pro-access, anti-gatekeeping statement in Steven Levy’s journalistic Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which included a hacker manifesto that stated: “All information should be free. If you don’t have access to the information you need to improve things, how can you fix them?” (emphasis mine). While this manifesto meant access to room-sized computers in large institutions, it quickly transferred to early internet forums and websites.

One impressive example of wider access to information—in this case, artistic works like theatre performances—occurred during the early COVID pandemic months. With theatres shuttered to in-person performances, many theatremakers turned to online work. Suddenly, millions of people could watch high quality theatre work online as large companies like the National Theatre in the United Kingdom, the Thalia Theatre in Germany, and the Surabhi Drama Theatre in India released filmed archival works for free or cheap. Theatremakers were confronted with digital platforms as potential stages.

Can increasing access to creative work outside of government-managed institutions, in an online space, make a cultural change for the better?

In response to this flood of exciting performance material, the futureStage Research Group at metaLab Harvard published “A Manifesto for the Future Stage: Performance Is a Human Right” in American Theatre, which stated: “Performance is a human need … Performance is a human right.” Access to performance “deepened sense of individual and collective belonging” and accessing “performance must become an integral part of policy planning and economic life embedded into the social fabric of public spaces and civic discourse.” Art is for everyone, and accessing this data is part of the internet’s founding social ethos.

However, this increased access is not in the interest of technology companies who obscure the accuracy and searchability of information. It might be possible to find events in your area using Facebook, or find a recipe using Google search, or generate decent software code through ChatGPT, but you pay for this access with your data, and you do not know exactly how tech companies’ proprietary algorithms surface or hide information from you. While it took a life-threatening airborne disease to force the majority of Western theatremakers to consider the accessibility, audience reach, and ecological benefits of the digital stage, numerous global performing artists have used digital tools to not only explore the meaning of hallowed theatrical words like liveness and presence, but, even more importantly, to create tight-knit international communities, develop wider support networks, promote democratic processes, protest injustices, and improve access to the variety of theatre being made regardless of physical impediments (from disabilities to borders). Much of this work has been posted on platforms like YouTube, meaning it is easily accessible to audiences but is also a form of data for larger companies with a similar extractive ethos to current governments. How should artists think about approaching this type of accessibility?

Digital Theatremakers’ Ethics

Claudia Alick, a HowlRound advisory council member and theatre critic, told me, “I've been obsessed with the use of technology to bridge human connection at a distance” since the 1990s. Alick has produced online theatre and performance for decades, often focusing on social justice and protest movement work like Korematsu Revisited produced by her company Calling Up Justice! Her years of work with digital performance means she thinks deeply about how the affordances of the platform reflect the ideology of the makers, or the expectation of who will use the platform—those working within a hierarchy, rather than anarchist collectives, ensemble theatremakers, or non-Western communities. For instance, she noted the inherent hierarchical nature of Zoom meetings that require the organizer to give recording permission to other meeting attendees. This does not support ensemble work (a detriment), but it does support consent-based negotiations (an affordance).

For Alick, the performance space itself—physical or virtual—dictates performance dramaturgy. “What is the story the room is telling you? Why is it that some people go into a theatre space and immediately feel alienated, immediately feel like they are not welcome?” The meaning-making process within a performance space always implies certain politics. Alick discussed door locations as an example: Is it possible to enter quietly? Is a ramp available to improve access? What size is the door?

Similarly, online platform accessibility changes the audience’s meaning made from the performance. Helen Varley Jamieson, one of the original online theatremakers, began her digital work with her performance troupe Avatar Body Collision (ABC) in 2001, and the process forced a reconsideration of platform affordances. In a 2007 article, Jamieson notes that Web 1.0 chatroom-style platforms iVisit and the Palace, which had both been stages for ABC, ceased being accessible platforms for their democratic work when they “increased their security measures, removing the option to change usernames and requiring users to purchase a subscription.” The encroachment of the capitalist panopticon into their performing spaces led the group to develop UpStage in 2004. The platform is still available today and most recently organized the Mobilise/Demobilise Festival 2021.

Though the internet inspires incredible creativity and allows more communication and collaboration than ever, these attributes are not always used for good. Can increasing access to creative work outside of government-managed institutions, in an online space, make a cultural change for the better?

Flood the Zone Tactics

In Political Cyberformance: The eTheatre Project, Christina Papagiannouli builds on Jamieson’s work, borrowing the term “cyberformance” and applying it to political theatre created and performed online for activist purposes. Papagiannouli, though, was writing from the post-Arab Spring, just barely post-Gamergate liberal haze of positive feelings towards online social networks as they transitioned into social media, making these communication platforms “a menace for power-holders…against the absolute truth of controlled mass media as proved by the use of social media.” From a post-truth, pandemic-era perspective now, analysts decry social media algorithms: “A 2013 study of the Chinese platform Weibo found that anger consistently travels further than other sentiments,” writes Max Fisher in The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Brains and Our World. Fisher notes that studies of Facebook and Twitter (now X) uncovered the same problem, meaning algorithms are trained to purposefully enrage users.

The internet has helped activist movements and theatremakers grow their practices, but visibility relies on opaque, algorithmic decision-making that considers current popularity based on a tangled web of potential interrelated interests and reactions. Searchability and access are further stymied by bad actors “flooding the zone with shit,” a phrase uttered by former Trump staffer Steve Bannon in 2018. Not only do algorithms in search engines and social media sites prioritize trendier and newer information based on emotional reaction, but a consumer’s critical thinking skills can be overridden when they encounter the algorithmic barrage of falsehoods.

We must not simply post our message online and hope our art reaches someone, anyone (including our friends list). We must rebuild community outside of the silo.

Breaking Through the Distortion

Could the tactic of “flooding the zone” positively retrain the algorithms we are beholden to? Alick suggests it is possible: “We storytellers have the ability to use the internet to create our own digital archives of performance so that the positive outcomes of those performance exchanges can last over time and have more reverberations.” Collective action by swamping the opposition can work for progressive politics, as well—take the cyberbullying of Elon Musk or the swiftly organized, massive Hands Off protests. Would it be possible for theatremakers to use online platforms like YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram Live to widely promote their work and shut out political misinformation?

In a Medium article, writer and painter Arlene Goldbard notes a few examples of leftist political activists attempting this, but also states that many “liberal-to-leftist media messages” that Bannon and his cronies use to “flood with shit are more local in focus”— while fewer people see each message, the total number of messages is overwhelming. A small-scale report from Define American examined the efficacy of several anti-immigrant YouTube videos, including those in the Great Replacement Network (GRN), and chose characteristics like authoritative voice and specific visual cues as common elements used to persuade “the Moveable Middle.” The organization then created two videos—one expressing pro-immigrant sentiment, and one expressing anti-immigrant sentiment—using the same editorial tactics in messaging and gathered a trial sampling of 6,534 participants. Define American reports: “When packaging of the video content was the same, but the messages opposite, the Moveable Middle were swayed more pro-immigrant than anti-immigrant.” This suggests that the zone can be flooded with more progressive values, but it might need to wear a costume and perform a different soliloquy to get into the average consumer’s feeds.

Leaving major technology platforms is another potential solution. Claudia Alick considers disintermediation a vital part of the work she does. Many current platforms, Alick noted, are not just intermediaries facilitating communication, but are rent-seeking middlemen disrupting our storytelling amongst ourselves for their own profit. Alick’s dream of a disintermediated world does not give up media in the sense of art and stories, but removes greedy “mediators” getting between us and natural creative human communication. However, Alick acknowledges that “migration is always hard,” both for physical and virtual transitions, due to potential audience loss. Post-“return to normal,” we must not simply post our message online and hope our art reaches someone, anyone (including our friends list). We must rebuild community outside of the silo.

Fortunately, as I learned while talking to both Alick and HowlRound’s Vijay Mathew, there are alternative performance spaces.

Using the available, standardized digital platforms for performance work and community gathering only serves those at the top of the hierarchy.

Rappelling Over the Walled Garden

Vijay Mathew is one of the co-founders of HowlRound and, as an organizer of inclusive, accessible, more sustainable online spaces, he currently studies and advocates for the adoption of peer-supported, open source, decentralized internet technologies that can support artists and activists. In our conversation, he referred to this as “democratic software.” which is “this intersection of software that's lower resource use, lower impact.” Democratic software can reduce carbon emissions, water use, and electric grid stress while also offering greater inclusion for people who struggle to access in-person spaces, as well as those who struggle to access online spaces. For example, Mathew worked with a Caribbean theatre group Canales Abiertos/Open Channels to livestream some of their performance work during the height of the pandemic. While many Global North theatremakers excitedly took to high resolution, high bandwidth streaming platforms, Mathew explained that this was not an option for Canales Abiertos, which featured many artists in Cuba:

We had to be very careful about what software we were using, because Cuba has very expensive internet and very spotty internet, low bandwidth. And those are obstacles that, to us in the Global North, we don't really experience that spottiness... Our software is designed to be maximalist. It's not meant to be sufficient or adequate.

Mathew and Canales Abiertos eventually created a workflow using software that was predominantly open source, thus community-created and -supported, and not embargoed due to trade agreements or pressures. The peer-to-peer basis for the software distributed energy usage and internet download speeds, allowing good quality video without relying on one server farm.

Supporting lower bandwidth, less power-hungry online platforms led Mathew into considering options that not only reduce ecological harm but improve access, supporting greater dialogue between artists regardless of national borders, internet or mobile phone data access, and physical requirements. When software is developed by and for a larger community and can cross borders, new political conversations, new work, and new communities can be formed.

But what about surveillance of digital platforms and devices? Technology companies have a long history of working with governments and enforcement, enforcement agencies are increasingly attempting to access these spaces without explicit permission, and digital platforms are allowing abuse and harm as long as it is fiscally expedient. Not only are online platforms like social media sites no longer useful to artists trying to connect to their communities, but they are actively harmful. Is it even safe for artists and activists to use online communications platforms?

Farrell and Berjon’s article considering a wilder, diverse internet infrastructure suggests that part of the issue is intentionality with our digital media choices. “Part of rewilding means taking what’s been pulled into the big tech stack back out of it and paying for the true costs of connectivity.” The “true costs,” as Mathew discovered, include lower bandwidth options, federated and decentralized programs, and community-run and managed spaces with smaller attached followings. Alick made a similar suggestion, comparing her 47,000-follower TikTok presence to decentralized networks like Mastodon or Bluesky—smaller potential reach for creative works, but greater personal and professional control.

Mathew noted that switching to smaller platforms could be a form of protection against the surveillance state, echoing Alick’s disintermediated approach. GNU and open-source software typically work with direct contributions from their communities they serve. At HowlRound, for instance, Mathew commissioned a software developer to create a more accessible web chat for PeerTube, a peer-to-peer distributed video streaming platform that looks like YouTube but functions as a peer-to-peer network. When the whole community has such a direct impact on the form a software or online platform takes, it becomes less likely for a platform to cause harm to that community through violence like data harvesting, data breaches, and privacy violations. Mathew envisions a world of community-centered inclusive online work in which “users” are also creators and the community considers more strongly the impact of the digital tools they use. This should not discourage theatremakers from creating online performance work, but it is important to recognize that just using the available, standardized digital platforms for performance work and community gathering only serves those at the top of the hierarchy.

Rewilding the Stage

After months of an external review and a significant outcry from creative workers, Creative Australia has reinstated Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino to represent the nation at the Venice Biennale. However, problems in the United States with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kennedy Center remain.

As our larger art-making institutions are taken over by bad actors, we must realize much of our media has been in this state since Web 2.0. However, we theatremakers can intervene through specific creative choices, utilizing platforms’ affordances to highlight this issue and subvert algorithmic siloing. This allows audiences to both emotionally and critically reflect on performances on platforms and reconsider how they wish to engage. Content controlled by institutions like the Kennedy Center, Creative Australia, Meta, Google, OpenAI, and others reflects an attempt to impose value on potential audience/users, but decentralized digital or hybrid theatre might subvert that imposition.

Returning to rewilding the internet, Farrell and Berjon write: “Our internet was built to be complex and unbiddable, to do things we cannot yet imagine… Internet infrastructure is a degraded ecosystem, but it’s also a built environment, like a city. Its unpredictability makes it generative, worthwhile and deeply human.” The internet, like theatre, has been built on collaborative open standards with access to this underlying framework increasingly hoarded by large, expensive institutions with increasing opacity in their operations. But it doesn’t have to be this way. And creating a desirable reason for more people to form community elsewhere—by making that space beautiful, fun, and full of lively narrative—might be one way to re-seed the parched ground.