Flying Leap productions: Our mission and our vision
Our Mission
Flying Leap Productions creates immersive, site-specific theater for young audiences and families in New York City and beyond. We make thoughtful, participatory performances around complicated or difficult subject matter for families to experience together. Our work takes place outside traditional theater spaces—in parks, community centers, and public spaces—created in direct collaboration with our artists and audiences. With a core emphasis on accessibility and joy, our performances offer a foundation for discussion between children and their families.
Our Vision
We aim to empower families to leap across perceived boundaries together and towards each other, into a more liberated world where kids have the agency to ask challenging questions and take action, and adults have the tools to navigate tough topics alongside them.
Our Values
Our Values
At Flying Leap, our five core values guide every aspect of our work, from the stories we choose to tell to the communities we serve.
Care
Care forms the foundation of everything we do. We approach difficult subject matter prioritizing the wellbeing of our artists, audiences, and communities. We listen deeply to our communities and respond to their needs rather than imposing our own agenda. We model a more equitable ecosystem through strong pay equity protections for artists and artist-led care practices. And we always put care first.
Collaboration
True collaboration goes beyond simply working together. It means sharing power and decision-making throughout the creative process. We create space for co-creation where all voices are valued equally, whether from seasoned artists or community members encountering theater for the first time. Collaboration requires vulnerability, patience, and the willingness to let go of predetermined outcomes in favor of discoveries that emerge from collective wisdom.
Radical Inclusion
Radical inclusion means fundamentally restructuring how we create and share art to ensure everyone can participate fully. This goes beyond accommodations, to actively designing work that celebrates difference and challenges systems of exclusion. We consider accessibility from the beginning rather than as an afterthought, creating performances that welcome diverse abilities, languages, economic situations, and socio-cultural backgrounds. Radical inclusion requires constant learning and adaptation, work we are deeply passionate about.
Queerness
Queerness at Flying Leap encompasses both identity and methodology. We celebrate LGBTQ+ stories and creators while also employing queerness as a way of working that challenges conventional expectations. We don’t accept “that’s the way it’s done” – we question every decision, every structure, to evaluate what works for us, and what we can reimagine for ourselves. Queerness allows us to imagine new possibilities for what theater can be and do.
Action Research
We integrate rigorous inquiry into our creative practice, studying our impact and sharing learning with the broader field. Our research has been presented at international conferences and published in peer-reviewed journals and books. We engage in community-based participatory research, working with communities to identify questions worth investigating, and share our results with our peers in the field.
Our Impact
Founded in 2021, Flying Leap has produced immersive theater experiences across the United States and internationally. Our children's theater productions and family theater experiences have built partnerships with the New Victory Theater, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and major arts funders, all while maintaining our commitment to community-based practice.
Our work demonstrates that theater for young audiences can be both artistically ambitious and deeply accessible, creating space for families to engage with the full complexity of contemporary life through innovative, site-specific performances.