2020 is an exciting year for dropshift, as we celebrate 10 YEARS of DANCEMAKING!  This season we will produce and tour original creative dance production and continue our inclusive teaching  programming throughout the Chicagoland area.  Our programming includes: early childhood arts-integration residencies within local Montessori classrooms, community movement workshops, company class - open to all levels of movement ability, and Laban based workshops for movers of all levels. Laban Movement Analysis is a system, which dissects and distills movement into the categories of Body, Effort, Shape, and Space. dropshift Artistic Director, Andrea Cerniglia, holds her Graduate Laban Certificate in Movement Analysis from Columbia College Chicago and brings this framework to dropshift’s choreographic process, open company class, and educational programming.  The company values an empowered collaborative process and develops a strong sense of community within performative and educational work. 

In 2020, while we celebrate TURNING 10 we will:  travel to RADFest in March 2020 to share excerpts of 2019 production, "At Our Edges", continue our arts-integrated work in the classrooms at Casa dei Bambini of Mayfair, offer public workshops based in Laban Movement Analysis through a creative exchange at Hamlin Park, Chicago, tour developing new work to Satori at ANNOYarts in St. Louis, host public open rehearsals of, "FADE/render", and at the end of the year, share the world premiere of this new work in Chicago. This fundraising campaign will help to offset a portion of general operating, artistic, and production costs throughout our 10th Anniversary season.  The success of our campaign will mean that we can continue to tour repertory work, make new work accessible to our local community and beyond, and continue to support important educational programming. 

New work, "FADE/render", will compare our sense of home/familial place with: the body, its movement patterns, and our habits of interaction/disengagement. This work will also draw inspiration from dancer narratives and a variety of mollusk shell imagery. These animals only ever make one single shell- growing it over time to making room for the soft animal inside. The shell is a home, protection, and ultimately becomes a unique artifact upon death. The inclusion of the mollusk imagery will connect us to a sense of time - we will use the spiraling shell patterns as trajectories in space and mollusk movement patterns that  ripple/shuffle/hop/jump/dig to inspire phrase creation.

FADE will link the body to our sense of home and explore its references within our physical archive. Our body is an archive of memories, patterns, and experience. Home is defined as: the place where one lives permanently. Dancers will contribute personal narratives drawn from memories of home/displacement, stability/unrest, and fulfillment/disillusionment. Our creative explorations and conversations will track each dancer’s story, our definitions of home, and will be framed by any associated images. 

We are THRILLED to continue to make work and share our process with our community.  Year after year, we are humbled by the support that we receive from our community near and far, and are committed to continuing to push to the edges of the world of dance with the work that we create!