About

Mission

Flux Theatre Ensemble pollinates plays and culture to grow creative kinship. Against the dominance of exploitative systems, Flux advances collective care, long-term artistic collaboration, and shared power. Rooted in New York City theatre, we follow where our people lead: across distance, disciplines, and generations. Rising toward liberation, we create the worlds we need, an act of play at a time.

Learn how Flux revised our mission in 2024 here.

More about Flux

Since 2006, Flux has produced over 30 full productions and over 500 developmental projects. The ensemble is led by twenty two Creative Partners (CPs) who practice shared leadership through consensus-based decision-making, collectively held resources and labor, and artistic collaboration. There are no fixed executive or artistic director positions. Instead, CPs move in to and out of leadership roles depending on the project, with other CPs consenting to those temporary roles. In this way, the power of leadership is not fixed and exploitative, but rather relational and abundant—a resource we all contribute to and draw from. Learn more and meet Flux's Creative Partners here.

Flux is the proud recipient of the 2011 Caffe Cino Fellowship Award, presented annually to an Off-Off-Broadway theatre company that consistently produces outstanding work. Over the years, Flux has received New York Innovative Theatre Award nominations for their productions of Once Upon a Bride There Was a Forest, Jane the Plain, Sans Merci, Hearts Like Fists, Ajax in Iraq, The Angel Eaters Trilogy, The Lesser Seductions of History, Dog Act, Rizing, and Operating Systems. The company’s productions of Hearts Like Fists and Ajax in Iraq were chosen as “New York Times Critics’ Picks” and Backstage named Flux one of “eight young and mighty New York theatre companies.” See of our full production history here.

Core Values

Collective Care: Our commitment to supporting each other extends beyond our professional collaboration. We’re dedicated to the well being and thriving of each Creative Partner, both within Flux and in our lives. This collective care extends in concentric circles to our wider communities.

Consent and Agency: Flux works toward a non-hierarchical collaboration, practicing consensus and prioritizing consent in all our process. The value of consensus is set in a healthy tension with agency, where each collaborator feels fully empowered to take risks, try new things, and experiment.

Rigor and Release: Rigor is the attention we pay to the craft of theatre, a care for both the details and the whole, the commitment to going deeper than our first impulses, and a welcoming of healthy idea conflict that leads to richer work. Yet we also know rigor can easily slip into the damaging dynamics of perfectionism. We also believe in the necessity of letting go, going fallow, slowing our thinking down, moving back and stepping away.

Aesthetic of Liberation: Flux is working toward an aesthetic of liberation, which means that every creative choice seeks to make people more free. We recognize that works about systems of oppression can often re-inscribe and replicate those systems—and we commit to finding better ways to tell those stories. An aesthetic of liberation recognizes that a script choice, a casting choice, a design choice—anything—can contribute to the work of liberation, whether that’s in a character’s journey, an artist’s process, or an audience member’s experience. This process also often leads to transformative and imaginative theatrical moments.

Joy: This core value has been with Flux since the beginning. Where joy exists, all things are possible. Where there is joy there is also freedom, creativity, safety, openness, pleasure, magic, electricity, goose bumps, smiles, warm fuzzies, long hugs, and open hearts. Joy is not just a feeling, it’s an act: an act that Flux is committed to creating and embracing in every word, every room, every show, and every interaction, whenever possible.

How we revised our mission

In October 2024, after a year-long process, Flux revised our mission statement (see above). The revised mission emerged from sustained conversations about how Flux and the world have changed since we reached consensus on our last mission statement in 2010. It took rituals and story circles, Google Docs and chart paper, community conversations and collective prophecy. We hope you’ll join us celebrating and manifesting this new vision over our next decades together!

Flux’s mission from 2010-24: “Flux Theatre Ensemble produces transformative theatre that explores and awakens the capacity for change. As an ensemble-artist driven company, we believe that long-term collaboration and rigorous creative development can unite artists and audiences to build a creative home in New York.”

Land Acknowledgment

Flux Theatre Ensemble has produced the majority of our plays on the Lenape island of Mannahatta in Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland. Flux has also produced work on the lands of the Kizh, Tongya, and Chumash, colonially known as Los Angeles; on the lands of the Canarsie and Munsee Lenape, colonially known as Long Island City, Queens; and on the lands of the Lenni Lenape in Easton, PA. Every year, Flux holds our Annual Retreat at the Little Pond Arts Retreat, also on Lenni Lenape lands in Nazareth, PA. We honor the generations of stewardship Native peoples have given to the water, air, and land.