Re-Crafting a Mission Statement

As we've went through our strategic planning process, and some regrouping, it's become clear that our mission statement could use some tweaking. Not our mission, but our mission statement. How we talk about and encapsulate what we do.

Our current Mission Statement:

Halcyon Theatre explores how stories and the art of storytelling can cross cultures, heal old wounds, reconnect peoples, create communal experiences and forge new paths forward.

While we are working on tweaks/rewrites, what do you think of our current statement?

For those of you who have seen our work how would you describe it? What mission statement would you write for us?

I had a meeting with a foundation rep a while back. One of the things I mentioned was that we were working on re-tooling our mission statement, as it was more nebulous than we'd like. He said that he was always struck that even though probably ninety-percent of the applications he reviewed were for companies "that spoke to the human condition," he could find almost no one who could say clearly and succinctly what that actually meant.

One of the things that has become painfully obvious over the years is that most artists and most arts organizations have a profound struggle to communicate with anyone outside their immediate sphere. We tend to have an implied code that we use, often without realizing no one knows what we are actually saying.

It's something that I tend to do as well. I'm much better than I used to be. It takes a constant effort to unpack all the jargon, arts-speak and nonsense phrasing I've accumulated in a decade in the arts. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how well I can communicate on the inside of the closed-loop, if I can't explain it to my sister, (Not that she isn't smart, she's just not in an arts silo) or someone who shows up at a theater for the first time.

What do you think?