At the heart of our events were certain guiding principles:

 

1. We sought non-traditional spaces or used traditional spaces non-traditionally to challenge the barrier between passive audience and active performer.

2. We invited a party or carnival atmosphere to charge performances and gatherings with a participatory, transformational, energizing power that the audience could bring into their own bodies.

3. We were willing to make physical demands, simple but demands nonetheless, of those choosing to come to our events–to remove watches, to be fingerprinted, to dress in orange, to leave the main space for a sojourn into the outside, to find venues which were then off the beaten path.

4. When curating a space, we sought to both provide individual artists with as much autonomy as possible and to heighten the interaction of all the elements of the event. We did this by making each artist aware of those elements and inviting them to weave this awareness into their own work.

5. We programmed the nights to move in waves, to have silences and crescendos, like a jazz score where all players will step forward to solo and to recede to the back.

6. We saw the spaces and events as a total experience. Every part of the space was a part of the whole. The fliers, communication, entrance way, and so forth were not separate things, but all served to create the total environment in concept and experience.

7. We welcomed all mediums and experimentations in form and content.

8. In this same vein, we did not prejudice one artist over another. The artist installing a work or doing a performance underneath the staircase that only 7 people will crawl into over the course of an evening is as essential a part of the gathering as the DJ bringing his entourage to the dance court.

9. We worked to ensure as much autonomy and freedom as possible for those at the events, a temporary safe space on the periphery to shed a skin at least for a slice of unknown time .

10. We shared all revenue with all participants.

These principles informed and inspired our larger performances, cultivating an ability and wish to engage those who shared the space with us on levels beyond that of audience or spectators. When we were in integrity with these principles, using the tools of theater, we invited the waking of light in the eyes and bodies of those with us for that moment in time.

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