Since the founding of our company in 2008, we have dedicated ourselves to the devising, development, and production of new plays.  The acts of creation, cultivation, and curation are what inspire us, and what has allowed us to connect artists to audiences for over a decade. At the company’s founding, the different energies and aims of our ensemble aligned toward one specific goal: to combine the structure of traditional playwriting with the anything-can-happen energy of improvisation.  This resulted in our devising process: a collaborative playground to find new paths of storytelling, focused on the specific voices of the artists in the room.  And thus, The New Colony was born! Now, with 32 world premieres in our history, we continue our commitment to creating and uplifting new stories you won’t see anywhere else.

Over the last year, we have revised our policies and practices with another priority in mind: to ensure our organization is actively and explicitly an anti-racist theatre. We have made strides in revising our company structure, budgeting practices, and development process, with more work ongoing and still to come. These efforts are publicly available through our Anti-Racism page with updates made on a quarterly basis.

Part of our work is to educate and examine ourselves, to be accountable to our history as a primarily white institution, and improve the experience of collaboration with BIPOC artists.  One of the changes we're making is the name of our company.  It has been an increasingly awkward fit for some time now. It's a little absurd to call for de-colonizing theatre and its labor practices when it's right there in our name, in our communications, an odd sticking point in all of our introductions.  How we represent ourselves says a lot about who we want to be; so we looked to honor our past along with our future.

We are now The New Coordinates. This simple update is just the most visible component of a fundamental shift in how we work.  New play development is not about staking a claim, but the new places we can go.  It isn't setting ground rules, it's supplying tools for where our artists want to take the audience.  Our mission is still the same; we still passionately do what we have always done, which is to tell new stories.  But who we are, and how we execute the mission, can and will always continue to get better. 

We're excited to embark in this direction, and invite you to join us in finding what's next.