Young Dance Collective

We are the Young Dance Collective: a socially conscious modern dance group formed by seven teen dancers and choreographers. We are dedicated to dance as an art form, and our mission is to create and perform works that express who we are, and where we are in our lives.

While we’ve collaborated with a number of great choreographers—including Brian Brooks, Larry Keigwin, Noemie Lafrance and more—what we love most is to perform our own collaboratively developed works.

Together, we are able to create something very powerful.  Our movement expresses our thoughts about communication (or the loss and absence of it); about love, and how love manifests itself in friends, relationships, and the world around us; about loss—individually, and as a society; peer pressure; death; loneliness; self definition… our discussions transform into our art, and in the end, we use our shared experience and expression as a catalyst for our growth as individuals—and to provoke thought in our audiences.

Through our collaborations, we continually react to, and interact with the world around us—all while supporting one other, existing in the moment, sharing a common identity and purpose, and diving into the core of the struggles and pressures we face and the joys we share.

We’ve grown from performing in one-room spaces—altering our movements so we don’t run into the audience—to performing at the Citigroup Theater Joan Weill Center for Dance.  As an independent, nonprofit company, we work diligently to produce our work and no creative endeavor has ever been compromised.

We believe this retrospective performance will be a powerful forum for sharing our message with other teens—teens who may be inspired to deal with their own struggles in a more productive way as a result, and possibly to choose a path that allows for their own expression and healing. We will be drawing from the pieces we’ve performed in the last decade, through to our final body of work.

Save the Dates: April 20-22 2012