Between Stage and Care: Care as Everyday Practice
As part of our conversation series with inspiring FLINTA* people, we are coming together on October 23 to talk about something that, for many of us, is always there and always important: care.
We meet at Delphi to share experiences. We sit at the bar, not on a stage, because this conversation is meant as an exchange, not a lecture. Care is not something abstract, but something each of us lives, negotiates, and organizes. Still, we have guests who open and structure the evening with their expertise: we are here with Verena Usemann and Teresa Monfared from Bühnenmütter* e.V., and with the team from Theater im Delphi, Georgina Koschke and Laura Wimmer, who negotiate care in theatre in very practical ways.
Bühnenmütter* is an association of stage artists based in Berlin, with a project office at C*SPACE in Weißensee, advocating for more family-friendly working conditions in theatres. Through studies, talks, and projects like Culture.Care, they make visible what the (in)compatibility of art and care looks like today, and they develop concrete changes together with theatres.
Theater im Delphi is a special place for this. The building, with its rough facade, stands on Gustav-Adolf-Straße. From the outside it looks raw, angular, resistant. When you step inside, the same structure and the same material transform into an almost magical space.
Delphi is co-led by Georgina. Having a FLINTA* person in the artistic leadership of such an influential venue changes which questions are asked, who feels addressed, and which stories find space on this stage. Today, that also includes the question of how theatres can become more caring, for the people who work here, and for everyone who comes here.
In this text we publish selected excerpts from the conversation.
What do we mean when we talk about care?
Teresa: Care translates as care work or caregiving. And here it explicitly does not only mean care for children.
For us here, care means not only caring for children, but also caring for parents, animals, the environment, a sick neighbor, friends. And not least, and this is especially important in theatre, self-care too. Every one of us would have starved or been neglected as an infant without care, no matter the quality or quantity.
That someone cared for us is the reason we can meet here today. That is what care means.
The status quo is not okay: Bühnenmütter*’s pilot study
Verena: At some point we realised: the status quo is not okay. But how do we get solid numbers so that anyone will even listen to us? So we conducted our own qualitative pilot study. We developed a questionnaire, for example: How has your income situation changed since becoming a parent? Have you experienced discrimination, and if so, how? Were there also positive changes in your job or how you feel in your life? 121 women or people who read as female responded. Back then we very consciously focused on mothers.
Teresa: Almost half, 45% of the participants, stated that they had experienced discriminatory behavior in professional life because of their motherhood. One in four participants even said that a contract was terminated because of their motherhood, or that they were excluded from a production, which is actually illegal.
But of course in our field, whether in institutions or in the independent scene, there are always artistic reasons people can give to say: we won’t ask her, she’s not as resilient anymore, she has a child now. I find that so striking, this stigma: from the moment you are a parent, or the moment you are a mother, it’s like your artistic expertise is taken away from you a little.
“Bring the kids”: care at Theater im Delphi
Georgina: We never actively thought about how we do care work here, we just grew into it. I was the first. In the beginning it was just me and Nikolaus here, and I simply brought my daughter along. For me there was no other option: either I stay at home, take care of my child and don’t work, or I bring my child here, keep her occupied on the side, and work.
Of course it’s always a question of: sometimes you have childcare and sometimes you don’t. I try under all circumstances to avoid spending money on childcare, and instead try to solve it through friends and family. And most people don’t really have a lot of family in Berlin. I think that was the case for all of our employees with children too.
Then, step by step, first an employee with two kids joined, then two more employees with two and one child respectively.
Laura: We are extremely family-friendly. Children are always brought to rehearsals if there is no way to arrange childcare otherwise.
And then there’s an assistant or an intern who comes and takes care of the child. We try to create a framework, even when there are performances and babysitters or other childcare falls through.
I find it absurd how many performances and rehearsals we cancel and postpone because things don’t work, because childcare isn’t in place.
Bring the kids.
We bring the dogs, we bring the cats, it feels like, but the kids are not allowed to come. Why? Explain it to me.
Georgina: By now I’m relatively brave and I talk about the care work I do. I think that matters.
And I have a few people around me who model it for me, or who do it too, and I actively exchange with them, like with you now. And then I get the feeling: this is important, and then I say it too. Like, I took care of my father, and I bring that into the room. I say it in a meeting, out loud.
I don’t just say, I’m not there, I’m taking unpaid leave, or I’m sick, or whatever. I say, I’m not doing well right now because… And then I say three sentences afterwards. Because I believe it’s important that it becomes visible.
A difference of one million euros
Georgina: I think if we look at how men do care work, then we really have to go a lot deeper and ask: how are men socialized, how are women socialized? In my case, women are the ones who earn less. And when it comes to who takes care of the child, who takes parental leave and vacation, it will usually be the parent who earns less. And then, during that time, that person also develops less professionally. And all of that is proven.
Teresa: Let’s talk about the gender pay gap. In Germany, on average it’s currently 18 percent, but interestingly it’s much higher in the visual and performing arts. In the performing arts it’s 34 percent.
Because that’s exactly where these mechanisms kick in, and especially in the performing arts we are paid quite precariously. And then 100 euros more or less per month really makes a difference. And then women are penalized with the lifetime earning gap when they have children. The lifetime earning gap means the total volume of what a person earns across their lifetime, and there’s a gap between people read as male and people read as female of around one million euros. And for each child you have, I think there’s another roughly 100,000 euros down on top of that. For fathers, it’s actually the case that the lifetime earning gap gets even larger, because they earn more, interestingly.
So there’s a gradient there that clearly also works on an economic level. That’s interesting, and actually we could also bring fathers in much more as allies.
Structural change only happens this way
Laura: I think the independent scene depends so heavily on goodwill and networking. And who can network?
The one who has time. The one who doesn’t have a child in their hand, to put it bluntly and harshly, and can just run to the networking meeting. Yes.
Why do we have funding? Because Nikolaus is insanely good at sitting down with the right people at the right time and networking. I could maybe still do that if I weren’t juggling 35 projects on the side in addition to my job here.
But the times of networking meetings, when the invitations come and I forward them, they’re just not doable. Not family-friendly. And then you end up again with solutions like: one person stays home with the kids, the other goes to the meeting.
But then we’re also the two young women from Delphi. Who is even talking to us?
Georgina: And then there are so many more layers on top. Intersectionality is the key word.
Laura: Definitely intersectional. It’s simply a diversity of discrimination structures that are internalized and embedded in funding structures.
It’s nice that commissions and juries now include the dramaturge, the head of an arts university, and whoever else. But they also come from a system that brought them into those positions, a system they lived through, and one that doesn’t necessarily lead them to oppose that system. They live off the system and benefit from it.
Verena: But on the other hand I think: how can we change the structures? We can’t just leave them. We have to get to the structures.
That’s why we’re so happy that with the project Culture.Care we can initiate change at seven institutions. Until the end of 2027, we’ll work with the institutions on tailored trainings and awareness-raising measures.
Laura: I think what makes your work at Bühnenmütter* insanely valuable is saying: “Hey, by the way, we’re here, and we also support you.” That’s important, what you’re doing, so that more diverse perspectives can enter. So that everywhere, on all levels of theatre, these perspectives are there: okay, we have to include this, we have to include this. Structural change can only happen this way, if these views are present everywhere.
Maybe that question is exactly what brings the conversation back to Weißensee at the end: how could care here, on the neighborhood level, become more visible?
There are already countless places in Weißensee where sociocultural work happens. In the group, the idea emerges to think of these existing structures as care infrastructure: as places where you can share spaces, exchange knowledge, and forge new alliances. Maybe initiatives like Bühnenmütter*, Delphi, KIEZ:MOBIL, and youth programs in the district can enter an even stronger exchange.
The question is less whether something already exists, and more how we find it, connect it, and carry it forward together.
Polina Medvedeva
The project is organised by C*SPACE Berlin gGmbH in cooperation with Polina Medvedeva (urban researcher and co-founder of the Feminist Spaces Collective). The conversation series is co-curated by Katya Romanova. The project is funded through the “Demokratie leben!” program of the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth.
