ACCOUNTABILITY AND ANTI-RACISM

On July 8, a collective of multi-generational, Black, Indigenous and People of Color theatermakers released a “comprehensive but by no means exhaustive” list of demands for the White American Theater. This powerful document can be used as a guidebook for both becoming an anti-racist organization, and for communally co-creating an anti-racist theatrical landscape. Ars Nova both honors and is grateful to the collective for their labor creating and sharing this document, and acknowledges that their demands stem from the years of exclusion, exploitation, and erasure of their Black and brown bodies and stories by predominantly white arts and culture institutions. We recognize that we are one of these predominantly white organizations, and that we have been both complicit in and the beneficiaries of the same culture of white supremacy and anti-Blackness that has caused them harm.

We reaffirm our commitment to doing the work required to dismantle these harmful, racist systems and to building a more equitable, just and participatory organizational culture and framework for art-making.

In the spirit of transparency, we are “showing our work” and sharing our process and pathways as they exist now.  In the spirit of accountability, we are sharing our next steps towards these goals.

TRANSPARENCY:

In the past six weeks we have:

• Formally incorporated the BIPOC Demands for White American Theater into our existing Organizational Goals for equity, representation, and anti-racism;
• Taken a comprehensive inventory of these demands and completed a full-team self-assessment and audit of our performance across each one;
• Created a structure for pursuing these anti-racist Goals that complements our horizontally collaborative operational structure by:
  • Creating mandatory Working Groups in Immediate Response, Equity and Justice Plans, Education, and Data/Surveying that meet weekly;
  • Creating a leadership structure for these Working Groups that does not directly correspond to existing organizational hierarchy, and that also meets weekly;
  • Explicitly including anti-racist work in the job descriptions of every team member and on the agenda of every extant organizational team’s weekly meetings;
  • Assigning each of these demands to one of these Working Groups or Organizational Teams; and
  • Activating our Board’s Equity, Justice & Inclusion Task Force in response to these demands and to forge and activate a work-plan at the Board level for the year ahead.

ACCOUNTABILITY:

In the next six months we will:

• Commission and develop a majority of BIPOC artists;
• Develop and experiment with more equitable and power-sharing curatorial practices;
• Publish our FY21 Organizational Budget and its guiding principles;
• Triple our budget line item providing for regular anti-racism work;
• Publish explicitly anti-racist policies and share them, along with our extant Code of Conduct, with all collaborators prior to beginning work together;
• Expand our practice of ongoing, mandatory EDI Training, creating an educational arc that is flexible and supportive of our artists and the teams that support their work;
• Compensate artists for their performances at all donor events;
• Begin meaningfully and respectfully acknowledging the history of the land we work on and benefit from; and
• Publish regular progress reports from our Working Groups and Organizational Teams, as we further and deepen this work.

Our process is iterative; while we can’t promise it will always work, we can promise we will be intentionally flexible and responsive to change if it does not. Further, this list of commitments and actions is not exhaustive; it represents neither the extent of the work to be done, nor the extent of the work we’ll do. But, we will endeavor to become a more racially and culturally just organization that creates art more equitably and inclusively by immediately taking at least these steps.

And, we promise we will continue.