Friends Help Artists Flourish

Thanks to our community of supporters, KSD is more than just an arts organization. We’re a loudspeaker for the causes and issues that matter, transforming all of humanity through movement and the value in our bodies. And, we can’t do any of this without YOU.

READ MORE BELOW about the PAST-PRESENT-FUTURE story of KSD and how your financial friendship will help this work FLOURISH!

Make a one time donation

or Become a monthly SUPPORTER of karin stevens dance!

If you would like to send a check to make your donation, please mail to:

1004 NW 130th Street, Seattle WA 98177

or

VENMO @Karin-Stevens-2

All donations made to KSD are tax deductible.

Friends Help Artists Flourish

Flour·ish

/ˈfləriSH/

1.(of a person, animal, or other living organism) grow or develop in a healthy or vigorous way, especially as the result of a particularly favorable environment.

It was through my movement and also in spite of being a vocational dance artist that I have had to learn to move in new ways to create health within the ecology, the inner landscape, of my body. 

The covid-pandemic-pause gave me the space to finalize a healing journey that I have been walking since the beginning of Karin Stevens Dance (2009). In this pause, underneath the depression and anxiety, that year by year has been diminishing, I discovered shame. 

Shame for simply being a dance artist in the face of our dominant American culture.

Through transforming this shame into a confidence in myself, my purpose and my message as a spiritual-ecologist-facilitator-of-healing-movement ARTIST, I was able to face and transform the more recent shame I carried for not being able to make my life’s-work flourish within the local and national environment for the arts. Funding for the arts is impoverished. And our nation is worse off for it.

Economy and ecology share the same Latin and Greek root: “ecos,” meaning home and community. 

Essentially, artists flourish through a community of friends who create an economy of health and sustainability. The role of the artist in return is to create a culture of health by revealing hard truths and imagining movements toward restoration, reconciliation, revision. 

Imagine if 300 of you (over 300 open my emails) gave a monthly sustaining donation

of $10-$100 for years to come? 

Or those of you inspired by my writing, videos, and images on social media––that number is countless––donated a monthly sustaining donation of $5-$25?

Imagine the $10-$15,000 of the past becoming 

$50,000-$100,000: a healthy environment for a flourishing KSD future!

***

I work at the interchange of body, movement, art, ecology, and social issues, aiming to create for dancers, collaborators, audience and readers, transformational, healing and evolutionary experiences. This is more than art, it is a way of life! It is a mission to communicate through movement and writing the urgent message that our bodies matter for overcoming the mistakes of the past, especially the Western conception of mind over body, and White Supremacy. 

Through the last twenty-four years, my choreographic projects explored the narratives of harm and healing written into our bodies and earth places. What is contained in our ancestry reverberates within our current social and environmental consequences until we begin to move in new ways to reveal and heal the past. And what is spoken through interdependent Earth ecologies teaches us about our true selves.

I converse, commune and collaborate with others through movement, sound, visual design, and ideas to touch the heart of pain, personally and collectively, in the hopes of discovering new movements that resonate possibilities for the health of a future global community. 

Through Record of the Anthropocene Movement 2017, with poet/photographer Omar Willey and composer Paul Rucker, we considered the layers of historic harm and restoration in body and landscape. Through lily[bloom in my darkness] 2018, with composer Kaley Lane Eaton, before I learned of Resma Menakam’s work on racialized trauma, I examined violence within White lineage and strengthened my communication about White Supremacy and healing. Through Sea Change Within Us 2019, with a team of collaborators, I created an extensive work speaking to the consequences of human movement patterns upon the earth, impacting water, climate, and the future for human and more-than-human beings. In 2019/20, I generated four dances through my body in relationship to places; and a writing practice blossomed into published essays speaking to somatic, spiritual and justice ecology. 

I have done all of this with a minuscule KSD income, supplementing dancers’ and collaborators’ inadequate pay with Stevens’ family household income. Thank you to many of you who donated the years before the pandemic and to the handful of you that have remained monthly sustaining donors. You kept the lights on in my heart and for KSD throughout the pandemic. 

Friends, please help this timely and important work flourish to serve people longing for recuperation, a city in cultural transformation, and a world in crisis!

***

Rather than the time and funding project-to-project-stress of the past, I am building a more sustainable and communal rehearsal process that serves a way of life as much as the creations we produce for the concert stage. Recently, I placed a call for dancers who “believe that the movements we make matter. That everytime we come together to rehearse and create a moving art we are seeking to transform old patterns of pain and obstacles into ‘rhythms of bodily becoming’ (philosopher Kimerer LaMothe) for the greater good in our body-selves, our relationships, and the collective ecosystems of the human and more-than-human Earth.” 

As I described the dancer I strongly encouraged to audition, I invite all of us into a global community of humble, kind humans moving toward the highest level of flexibility and extension to reach beyond our individual self toward the wholeness of being; and with the strength and release to drop our weight with love, courage, “alchemical resilience,” and risk into the Earth.

In 2019 I spoke in a fundraising video about the ten year mark for KSD: In walking this artistic path “…it opened spaces for me to overcome my own personal pain, whether it was in my education, religion, or family of origin, or simply learning what it means to be a loving person. Through raising up an art, that was supposed to be something that once stood for the good of the community, I learned through the obstacles and the pain that emerged, not only to overcome my own history, heal my lineage––and I will name that White supremacist narrative––it also helped me understand the importance of what this artistic pathway meant for opening up toward a mission to help others, and to make a great change in our nation. In connecting to and understanding the interconnectedness globally and the power of movement––that movement is at the heart of all matter––I experienced that there is also a process of tapping into something that animates all of matter that is good and can move through us when we begin to develop new rhythms of greater health and greater love for one another.” 

I will continue to walk my spiritual, healing, and artistic path for a world in the midst of what Joanna Macy refers to as the “Great Unraveling” toward the “Great Turning.” Like my 2021 work, “A Pearl in Sorrow’s Hand,” title drawn from a Rumi poem, I must continue to make works that invite us to exhale grief, pain, loss, and inhale imagination for love, recovery, and evolution. 

Like Macy, I too have a “wild love for the world” that I cannot control. I will continue unfolding in my Art & Practice of Movement that daily helps me flourish in the face of radical uncertainty financially and in global ecological crisis. 

FRIENDS, will you also move toward helping me FINANCIALLY support the dancers and collaborators necessary to make new dance creations FLOURISH?!