NETneXt:
Co-Creating the Future
In Fall 2022, with multi-year, leadership support from the Mellon Foundation, NET embarked on NETneXt, an 18-month process of organizational re-envisioning to better serve a changing field of ensemble theaters and artists.
Approached as a community devising process, NETneXt aims to turn the transformational practices of ensemble creation on NET itself to create what’s NEXT for NET in collaboration with its national membership.
The national ensemble arts community is uniquely poised to navigate this moment of cultural change. NOW is our moment to come together to dream, plan, and actualize an evolutionary pivot to ensure a vital future for ensemble companies and artists, and for NET.
Join us for the Fall 2023 NETneXt National Circle-Up events
online and in New Orleans!
The project, NETneXt, aims to restructure NET’s operating model through distributed leadership and power-sharing to activate a broadened membership, increase staff capacity, and reconfigure Board governance. Importantly, it will reframe and widely share the story of NET, its members, and the ensemble arts movement.
We believe that, with its roots in lateral power structures and processes of collaborative co-creation, ensemble offers an opportunity to practice true “democracy in action.” In this way, collaborative, ensemble theater can play a powerful role in progress toward collective liberation and social change.
Guided by these core beliefs, we begin the NETneXt process with these questions:
What is the NET of Now? What might/should it be?
How have we evolved from our beginnings?
How must we change to make the change we wish to make? What is that change?
How might NET’s generations of ensemble practitioners learn from each other?
Why does the field need NET?
How must we meet the future?
As we turn the transformative practices of aesthetic experimentation, audience engagement, civic collaboration, and shared leadership on NET itself, how can these ensemble methods and the stories of ensembles and the movement as a whole guide us to that future?
Who are the people and communities, and what are the conditions, tools, and resources, we need to co-create this vision plan for NET's future?
