...we had a lot of feelings about last year...

Please watch the videos below and consider donating!

Dear Headlong Friends,

We have a lot of feelings about the year that's passed. It was a hard one and we are so grateful for all the support that has helped us keep moving. Now we are excited for the year thats begun.

Click the video below to listen to moving testimonials from artists we've been able to support during the pandemic. We need your help to continue to be a grassroots hub that extravagantly supports independent, experimental artists. Click here to donate now on our donation page. Or read and watch below for more of what we are doing, including a short video of our sweet and goofy return to the studio!

When the pandemic hit in 2020 and we had to close our studios, it came at a moment when we were already thinking about big changes. The challenges of the pandemic sharpened our understanding of the role Headlong must play in our eco-system. Our first thought was the vulnerability of Headlong’s large community of artists - the visionary individuals and grassroots companies that choose to make art no matter how difficult the circumstances. We devoted ourselves to supporting our community with free tuition for HPI residencies and free rehearsal space for artists in our Incubated Arts program. And we went to bat for artists with funders, asking that they be allowed to keep funding even if their projects had to change because people could no longer gather in public.

Watch this! Headlong Community Testimonials

We’re proud that we devoted precious resources to supporting our community. We know that Headlong is only as strong as our eco-system and we will never see ourselves as separate from that. This is who we are. Please consider donating now to help us to keep supporting experimental performance in Philadelphia.

Now, we are ready to begin making work again of our own. As Norma says, “we have to get in the studio, everything follows from that.” Yes! And we’ve finally started rehearsing in earnest towards two new Headlong projects. We have even begun a staff studio practice to support our embodied thinking before we sit down at our computers to do administrative work (ask us about it!). Please visit our donation page to help us develop these projects.

...sharing our sweet and goofy return to studio practice...

Headlong's two projects are:

The Brattonsville Plantation Project, led by Norma, is an art work, a set of practices, and the initiation of a working group devoted to creating healthy, tactile practices of empathy and engagement for audiences and makers in addressing the devastating racialized histories of our culture.

The evolution of Practicing to Die, led by David, works with the idea of islands as a metaphor for autonomy, home, and idiosyncratic eco-systems as fragile structures that nourish, limit and liberate us.

Thank you for reading all the way down to here! Please help us to keep doing the work we do in sustaining Philadelphia's experimental performance community and in making work that delights, moves and matters. We are grateful for your support from the bottoms of our hearts!

David, Norma and Alex

HEADLONG 

1170 South Broad St., Philadelphia, PA 19146

(215) 545-9195 | info@headlong.org | www.headlong.org

David Brick

Co-Founder/Artistic Director

Norma Porter

Managing Director

Alex Graham

General Manager

Melissa MacNair

Board Treasurer