Dear Dancers,
We are writing to you today with open hearts and a deep commitment to honesty, growth, and healing.
Over the past two years, Asheville Movement Collective has navigated painful challenges involving interpersonal harm within our community. Like many spaces dedicated to embodiment and connection, we have had to face the hard truth that consent violations have occurred here—impacting individuals and the collective field we share. In response, AMC’s leadership circles have spent the past two years actively working to understand, address, and learn from these experiences.
This letter is an effort to share, as transparently as possible, what has transpired (while protecting the privacy of those involved), to accept accountability, to acknowledge the impact of harm, and to communicate what we have learned and the changes we have made. We invite you to be part of this continued journey toward building a truly consent-centered culture, and we welcome your engagement and feedback. Please review our new policies here.
What We Have Learned
Since December of 2022, we have received at least ten written incident reports from dancers who courageously shared experiences of harm by other dancers. Through these reports, patterns emerged — including more than one case of individuals abusing their power within our space. A significant number of reports involved one of our staff members. To each person who came forward — and to those who may not have felt able to—we say:
We believe you. We are deeply sorry this happened. You did not deserve this.
Even though AMC has long upheld consent as a core value, we recognize that we lacked the necessary training and structures to respond appropriately when harm occurred. Our collective blind spots, insufficient formal training, and societal conditioning limited our ability to act swiftly and effectively. While our intentions were rooted in fairness and care, we acknowledge that we fell short of the best practices needed to truly create a safer, survivor-centered space.
Accountability for Harm
We accept responsibility for the ways we, as a leadership body, contributed to additional harm through the following missteps:
- We enabled and failed to adequately address patterns of boundary violations and abuse of power over time.
- We underestimated the complexity and seriousness of the harm that was reported.
- We overestimated our understanding and our ability to effectively respond.
- We did not respond with the timeliness and decisiveness that survivors deserved.
- In the most serious case, we breached confidentiality by inadvertently sharing a report of sexual assault with the accused individual, a staff member, before their access to internal communications had been removed. We have since heard directly from the impacted dancer who courageously filed the report, how this breach compounded harm and led to additional social fallout within the community, where they have been ostracized, bullied, and even physically threatened. We are truly sorry.
- In our attempts to be “fair,” we sometimes asked survivors to “prove” their experiences, and in at least one case, we placed a reporting survivor on pause from events during an investigation.
We acknowledge that these failures deepened harm, broke trust with those who bravely spoke up, and likely silenced others who might have come forward.
Steps We Have Taken
In response to these painful lessons, we have made significant changes to support a safer and more accountable community:
- Individuals who have been reported for causing harm have been informed they are no longer permitted to attend AMC events.
- We have formally established the AMC Consent Circle within our governance structure, holding regular meetings dedicated to cultivating a safer culture.
- We engaged professional consultants specializing in conflict resolution, trauma-informed practices, and organizational healing to guide our next steps.
- We collaborated with Our Voice, a local organization supporting survivors of sexual violence, to design and deliver customized training to our leadership. Ongoing training is now required for all circle members.
- Two members of the consent team, and key contributors to our consent policy, undertook continued training and experience through involvement with the Interfusion Festival Consent Team.
- We co-created new consent policies and practices with our consultants that prioritize survivor safety and reduce opportunities for abuse of power.
- We have contracted an experienced third-party professional to independently review any severe new incident reports to ensure transparency and accountability.
- We created an Incident Responder Team, a smaller group within the Consent Circle, tasked with handling all incident reports promptly, confidentially, and in a survivor-centered manner. Responders will receive dedicated training to strengthen our community’s response capacity.
Many thanks to all of you for learning with us and for participating as we collectively build a culture of consent and safer space for us all. We encourage you all to read our new zero-tolerance for sexual harassment Consent Policy, that reflects our learning. These policies provide a template for continued growth and competence as space holders and reflect our deep commitment to holding ourselves and our space to higher standards of safety, care, and justice.
In Closing
We remain deeply humbled by the courage, honesty, and resilience within this community. We are learning. We are changing. We are committed to doing better.
Thank you for walking this path with us. Together, we are co-creating a space where every dancer can feel safer, respected, and free.
With gratitude and humility,
The AMC Board, Core Circle, and Consent Circle