To our community, friends and collaborators:
Breaking & Entering Theatre Collective is proud to stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and the protests that have been taking place all over our country and world.
As a collective we are firm in our belief that Black lives, stories, joy, and art matters: but as a majority white collective it is vital that we actively confront our own internalized biases (on an individual and collective basis) and commit to anti-racist work on every level of our organization and art making process.
Breaking & Entering has always strived for diversity, however it is clear that our efforts up to this current moment are not enough. As an organization that prioritizes community building between artistic peers it is imperative that the inclusivity work we do is not a brief, performative fix: but rather a long term plan that will ensure Breaking & Entering provides an artistic home for pre-emerging Black artists, Indigenous artists, and artists of color.
This work begins with community engagement. It’s vital that we engage with the way we build both our artistic communities and our audience base as we actively work to center Black voices. The Pre-Emerging Black Artist is so often denied the resources necessary to create a career in the performing arts, and Breaking & Entering believes it is our responsibility to provide those resources as we are able to.
The importance of accessibility in this work cannot be understated. B&E believes in the necessity of accessibility because our audiences are an essential part of the community we are constantly trying to build.
More than anything our goal is for artistic representation in all areas of our organization. We will be addressing racial inequity in our own work by centering Black and Indigenous voices in our ADMINISTRATIVE TEAM (Core Team), CREATIVE TEAMS (Project leaders), ON STAGE TEAMS (The Cast), and THE LINE UP ( Resident Artists).
While our small collective temporarily canceled programming due to COVID-19 we are immensely excited to begin collaborating with one another again. We continue to educate ourselves on the best ways to continue our anti-racism work in our practice as theatre artists and we will continue to listen to our Black peers as we navigate the changes we must make in order to create more equitable theatrical spaces. Breaking & Entering was formed out of desire to destroy the gatekeepers of the theater industry, and this is simply the next step in that journey. I apologize that this step was not taken sooner.
With Much Love Always,
Emily Bubeck
Artistic Director, Breaking & Entering Theatre Collective
* Bold text indicates a hyperlink with more concrete details on the steps we are taking to actualize these goals *