Risk/Reward hosts this gathering of Portland’s independent theatre, dance and hybrid art-makers. Come together to help survey the field and discuss ways that independent performance makers and organizations can create and support a more vibrant community for all.

After 10 years of programming, the board and staff at Risk/Reward have been evaluating our service to the community. We love the impact our festival and other programming have, but we’re thinking forward to what we can/should do to step up our value to local artists.

As a result of this reflection, we decided to survey local artists to make sure that our instincts on local needs/opportunities line up with the actual feelings of the makers we intend to serve. In the process of crafting that survey we decided to step back and get more input to make sure we’re asking the right questions and not leading people to the answers we want to hear.

The summit is intended as a jumping off point, to collectively identify the biggest topics to address as a community; to spend some time digging into these topics together; and to come up with some broad and specific questions that might end up in a survey to be distributed locally. We’ll then try to get responses from as many artists as possible.

Our end goal is to collect a clear list of needs/opportunities for the field that we can use to not only guide our own programming, but to share with you; with other arts organizations; and to policy makers and funders. Our hope is that this information can help arm our sector with more leverage to collectively further the field and the address the issues that Portland artists face when making and sharing their work.