Kickstarter

I have always been interested in stories: the stories we tell about ourselves, the ones that tell us who we are, what we enjoy, what we value. But what affect do these stories have on our present selves at this very moment? This is the question I am exploring with my choreographic project, “The Evolution of this Moment”. This question was first explored by tracing my own journey to becoming a dancer and choreographer in Philadelphia. The story begins with the hug, kiss, and flip that my father gave me everyday before daycare and continues with the first time I felt a Martha Graham contraction then to the bench I shared with Peter, my boyfriend of five years, on the first day we met. All of these memories, or stories, have contributed to my present self in a profound way. The goal of this project is to use these stories to facilitate a larger exploration of how a human life unfolds by creating pieces of dance and short films that will share experiences and raise questions.

The stories we tell will not only be mine, but also those of my dancers. Each dancer will each trace her own path to this present work and select seven clear experiences that have contributed to her presence in this moment. When each dancer has identified the key moments, we will collaborate to distill the stories into the phrases of movement that will be the vocabulary of the dances. The goal is not to mime the experiences in a literal way but to capture their essence in the gesture of a finger, the softening of a kneecap or the whipping of a torso through space. The dancer and I will work together to create the movements because I want them to be both internally satisfying for the performer and also aesthetically interesting and accessible for the audience. While I pursue the dance side my collaborator, filmmaker Price Campbell, will be creating several short films that explore similar themes in the exploration of stories and their effects on evolution but, rather than focusing on humans, his films will explore how a place, an object or an idea can evolve daily based upon its exposure to the world. Thus this small idea, initially explored by me, has become a highly collaborative effort that will be performed on September 9th and 11th as a part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.

To make this project work we will need to book space to rehearse and perform, rent lights, buy film equipment, pay for posters and postcards and, hopefully, pay our dancers. And this is where you come in. Any type of financial support will directly benefit the freedom of creativity for the artists involved in the project. We have done our best to select rewards you will enjoy: a personalized thank you note, an invitation to a rehearsal, even an opportunity to share the evolution of their moment in the show’s program. We want you to feel like they are a part of the process because we believe that successful art is interesting, accessible and inclusive—and that’s the kind we want to make.

For more information check out the website for the project below:
http://evolutionofthismoment.weebly.com