Kickstarter

Help us create a new dance and present our experimental company's 2010 NYC performance season. We're a collaborative of dancers, musicians and artists. The program will feature this new work and repertory.

As artistic director of Anita Cheng Dance, I'm asking for your support to make and show: "Meanwhile: 8 Etudes on Reverse." The dance will be about 20 minutes, with 8 sections. Each of the sections will use movement, music and video projection to poetically explore the concept and kinesthetic feelings of reversing time. These days, with the ubiquity of video, film and digital media, we can easily see things in reverse. We are so used to be able to rewind the tape, or rewind the DVD; I think we forget the wonder of it, the impossibility of actually rewinding life.

Dance is not what physicists call “time-symmetrical”. Dance cannot be the same going forwards and backwards. However, a paradox is always a wonderful engine for creativity, and for the past two years, I have been working with a technique of live-processing video through the computer. With this computer program, my research details a kind of reverse engineering of the physical effects of gravity and momentum. In performance, I imagine the dancers, music and video projections combined to feel like they are slipping back and forth in and out of linear time. I hope to lead the audience into an experience that invites new mind, body, and time connections.

I am happy to be working with composer Gordon Beeferman, Brazilian artist Ronaldo Kiel and wonderful dancers. The dance will have four performances at a downtown NYC theater, thanks to co-producer Chen Dance Center. There'll be live dancers, musicians, costumes, video projection and scenography. After the show, the dance will live on in web videos, a DVD and performance revivals in the years to come. (As a backer, you can have a DVD!)

Good news: after almost eight years of collaborations together, composer Gordon Beeferman and I have received a generous Music for Dance grant from the American Music Center (http://www.amc.net/). We are very excited to have top-tier NYC musicians to perform Gordon's new score. The musicians will perform live with the dancers in every performance.

Creating experimental performance requires two commodities in short supply in New York City: space and time. Your support will help pay for our part of the theater costs, rehearsal space and artists' fees for creative time. With your help, our creative work can blossom.

The New York Times has called our work, "a stunningly simple, imaginative blend of projected images and live dancing." Anita Cheng Dance is a new media, live music and dance collaborative. Our work has been seen in theaters, schools, museums, galleries, libraries, public spaces, on television and the Internet. (http://www.dailydance.org/)
Anita Cheng Dance (http://www.chengdance.org/)
Gordon Beeferman, http://www.gordonbeeferman.com
Ronaldo Kiel http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/art/rkiel/ck/bio.html
Chen Dance Center http://www.chendancecenter.org
Collaborator John Jannon's Camp Ballibay http://www.ballibaycamps.com
See us on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch...

NOTE: If you'd like to make a tax-deductible donation, it's very easy through our fiscal sponsor. Please contact me.

PLEASE tell your networks, friends and family about our Kickstarter project. Help get us out there in Facebook, MySpace and your social networks. Every bit counts! Thank you very much.
As a backer, you'll be listed in our performance program, video, DVD and website. You can also receive many rewards (see list)!