If we do not look back to our ancestral practices to inform how we ‘be’, then we have decided to allow the status quo to decide and guide. In societies founded on discrimination and subjugation, we must look to other cultural sources for examples that are better aligned with who we would like to become.

Reimagination relies on a willingness to take bold risks. This requires that folks showing up ready to learn to be uncomfortable and affected; to not know what the outcomes will be - and to still say ‘yes’.

Facilitator and organization, employee and leader, artist and audience, teacher and student, etc. are in symbiotic partnership. Our work is about constant exchange of information, emotion, and experiences; the roles are interchangeable.

To be in community is to be responsible for and committed to others; to be equally concerned about others’ well-being as one’s own. Our inherited capitalistic container will not permit us to build true community so we must reimagine it.

We are artists and understand that what we can create collectively will be infinitely better than what we conjure separately. We combat the influence of rugged individualism by co-creating from the beginning.

It is easy - lazy even - to believe that equity will never be achieved. Equity is a current fiction and so were the ideologies of domination that characterize our current culture. Because capitalism insists that we deal in the realm of the intellectual and realistic, we choose to operate in the realm of the ideal.

We reimagine what exists and hand that vision to the next generation to steward as best they can. This guards against exceptionalism and exhaustion; we do our designated part. These inequities and ideologies of domination are centuries-entrenched, and will not be dislodged overnight. We must be intentional about what we are seeding, with the understanding that we may never see what blooms.

Our artist self is our freest self and worthy of fierce protection. When we create containers of liberation, we can keep that self close. Our liberatory selves are in an empowered relationship with fear - the foundation of most if not all ideologies of domination. We are more committed to liberation than we are to fear.

Progress does not happen without facing the pain of the past and its resounding impact in the present. We elicit others’ stories and experiences with a willingness to be changed and affected by them. We acknowledge also that empathy and witnessing are related by not synonymous. One should not need to feel into the pain of another as though it were their own to bear witness to an external experience of suffering. We honor both joy and pain as prolific human realities.