Visual Echo
MISSION
Visual Echo is a NY-based multidisciplinary performance organization that fights polarization by creating space for genuine contact between people with opposing views. We believe in the power of generative dialogue to change beliefs and prejudices and, ultimately, break down the barriers that divide us. We employ innovative art and design and performance-based programs as catalysts for exchange around civic and community issues. We create an environment in which a multitude of opinions and constructive dialogue are vital to the well-being of individuals and their communities, and essential to our artistic and social success.
IMPACT
We help individuals and diverse communities with opposing perspectives create generative dialogues and form connections on a horizontal human-to-human level, through visually stunning live performances, social engagement, and empowering educational programs.
PROGRAMS
Visual Echo is committed to its founding mission through three interconnected programs: the production of original, design-driven performances (VE Performance), the development of educational programs (VE Education) and the fostering of creative partnerships with community organizations (VE Community). All our programs are avenues for people to make the transition from an art experience to a generative dialogue. Through our extensive programming and audience outreach strategies we seek to engage a broad diversity of publics in discussion and reflection on the important matters of our time.
VE Performance is our platform for the creation and presentation of original, visually mesmerizing, politically charged live performances, which serve as frameworks for a public dialogue around polarizing concerns and pressing issues.
Our original productions are positioned at the intersection of groundbreaking theatricality and social activism, and are intended to inspire, empower, and awe the audience while fostering debate and encouraging a call for action to disrupt systems of power.
Our work is produced in a laboratory environment through a rigorous process that involves long periods of research, collaboration and experimentation. We employ design, visual dramaturgy and visual playwriting as tools to devise multilayered, multimedia performances that challenge the traditional relationship between visuals and text and redefine the boundaries of theatrical storytelling.
Our performances are activated by audience and community engagement, blurring the borders between theatre and civic participation. We seek to reach people across both privileged and underserved New York communities and stimulate them to talk in new ways about issues that matter to them, illuminating institutionalized power hierarchies and inequities.
VE Community is a theater-based social and civic dialogue platform for innovative partnerships that bridge the gap between art and communities – local, regional, national and international, both in theatre and non-theatre settings.
We challenge communities with the question: How can we share a common experience among people who may feel they have nothing in common, and break down the walls that too often divide us in everyday life? We challenge ourselves with the question: How can Visual Echo help diverse communities communicate fruitfully across cultural and political divides?
We bring our unique arts-based processes and visual communication tools to the table and apply visual storytelling, interactive installations, and the creation of stimulating environments, in order to provoke people into effective communication and cultural exchange with those they may not understand or feel connected to in any other way.
We use arts-based civic dialogue to bring diverse New York communities into meaningful exchange with one another concerning community-identified complex and polarizing issues, in order to foreground marginalized voices and dismantle identity-based inequity. We go past the rhetoric of politicians and connect actual people in a society with one another by urging them to engage in imaginative thinking and expressive actions.
VE Education is our training ground for employing storytelling and design thinking as tools to activate the artistry and creativity of artists and non-artists alike, with the goal of increasing mutual understanding and meaningful connection between people. We facilitate interactive workshops, classes, lectures and other educational activities, where we explore the open-ended nature of images and sounds, in order to equip people with creative skills, knowledge and inspiration to tell stories and formulate meaning that might be difficult to express verbally.
We explore the impact and value of visual thinking and visual communication as tools for unlocking alternate points of view, awakening the capacity for empathy and a respectful exchange of ideas. We offer custom-designed training programs for a wide range of participants and organizations, including performance artists, educational institutions, community organizations and corporate clients.
Performance Artists: VEE aims to invigorate the creative practices of our artistic community (professional and academic) by offering affordable training workshops on the fundamental techniques underlying our groundbreaking visual devising methods, including visual dramaturgy and visual playwriting. We welcome artists from all different disciplines, interests, abilities and backgrounds to expand on their theatrical vocabularies and engage in cross-disciplinary exchange where everyone contributes artistic input to foster creative storytelling.
Schools: VEE provides a variety of accessible school programs for all ages and grade levels that engage students creatively, physically and analytically through the use of theatrical design and visual art techniques. We are committed to making our programs affordable to low-income public schools. We believe that every student, independent of race, class, gender, age, ability, and sexuality has unlimited creative potential, and that it is our job to create an environment where creativity can happen and students can harness and realize it. Our learn-by-doing framework helps students unlock their personal imagination through their discoveries, and develop confidence, self-esteem and self-expression. We offer innovative visual storytelling workshops designed to empower students to reflect and reconstruct complex notions about their identity, values, and beliefs, in order to harness their potential for empathy and reduce the level of bias and misunderstanding in generations of tomorrow
Community organizations: VEE is passionate about making a difference in our communities. We offer our creative tools through partnerships with a broad sector of community groups, and bring high-quality artistic experiences directly to underserved communities. We are committed to assisting marginalized New York populations through a wide variety of free practical workshops, designed for those who have little to no formal training in visual media or performance. Our activities are rooted in a sensible, hands-on investigation of the power of the universal non-verbal language which does not require translation and transcends cultural, social and economic barriers.
Corporate Clients: VEEs school and community programs are partially supported through training activities for corporate clients. VEE provides arts-based training that offers a fresh, dynamic approach to personal, team and organizational development. We help our clients initiate collaboration and teamwork, and develop strategies to reach their goals, through an innovative design strategy and visual storytelling approach that entails visual speculation, creation of spatiotemporal maps, design charrettes, and development of prototypes. We use an explicitly design-centric space as a physical framework for collaborative thinking, to help clients generate hybrid, deeply felt, embedded, and original articulations of their current needs and challenges not readily available through other forms.
OUR HISTORY
Visual Echo was founded in the summer of 2020, at the peak of Covid 19. The pandemic provided a perfect common adversary to spark a sense of interpersonal solidarity and transform a rigid system of silos and hierarchical structures into one where genuine connection between people might become primary. However, the current crisis has also revealed the fragilities of our global system: systematic racism, violence, and economic injustice, locking society deeper into a never-ending cycle of anger, chaos and conflict.
We established VE to build on this moment of toppled systems and disrupted hierarchies and address the needs of our times. VE does not identify as just a theater company – we see ourselves as a small-scale institution that uses the unique capacities of theater and visual art, to strengthen civil society against polarization. We have the tools and skills to facilitate respectful confrontational dialogues among people from the left, right and center, to promote tolerance, respect and understanding, from which new social and political alignments can emerge.
We stand on the shoulders of heroic COVID-19 first responders. We consider ourselves as “next responders” providing support to a broken society in need of connection and healing, one individual at the time.
OUR PHILOSOPHY
The central concern of our work is the intersection of the past and the present, of historical societal patterns and contemporary truths. We question and investigate accepted historical narratives and unpack and reconstruct complex histories to hold up a mirror to our present selves and shed a light upon the future. Our principle of making is to ‘work small, think big’, ‘scale deep, not wide’ engaging in a deeply personal way with our diverse audiences, community partners and students. We prioritize the individual story over mass experience, in order to create structures that promote physical and emotional connections on a human-to-human level, turning strangers to people who matter.
We are committed to pushing the boundaries of art and dismantling the idea that the results should be quantifiable. Visual Echo is a laboratory through which we investigate models for producing content that goes beyond measurable artistic and educational success. We strive to produce a positive lasting change, create relationships and understanding, and make our world more beautiful and equitable.