Very Good Dance Theatre

Very Good Dance Theatre is a queer-led, BIPOC-centered, performance art collective founded in 2018 in Dallas, TX. What began as a one-off performance project (The 1st Annual Gay Show or F.A.G.S.) has since blossomed into a rotating ensemble of experimental artists, culture workers, care workers, and community organizers interpreting what it means to be/to do “good”. We make performance work that gives voice to lived experience(s) of those most impacted by oppression, with an intersectional lens, and lend space - if only for an evening - to manifest the worlds we want to see into our futures. We devise work that blends the genres of dance, theatre, and performance art and trends toward “gathering” or “communing” over “entertaining” or “reciting” (the ensemble has asked to include here that we are still very entertaining).

At its core our work charges us, artists and audiences, with coming together to discover the work that it takes to be good to one another. We ask what we need, we provide what we can, and we imagine together what we can’t yet grasp - with/for each other.

Over the last 7 years VGDT has expanded the definition of “good” art and experimented with the

possibilities of the function (and necessity) of performance art in order to explore what our work does/can do when we are (not) together.

Here’s what we’ve learned: Performance is a liberatory tool that shows us our own/collective power. Performance work generates the answers for what lies between where we are now and where we want to be, and more importantly it teaches us/lets us practice with the tools needed to build those realities outside of the performance space by allowing us to try it, play with it, and get it wrong in the room first.

Our mission is to reimagine and redefine performance art as a tool for cultivating community togetherness, promoting coalition building, and envisioning collective liberation. Our goal is that performance practice becomes a vehicle more widely utilized for teaching, and practicing, what it means to be/do "good" for/by one another; asserting that performance art can show us how to create futures we want to see together, while also providing the embodied evidence of that truth.