O
ur art requires the courage to prioritize imagination. Our art holds space for authenticity, interaction, and identity for whoever is seeking creative, emotional, spiritual, and political clarity. Our art is created and sustained within an open, honest, meaningful relevant shared experience. We call this Living Culture.
Within the framework of Living Culture, anyone is invited to participate in Double Edge via performances, programs, or training. This demands rooting out appropriation, exclusion, invisibility, marginalization. We want to be sensitive to what we are taking from the outside and how we are nurturing on the inside. Yes, it’s important to collaborate / think / work together — but it is equally important to question why? What are our intentions? Throughout 40 years of listening — we have learned to work authentically and earnestly with artists, collaborators and partners.
On the platform of Art Justice, we build equity and solidarity with the deliberation and intentionality that stretches across aesthetic / cultural / economic / generational / gender / geographical / professional / political / social / racial backgrounds. This commitment includes the artists with whom we collaborate; the neighbors with whom we trade or work; our residency and training participants; and the consultants who helped to guide us. This labor of love led us to research the lives of Heber Honestman and Susannah Honesty, the freed slaves who founded the town of Ashfield, Massachusetts, only to have their African and African American ancestors and legacy disappear. Our interactions introduced us to the Indigenous Peoples who still inhabit this land after millennia, even though their presence has been rendered invisible on the land we now occupy. We have come to the realization (sometimes painfully) that we do not have the luxury of waiting twenty more years for broad-based diversity to come to the isolated and geographically rural region of Ashfield, MA (population 1800). Ashfield may never be “diverse” within the currently circumscribed and restrictive use of the term. However, the mission / values / vision / work of Double Edge will always reflect the larger population of our region / our state / our country.
Our people, our Ensemble, our collaborators identify themselves rather than being defined by others. Each person is valued according to how they want to live and work. For example, while we function in a capitalist system, we simultaneously operationalize alternative economic practices for the exchange of goods and services: bartering, local food exchange, increasing our food self-sufficiency, sharing with our community. We receive contributions. We have neighbors who help us build. We create a world that we believe has value. And that is our art, too. This is what Baraka Sele, a friend and Art Justice leader of Double Edge, refers to as “cultural democracy.”
