“Honestly, if I could wave a wand and change one thing, I would wave the wand that makes artists essential workers, period, so that we wouldn’t be thinking about that anymore.”
I had the pleasure of talking with Rob Bailis. After nearly four years of planning, the Santa Monica International Jazz Festival was approaching its debut, and Bailis was still chasing the final $50,000 needed to make it happen. There were last-minute phone calls and a question he remembers asking: “What are we going to do?” The festival went ahead, bringing established jazz artists, emerging musicians, and audiences together across Santa Monica and Los Angeles. But that close call says something about the man behind it. Bailis has spent much of his career trying to create extraordinary artistic experiences while confronting the decidedly ordinary problems of money, logistics, and institutional survival.
As artistic and executive director of BroadStage in Santa Monica, Bailis occupies a position that demands both imagination and financial discipline. There is an interesting contradiction in how he arrived there. He once devoted himself to mastering a single instrument, pursuing the kind of permanent orchestral position that would allow him to concentrate almost entirely on music. Instead, he became responsible for an institution where the success of any performance depends on the contributions of countless people. “No one does this work alone,” he says. For Bailis, that conviction comes from experience, including years when he was trying to make a living as a musician himself.
He grew up in San Francisco, where his parents had relocated from Philadelphia in the early 1960s. He remembers the Bay Area as a place where artistic experimentation, progressive politics, technological reinvention, and the natural world existed in unusually close proximity. That atmosphere influenced his understanding of creativity. His first instrument, however, was partly a practical choice. His older brother already played piano and trumpet, so when an after-school music program offered clarinet lessons in fourth grade, Bailis gave it a try. He discovered an aptitude for the instrument and soon became absorbed in mastering it.
At Northwestern University, he pursued classical music while finding himself equally drawn to theater. The university’s drama program offered access to artists whose work interested him, and he sought opportunities to learn alongside them. By graduation, he was considering two different futures. He had arranged to study directing and playwriting through an international program at London’s Royal Court Theatre and was contemplating staying in London to pursue theater. Then came an opportunity to attend the Yale School of Music. A clarinet mentor warned him that the physical demands of becoming an accomplished instrumentalist created a limited window for advanced training. Bailis chose Yale.
What followed was the professional life he had hoped for. He spent years performing with regional symphony orchestras throughout Northern California, a network of ensembles affectionately known as the “Freeway Philharmonic.” He played symphony, opera, ballet, musical theater, and contemporary music, toured with his Mirage Ensemble, and taught at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts and San Francisco Community Music Center. The work was rewarding, but the practical demands were considerable. He remembers assembling his annual tax forms and marveling at the number of engagements he had accepted. His Honda Civic accumulated well over 200,000 miles, a tangible record of the distances required to sustain a freelance musical career.
He continued auditioning for permanent orchestra positions, hoping to find a more settled professional life. Yet the collaborative theater work he had explored in college kept drawing his attention. By his early thirties, he was ready to pursue it seriously. That decision eventually brought him to ODC in San Francisco, where he entered arts presenting and theater leadership. He later held senior artistic positions at Cal Performances at UC Berkeley before joining BroadStage in 2019, shortly before the pandemic disrupted the performing arts industry.
At BroadStage, his responsibilities extend beyond the organization’s 535-seat main theater and smaller performance spaces. He is thinking about the institution’s approaching 20th anniversary, the future of its international jazz festival, and plans for programming connected to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. These projects require the kind of coordination that once drew him away from an exclusively performing career. They also demand decisions about who gets access to artistic opportunities and how institutions support the people creating the work.
His collaboration with Stanley Clarke provides perhaps the clearest expression of that philosophy. During a three-year residency at BroadStage, which became the foundation of the Jazz Festival, the celebrated bassist worked closely with music students at Santa Monica High School and Santa Monica College. Bailis was struck by Clarke’s distinction between teaching and mentoring. The students already had teachers. What Clarke offered was the experience of playing beside a musician of his stature, without the usual barriers of reputation or hierarchy. Bailis describes their everyday exchanges with affectionate humor: “In between potato chips, pearls of wisdom.”
According to Bailis, three participating students became professional musicians during the residency. More consequential for his own work was the example Clarke set. The festival they developed sought to extend that spirit of invitation to the relationship between performers, emerging artists, and audiences. Its inaugural edition included ticketed performances and free public programming. The logistical difficulties were real, but Bailis remembers the experience principally for the way Clarke’s generosity changed his understanding of artistic leadership.
His philosophy of persistence has its own peculiar sense of humor. Faced with rejection, Bailis developed a private refrain: “Embrace the ‘no’ and chisel on, Michelangelo.” He sees refusal as an unavoidable feature of creative work, sometimes even a useful way of clearing away distractions. His other guiding phrase, “fearlessly make, bravely listen, and wisely adapt,” reflects the balance he believes artists must maintain between conviction and openness to criticism.
Beneath these practical lessons is a more demanding argument about the place of art in society. Bailis wants artists, particularly independent artists, to be recognized as essential workers entitled to a living wage. It is a position shaped by someone who remembers the crowded performance calendars, the tax forms, and the miles driven between jobs. Now, as he builds larger platforms for other performers, the question of how artists can sustain their lives remains inseparable from the work itself.
Yitzi Weiner: Rob Bailis It’s really an honor to meet you. Before we dive in deep and talk about your amazing work, our readers would love to learn about Rob Bailis’s personal origin story. Can you share with us a story of your childhood and how you grew up, and particularly the seeds of all the amazing creativity and genius that has come since then?
Rob Bailis: Oh heavens. Well, first of all, it is a pleasure and an honor to be with you and to spend this time, truly.
Boy, childhood. Well, I was very fortunate that my Philadelphian parents decided to move to the San Francisco Bay Area in the early ’60s and have a really good time until the early ’70s before they decided to have me. I was very lucky in my time and place of birth in San Francisco, just an incredible place to grow up. It was certainly both a complex and wonderful time.
What I love the most about the Bay Area, apart from, of course, its dedication to the very progressive edge culturally, politically, and artistically, is that it’s also very much immersed in the natural world. In particular, it is where the natural world comes crashing up against booms and busts, innovation, and this whole sense of constant reinvention. I think when you’re bathed in that or swaddled in it as a child, you absorb a degree of that in your own sensibility. That just stuck with me from the very beginning, and it is just part of being from there that you absorb a bit of that.
From the jump, that just got into my bones and in my blood. The drive for innovation and that drive for creativity, to do it in a very self-propelled fashion, and to look for the furthest edges of it, was really there from the beginning. I was lucky to grow up in a place where that was fostered, in a family where that was fostered, and to have a community around me that really embraced those same values was quite fortunate.
Yitzi Weiner: Could you tell us the story of how your career developed? Tell us about your first breaks or first entrée into the music industry. I’d love to hear how you first broke into it.
Rob Bailis: Breaking into it is such a phrase, isn’t it? How did you break into it?
It’s a little bit like we’re all cat burglars, right? Somehow we got out our kits and we picked the lock, or what is it that we did? Or maybe we broke into it with a battering ram. Whatever it is, it’s quite a thing to crack open.
I’m not sure that the gates swing wide for anyone, no matter how talented, brilliant, or how much perseverance you apply. It’s going to be a journey for everyone, no matter what your condition is coming into it.
For me, I started off as a performer. I started off as a classical clarinetist, and that was pretty much my obsession going back to childhood. I started off in an after-school class in the fourth grade. My parents had to find something to do with me. My brother was already playing the piano and the trumpet, so I couldn’t exactly do that.
I picked up the clarinet and just happened to be pretty good at it from the very beginning. It became my ambition to figure that instrument out. When I really did truly and honestly fall in love with it, it became my career passion from very early on. Off to music school and on my way. That was the deal, and I pursued that life and got it going as fast as I could. I went into life as a concert musician.
I got my first jobs in symphony orchestras. I played for about 10 years on what we lovingly in the Bay Area refer to as the Freeway Philharmonic, which is a term for the many great regional orchestras that populate the nearly 200-mile stretch from the Napa Valley all the way down to Carmel-by-the-Sea, all the way out to Modesto and Sacramento. There were quite a number of really good, smaller symphony orchestras.
That was where I spent most of the first decade of my professional life and teaching really actively in two different schools: one at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts and the San Francisco Community Music Center. I was also playing an insane amount of musical theater gigs, opera gigs, ballet gigs and so really doing my time in theaters as well.
I did a fair amount of touring, a fair amount of playing in contemporary music ensembles, and I had a really beloved trio at the time, The Mirage Ensemble, that was a soprano, clarinet, piano trio. We did a lot of performing and some touring as well, and we built a truly unique and beautiful repertoire for that configuration. I loved doing that. It was my dream to have a full-time life as a clarinetist, and I got there — I had a really lovely life doing that.
Of course, when you’re a musician, you’re putting your life together, especially in those earliest years, from so many different sources. I remember I’d get my 1099s together at the end of the year, “Did I do this many gigs? How did I do this?” You’ve got your trusty, road beaten Honda Civic, looking at the odometer and thinking, “Yeah, that was a busy time,” knowing what it took to do all of that.
There was a period there where I was flying around the country taking every audition I could, doing really well with those auditions but just not winning. And I was really taking very seriously my approach to trying to find a single permanent job that was going to keep me in a really great symphony orchestra and find my way to something that could be a little bit more focused on one place that I could concentrate on just playing and less hustling. And this is just hard to sustain in both directions.
At some point along the way, a number of the things that I was doing more collaboratively as a musician were beginning to really strike me as incredibly, intoxicatingly interesting. I think this really spoke to earlier parts in my education, particularly in college and in parts prior to that, where I’d had just as much focus on training in theater, training in multimedia performance, and collaborating across those fields, where I thought, “This is a place I really want to return to. This is something I want to come back to.” Perhaps there is another way.
There was a real turning point in my life where, at the end of my undergraduate career in college, I had managed to somehow, magically, because I happened to be at Northwestern University, which at the time had a really phenomenal music school that was basically a conservatory within the university, and also had one of the best theater schools around in the school of speech. I had managed to talk the theater school into letting me find my way in there as best I could. These were the days of Frank Galati and Mary Zimmerman making such game changing innovations in theater. I just wanted to be alongside that at the time, even though I was in the music school. I thought, “How can I get a toe in there and learn from these guys, and how can I exercise this curiosity?” Because it was Northwestern’s philosophy, they encouraged that kind of student-driven aspiration, which was a big part of why I thrived there, even amid the intense conservatory constrictions.
I came out of NU really not sure if I was going to try to be a theater director or if I was going to try to be a clarinetist. That summer, I had actually gotten myself into an international training program at the Royal Court Theatre in London, where I was going off to study theater directing with Max Stafford-Clark, Stephen Daldry, and a number of other equally intimidating luminaries. I was actually planning to stay in London and sort of figure out, “Okay, I’m just going to make the break; I’m going to see if I can make something happen in theatre.”
In the middle of that, I got into the Yale School of Music to finish my training as a clarinetist and get started on that career. I had this conversation with my clarinet mentor at the time, who said, “There’s a physical reality in your life and in your body, there is a timeline where you either get this stuff really into your bones and really into your muscles at a certain age, or it just doesn’t happen. Now is the time. If you’re certain that you don’t want to play the clarinet for a living, then by all means go do what you need to do.” which he absolutely supported me to do. “But if you’re thinking you want this career as a performing classical musician, which you absolutely can have, now is the time to finish this. Otherwise, the window will close.”
On that advice, I went to Yale, finished my Masters, and got started on my career as a performer.
Some eight years later, I was really hungry to get back to what other worlds awaited me in combining my passions and my loves for all of that. That’s really what started me in this transition to what I do now, which is this whole other realm of theater making, producing, and arts presenting.
It’s a circuitous path, but that’s a bit of how it all came together. I got to the end of those years of playing, and I was thinking, look, again, kind of like it was at the end of my undergraduate career, “Are you going to play the clarinet for the rest of your life, or are there other things that you really have to do?” Somewhere right there in my early 30s was the answer. That was: let’s figure out if you can talk somebody into giving you a different opportunity.
That’s what led to my first job as a theater director and administrator in arts presenting and producing, and that took me to ODC in San Francisco, where I had the opportunity to catch up, learn, retrain, and thankfully settle in and stay and grow with the organization for the better part of a decade while I learned a new career. It’s been an amazing, nonstop, 23 year learning curve since my first day on that job!
Yitzi Weiner: Please tell us about the exciting new initiatives or programs you’re working on now. Please feel free to be as elaborate as you’d like.
Rob Bailis: Right now, BroadStage is such an interesting place to be and to work. It’s a fantastic institution. We’re so fortunate to be nestled in Santa Monica, California. It’s a destination city, the end of Route 66. We’ve got this perfect weather, these beautiful beaches, and this incredible California population. We’re also literally the epitome of the beach communities of LA. It’s a little bit of everything. It has all the magic of what you think of when you think, “Oh, it’s LA. It’s Hollywood,” and that is a bit ironic as Santa Monica is neither LA nor Hollywood — but it is an iconic, transformational place, calling dreamers to this day.
We’ve got this beautiful jewel box of a theater. It’s a wonderful 535-seat venue that also has a gorgeous 120-seat black box and a beautiful indoor-outdoor space for about 250 folks. It really has incredible flexibility to do all kinds of things on a medium and small scale. It gives us a lot of flexibility to play. We’re able to get outside of these venues as well and present at whatever scale speaks to us.
As we’re looking at what’s coming up for us in the next two years, we’ve got our 20th anniversary at BroadStage. We’re reflecting on 20 years of arts presenting and producing in this community and on an international scale.
We’ve just launched the Santa Monica International Jazz Festival, which is a massive new project, a brand-new international jazz festival that leapt fully formed at a really large scale into the world last year, which we’re producing with Stanley Clarke as the artistic director and all of the things that go along with that. That project is going into its second year.
Sort of the pièce de résistance is that LA has the Olympics coming in ’28. We’re envisioning our international performance festival for the summer of ’28, and thinking about what that would be for how you capture the international power of Los Angeles, the international implications of what people think LA is or think Santa Monica is, and the fact that Santa Monica will be hosting, as of now, 11 different international houses during the course of the Olympics. How do we turn that into a warm embrace for visitors and also articulate a platform for the vast depth, diversity and history that is here — the incredible culture that is LA and all the international connections that already come with that?
Between the Jazz festival, the Olympics festival, and the 20th anniversary of BroadStage, it’s a lot to consider. All of those things will have a lot to say to each other about how you think about performance festivals, how you think about celebration, and how you mark time, particularly at a moment now five years out from the pandemic, which was the largest global interruption of time that we are collectively familiar with. It’s a lot to look at, but these are beautiful opportunities to reorganize, reimagine, and reinvent.
Yitzi Weiner: You probably have some incredible stories from your career, and I’m sure this is difficult to single out, but can you share with our readers two stories that stand out in your mind from your amazing career?
Rob Bailis: Because it continues to teach and shape me, I’ll go back to the Santa Monica International Jazz Festival as a defining experience of recent years.
One might wonder how we pulled off a large-scale international festival in its first year out of the blue. The answer is that we didn’t. The answer is that it was actually three and a half years in the making, working very closely with Stanley Clarke, hand in hand with a living legend — just sort of in your daily life. It’s kind of like you think you will never get used to sharing a sandwich with Stanley Clarke, and then you do get used to it — but you still have to kind of check in with yourself and make sure.
I think for me, as someone who has been in leadership for a while and has been thinking about organizations, populations, budgets, audiences, and all the inner workings of institutions, to get to experience this level of inspiration again on a daily basis, and not just going to a show and admiring that an artist is great — because, of course, they are, and we get that all the time in the theater — but here just in the daily humanity of exchange, finding that so many pearls of wisdom are coming from this individual on a daily basis. In between potato chips, pearls of wisdom. Just the most mundane ways in which someone can utterly change your life. That was such a gift to have over these three years.
The Jazz Festival was the end product of a three-year artist residency BroadStage developed with Stanley. The essence of the residency was that Stanley was working very closely with our local high school, Santa Monica High, and also with the students who were here on our home campus of Santa Monica College. He had identified a group of students that he had basically promised, “Listen, you guys are our top talented kids. If you stay with me for the three years of this residency, I promise you that I’m going to find a place for you when this festival debuts, and you’re going to be on those stages. Just work with me, stay with me, and something great is going to happen.”
The way that he separates teaching from mentoring is that all these kids had teachers. They’re all in jazz programs, they all have teachers, and they don’t need another teacher. They needed a mentor. The way he separated mentorship from teaching was that he would just be a peer, and give them the sensibility when he was alongside them in the music that they belonged alongside him. He took away that barrier of “I’m a Jazz great and you’re not,” and simply said, “This is what it feels like when you’re in the groove or really in the pocket — this is exactly how these changes go, exactly how this feels when it’s locked — here is what to listen for in this harmony — here comes the part where you listen across.”
People would just rise to his level instantly and have their first moment of feeling, “Oh, that’s how this is supposed to go.” They just continually pushed themselves back up to that level, with or without him. Sure enough, over the course of three years, three of those students went pro. It wasn’t as if he was opening career doors for them or calling up agents; he was just literally meeting with them a couple times a month, playing with them at a high level, and saying, “This is the level; come on up.” He put no barrier between himself and them, no ego barrier, no “you can’t be me,” just “come on up.” And he only ever stayed laser focused on the fundamentals of music.
I think that humanity, both the act of it and the outcome, and watching that gave us the inspiration for how to build the festival. The whole thing, as producers, we were like, “The whole thing has to feel like this. It has to feel like, let’s build a platform on which everybody feels like it’s made for them and they get to feel this absolute connection of spontaneity. It’s crisp, it’s clean, it’s clear, and everybody feels like they’re having that experience that we got to watch happen here with these students…come on up.” That’s actually what artistic direction looks like when it’s good, right? That’s what it looks like. It looks like there’s no barrier between the idea, the artist, the audience, and the community getting to say, “Here is the transformational power.” It’s the absence of ego in that space and the presence of genuine invitation and care.
We really decided to build from that place and try to get it to happen. There were many things along the road that made that really hard and challenging, including the fact that the funding came through at the very last minute. We were just white-knuckling it to the very end. I mean, it was literally last-minute phone calls for the final $50,000, where we were thinking, “What are we going to do?”
It was a trick. As we often say in this business, it all works out in the end, but you just don’t know how sometimes until the 11th hour, and if you give up before you get there, you’re doomed.
In the end, we put on four days of performance across a staggering number of artists in venues as different as the Orpheum in LA; Tongva Park, which was our headline space — it’s the first time that a six-acre park in Santa Monica had ever been turned into a ticketed venue; to the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, that was a full day of free performances open to the public. I think we had at least 3,000 seated people and probably 10,000 people passed through that day. Of course, at BroadStage, an amazing evening of performances. That was the inaugural year, which also happened to fall on the centenaries of both Miles Davis and John Coltrane. We had plenty to work with.
That was the essence of it. There’s more to say, but that stands out to me as one of these times in life that you so rarely get, when someone has been so utterly who they are that the generosity is unmistakable. It just realigns everything about your practice and changes how you think about what you want to do, how you perceive your purpose.
At the end of the day, the thing that is born is of a different kind. It just has a different glow, a different shine, a different feel, and somehow it just clicks into place and works. And it did. We’re looking forward to a successful second, third, fourth, fifth year ongoing, and to carry the spirit forward as it continues to grow.
Yitzi Weiner: Rob, this is our signature question. You’ve been blessed with a lot of success now and you must have learned a lot from your experiences. Looking back all the way to the beginning when you first started, can you share five things that you’ve learned over the years that someone starting out today can really benefit from? Five things you’ve learned over the years that someone starting out today can benefit from.
Rob Bailis: Okay, yeah. I’ll start with the thing I say the most to anybody who will listen, which is: no one does this work alone. That’s the first thing I will say to anybody who asks. When I say that, of course, what I mean by that is that this field is entirely predicated on collaboration. Everybody needs somebody. There’s nowhere where you’re not going to need to work with other people, there’s nowhere where you’re not going to need a community, and there’s nowhere where that community isn’t going to need you!
There is no such thing as the mythology of the lone genius who’s somehow going to ride in and save the day, or these images we have of stardom, the magically arriving person who’s somehow just a lightning strike of unique difference in the world. It does not exist. It might appear that way, but it certainly doesn’t exist. I think those images, as much as we love to create them because they’re part of mythology, are really dangerous for people who are actually going to pursue a career.
No one does this work alone. No one. The most important thing to realize is when you really think about it, the entire field of the performing arts is a calculation of risk and reward. The entire field, everybody’s in it for some level of risk and some level of reward. There is nothing else involved. You have to take risks; there’s nothing without that. If you’re risk-averse, don’t bother. Some level of that ratio is required.
Because that’s there, the underpinning of the whole enterprise is vulnerability and trust. You have to be willing to be vulnerable, and vulnerability breeds and requires trust. The stock-in-trade of this industry, believe it or not, is vulnerability, trust, risk, reward, and that demands community.
These things are sometimes very combustible when you put them together and not always friendly in the same room or in the same fishbowl. But the reality of it is that this is what binds us together. It is the requirement of trust and the requirement of risk that makes this work what it is.
Number two is kind of an offshoot of that, but I would say that everybody at some level is going to be thinking at some point career-wise, or at least professionally, about power, money, influence, and all that kind of stuff. Your relationships will sustain you more than any of those things will, and your relationships are likely your best path to those things, period. Unless you happen to be that inventor, unless you happen to be that odd scientist, your relationships are your path to everything and anything. Everything else is an illusion.
The need to care for yourself in the very act of caring for other people is the baseline of all things in this career. It’s acts of generosity, acts of simple kindness, acts of awareness that involve caring for those around you, those you endeavor with. Seeing that as an act of self-care is absolutely essential.
What’s at the baseline there is that your integrity is all you have. Your integrity is it. If that’s impugned, what do you have? Above all else, integrity, authenticity, and real intentionality with your choices — that will keep your relationships burning clean, and keep your trajectory focused.
Number three and another favorite phrase of mine: of course you’re going to get “no” a lot more than you’re going to get “yes,” right? I have a phrase that I used to say to myself all the time, which was: embrace the “no” and chisel on, Michelangelo. I used to say that to myself all the time. If we’re on the way to “yes,” “no” is how we get there. “No” is not just rejection; “no” is incredibly helpful too. “No” is: “this isn’t helpful to me, this isn’t getting me anywhere, this isn’t right.” “No” is all the clutter you have to get out of your way.
There’s so much we have in our heads and so much that just gets in our way. Every actor will tell you this, every director will tell you this, every maker will tell you this: they’ll tell you the biggest problem you have, probably, is you, and the things that you invariably do to complicate your own self and/or your own process for no good reason. There are so many wonderful ways in which “no” does not have to indicate something negative. It actually can be a blessing that removes things. It’s an incredibly sharp tool that can do wonders for you in improving and clarifying your life.
Number Four: The other catchphrase I have for myself is: fearlessly make, bravely listen, and wisely adapt. Those are pretty straightforward. You’ve got to listen, and you’ve got to change based on what you hear, no matter what. But the fearlessness it takes to get your work in the world is paramount. You’ve got to be brave about getting out there and doing it; there’s no other way.
If the fear of listening to critique is worrisome, then there’s got to be a way to figure out how to work on that or find your way through it. On the other hand, disappearing into critique is the worst thing that could ever happen to you; don’t ever do it.
Adapting wisely is something only you know. You’re here to do your work; you’re here to be you. You’re not here to be anybody else. Make your choices. But do listen. If you find yourself isolated, there might be a reason why you’re there, so take a good listen. It is true, no one does this work alone. So if you’re alone, you absolutely do not have to be. Maybe start by listening. Sometimes, the courage or fearlessness it takes to make something overwhelms every other sense. And for a time you can’t listen. Or perhaps you can listen but you cannot adapt. One can’t always do all of these things all of the time, or all in a row, or at the same time. That is why they are three separate pieces of advice and not one.
Number Five: The last thing is stay curious. We’re all constantly reinventing ourselves. We’re all self-made creatures of our own design. The minute you think you know something, you don’t. It’s constantly going to change on you. Always being at the beginning of something, where you can remind yourself that, no matter what you think you know, being humble in front of something that is much bigger than you is a good practice for every day. Curiosity is the key.
Yitzi Weiner: Rob, this is our final aspirational question. Because of your amazing work and the platform that you lead, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re a person of enormous influence. If you could spread an idea or inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? Because you never know what your idea can inspire.
Rob Bailis: Honestly, if I could wave a wand and change one thing, I would wave the wand that makes artists essential workers, period, so that we wouldn’t be thinking about that anymore. Artists don’t need a reason for being that has to somehow be defined by a transactional nature around their work.
The arts themselves, particularly the performing arts, are the most powerful materials known to humankind. We accept this. We know that if you take away dance, you take away music, you take away language, you end culture. It cannot self-replicate, regenerate, or evolve without those things.
The arts literally move mountains, not figuratively. Arguments over ideas move boundaries, move rivers, move nations, and move seats of power. Ideas do that. Let’s not pretend that the anthems that carry those ideas and the vehicles of these points of view are not the most powerful materials known to humankind. Let’s not pretend. And yet, as a career — for almost all working artists — completely unsustainable.
If I could radicalize any one notion, it would be that one: that if we’re having conversations about essential workers, include artists. Particularly independent and self producing artists that have no other direct means of affiliation — they absolutely need to receive a living wage to support their creative process time. That would be it.
Embedded within that would be the somewhat more universal notion: perhaps it’s time that we acknowledge these are indeed the most powerful materials known to humankind. More powerful than the tools of annihilation. In fact, these would be the things that would provoke our use of the tools of annihilation, or enable us to create the tools of annihilation in the first place, so perhaps they’re even more powerful. This is the stuff that dreams are made on, so let’s get real. This is the real transformational stuff.
If we have that awareness, then we also have the radical power to deploy it for all the best purposes. Those best purposes are also available to us, not just the scary ones, but all the really good ones. That’s where I am so hopeful for the kind of change that we can all make. That’s the kind of thinking that we’re all about at BroadStage; that’s what we’re trying to get done, that’s the work that we want to bring into the world, and the relationships that we’re trying to foster across this incredibly wild west that is Los Angeles.
Yitzi Weiner: It’s truly been an honor to meet you. How can our readers continue to follow your work? How can they come see a performance? How could they support you and your work in any possible way?
Rob Bailis: Of course, go and see a show: broadstage.org. Go and see a show; that’s the best way, because then you also get to support the artist, and that’s really where it’s at. That’s the best possible way. There’s so much to see, so much to enjoy, and so much to take in.
As we come up on institutional milestones, there’s also going to be so many different ways in which we’re going to be reaching out into the world. Keep your eyes out there. There’s going to be a lot coming out of BroadStage nationally and internationally about how we’re trying to make change. Maybe if you’re reading this, you might find yourself in a corner of the world that’s nowhere near Santa Monica, but as you’re thinking about ’28 and what’s going to be going on internationally with the Olympics, or even with the Super Bowl in ’27, if you find your way to LA, come and check us out. Or if you are intrigued by our trajectory and would like to get involved or support a project, please get in touch — we have plenty of room for you! Get in touch through our Development Team or our Programming Team and share your voice.
Yitzi Weiner: Rob, it’s been a joy to meet you. I wish you continued success and good health. I’d love to do this again in the near future.
Rob Bailis: Absolutely. Any time. Thank you so much. It’s a real pleasure.
Yitzi Weiner: It’s my pleasure and an honor. Thank you. Have an amazing day.
Rob Bailis: Take care.
BroadStage’s Rob Bailis: Why Artists Are ‘The Most Powerful Materials Known to Humankind was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.