North American Cultural Laboratory
NACL is an artist-run center for research, development, and experimentation in the performing arts. We provide space and time to independent artists and ensembles, present artist findings to live and virtual audiences, and produce and maintain a library documenting artistic works as active, embodied courses of discovery.
We invite you to join us, in Highland Lake or online, as artist or audience, or as a champion of our cause.
creating space for exploration and discovery
MISSION
North American Cultural Laboratory provides a haven for artists and ensembles to explore their craft, experiment with new work, and share their investigations in ways that have a profound impact on their practice, the field of performance, and the public.
VALUES
(re)Search – We value the concerted search for meaning, for solutions (elegant or otherwise), for the sublime. We see value in the sensory experience of the embodied search. We not only seek, but we find, and we believe in the importance of sharing our findings. We value exchange, and we share songs and games and meals as part of our work.
Craft – We value the process of honing. We think attending to process is at least as important as presenting product. We also value excellence. We appreciate things that are well made and we try to make them well; and we value the artful inclusion of abstraction, surprise, and joy in live performance.
Equity – We want people to feel welcome, safe, and appreciated here. We value difference. We recognize that we live inside structures of oppression — both visible and invisible — and they live inside us, and we value the work it takes to illuminate and dismantle them. We also believe that striving for fairness in our labor practices is essential to contributing to a healthy culture (in and out of the workplace).
Three Decades of Growth
2027 will mark our 30th year — 27 of them in our Catskill home, making and presenting work in a performance space that was once a Franciscan church, built in 1922. NACL is now steward of this structure that has stood for more than a century on the shore of Highland Lake, a monument of early 20th Century craftsmanship, whose purpose has shifted from serving the spiritual needs of a specific faith to fostering the life-expanding pursuits of a diverse community of artists and witnesses who gather together in the spirit of creativity.
A 30-year-old institution in a hundred-year-old home with a circle of contributors near and far numbering in the thousands — and by contributors we mean doers and watchers, singers and hearers, throwers and catchers, givers and receivers — all of us together, contributing to what gets made here.
Our community of artists, audiences, and individual donors have always been at the core of our ability to produce and present engaging new live performance work, to dive deep into craft, and to fuel the engine of discovery that takes place here.
Please join us in support of the continued evolution of live performing art.
NORTH AMERICAN CULTURAL LABORATORY is a 501(c)(3) non-profit center for research and development in the performing arts, serving artists and audiences in the Southwestern Catskills, including communities in the Upper Delaware region of New York and Pennsylvania.