The Yard is dimming its lights for a year-long pause to rethink their programming and financial model to ensure sustainability.

The Chilmark-based performing arts incubator, which has hosted dancers and artists since 1973, will stop programming beginning in October.

According to executive director Stephanie Pacheco, this step was an essential one.

“We knew we needed to take a step back so that we weren’t overcommitting ourselves for next year with a model that we couldn’t sustain, and committing to artists and staff and the community to do things that we weren’t sure we’d be able to do,” she said.

The hiatus will be an opportunity for the Yard to look at their financial business model during a time when the entire arts industry is having to make difficult choices, according to board of directors president Michele Sasso.

“Many organizations know the model is broken, so to speak, or is just an unreliable stool where if one part of the stool is shaky, then the whole thing collapses,” she said.

Funding for the arts, and nonprofit organizations in general, has been cut drastically under the current presidential administration, Ms. Pacheco said.

“A lot of those cuts have been dramatic and they have been really sudden,” she said. “There were over 28 million in arts grants that the federal government rolled back in the middle of this year, in addition to ongoing grant cycles where organizations like the Yard that have been funded for years by the National Endowment for the Arts did not receive the funding that they were [expecting].”

The funding cuts have become a catalyst for change.

“That was a culminating button on what’s been some pretty seismic shifts over the last couple years in the way our funding has been structured,” Ms. Pacheco said.

Though the organization has been through many iterations since its inception, taking a break from programming to rethink their business model is a new direction.

“I think that has inherently happened, but I wouldn’t say to this level of decisions that we’ve recently made to really make sure that the Yard has a longevity in its future,” Ms. Sasso said.

Ms. Pacheco thanked the community for continuing to support the Yard and its place in the Island performing arts community, and she is excited to begin brainstorming ways to expand those relationships.

“The Yard has been growing and evolving and maturing as an institution, and so to be able to ask what will this next iteration look like at a time when so many organizations are having these existential questions...it’s going to take the entire community around the Yard to engage in this conversation and to envision something different that’s sustainable in a new and different way,” she said.

To end the current season, there will be a he work-in-progress performance on Oct. 5 by Johnny Loves Johannon, which features violinist Johnny Gandelsman and choreographers John Heginbotham, Caili Quan, Jamar Roberts, and Melissa Toogood. The event takes place at Vineyard Arts Project in Edgartown, and begins at 5:30 p.m.