In January, I had the chance to attend the Sundance Film Festival—the last one in Park City, Utah, before it moves to Boulder, Colorado, next year. Founded in 1978 to help independent filmmakers showcase their art, it’s a festival I first covered nine years ago as a fresh-faced journalist who had never worked in that type of extreme cold before. In the years since, I covered Sundance virtually during the Covid-19 pandemic, and this year I went intending to cover the films that were based on theatre and/or starring theatre artists at the festival.

There were a number of them this year, including The Musical, starring Will Brill and Rob Lowe, a quirky comedy about a playwright/middle school theatre teacher who finds himself in the middle of a casting controversy; American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez, an excellent documentary about the Teatro Campesino founder and his legacy of using art to advocate for Mexican farm workers; If I Go Will They Miss Me, a cerebral, beautifully shot film starring Danielle Brooks and J. Alphonse Nicholson, about the complex ways in which the penal system and environmental racism impacts the relationships between fathers and sons; and Once Upon A Time in Harlem, a Harlem Renaissance retrospective featuring a 1972 reunion of some of its artists and a look back at the world in which they created a movement.

However, the many panels and sessions that I attended at the festival, as well as my own experience of this year’s event, left me inspired to write about something else. My 2026 Sundance experience was shaped by the people I met who were interested in community-building through art, even with the advent of verticals, microdramas, artificial intelligence, and new union contracts. There were a number of sessions about artist care—about building a production team that is centered on well-being, not just a finished product. For all of the egregious consent violations in the film industry that the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements shone a light on, I was heartened by what I heard about artist care from the independent filmmakers, and I believe that there’s much that theatre can learn from them. I’d like to offer takeaways from my time at Sundance on how we can center the art of care in our theatrical practice, especially in politically, morally, ethically, and socially fraught times.  

1. Keep safety first by knowing everyone’s answers to the following question: How do you define safety physically, mentally, spiritually, economically, and legally? One session at The Solidarity House, titled “Shield & Sustain: The Future of Artist Safety,” featured panelists Adam-Michael Royston, founder of Queer Livelihoods Project; April Reign, an advisor and lead investor of the community equity round for the Spill app; Karim Ahmad, CEO/founder of Utopia Studio/OTV; and moderator Aisha Burrowes-Becker, founder of the Feminist collective. They offered practical tips on building production teams, reminding attendees that artmaking is a bold, courageous endeavor, and that knowing each person’s capacity for risk is critical to the process and seeing the vision to fruition. Ideally, questions about safety are asked of each person interviewed while assembling a production team to ensure ideological and artistic alignment before starting the production process.
2. Build community by any means necessary. At that same Solidarity House panel, Adam-Michael Royston offered an anecdote about the Beijing Queer Film Festival, the only LGBTQIA+ film festival left in China, as others have shuttered in the backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as China’s already existing punitive censorship laws. Despite the risks, the Beijing festival has been programming film screenings since 2001, and in 2014 they even held some on a train. At the last minute, after losing their theatres for movie premieres, they invited ticketholders to meet at a specific train at a specific time. When people arrived, they each received a laptop and a USB with films on it. People watched movies on the train ride and engaged in discussions afterward. When walls disappear from community-building, all kinds of possibilities open up.   
3. Everyone needs to be an ally to someone. A culture of silence and compliance with unjust policies and practices is unhelpful at the least, and perpetuating harm most of the time. April Reign, who in addition to being  lead investor on the Spill also created the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, defines an ally as “a person who stands in the gap for someone from a community not like their own, without expectation of reward or recognition.” How would production teams and casting choices differ, evolve, and take shape in the American theatre if an allyship lens was applied to decision-making? How would staff, administrators, boards, and audiences reap the benefits if they were empowered to see themselves as a team full of allies? Every regional theatre is as different as the communities they serve, but it’s past time to move from transactions to relationships, and allyship is a great leap in that direction.
4. Marketing cannot be an afterthought. What do you do? Who do you do it for? These questions drive decision-making for Ramon Soto, the vice president of marketing at Northwell Health and the president of Northwell Studios, who spoke at a session on dealmaking and product placement at the Impact Lounge. Now, one can debate the ethics of whether New York’s largest healthcare system should be in show business in the first place, but for Soto and his colleagues it’s about “having people know you before they need you.” There’s something that regional theatre can learn about raising top-of-mind awareness, since often audience targeting and marketing happen two to six weeks before opening, if they happen at all. Marketing is not often thought of as a mode of care, but who we market shows to, when we market those shows to those people, and what resources we apply to marketing and amplification absolutely impact the level of care artists experience throughout the production process. In the case of Northwell Studios, with the Netflix docuseries Lenox Hill, they gave people a curated inside look into the process of care so that they can be the first choice when people select care. Imagine what could happen if regional theatres showed their hand a bit more to build trust and affinity with community members who would then become patrons. And, for those who don’t believe theatre should have to do all of that because it’s an innate public good, remember that so is healthcare.
5. Don’t just drop in; plant seeds of care. One of the most impactful sessions at the festival was hosted by an organization called Brown Girls Doc Mafia, a global collective of women-of-color documentarians, many of whom had films screening at Sundance this year. In a discussion at the United Airlines lodge, Poh Si Teng, a former New York Times reporter and director of American Doctor, about doctors performing life-saving surgeries in Gaza, said that at one point in the production process, she realized that she could send messages to Gaza but not food, so she had to reorient and change the way she worked. Janay Boulos, the co-director of Birds of War, about a BBC producer and a Palestinian photographer who fall in love while covering the War in Gaza, said she had to shoot on an older Canon camera, because 4K files were too large to share given the infrastructure of the places where she was shooting. Bea Wangondu, co-director of Kikuyu Land, about the fight over land ownership of tea plantations in Kenya, said that uplifting the talents and expertise of local heroes was crucial to building trust to get her film made. These women’s on-the-ground lessons have much to offer to regional theatres about empowerment versus extraction, especially those that are engaged in documentary theatremaking and commissioning projects by people in historically excluded groups. Planting seeds of care means that healthy, trusting relationships with people are valued over an artistic end-product. Further, the artistic product is allowed to reach excellence when care is centered.
6. “Consume less and create more” are the words that Adam Faze, the founder of the verticals production house Gymnasium and co-creator of “Subway Takes with Kareem Rahma,” said on a panel at the Impact Lounge. This was a shocking statement from someone who makes his living gluing eyeballs to screens, but his point was much deeper than that. Faze created a fake account to hack the algorithm so that it would feed him content for a teenage white boy. What he found was that extremists are targeting young men aged 15-24 with violent content on social media and other digital forums at a rapid pace. There must be a counter-narrative; and it made me think about how theatre can infuse and help shape a healthier outlook for young people by putting stories on our stages that promote compassion, empathy, hope, and peace. Care looks like taking an active role in creating art that speaks to the future we want to live in.

At the core, what all of these lessons about care have to teach the nonprofit theatre industry is about the willingness to pivot to reduce harm. Artistic vision must include worker safety. Pivots can happen in big and seemingly small ways, whether it’s changing a wig or adjusting choreography for an injury, or changing programming or mission to better serve a community where demographics have shifted. These are neither extreme nor petty examples; they are scenarios that happen in theatre all the time, and they often get brushed aside as just part of the cost of doing show business. But we must remember that care is what happens before, during, and after the show is onstage. When care leads operations, everyone is empowered to be their best selves and not only workers but audiences reap the benefits.

Kelundra Smith is TCG’s director of publishing. Her play The Wash received a 2024 National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere. Her articles have also been published in The New York Times, ESPN’s Andscape, Garden & Gun, Atlanta magazine, and elsewhere. More at kelundra.com.