Forager’s primary goal in all its branches is to make spaces that are welcoming, engaging, and socially informed. While the projects and personnel may vary, we approach everything with the same process, code of ethics, and freshness as if it were the first time. We strive to combine the artistic equality of a theatre collective, the benefits of a defined top-down vision from traditional hierarchical structure, and the ensemble-focused sustainability of community theatre. Through collaboration with each other, our artists, and audience, we push the boundaries of what can be done by a small company with a small budget and small reach, foraging from every corner of our lives. 

Yes! Though we began mostly working with dear friends who donated their time and artistry in a ‘do-it-for-the-love’ fashion, the outpouring of interest in the Forager way of doing things, of foraging for inspiration from every part of one’s life, lit the fire under us to make this more. Our creatives and performers are working professionals with bold artistic visions and our work provides them a space to execute their craft. However, we constantly find ways to engage the more casual community members onstage, offstage, and behind the scenes, and ensure our professionals adopt that attitude too. We believe this combines the innovation and quality expected of a radical young theatre company of professionals and the ensemble-based integrity of a community theatre.

To acquire the pieces necessary, we take our company name literally and spiritually. We source as many materials second-hand as possible, accept item donations, then regift, return, or reuse them for future projects. We also practice radical transparency with our friends, neighbors, and strangers, asking everyone how they might be willing and able to help. Rather than pretend to have what we need (when as a nonprofit we often don’t), this art of asking yields boundless community engagement and generosity. Some of our most essential needs for projects were filled simply by unabashedly asking a random group of people, “Hey, we’re looking for [this thing]. Any ideas?”

We communicate our expectations for involvement with Forager to every creative, performer, designer, co-producer, affiliate, and partner that works with us. In good faith, we expect them to: 

1. Practice the company’s core philosophy of foraging for objects, spaces, viewpoints, contributions, and people from any and everywhere. This includes material items to encourage sustainability in a capitalistic society and ephemeral things that facilitate self-education, perspective expansion, and harmony with one’s community.  

2. Practice inclusivity by way of radical open-mindedness about others’ potential. This means being receptive when others exhibit skills, ideas, or roles that bias/prejudice might prevent them from envisioning for others and strongly rewarding others’ interest in unorthodox or expansive ‘hyphenates.’ 

3. Practice an active ‘can-do’ attitude toward their own and (particularly) others’ ideas. This means ‘sitting up and forward’ to consider all possible pathways to achieving an idea and putting aside the desire to be ‘right’ or knowledgable if it means a collective, unorthodox, anti-oppressive solution might be attainable. 

4. Practice maintaining an ambitious yet achievable expectation of excellence from themself and others. This means having a  personal, consistent motivation to elevate one’s own and others’ crafts and that every project, no matter how small, is deserving of detail, imagination, and quality execution.  

5. Practice a humanist approach to understanding all people within Forager’s purview. This means seeing people as holistic individuals with complex lives beyond Forager, maintaining transparency, patience, and compassion during conflict, and being fiercely protective of the humanity of every person involved in the company.   

We consider what is going on in our society, what our friends are talking to us about, what is spiritually preoccupying our minds, what is missing from our own lives, and we share these thoughts constantly among the team. When a thematic idea excites us all, we determine which of our four branches would be the best vehicle to interrogate that idea and then challenge each other on whether Forager can use that proposed creative outlet to bring something vital, urgent, and powerful to it. We also determine if this idea is best served by our small, independent company, rather than a larger entity, and ensure it is authentic to Forager’s mission.

Before any creative work begins, we craft a clear set of goals of what we want to provide for ourselves, the artists we bring on board, and the intended audience, with enough flexibility to change those once we forage for people, perspectives, and experiences within our community. We have no permanent home in NYC, so we then brainstorm which venues would best serve this endeavor, so that we can appropriately interact with and hold a mirror to the community local to that venue.

The core Forager members use our mutual trust to leave our egos at the door, so that we may propose a hundred cliché ideas and then collectively evolve those into what we call ‘The Forager Twist.’ We question how the industry has traditionally approached this type of material and rather than go through that door, we search for any windows out of that room. Even if those involve excavating the story, inventing a new meta-narrative, incorporating ideas too big for the medium, we pursue them wholly. We encourage our designers to take full artistic agency and make their contribution as artistically daring as every other element, authentic to the Forager ethos, and reflective of the moment. 

We provide every collaborator with a detailed list of expectations of how we hope they conduct themselves. We explain the artistic vision to the whole room (both what is known and not), the goals for the project, and our commitment to a safe, consensual, egalitarian space that accounts for neurodiversity, disenfranchisement, disabilities, chronic illnesses, etc. We also emphasize how we are each more than our identity and historical labels, and how we hope that the fierce artistic pursuit of something beautiful is our collective north star. We always invite questions, pushback, and feedback, so that we cross-examine our process in the moment. 

With all five organization members being performers in some respect, we gladly apply the lessons from our own experiences with mistreatment in artistic rooms to the one we’re creating. The company prepares a rehearsal structure and personnel hierarchy primarily to enable effective communication, and runs our non-union rooms with the same guidelines as Actors Equity, with timed breaks, an elected representative for the cast (a la deputy), and appropriate working conditions. We create schedules that accommodate how everyone must make a living through multiple jobs in a capitalistic society, yet allow anyone interested to sit in on others’ work sessions, for the sake of education and building communal trust. 

We ask our people to push their own boundaries, leave perfectionism behind, in service of making the biggest, boldest, messiest version of the work. And when everyone pushes their skills to the highest level of aspirational excellence for that purpose, true beauty is found. We select creative leads that are experienced in education and can facilitate questions, concerns, and crises in a way that encourages creative solutions and mutual respect. The company also ensures that the creative leads constantly encourage direct collaboration with each person in the room, seek out suggestions, and ask for contributions from those with knowledge in other fields, since no one has a monopoly on one discipline. We remind folks to ask “How can we reinterpret these ideas, reinvigorate old ones, and choose the road less taken?” Our creative leads debate right there in the room, asking each other “Why?” It’s never about ‘doing a show.’ It is about the dream, the pursuit, the doing, the daring.

Since we move from venue to venue, we do not have one location-based audience we constantly speak to, though our spaces are often based in New York City. Our audience began with fellow creatives seeking innovation, eager young artists wishing for inspiration, jaded New York theatergoers looking for more diverse offerings, and non-theatergoers who heard a logline and went, “Interesting! I’ll give it a shot.” But what keeps our audience coming back almost always stems from our company’s story, our stated commitment to sustainability physically, intellectually, and spiritually, and our transparency in how we run the organization. Our interactivity begins with the outreach to the community, asking them to be foragers themselves, offering items, expertise, and contributions. And within a society built on protectionism, waste, and consumption, people become fascinated with this mission, the antithesis of that. We then create immersive environmental spaces in which the artists keep engaging audience members in pre-shows, meta-narratives, and mid-show moments, and by way of our content and creative vision, ask them to sit up and sit forward. And having been treated as participants in the creative process, at the end, these audience members don’t just want to come back to see more; they want to become involved.

Our company members keep the organization running and also fulfill many different roles within each branch. One may be starring onstage, hanging lights, music directing, and technical designing simultaneously. When it comes to folks outside the nonprofit, we engage with as many creators in our immediate circles as possible, and then take recommendations and submissions from anyone that comes across us. After working with an artist once, our next step is to offer them an opportunity to do something different on another project to expand their hyphenates. We are not a repertory company, so we constantly refresh our roster of creatives, but those that appear on multiple teams are ambitious, driven, self-starters, who don’t believe their talent is their most important characteristic, who have positive infectious energy, who have a deep passion to create, and who understand that the showing of that passion is mutually beneficial to all.

Our self reflection begins with in-depth post-mortems that incorporate feedback from our artists, audience reactions, and the lessons learned at each step in the process. Even though we have many varied years of experience between our team members, we are a young company learning day by day, and wish to become an institution worthy of the incredible creators we surround ourselves with and of the generous individuals in our community. We pay our designers, performers, and creatives as much as possible on our extremely tight budgets and revenue streams, and envision a day when we pay them all a livable wage for every project, while also continuing to make art that prioritizes sustainability over commercial success.