Update for Thursday May 25, 2023
We are preparing for our busy Memorial Day Weekend and we have 4 artists from Choreo Cookies coming to teach on Monday (Memorial Day)! Sam Moore, Ysabelle Tolete, Dustin Yu and Ysa Penarajo will all be teaching! Ysa was added just recently when we found out that Chris was going to be off tonight. They will all be in town performing at the CompanyFam show on Saturday night (can’t wait to see it :).
Our summer performance workshops have been announced and we have some fantastic choices! The theme will be “Summer of Love” :) Take a look at the schedule and sign up today! Shows are August 19/20.
Also, Victor Reyes, the brilliant artist who painted the Annex in 2011 has just finished painting the entire 100 feet of our building that borders Colton Alley. We suggested this to the building’s owner because we kept getting tagged. Luckily, the owner decided to hire Victor to do this gorgeous art. Take a look next time you visit the studio! We also put images of it on our instagram @citydancelive.
Let’s Dance!
Update for Wednesday March 22, 2023
We have continued to have various water intrusion issues, like so many other buildings during this crazy winter, but thankfully nothing has been as bad as the massive flood of early January. Thank you again so much to all of our wonderful supporters who contributed to help us get through that. Another piece of good news is that we have been able to pay back one of the loans we had to take out last year in order to survive 2022. We have 3 more to go now but it feels great to make progress. One of the most wonderful things is that we have been making our daily quota of dancers much more often in 2023 than we did in 2022 and we hope that soon we will stabilize. We have been working very hard to bring special guests to the studio and it’s been so wonderful that students have been responding.
We love 60 Brady Street and love seeing all the happy faces coming through every night!
Update for Sunday Jan 8, 2023
We worked all last week to clean up the flood damage and get the Marley laid again. The subfloors need to be completely replaced and we will get to that next. Huge progress was made on the new wood flooring in the lobby, which is now going to be a dance studio. It looks amazing! And, the long awaited portable mirrors will be up and ready for classes tomorrow night! My husband Tophe designed them, learned how to weld, welded them and today we both installed the mirror glass to them. We can’t wait to take off the clamps and use them tomorrow!
And finally, the Gofundme campaign has been a wonderful shot in the arm. We are 20% of the way to our goal. Please share the link and contribute if you haven’t already. Many thanks to everyone who has helped!
Update for Thursday Jan 5, 2023
The recent rains have brought some bad news to our back studio in the form of water, everywhere. We were able to shop-vac it up and install some dehumidifiers on Tuesday. It appears to be dry enough to roll the Marley back and hold classes tonight (yay) but ultimately we will need to replace the whole subfloor and do more substantial work. We started a gofundme because this comes at a very hard time for the studio. Please contribute if you can!
Update for Sunday Jan 1, 2023
Greetings! Happy New Year!
The big news for January is that we consolidated all of our classes to 60 Brady Street. This was very challenging but we were able to accommodate almost all of our classes into one building. We are now looking forward to having the City Dance Community all housed into one gorgeous location!
2022 had some incredible moments and we are thankful to all our students, teachers/choreographers and enthusiasts! For Example:
We produced three shows at 60 Brady Street last year. It’s truly the realization of a dream to be able to host our own shows in an inspiring space. The first (in the spring) had a fashion show theme and no one can forget Nico O’Connor’s show stopping catwalk/dance/performance art! Larkin Poynton also performed a beautiful solo, NastyRay and Shyguy performed an amazing duet, Taylor and Caitlin Raymundo created a gorgeous sister’s duet, two talented City Ballet Students: Zoey Chu and Aurora Chernis also performed captivating solos, and City Dance instructors Jack Waack and Jepoy Papas also worked the runway theme with style and grace.
The second show (in the summer) had a Motown Theme and our special guests included Intricate, Sauce Dance Crew, Prince Ali, Chris Martin, Jordan Defiesta, Julian Straker, Sophie Williams, Nicole Hielscher and NastyRay. Lauren Benjamin wrote a fantastic history about Motown that we played before the shows and it’s themes tied in beautifully to what is happening today in many ways.
The winter show theme was “Movies We Love” and our choreographer’s each created a piece that was influenced by some of their favorite films and documentaries. Fight Club, Crazy Rich Asians, Kill Bill, Come As You Are, The Great Gatsby, Men In Black, The Matrix, Blonde, Fat Albert, Nightmare Before Christmas and Top Hat were the points of inspiration for the performers and it was an amazing show! King Charles and Kelli Forman flew in to work with students intensively right before the show, Chris Martin worked with over 50 dancers to create his Fight Club piece, Georgi Carmack performed a wonderful solo and so did Sam Weber.
Another highlight of the year was the dance film festival called Project Home Art that Chris Martin and Larkin Poynton produced at 60 Brady Street. They curated a truly incredible event that culminated in them showing the winning films selected from submissions from all over the world. They also wove an amazing dance piece into the evening that was performed by Vivian Lin, Pat Cruz, Maya Kell-Abrams, Larkin Poynton and Chris Martin. This is the type of event we hope to have on a more frequent basis at 60 Brady Street.
Budding film maker and former artist at San Francisco Ballet, Emma Rabinowitz filmed Yuri Zhukov’s “With Time We Go” over several days in the space and she created a beautiful work of art. We hope that other dance film makers feel inspired to rent the studios and realize their visions at 60 Brady Street.
2022 also brought some truly world class artists to our studios. We hosted workshops by Ysabelle Capitule, Ian Eastwood, Noelle Franco, Nico O’Connor, Jesse Julian, Jaylen Pea, King Charles, Jay Chris Moore, Lai Ling, Eddie Mina, Andre Maya, J Smooth, Moscelyne ParkeHarrison, Dom Lashawn, Chrybaby, Ouili, Poe One, Brooklyn Jai, Boogie Frantick, Alex Fetbroth, Jessie Munoz, Ysa Penarejo, Brandon Halk, Mikey Ruiz, Aggie Loyola, Ant and Tal, Scorpion, Sekhou Heru, Vince Chan, Lea Gredonia, Amor Ledesma, Carlo Darang, Austin Edwards, Niko Teoseco, Hannah Hapin, Devin Pornel, KJ Estudillo, Ellen Kim, Jolo Cabrero, Alfred Remulla and Allan Frias! We also produced two workshops in Montreal with Les Twins!
And finally, we also shared many hundreds (thousands?) of hours of amazing moments in class with our incredible teachers and we are very much looking forward to more of that in 2023!
See you on the dance floor!