ARS NOVA WORKSHOP INC
This organization has already been registered
Someone in your organization has already registered and setup an account. would you like to join their team?Profile owner : m**k@a*************p.o*g
Mission Statement
MISSION: Ars Nova Workshop cultivates connection and curiosity through deep listening, improvisation, and joyous creative expression. VISION: We are building a community of artists and audiences who find liberation and connection through creative music—a community that embraces the wisdom of improvisation and integrates it into how we live and grow together. We are building a future where our community recognizes, honors, and advances the central role of Black creativity, culture, and experience in expanding creative music and reverberating art forms. VALUES: Community—We encourage and develop social relations with great music and art. We practice hospitality, value healing, and model care through reciprocity and relationality. Creativity—Risk-taking is central to our work. We challenge norms and work to reframe and redefine contexts for music and art. Through creative practice, we believe artists lead the way towards new futures. Presence—We create space for awe and deep feeling through liveness and collective attention. We believe in the power of non-verbal communication. Trustworthiness—We are committed to self-knowledge, accountability, reciprocity, and awareness of the contexts in which we work, and we encourage it in others. Humility—We embrace the vulnerability of not knowing. We move with curiosity around the history and future of the art forms.
About This Cause
ANW began as a vehicle for the founder, Mark Christman, to attract to Philadelphia the musicians that he was traveling to New York to see in performance. These musicians were the greatest artists that followed the spectrum of experimental music (sometimes called “The New Thing” or “Free Jazz”) developed initially from John Coltrane. Christman recognized that Philadelphia was an important source of the creativity embodied in the form—Coltrane himself hailed from here, as did McCoy Tyner, Reggie Workman, Odean Pope, and many others. Presenting the music—here, in Philadelphia—was a way to restore a connection to that legacy as well as encourage new artists. In the course of the organization’s first decade, run as an all-volunteer effort, ANW quickly gained a reputation among artists and critics as the most valuable presenter in the city. Those ten years also saw an evolution of programming beyond just enabling musicians to be on stage for an hour or so: we began to explore where the music came from, what made the musicians tick, and what made the artform so compelling. These interests soon developed into projects like commissions, master classes, and site-specific performance events. Small exhibitions, highlighting the historical significance of the music and the parallel professional endeavors of the artists (e.g., in visual arts or biological sciences), soon followed. By 2015, when the organization transitioned from a volunteer to a professional organization, these efforts had begun to blossom into a full-fledged organizational North Star: What is improvisation? What are its cultural origins and value systems? How is it learned and taught? What does it reveal about the human mind and spirit? How can it be applied to ever-broader lines of inquiry? And how do we enable the further progression of it? Ars Nova believes that improvisation is a powerful and necessary force in the world, and our primary tool for exposing people to the work is by offering performances by world-class musicians, now at our venue on South Broad Street. That is a foundational focus, and we will continue to do that. Building audiences for jazz and experimental music is fundamental to our ability to strengthen its legacy, support contemporary practitioners, and pave the way for a next generation of artists. We see that these products of improvisation—jazz and improvised music—garner interest by a broad public. But the productive and liberating phenomenon of improvisation itself—the history, the practice, and the possibilities it engenders for productive exchange, civic dialogue, and inventive problem-solving—are not necessarily understood or appreciated, or even associated with the profound experiences of listening to and witnessing great jazz performances. Still, we do believe that the draw of the great jazz artists whom we present is both the highest cultural expression of improvisation and the most open access point for engendering further curiosity about it. We celebrate the musicians who have developed their improvisational practice to such a peak level, and we explore the wide world of the creations, practices, and cultural implications of improvisation. We invite audiences to join with us in exploring the vast possibilities that arise from the pursuit of improvisation. Jazz as Black Cultural Expression In the past decade, we have grown in our understanding of the role we must play to address histories of inequity and injustice in our field. Jazz is Black creative music, and a history of racism towards and exploitation of jazz artists reaches back to the birth of the art form. Wealth generated by commercialization of the art form rarely found its way back to the artists or communities from which it came; on the contrary, it largely benefitted the predominantly white corporate leaders who produced and presented the work. Commercialization also constrained artists’ creativity, restricted the use of improvisation, and repackaged the work as mere entertainment, diluting its power and diminishing its legacy. Today’s artists enjoy greater rights and protections, but they still navigate considerable challenges. And we recognize that the institutions with power to influence the future of this art form are too often led by predominantly white staff and boards. We do not dance around this complexity: we know that this is also true of Ars Nova (whose founder and senior staff are white), and it is something we are bringing great awareness and intention to as we move forward. In the work outlined here, we seek to share and transfer power, leverage our access to resources and networks, and bring a reparative frame to how we support and advocate for our collaborators. As we grow, we are also committed to continuing to recruit board and staff leadership that reflects the demographics of the art form as well as our home city of Philadelphia.