About
Lupine Performance Cooperative is a Philadelphia-based collective that creates multi-sensory live performance. Our work complicates contemporary understanding of human experiences both large-scale and small. We believe in sustainable artistic practices that value people over product and commit to enriching the cultural lives of our local community through equitable and justice-focused live art.
Lupine Performance Cooperative began in 2017 as a collaboration between theater makers Krista Thorp and Tenara Calem. Lupine Performance Cooperative grew to become the organizational umbrella that presents the collaborative works of a small network of associated artists, all of whom consider their art-making practice as critical to their development as artist-citizens.
History
Our values
We practice sustainable art-making. We work on a project-to-project model, allowing our work time to marinate and develop before it feeds us.
Our work is live.
Our work is often interdisciplinary, and our methods of making work serve the project and the people, not the method.
We commit to honesty in the art and in the collaborative process.
We seek to make work that complicates our intellectual understanding of the world. We seek to shake our comfort like a snow globe.
Live performance is people-focused. We treasure our audiences. We treasure our artists. To do that, we must commit to practicing our art in a way that feels nourishing, healing, and anti-hegemonic.
Our tickets function on a Pay What You Can model. No one is turned away from lack of funds.
Our commitments
Our beliefs
We believe that the personal is political, and vice versa.
We believe that a holistically healthy artist will pursue interests, skills, and conversations that are not artistically generative in nature. Artistry is strengthened even when no work is being made. Our artists have their fingers in many different pots.
LPC draws its administrative model, inspiration, strategies, and insight from the Momentum training institute. Momentum offers collaborative art-makers tools to orient group dynamics in a way that feels productive and healthy. We believe our mission is best executed with collaborative structures that distribute artistic philosophy and decision-making on a more equal basis.
For more information about our Cooperative structure, our values, commitments, and evaluative methods, click here.
We commit to honesty in the art and in the collaborative process.
Photographs and video by Tenara Calem
Support for Lupine Performance Cooperative provided by the Philadelphia Cultural Fund
