So we embarked on the impossible. Collaborating with the usual six minds in the room, and bringing in three more to the mix, over the past six months. Shift the Grid is coming up on it’s year anniversary and has been selected as the resident artist for Motion Pacific’s Incubator project. We are honored and lucky to have the opportunity as an incredibly young collective, to embark on the journey of putting on our own evening lengths work. We are so EXCITED!! And nervous, and unsure and completely making things up as we go along. The aim of the project is to explore our curiosities through contemporary dance, and work in a truly collaborative process in doing so. We wanted to push ourselves to make the entirety of our show together as 6 choreographers, honoring each voice and body in the room.
Motion Pacific has granted us money to cover costs of rehearsal space, tech time, marketing materials, and performance space through the Incubator Grant. The nine of us have put in roughly 20 hours of work a week, in and out of the studio over the past 6 months. We are absolutely in love with what we do, we wouldn’t do it otherwise. But with your help we can pay our performers, our musical collaborators, our fabulous photographer Becky Ruppel, buy some amazing costumes for our production, and provide everyone performing with compensation. The percentage of ticket sales we receive is less than average, due to the other expenses the Incubator grant provides for. That is why we are asking you for your generosity in helping us provide everyone with compensation for their efforts! We can’t pay everyone hourly what they deserve, but we want to try to raise enough funds to compensate nine dancers for all the time spent rehearsing and performing, for travel expenses, as well as all collaborators (photographers, film crew, and musical artists) who contribute their talents to this project.
We take this opportunity to turn to our friends and family, old teachers and dentists, soccer coaches and YMCA tutors and say, anything you can give will help us reach our goal. And if you can’t give, tell a friend about our project, or come to our show. And if you do give, you should come to the show to get a thank you in person!
In our most recent work, Vacancy, we are exploring the idea of being in two places at once. We are interested in the expectations we have for our lives, the effects of social media on these expectations, how special and finite time can feel, how we literally feel pulled in all directions by the busy schedules we maintain, ever encouraged by capitalistic notions of efficiency. We are motivated by the simple fact that the body communicates massive amounts of information and therefore carries with it, stories and histories bigger than ourselves. Our job is to tell those stories.
So where to go from here? Well, there are a few things you can do. COME TO OUR SHOW!!!! Our show is two evenings in November, the 20th and 21st, at 8PM at the Motion Pacific Studio in Santa Cruz, and we really mean it when we say we want to see you there. That’s at 131 Front Street, Santa Cruz CA, at 8PM (insert voice from Shane Company Commercials, for credibility sake). One very special part of what we do as movers, is that we get to sometimes share our work with an audience. This time around we have been granted that opportunity, so please, join us!