What is the Procession of the Species?

The Procession of the Species is a joyous, spontaneous artistic pageant where community members celebrate their relationships with each other and with the natural world.

Created by the community for the community, the Procession program facilitates art, music, and dance workshops that inspire personal understanding of and local action for wildlife protection.

Then on Procession day, residents don their creative expressions and proceed through the streets of Olympia in masks and costumes. Carrying banners, windsocks, and giant puppets, they participate in a cultural exchange honoring the awe and splendor of the natural world.

See photos and videos of past celebrations

Goals

The Procession seeks to bridge the arts, the environment, and our local community. As a celebration of art, it involves citizens in a creative process affirming art’s place in the forum of public expression. As a celebration of species, it awakens public sensibilities to the issues surrounding environmental awareness and protection. As a celebration of community, it enhances the exchange between local schools, local government, businesses, and civic organizations.

Designed to create a cultural exchange rather than an entertainment event, the Procession is an open invitation to participate in imagination, creation, and sharing. By fostering inclusiveness and collaboration, the Procession engages area residents regardless of age, background, or ability. Providing schools, social services, businesses, tribes, and fellowships with the same opportunity, the Procession involves a broad cross section of the community.

Founding Tenets

The Procession of the Species purpose is encompassed in the following intentions.

1. Use our energies to create a long-term cultural exchange rather than a short-term entertainment event or political protest.
2. Hold the arts as a very powerful tool to raise the collective consciousness and awaken our culture’s numbed aesthetic values, thereby inciting a hunger for personally protecting the natural world.
3. Foster diversity of expression and participation through an inclusive invitation where the dignity of the human spirit is elevated through a process of imagination, creation and sharing.
4. Promote public outreach by organizing and providing numerous art and environmental workshops with the understanding that everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn.
5. Be an example of sustainable community practices by emphasizing the use of recycled, natural, and donated materials for art project construction.
6. Place music and dance into the hands of as many people as possible by providing workshops for free or at minimal cost with no one turned away for lack of funds.
7. Request a donation of two cans of food for the local food bank as a registration fee to nourish the understanding that by taking care of nature we naturally take care of ourselves.
8. Empower our role in global preservation by discovering, recognizing, and understanding our local connection to the world around us.
9. Envision that for each person the Procession is a journey, a process of experience and vision, ending in a collective expression of joy and appreciation.