The Shala Daily

In a recent piece for The Bulwark, Sonny Bunch walks through what’s happening to the Kennedy Center. It’s been shuttered for two years under the banner of “renovations.” The Washington National Opera is leaving. Performers are pulling out. Patrons have stopped coming. And with them goes an entire ecosystem — artists, technicians, educators, people just starting out who needed that first real gig.

This is how cultural infrastructure dies. Not dramatically, but through bureaucratic decisions that treat people like budget lines. When you eliminate jobs in the arts, you don’t just lose positions. You lose pathways. The stage manager who knew every quirk of the lighting board. The vocal coach who trained three generations of singers. The kid who was going to get their first backstage internship next year.

The best people will relocate because they have to. And the city that remains will be smaller in ways that spreadsheets can’t measure.

🎭 When Institutions Forget Their Purpose

In yogic philosophy, dharma means purpose — the particular role you’re meant to play. But dharma isn’t just personal. Institutions have it too. A theater has a dharma. A cultural center has one. It exists to cultivate, to preserve, to hold space for expression and transformation.

When you violate that purpose, there are consequences. Not cosmic punishment, just cause and effect. Karma yoga teaches that action ripples outward. Every decision creates conditions for what comes next.

Close a theater and you don’t just cancel shows. You sever relationships. You disrupt training pipelines. You send a signal to an entire generation of artists that this place doesn’t value what they do. That signal travels. People make plans accordingly.

Bunch found an old ticket stub in his coat pocket from 2019 — a children’s show, a family memory. That’s what gets lost when we treat culture as disposable. The accumulation of small moments. The kid who sees their first ballet. The college student backstage for the first time. The visiting artist who decides to stay.

🌿 What We’re Actually Destroying

There’s a principle in yoga called ahimsa — non-harming. It sounds passive but it’s actually quite active. It asks: what am I creating with this choice? What am I destroying?

When we destroy jobs, we’re not eliminating positions. We’re harming the web of relationships that make a place livable. The box office worker who remembers your name. The lighting designer who’s been there for twenty years. The music teacher who moonlights in the orchestra pit and brings students to see shows.

These aren’t interchangeable parts. They’re the mycelium of a cultural ecosystem. Pull them out and the whole thing starts to collapse.

The concept of tapas — disciplined effort, sustained heat — is exactly what builds institutions worth keeping. It takes decades of attention to create a place where artists want to work, where audiences trust they’ll see something meaningful, where young people can imagine a future.

You can burn that down in an afternoon with a single administrative decision.

🎫 What Doesn’t Come Back

That ticket stub Bunch found was from December 2019. Right before the pandemic, right before everything changed. A small piece of paper, a reminder of continuity. Of a place that held space for a father and daughter to see a pigeon try to drive a bus.

Continuity matters. Not because it’s sentimental, but because it’s structural. Cities need places where culture can breathe, where the next generation learns from the last, where risk-taking is supported by infrastructure.

When you lose that, you don’t get it back easily. The musicians move to New York or LA. The designers take corporate gigs. The directors go freelance. And the city that remains is a little less itself.

Maybe that’s the real cost. Not just what we lose now, but what we’ll never have the chance to build. The shows that won’t get made. The careers that won’t launch. The kid who won’t find their way to the stage because there’s no stage left to find.

Every action is a seed. Some seeds grow into forests. Some grow into wastelands. We’re planting something right now with these decisions. We should probably look at what it is.