Theatre Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging initiatives

 As a program located within a university, all of our work centers learning for all participants, especially students. 

Learner-centered work looks like:

• Respect for our commitments to coursework.
• Space for revision and discovery, which may include different timelines and expectations than professional spaces.
• Respect that productions include multiple artists whose learning must be balanced.
• Care and skill in giving feedback that supports student growth.
• Treating students as valuable artists and collaborators right now.
• Play selection guided by learning objectives, access and inclusion.

As practitioners of an art form uniquely centered in the human experience, we cultivate and honor our full humanity. 

Respect for humanity looks like: 

• Centering emotional, mental, physical and cultural wellness for all participants.
• Dismantling “the show must go on” attitudes. 
• Supporting everyone’s accessibility needs.
• Honoring our cultural and social contexts, including names, pronouns, heritages and ways of speaking and moving through the world, as assets to our community.
• Engaging in antiracist practices, including decentering whiteness and creating inclusive space for multiple cultural traditions.
• Centering human wellbeing in technological and process designs.

Autonomy and the right to consent are crucial to learner-centered, respectful, and effective work. 

Centering consent in our program looks like:

• Clear parameters for physical intimacy, staged violence or triggering content.
• Setting fair and clear expectations for work schedules. 
• Opportunity to consent to any schedule changes.
• Space to revoke consent, take a break or opt out of an activity without retaliation. 
• The involvement of intimacy coordinators in every production.

Our program commits to operating honestly with one another. 

Transparency looks like:

• Clear communication of expectations.
• Decisions that may directly impact an actor’s person or a collaborator’s vision are clearly communicated to those impacted, including opportunity to consent.
• Accessible, frequent and open conversations about program direction.
• A designated cultural context representative for each show.

We commit to holding one another accountable and to being accountable to learner-centered, humanizing consent-based work. 

Accountability looks like:

• Multiple options for sharing concerns, including anonymous options.
• Clear and specific processes for responding to concerns.
• Immediately addressing actions compromising the physical or emotional safety or wellbeing of company members, including actions that create an environment of racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism and/or other harmful biases, up to and including the removal of those violating this commitment.
• Ongoing review of all areas of production for opportunities for improvement.
• Specific, measurable and timely announcement of steps being taken to address issues.