With support from the California Arts Council, Aviva Arts will strengthen organizational capacity by increasing executive leadership positions to full-time wages and adding part-time Artistic Producer and Marketing Director roles. These positions will support sustainable programming, communications, fundraising, and healthier working conditions for staff and collaborators.
Aviva Arts will produce SWITCH, an immersive new ensemble work using oral histories from California-based SWANA, (Southwest Asian/North African) Americans to explore code-switching, cultural belonging, and survival. Integrating live performance, original music, projections, and audio installation, the project is created in partnership with Meem Collective, California State University East Bay, Golden Thread Productions, and Red Poppy Art House. Aviva Arts will also launch the SWITCH Audio Series, featuring community interviews and music exploring SWANA immigrant and first-generation experiences.
Aviva Arts Guiding Principles
We cultivate belonging. We see collaborators as whole beings, recognizing that the ecosystem of the whole is dependent on the well-being of the individuals. We recognize and embrace differences. We work to center and lift up underrepresented voices, narratives, and bodies. We are committed to deepening and growing our relationship with Disabled, Indigenous, Latine, MENA, LGBTQ+, Asian American, and African American communities.
We value longterm collaboration by cultivating authentic relationships that change and grow over time. We believe that working in groups creates more dynamic and compelling outcomes than those of any one individual.
We work to create revolutionary models for theater-making within the structure of an inherently oppressive system.
We foster systemic change through iterative education for ourselves and our constituents. We are committed to transformation with grace.
We work towards creating better hiring equity, system transparency, and wage reform practices.
We embrace the speed of innovation while making sure no one is left behind. We invest in processes that nurture and build trust among collaborators and repair relationships.
*For more information about adrienne maree brown’s concepts of Emergent Strategy, check out her book here: https://www.akpress.org/emergentstrategy.html