Vision & Mission
WildHeart
Center for Performance and Embodiment Practice
is a land-based culture hub that incubates new performances, cultivates deep community and hosts transformational events.
Located in the Hudson River Valley, between Beacon and New Palz, on Schaghticoke and Munsee Lenape ancestral land.
Mission
We host the creation of new performances by our community members and by visiting artists and ensembles. We have a small movement/rehearsal studio, and are in the process of building a larger rehearsal and performance space.
Though we see the other elements of our mission as directly supporting the long-term sustainability of artmaking, this is where we engage most directly in our Vision of a world with more new “performances created as an expression of deep integrity, nourished by embodiment practice, while living close to the earth.”
We host:
- individual residencies for writing, composing, choreographing, and conceptualizing new work
- devising intensives for ensembles of collaborators
- rehearsal residencies
- work-in-progress performances
- public performances (coming soon!)
We cultivate deep community (a social sculpture of long-term residents and visiting beloveds, broadening circles of chosen family, supporting eachother’s collective wellbeing)
We are a small residential community of artists living together in the Hudson River Valley – ancestral lands of the Schaghticoke and Munsee Lenape nations. We are growing our infrastructure towards the capacity for up to 10 artists / families to live together, share food, tend the land, support each other in embodiment practice, and continue to make art! While our communal commitments are distinctly more intensive than “co-housing,” we fully expect that each community resident is pursuing their own career and that this landscape further enriches our community.
In addition to our long-term residents, we host an ever-broadening circle of chosen family for shorter-term stays, with a pathway to co-ownership of the land and structures for beloveds ready to lean into durational commitments.
The community practices that shape our “Social Sculpture” include:
- shared meals
- meditation and song-circles
- moon ceremonies
- antiracism working group
- artshares
We host transformational events led by our residents and by visiting facilitators that focus on embodiment, personal / collective transformation, and performance training. We host retreats, trainings, ceremonies, radical visionings, and immersive experiences for up to 30 people.
We offer single rooms, double rooms, dorm style housing and camping options. Gatherings can have access to the movement studio, the commercial kitchen and dining area, the forest, fields, and private lake!
In addition to housing and land access, we provide
- lovingly tended, ethically-sourced food
- more than a decade of experience crafting caringly held “containers” for transformation
- administrative support for retreat logistics and online marketing
- nurturing embodiment practices
- an experience of communal living with fierce commitment to our values (see below!)
Much administrative, manual and emotional labor supports those priorities. In the nitty-gritty of walking the walk, we provide food and housing, land access, studio space, event planning, logistical coordination, and marketing outreach.
Vision
Performances
created as an expression of deep integrity
nourished by embodiment practice
while living close to the earth
Values
Our Vision of a world with more “performances created as an expression of deep integrity, nourished by embodiment practice, while living close to the earth” is based on the belief that art leads culture, and culture leads legislation. We seek to support artmaking, (specifically new performances,) which call us to care for life, which support us to resist the seduction of default culture, which inspire us to live-into-being a more just and beautiful world.
It is a constant process of regenerative unlearning:
to shed the habitual patterning of the overculture; to shake off shame and shaming; and to create safe/bold/accountable spaces for the nervous system to settle after too much need for self-protection out there in the world.
We view embodiment practice, earth reciprocity, and performance craft as sites of liberation and consciousness repatterning. When we name Integrity, Embodiment, and Earth in our “Vision Statement” we invoke each of those as an expression of the spiritual path. In communal practices of meditation, ceremony and song, we honor and continually seek to learn more from traditions of Buddhism, Goddess culture, Earth-based religions, and Indigenous knowledge.
By sharing together in bulk purchasing and group cooking, our last decade of experience in communal living has taught us that our collective buying power and shared labor can heal the body, honor the earth, and support sustainable farming practices, while (astonishingly) saving money!
Sliding-scale / racially-responsive pricing, resource pooling, and at least incremental wealth redistribution. Yes we have bills to pay, but we constantly seek for our financial dealings to repair histories of extraction and oppression. “Resistance of the Heart Against Business As Usual” as Bread and Puppet calls it.
We are seeking physical, emotional, financial and ecological sustainability, for the collective and for each individual. By centering care, synchronizing effort, leaning into interdependence, we should be able to measure our success in ease of breath, in resilient systems of support, in basic wellbeing, and in personal and cultural transformation.