The Accountability Lab is an emergent space for identifying, growing, and valuing the skills we need to practice transformative justice, in our arts spaces and beyond.
The Accountability Lab is an ongoing series of conversations and experiments to explore how individuals, groups, communities and organizations in the performing arts sector can deepen the skills, interpersonal and otherwise, that could allow for transformative justice.
The Lab seeks to nurture deeper understanding of and action toward what the abolition movement means for the performing arts sector and its institutions, workers, audiences, partners, and wider communities.
The Lab asks: what is the relationship between the healthy, safety, and vitality of our artistic spaces, and the systemic structures of the arts sector (non-profit policies and governance, direction from and deference to funders, relationships to the state, prisons, and policing)? The Lab encourages people, as they dream up ways to make artistic spaces safer, more equitable, more joyful, and more excellent, to reimagine anything and everything they need to.
The Lab is curated by Nikki Shaffeeullah and other collaborators, and iterations of the lab take place through ad-hoc partnerships with arts organizations and other groups. The Lab resists working in service of any one institution or mandate and strives to instead stay accountable to grassroots abolition movements.
The Accountability Lab out in the world
Bringing It Home: The Accountability Lab in association with New Harlem Productions’
Community Justice Forum
May 5 and May 14, 2021
“Bringing It Home” is a two-part workshop that will bookend the Community justice Forum. It will offer forum participants tools, prompts, and frameworks for thinking about how abolition and other big, urgent ideas apply to our own daily lives and how we relate to power, conflict, community, and change.
Produced by New Harlem Productions. Facilitated by Nikki Shaffeeullah.
Workshopping Intervention: The Accountability Lab in association with the National Arts Centre - English Theatre
June 1, 2021
“Workshopping Intervention” is a roundtable event that brings together artists from across the country who have been offering interventions (practices, processes, policies, ideas, analysis, relationships) into the status quo of arts institutions, with a view to creating an arts sector that is willing and able to navigate conflict, facilitate healing, and minimize harm. This gathering is a starting point for further conversation and action toward a more equitable, accountable performing arts sector, here in so-called Canada, and beyond.
Produced by the National Arts Centre - English Theatre. Curated by Nikki Shaffeeullah and Sarah Garton Stanley.