5/13/2020

An update from Water in the Desert Artistic Director:

Dear WITD Community-

I am staying, like most of our species, quarantined inside an existential illegibility of the time. I am trying to listen deeply, to love more, to get rooted in simplicity and to detach little by little, day by day, from my own culpability to ways of being that replicate the harm inherent in the systems we have all been conditioned by.

At the beginning of 2020, I proposed to a small group of folx who were starting to work with WITD in varying capacities, that we consider moving towards a collaborative leadership model. While not a new idea in any regard, it has admittedly been a process of undoing to get to this location. I never set out to become the center of an arts organization. I was an artist, improvising around my passions of the last 30 years---dance, ecology, sustainability, healing and social transformation. Slowly, I became an artist also juggling bureaucracy, budgets, bills, artist fees, the maintenance of spaces, and the needs of everyone involved in those spaces. Admittedly, I could not figure out how to decenter myself from all of these equations but have known for some time that for there to be a future of this organization, it was going to have to grow beyond me…and my hope has always been to do this in way that does not repeat the usual institutional hierarchies.

When the pandemic hit, our current experiment of a collective of four (Marilou Carrera, Crystal Sasaki, keyon gaskin and myself) decided that this was a moment that allowed both the pause and thoughtfulness necessary and the erasure of expertise essential to begin to work towards a new model of organizing. As we move forward, you will begin to hear more from their voices and perspectives. Quite honestly, if I were here alone trying to navigate our survival, this letter would most likely be one of resignation. But instead, it is one of hope for our present and future….one being redesigned by a multiplicity of perspectives and orientations and adaptive to the time we are living in.

We are still sitting inside of many questions, like how are we going to continue to pay our rent and utilities when we have lost all of our streams of income? How can we move forward and maintain our spaces for the community without charging the artists who have been hit most severely by this pandemic to use the spaces? Is there a way to subsidize our overhead so that we move away from a rental economy model and into a sharing or bartering one? How do we support the many artists, local and international, who have been essential to our development and have now been without work for months?

We are puzzling our way into solutions. Taking the risk to keep paying rents on empty spaces, trusting we will find our way. So many of you have sent us unsolicited sentiments and donations of support---and we thank you for every single gesture. I truly believe that Water in the Desert was made for these times, born out of an early intuition that we would eventually find ourselves here...and so we will continue...to plant gardens, to dance, and to create in a small way the kind of world we want to live in (with all of you).

with much love and care,

mizu