Core Values
fPhoto of some of Flux’s Creative Partners with Micah Bucey, recipient of the Larry Kramer Artivist Award at Flux’s 2019 Fundraiser, A Year to the Day.
Collective Care: Our commitment to supporting each other extends beyond our professional collaboration. We’re dedicated to the well being and thriving of each Creative Partner, both within Flux and in our lives. This collective care extends in concentric circles to our wider communities.
Consent and Agency: Flux works toward a non-hierarchical collaboration, practicing consensus and prioritizing consent in all our process. The value of consensus is set in a healthy tension with agency, where each collaborator feels fully empowered to take risks, try new things, and experiment.
Rigor and Release: Rigor is the attention we pay to the craft of theatre, a care for both the details and the whole, the commitment to going deeper than our first impulses, and a welcoming of healthy idea conflict that leads to richer work. Yet we also know rigor can easily slip into the damaging dynamics of perfectionism. We also believe in the necessity of letting go, going fallow, slowing our thinking down, moving back and stepping away.
Aesthetic of Liberation: Flux is working toward an aesthetic of liberation, which means that every creative choice seeks to make people more free. We recognize that works about systems of oppression can often re-inscribe and replicate those systems—and we commit to finding better ways to tell those stories. An aesthetic of liberation recognizes that a script choice, a casting choice, a design choice—anything—can contribute to the work of liberation, whether that’s in a character’s journey, an artist’s process, or an audience member’s experience. This process also often leads to transformative and imaginative theatrical moments.
Joy: This core value has been with Flux since the beginning. Where joy exists, all things are possible. Where there is joy there is also freedom, creativity, safety, openness, pleasure, magic, electricity, goose bumps, smiles, warm fuzzies, long hugs, and open hearts. Joy is not just a feeling, it’s an act: an act that Flux is committed to creating and embracing in every word, every room, every show, and every interaction, whenever possible.
History of Flux’s Core Values: Flux first articulated our Core Values in 2010, and for a decade, they served us well. But, as the ensemble has grown, we began to feel those older values no longer described who we’ve become and where we’re trying to go. In July of 2019, the Creative Partners met for a mini-retreat, and those conversations led to Corinna Schulenburg proposing four new core values to join our longstanding commitment to joy. In August of 2019, the Creative Partners and key collaborators gathered at the Little Pond Arts Retreat to go deeper, including a visual dramaturgy exercise for each value, led by Heather Cohn:
Emily Hartford completed the next round of edits, and Lori Elizabeth Parquet drafted a renewed definition of Joy. Then, Jason Tseng and Will Lowry illustrated our Core Values as part of our 2019 annual appeal letter:
We offer our deep thanks to Creative Partners past and present, and to our friends of Flux who have reflected us back to ourselves with loving clarity. Flux’s Core Values will continue to evolve, and in another ten years, who knows what wild and wonderful new values will have bloomed?
