Guaranteed income: Theater gets in on act
Cal Shakes provides $500 a month to 5 artists who had no idea it was coming
In December, a very pregnant Tatiana Chaterji was leading an online restorative justice circle from her mom’s house in Berkeley when she got a surprise call from California Shakespeare Theater Artistic Director Eric Ting. She was going to be one of five inaugural members of the theater’s Artist Circle, he told her, which meant she’d get $500 per month for a year, no strings attached.
“I was surprised,” recalls Chaterji, an Oakland educator, restorative justice practitioner, participatory theater artist and facilitator. This call was the first she’d heard of the Artist Circle, though she’d worked with Cal Shakes before, including by writing a 230page curriculum on theater and restorative justice with the theater’s support. “It felt very generous and unexpected in a time of overall scarcity and theaters shutting down.”
Many local governments in Northern California are experimenting with guaranteed income pilot projects — including Stockton, Oakland and Marin County, as well as an artistspecific initiative in San Francisco.
And arts organizations support artists all the time, but usually artists have to do something in return, whether it’s making art, consulting or attending events.
But Cal Shakes’ program, which sent its first checks to artists in January, is among the first of its kind. The artists, in addition to Chaterji, are director, actor and educator Shannon R. Davis; writer, educator, trainer, and transformative justice and disability justice expert Mia Mingus; actor, producer and activist Sarita Ocón; and theater artist Lauren Spencer. All were chosen for the effect they’ve already had on Cal Shakes’ antiracism work, Ting says.
Davis puts it differently: “I think (Ting) chose people that challenge him” — a claim Ting does not dispute.
The idea for the program came from conversations last year between Ting and a fellow artistic director, Crowded Fire Theater’s Mina Morita, about the effect basic income could have on local artists. Ting wondered, “Why do we have to wait for the gov
ernment to do this?
“Artists have been more and more peripheralized from our institutions over the last couple decades,” he adds. “A big chunk of that is the nature of freelance and the temporary nature of that kind of work.” He wanted artists’ relationships to the theater to last longer than the few weeks of a show’s run.
Still, even though members of the Artist Circle receive invitations to all kinds of Cal Shakes meetings, from strategic planning to season planning, Ting emphasizes that they’re not obligated to contribute or attend at all.
“We’ve been very up front at every step of the way that there’s no expectation that they even say hello,” he says.
For Davis, who lives in San Rafael, the monthly checks have already given her the support she needed to switch day jobs.
“The checks cover the exact amount of what I would need to pay for my health insurance and my car insurance,” she says. “This gave me the freedom to stop what I was doing at the time, that I didn’t love, and look for other opportunities where I could find more joy.”
She’s now the director of development at Marin Shakespeare Company, which has permitted her to apply for more outside directing gigs than her previous day job would allow.
Upon getting her first check, Chaterji says, “I was grateful and also guilty.
There’s so much need and so much suffering. So what is my responsibility now? How can I continue to open doors the way that doors have been opened to me?”
So far she’s used the funds to pay for three days per week of child care for her toddler and newborn. And she already feels her relationship to Cal Shakes has changed.
“It seems like they’re investing in me longer term,” she says. “I feel like I’m part of them now, which also is a responsibility.”
She plans to use her time in part to further develop the curriculum she wrote with Cal Shakes’ support.
Cal Shakes is funding the program, which Ting hopes to extend, with a National Endowment for the Arts Cares Act grant, which is tied to COVID19 pandemic relief; a contribution from the Tournesol Project, a frequent funder of theaters in the Bay Area and throughout the country; and a private donation, which means it won’t further strain the theater’s own already retrenched budget.
“One of the things this last year has revealed to me is the fragility of our community and the many vulnerabilities around it. How do we as nonprofit arts and cultural organization contribute to a more resilient community? This pandemic is simply one of many,” Ting says, citing both climate change and racial injustice.
He believes that any choice Cal Shakes makes to strengthen its community serves Cal Shakes as well. “This is about creating a healthier artistic ecosystem in the Bay Area.”