Photo credit: Kinga Michalska // Photo edit: Noel Vezina
Dear friends, colleagues and community,
Thank you for your solidarity this past year. It’s been intense, and your presence, creativity and care has kept us moored and hopeful. You have also helped us prioritize and make the most of this unprecedented disruption.
While governments, funders and large institutions are working to anticipate and respond to large scale trends, we remain focused on the micro. In a time of difficult social contexts marked by violent inequality, we see a wealth of possibility in rethinking our relationship mechanisms and emphasizing trust, supported by an active process of transparency and listening.
How can we better relate to one another? Trust is key to good relationships, and we believe that transparency and listening support trust. For instance, rather than adopt a blanket approach regarding accessibility, we have been consulting with disabled and Deaf artists who want to participate in our workshops, to build a pilot project (21-22) tailored to their specific needs. This has been a very enlightening process; we’re learning to move through discomfort, and (to try to!) let go of our assumptions.
Other behind-the-scenes activities involve taking a good hard look at equity across all of our pay scales – including staff, artists and contractuals – as well as how wage transparency could support open discussions around money, and improve accountability. We believe that these incremental efforts will lead to important positive shifts. We are proud of our steadfast, though mostly invisible, labour over the past year, and are keen to experience its outcomes with you all next season and beyond.
Your donation allows us to pursue our unorthodox trajectory – to go where we are not expected, to think differently, to sometimes confront and to often take care. Your unconditional donations support Studio 303’s independent thinking and doing.
Thank you for believing in us!
Love,
Team 303 💛