Thank you for checking out my first ever Kickstarter campaign! Allow me to tell you a little about the show I'm hoping you'll support..
SOUNDspace explores what I find to be most beautiful and exceptional about tap dancing – movement as music. In March of 2011, I was invited by David Parker and Judy Hussie-Taylor to share the first full evening of tap dance ever to be presented by New York City's Danspace Project (with one of my greatest inspirations, Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards). The experience of performing in St. Mark's Church inspired me to create a new site-specific work that explores the unique acoustics of this historic space through the many possibilities and sounds of the feet.
In SOUNDspace we use leather soles, bare feet, socked feet, wooden taps and sand dancing to create a range of rich tones and textures. In developing this work, I focused first, on the sonic possibilities in the space (things like polyrhythms with leather on wood and aluminum on carpet - things like executing 2 or 3 sounds simultaneously from different points of origin throughout the church and manipulating how that would read from the audience's perspective) -from there I started playing with specific vocabularies of movement and different visual ideas to help bring this journey through layers of sound, reverberation and movement to life.
I am honored to have 2012 Bessie Award winner, Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards and former STOMP cast member, Nicholas Van Young, featured in a cast of unique hoofers and multi-form dancers: Megan Bartula, Elizabeth Burke, Ryan Casey, Warren Craft, Michelle Dorrance, Karida Griffith, Mishay Petronelli, Demi Remick, Aska Shiozowa, Jose "Boy Boi" Tena, Byron Tittle with understudy, Ali Dietz, and Double Bass player, Greg Richardson performing original live music.
Please join me in supporting these artists for their time, talent and artistry. Your support will also help fund the creation of hand-made wooden taps - first used, before aluminum taps, by tap dancers/buck dancers at the turn of the 20th century; it will help re-sole old tap shoes with quality leather, giving them a new life and tone; and it will of course help to provide us with rehearsal space for this crazy process!
SOUNDspace premieres at
Danspace Project / St. Marks Church in-the-Bowery, NYC January 17 - 19 [Thurs-Sat] at 8pm.
For more information and tickets: http://danspaceproject.org/calendarandtickets/detail.php?id=202
Thank you so much for your support and we all hope to see you at the show!
Michelle
Risks and challenges
We have already hit some MAJOR obstacles - which is in fact, why your support would mean the world to us!
Obstacle 1: We had a very generous offer from a dance-wear company to provide complimentary leather soled shoes for the show, but unfortunately the shoes ended up on back order until February!
Obstacle 2: We had a wonderful laser wood cutting establishment in Brooklyn create a pair of prototype wood taps - but - just before they were ready to help us complete the full order, they accidentally threw out the very specific (and incredibly hard to find) wood from which these taps would be made!
Obstacle 3: New York City's craziest cobbler lost one (just one) of our replacement shoes in the madness of his workshop and accidentally ruined another pair of our leather soled shoes in his efforts to help make up for it!
The list goes on and on but what's important to mention here is that we have addressed our challenges head on - Nicholas Van Young and I are making the wood taps ourselves which required that we purchase some new tools and materials. The show must go on (!) and we'd love to ask you to be a part of making that happen!
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