HowlRound

Livestreaming on this page at 3 p.m. PDT (Los Angeles, UTC -7) / 6 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4). Los Angeles, California It is important to protect our right to privacy for ourselves and our community, but taking the steps to secure that privacy can be daunting. This skills session enables participants to take immediate actions and understand the larger commitments and investments artists can make to ensure digital privacy.

Entering Touch of Slavery meant releasing my dependence on sight and, in return, gaining a radically expanded understanding of what theatre is and can be. For the performance, audience members are blindfolded and individually led within a space where words did not exist and touch became the only language. What unfolded in that darkened space was genuinely transformative.

The infamous 2007 movie adaptation of Hairspray illuminated my parents’ television. Tracy Turnblad, the fat protagonist, belted “Good Morning Baltimore” as she made her way to school. The lyrics of the opening number mirrored what I was experiencing at the time: “Hungry for something I can’t eat/Then I hear that beat.” At just eight years old, as I danced around the living room, my mom was at the height of her eating disorder, and I was a fat kid navigating the world through her guidance.

About this Artist Caregiver I am a thirty-nine-year-old neurospicy Jewish Cuban woman living about forty-five minutes outside a major city in the Northeast. I currently work five jobs: I teach technical theatre and design at a conservatory. I teach at an amazing, yet dying, creative writing MFA program. My final class of students graduated in late June 2026, after this diary took place. I am lead teacher/teacher coach and director of a Hebrew language immersion school’s drama program.

A long strip of red cloth moved across the stage. It gathered, loosened, pulled against itself. For a moment it read as water, then thickened into blood, then hardened into a line that could divide. Just as the eye began to fix it in place, the cloth was lifted and wrapped into a Sikh turban—a pagri. The shift was small, yet it altered everything.

On 18 December 2025, International Migrants Day, a lone woman stands on a small stage in İstanbul and speaks, not to explain herself, not to accuse, but to think aloud. This is Medea’s Head, Esen Özman’s staging of Andreas Flourakis’s contemporary monologue Medea’s Burqa, and it is less concerned with retelling a myth than with asking a question that feels urgent far beyond the theatre walls.

For more than ten years, I worked in Ukraine’s extracurricular arts education system. Unlike in the United States, where art education is often integrated into schools, Ukraine has a separate network of public educational institutions under the Ministry of Education and Science that provides art education after the regular school day.

Chorus of Voices: Gender euphoria is bliss. Freedom to experience masculinity, femininity, and everything in between. Getting to show up as your own self. Gender euphoria is opening the door to your body and being home. Unabashed bliss. You can feel it. You can feel the relief. Feel safe. And the sense of validation and actualization. Or sometimes it means being confident in who you are. But also to see yourself reflected back. Or maybe not, but being excited to find out.

As an openly nonbinary, aroace Shakespeare performer, I love making space for more aspec (asexual and/or aromantic) and trans folks in classical theatre. However, many of the theatremakers I talk with have never (or rarely) interacted with folks in these groups. This practical guide for theatremakers who may work with trans and/or aspec folks can be shared so that queer performers can focus on their performance. Thanks for being here! I’m so glad you’re reading this.

From education to health, from justice to environment, sectors that work to create compassionate webs of support are being systematically dismantled in the United States. The arts are part of this ecosystem, and theatre artists are storytellers and collaborators with the skills to organize, communicate, and imagine resistance.