Our Values
OUR PROCESS
Center our work in movement, community, and change.
Work towards a future where dance-making, dancing, and dance-viewing are sustainable, approachable, and accessible.
Collaborative processes that engage artists committed to the investigation of social consciousness through movement and sound.
Artistic process is informed by our bodies: specific physicalities, perspectives, and identities. Each time a work is performed, it is re-invented in small and large ways by the bodies of the observers and participants.
Take risks; be thoughtful and still make room for experimentation and failure.
Think creatively about space and relationships: Where can dance happen? Who can we partner with? How can we share resources?
Work locally and build relationships with folks around and through our work.
Deepen and expand our roots in the intergenerational community we have been sharing our work with over the last decade.
Connect with whole families by creating environments that are inclusive of children through free admission, matinee performances, and a lack of tension around their attendance. Inviting children into the adult world offers rich multigenerational shared experiences, instills a value for art, and lays the groundwork for cultural experiences they can continue to grow into, rather than out of.
Create work that makes space for the audience to process, shape, and discover meaning through their bodies.
Anti-Oppressive Framework
Horizontal, non-hierarchical, collaboration
Indefinite stream of conversations and asking questions
Stay engaged with anti-racism, anti-oppression questions and frameworks
Stay engaged with personal reflections and examination of our aesthetics, our work, our process, and the organization
Dance practices that move us forward in a more equitable way
Deepen our understanding of our privilege as a predominantly white organization and how to be conscious of and redistribute that privilege and work towards dismantling white-body supremacy
Self-care & Community Care
The opposite of complacency - Listening to our always shifting bodies. Be aware of our capacity. Trust each others’ choices.
If we are pushing ourselves beyond comfort, it is an intentional and personal decision
Maintain thoughtfulness for artists around food, location, transportation, bathrooms (mutual aid)
Continually Evolving Collaborative Structures
Artistic Collaborators Chloe, Harlee, Marisa, and Katherine
Consensus decision making around programming and finances
Making space and taking space
All four of us are art makers
Determine together how, when, and if to invite additional collaborators for projects, expand our collaborative group
Individual projects can be guided by one person’s vision or collective visioning
Administrative Collaboration
Artistic Director, Katherine and Financial Coordinator, Marisa
Acknowledge this is in place from our founder driven roots
Open to and creating space for change
Acknowledge that change requires restructuring, expanding and sharing knowledge, interest from collaborators and most likely reapproaching and increasing our budget
Board of Advisors
Provide feedback and perspective
Support Artistic Collaborators in being accountable to our mission and our values
Everyone weighs in, but not a vote, advisors not approvers
All four Artistic Collaborators attend Board of Advisor meetings
Financial Transparency
What is an equitable budget?
We have been thinking about this for a while and believe that is not a single solution to arrive into, but a question to ask and respond to each time we budget.
Here’s what it looks like for The Naked Stark in 12021:
Prioritize our artistic collaborators.
Together we laid out a mix of hourly compensation and project compensation, that meets the needs of the artists, scope of the project, and projected available funds.
Hourly rehearsal rate $15 hr, performance rate $75 a show
80% of our budget goes directly to artists (76% for artistic collaboration and 4% administrative collaboration)
5% to support Philadelphia dance equity work.
This money will go towards ongoing projects in Philadelphia working to repair harm and advocate for equity.
Katherine Kiefer Stark’s time is an in-kind contribution.
“I am middle class with financial stability through my husband, who works for Clorox and has excellent health insurance, and through my own work as adjunct faculty at Widener University.” -- KKS
Although our decision making process is collaborative, this is still a founder driven organization. Katherine is open to and creating space for change and change is a slow process that requires restructuring, expanding and sharing knowledge, interest from collaborators and re-approaching and increasing our budget.
