Our Mission
The Aviva Arts mission is to promote growth and transformation through liberatory arts modalities. We center intersectional narratives that champion our relationship to ourselves, each other and the natural world.
We do this by:
CONVENING: Facilitating community gatherings such as webinars, dialogues and in-person retreats which align artistic inspiration with the natural world.
CREATING: Producing performance experiences that interrogate form, center underrepresented bodies and endeavor to respond to the prompt: what is the artist’s role in society now?
CO-LEARNING: Facilitating liberatory public workshops through a social justice lens.
Aviva Arts Guiding Principles
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We see collaborators as whole beings, recognizing that the ecosystem of the whole is dependent on the well-being of the individuals. We recognize and embrace differences. We work to center and lift up underrepresented voices, narratives, and bodies. We are committed to deepening and growing our relationship with Disabled, Indigenous, Latine, MENA, LGBTQ+, Asian American, and African American communities.
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by cultivating authentic relationships that change and grow over time. We believe that working in groups creates more dynamic and compelling outcomes than those of any one individual.
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We work to create revolutionary models for theater-making within the structure of an inherently oppressive system.
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through iterative education for ourselves and our constituents. We are committed to transformation with grace.
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We work towards creating better hiring equity, system transparency, and wage reform practices.
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We embrace the speed of innovation while making sure no one is left behind. We invest in processes that nurture and build trust among collaborators and repair relationships.
*For more information about adrienne maree brown's concepts of Emergent Strategy, check out her book here: https://www.akpress.org/emergentstrategy.html
Aviva Arts continues to foster three projects that originated within foolsFURY
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Burning Wild, a new docu-myth about the California wildfires and Debórah and Noor Adabachi's personal story of survival from the Aug '20 Walbridge fire in Sonoma Co. Burning Wild cohort is: Noor Adabachi, Deborah Eliezer, Pamela Hollings, Cynthia Ling Lee, Nicky Martinez Yiyo Ornela and Dr Vidhu Singh Currently in development.
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(dis)Place[d], a solo performance written and directed by Debórah Eliezer about her father in the underground resistance from Iraq to Israel, which has toured US and UK.
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BUILD Digital Convenings gather the field of ensemble theater in a two-day format of dialogue, workshops, activism and art presentation across the nation and the globe. The signature-curated Art Share program matches dramaturgs with artists to create a short live or digitally-presented performance.
Born out of a calling for growth and transformation, Aviva Arts re-envisions the intersection of ensemble theater and radical community care. Aviva Arts is the next step in a long legacy ensemble focused generation started by foolsFURY Theater. Founded in 1998 in San Francisco, foolsFURY Theater sought to revitalize the American theater. After 24 great years, with a great demonstration of equity, self-care and grace, foolsFURY’s ensemble sunsetted the company, and looked towards the future.
Aviva Arts brings this future to the present- integrating new strategies for greater inclusion, more diverse leadership, and innovative programming that reflect the voices least heard. Key to the new structure of Aviva Arts is to disrupt the perceived divide of artist and money. We do this in several ways, including inviting all artists currently working with Aviva Arts to sit on our board, providing paid and housed internship opportunities, and a competitive living wage for our industry leading artists.