IndieSpace And Caborca Team Up To Launch ONE MORE EQUITY HEALTH WEEK PLAYERS

The bilingual downtown theatre company Caborca will join forces with IndieSpace, an organization established to disrupt the ongoing displacement of small theaters and to create a new model for equitable funding for the indie theater community, to create the One More Equity Health Week Players, a play-reading series designed to fulfill the dual purposes of exploring news plays and securing health insurance coverage for actors and stage managers who are represented by Actors' Equity Association.

Performing arts workers earn six months of health insurance coverage through the Equity-League Benefit Funds by working a set number of contracted weeks within a year. Regrettably, unpredictability of the industry often leads to gaps in coverage. IndieSpace has awarded Caborca with a $5000 grant for this new reading series which will help roughly 14-16 Equity actors and stage managers who are one week short of eligibility the opportunity to secure their next six months of health insurance coverage.

Caborca has issued an open call to participate in this reading series via their website, https://www.caborca.org/about-the-company with the first installment to take place in January 2026.

Caborca is a bilingual ensemble under the artistic direction of Javier Antonio González. Founded in 2009, Caborca creates work at the intersection of Latine and experimental theatre, with a particular focus on corrupt and colonial power. The company's membership includes 13 multidisciplinary artists, with 6 from Puerto Rico and the remainder from the continental USA, China, and South Korea. Drawing from a range of vocabularies including live-feed video, postmodern dance, choral speaking, and nonlinear storytelling, Caborca has created 16 original and adapted works of live theatre, 3 films that have garnered awards for writing, directing, and audience choice, a studio musical recording, and multiple readings, workshops, and symposia. The company's most recent work Zoetrope played at Abrons Arts Center in 2023 and was hailed as "a conservatory garden of theme and image, precise in every textual detail" by The New Yorker.

One of few US companies to maintain a sustained focus on all of the Americas, Caborca has participated in the Encuentro Festival of Latine Performance, premiered the first authorized Roberto Bolaño adaptation in New York and the first English translation of a seminal work by Arístides Vargas, and has presented original works in Puerto Rico, Central Cuba, and Bogotá. The company's next production will be Rubalee, a heavy metal choral musical about the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale. www.caborca.org.

IndieSpace was established in 2016 to disrupt the ongoing displacement of small theaters and to address systemic inequities in NYC real estate. In 2022, it merged with Indie Theater Fund, an organization focused on a new model for equitable funding for the indie theater community. By contributing a nickel per ticket from their shows to a pot of money for funding, the indie theater community could create a method of self-sustainability and could rethink philanthropy and the process of grant making. Through radically transparent and equitable grants, community resources and advocacy, the Fund supported hundreds of indie theater companies and thousands of individual artists.