MISSION
Red Pepper Spectacle Arts is a non-profit, community arts organization that co-creates and facilitates multidisciplinary arts engagements. We work interculturally, serving primarily First Nations/Metis/Inuit Communities. Red Pepper works in partnership with social service agencies, community health and educational institutions, municipalities, band councils, neighbourhood residencies, and other arts partners, to provide arts programming towards social justice, equity in cultural arts production, representation and arts access. Our services are collaborative and for each project we endeavour to create an environment and opportunities where all skill levels and learning styles are respected to achieve creative success within a wide variety of artistic media.
MANDATE
- To demonstrate the transformative power of the arts to unite and educate our community
- Provide a safe, inclusive and creative environment where all people share in the promotion of artistic accomplishment, social awareness, and positive transformation;
- Commitment to alliance-building and solidarity supporting community-centred, self-determination and consensual decision-making in all aspects of collaborative artistic activity and relationship-building projects;
- Development of collaborative projects between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists to produce works contributing to the Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission - Calls to Action Dec 2015;
- Sustain a community arts studio of skill and resource sharing, equitable access, employment training and exchange initiatives that supports leadership emergence, economic advancement and professional development opportunities in the organization;
- Support transference of intergenerational knowledge through participatory, multi-faceted art activities for the diverse communities of Toronto and Northern Ontario;
- Support Indigenous-led projects that honours Indigenous sovereignty by learning histories, heritages, languages and land-based values in our relationship as Treaty people, building intercultural understanding and mutual respect;
- Support community leadership and self-sufficiency through development of socially active arts and cultural practices to address the legacy of settler colonialism and its many forms of oppression;
- Contribute to community health and well-being with mutually mandated social service agencies and organizations with whom we partner to innovate models of care;
- Engage in skills-based training in intercultural competencies, conflict resolution, human rights, and anti-racist community-controlled healing and reconciliation projects.
VISION and VALUES
Red Pepper believes its artistic vision is evolutionary and is informed by the community’s vision, through collective generosity of spirit in creative collaboration. Each project is unique and is shared in reciprocity, from initial conception and formation of each endeavour. Our relationships have been formed over many years of wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary communal activity, relationship building, networking, and resource sharing. We provide high quality arts programming, committed to the community’s vision while always being aware of and responsive to the individual. We provide methods, materials and supportive skill-sharing enhancing individual expression within a communal context.
Respect for each of our own inherent creative abilities and gifts and encouraging their emergence is a driving motive. When engaged within the communal context, our individual selves are connected to a synergistic dynamic of mutuality and empowerment, and challenges the notion that only a select few of us are gifted or solely in possession of genius. We believe in the inherent creative ability within each of us to generate exceptional creative power, and its realization in the collective whole.
Red Pepper recognizes that the creative communal act is a source of spiritual connection, a sacred recognition of our interconnectedness that invites participatory involvement and evokes a passion of experience and remembrance. It is a meeting place of reflection, re-imagining possibilities, initiating agency, and encouraging hope. We strive to be inclusive of diverse perspectives and locations and accommodate the complexity therein. We have witnessed the rise of community arts as a social movement and reflect on its continued growth as a testament of our inherent collective will to participate in needed positive change and creative transformative involvement.