Artistic Statement

ARTSTILLERY PRODUCES EXPERIMENTAL AND IMMERSIVE WORKS THAT PUSH THE BOUNDARIES OF WHAT PERFORMANCE LOOKS LIKE.

Founded in 2016, Artstillery creates performances centered around issues of racial, cultural, and social injustice. Sometimes a story needs a storyteller, but that starts with listening. Our process begins with research using a combination of community outreach and interviews. We combine these stories with an interdisciplinary artistic approach that creates a ‘total immersive’ experience. Artstillery’s goal is to give a voice to people who feel they have none. 

Audiences should be more than just spectators. We’ve traded the fourth wall for an experiential performance style that creates immersive theater. 

Artstillery’s approach is a process of research by gathering stories though community engagement, interviewing, and documenting experiences. 

We combine those stories with mixed media, performance, sound design, video, and art installation for a completely immersive performance. 

We activate spaces through empowering community. We activate artist ecosystems.

Artstillery is available for contract work nationwide, including community-based initiatives and the creation of immersive experiences for conferences, expos, and special events.

THE HOW | WHY | WHAT

Artstillery is a multidisciplinary arts and social justice organization that uplifts underrepresented voices through original immersive productions. 

Artstillery serves the community in the following ways -

1. Immersive Productions based on community stories
2. Workshopping programs and new works with creatives, artists and community leaders
3. Providing space and resources for our community partners
4. Partnering with community leaders, civic organizations, and institutions to advocate for and implement tangible social change in the built environment, policy, and access to essential resources (public space, walkability, food systems, environmental health)
5. Our work has hyperlocal and national implications

Building the narrative with community stories -

Artstillery provides individuals from underrepresented groups with a space and platform to make their voices heard. We do this by working directly with community members by helping them share their own narratives. These interviews are incorporated into an immersive production, also known as an immersive experience. The community narratives we collect are weaved with research, original written pieces by our team, historical documentation and current events to create one original script. This script is our baseline for the immersive productions we create. 

We mount 1-2 original immersive productions a year throughout the nation. We intentionally embed ourselves within the community and perform in different locations to engage different audiences, we choose to meet people where they are at. Artstillery also hosts year-round community programs inside our West Dallas space, and we lend our space to partner creative organizations. 

We do not outreach, we engage - we are not helicoptering into communities, putting a quick fix on a problem and then leaving. We empower everyone to walk through our doors, we have created a platform that fosters true inclusivity and equity beyond socioeconomic barriers. We do not expect to be invited to the table, we ask to be included and take time to make connections.

This work results in -

1. Immersive practice begins with sustained relationship-building and compensated participation.
Artstillery embeds early within communities, investing in trust-building and collaboration with community leaders and partners. Project budgets intentionally fund community participation, recognizing lived experience, cultural knowledge, and leadership as essential creative labor.



2. Community members actively co-create the storytelling and site-specific installations.
Immersive productions are created with communities through a highly curated process that honors authorship and agency. Projects often result in site-specific installations shaped by community vision, extending storytelling beyond live performance through public-facing elements such as QR-accessed narrative archives.

3. Artstillery interviews community members based on a theme. We document by recording these narratives on film.

4. The community narratives we collect are weaved with research, original written pieces by our team, historical documentation and current events to create one original script.

5. A solid script is written and shared with our production team.

6. The script is then used for creating the multidisciplinary performance|experience. 

7. In our work, the location where the production occurs is just as important as the script. 

8. Elements of storytelling, projection mapping, live music, puppetry and mixed-media are weaved to create the final experience.

9. Our production times typically run 1 hour and 50 minutes. 

10. Audience members will walk through our performances over several location sites, or be situated in one location where they are welcome to walk around, or view the production from any seat of their choice. 

11. Post show discussions occur every evening as community members share their experience working with Artstillery or our directors share the process of creating the work and uplift community partners in our description. Audience members stay to re-examine what they just witnessed and speak to the Artstillery team and community.

12. There is a natural form of narrative therapy that unfolds through storytelling. It creates space to reflect on and move through trauma, to savor the beauty of moments passed, and to reconnect with both self and community. This process not only fosters healing, but also sparks a collective desire for meaningful change. The immersive nature of this work offers an antidote to the epidemic of loneliness that continues to shape the American experience today.