Vervet Dance

Vervet Dance has an exciting performance coming up! Check out their "Quartet for the End of Time" premiering November 22-23, 2024 at the Icebox Project Space at 1400 N American St, Philadelphia, PA 19122. This contemporary dance, choreographed by Loren Groenendaal, is set to modern music, "Quatour Pour La Fin Du Temps" that Olivier Messaien composed in 1941 while he was being held as a prisoner of war.  While this work deals with the difficult themes of apocalypse, an existential questioning of time, and humanitarian and environmental disasters, the overall expression is poetic, hopeful and uplifting, seeking to provide solace in difficult times. Much of the imagery in the dance comes from nature whose images, processes, and relationships provide their own naturalistic truth and solace as well as serving as allegories for more human stories. The cast is Philadelphia based dancers, Miryam Coppersmith, Chloe Marie, Loren Groenendaal, and Kate Seethaler. The contemporary movement vocabulary is primarily based in modern dance and has influences from hip hop, traditional Balinese dance, and contact improvisation. The dance will be accompanied live by an ensemble of musicians, Melinda Faylor on piano and serving as Music Director, Charlotte Munn Wood on violin, Julie Kim on cello, and Mara Mayer on clarinet.

$5-30 Tickets are available here: https://vervetdance.fourthwalltickets.com/shows

The project is also still raising funds, so donor level tickets and other perks are available at their BetterWorld crowdsourced fundraiser: https://vervetdance.betterworld.org/campaigns/quartetpremiere

sarah ingel

sarah ingel (she/they) is a choreographer and performance maker from Charlotte NC currently living in Philadelphia PA. Focusing on effort, endurance, repetition, symbolism in gesture, and emotional virtuosity, their work looks at contemporary mythologies, the rituals that connect us, and collective emotional phenomenon – love, grief, fear, rage, resistance, dreams, madness, + fantasy. Practicing world building and myth making from a queer and feminist perspective, Ingel uses experimental, art rock, sci-fi and DIY methodologies to craft environments where the choreographic, emotional, and theatrical can interact. She aims to engage with empathy, vulnerability, and humanity while simultaneously playing with spectacle and stage technology. 

Ingel graduated from University of North Carolina School of Arts with a concentration in Contemporary Dance/Composition, then received a BFA in Dance from Hollins University in partnership with the American Dance Festival. From 2015-2022 Ingel worked at Charlotte Ballet -- holding the positions of Production/Rehearsal Assistant, ASM, Company Shoe Manager and Costume Technician. She has worked in the studio and behind the scenes in support of choreographers Rena Butler, Peter Chu, Medhi Walerski, Stephanie Martinez, Christian Spuck, Helen Pickett, Matthew Hart and more. 

Her work has been showcased as a part of Charlotte Ballet’s Innovative Works and Choreographic Lab, presented at Hi-Lites Music Fest (2020), alongside Nat Baldwin of the Dirty Projectors (2020), at BOOM CLT (2017, 2018), and Hélène Simoneau Danse’s OnSite/InSight (2016) as well as multiple projects with musician Dylan Gilbert and XOXO Performance Ensemble. 

They are a 2021/2022 ASC Emerging Creators Fellow, a 2019 Knight Foundation/NCCAkron - Dance/USA Scholarship recipient and a founding Collective Member of Goodyear Arts. Ingel is co-director of repCLT, an organization advocating research + exchange in performance and co-founder of ladyfestCLT, promoting femme performance makers in the Southeast. ladyfestCLT won Charlotte Magazine’s Best of the Best Award for Best Dance Event of 2019 and QC Nerve People’s Choice Award for Best Local Show of 2020. 

Ingel recently earned an MFA in Dance from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She is currently working on a new piece (((pomegranate))) which will premiere at the 2024 Cannonball Festival // Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Join us at Icebox Project Space September 19th, 22nd, and 29th. (((pomegranate))) is a dance ritual by choreographer sarah ingel + collaborators diving deep into our own mythologies of grief. Through a mess of fruit, flowers, dance and dirt, together, we create an altar, a table, a memory, a ritual to hold us as we process complexities of loss and love. Our grief knows no bounds, yet ritual requires endurance and endurance requires ritual. 

sacha Vega

Sacha Vega is an artist who collages across movement, poetics, and humor to invite focus into the ideologies that train our bodies to move. Creating through performance, time-based media, and writing, her practice encourages critical play in reframing genres of embodied instruction. She often places a sense of mastery in complication with a novice in order to unsettle hierarchies around ability, discipline, class, race, and gender. Her own body is imprinted by: American dance theater, Filipino karaoke parties, a Bolshoi ballerina, immigrant parents, suburban aspirations, Postmodern chance forms, and clowning. Working in concert with performers and audiences alike, she’s invested in using her practice as an experimental space to test beliefs of authority, horizontal organization, and temporary utopias.

She has exhibited and performed at Westbeth Gallery, Theaterlab, Mason Gross Galleries, Leslie-Lohman Museum, Baxter St x CCNY, Java Project, Pelham Art Center, and 99cent Plus Gallery. She’s been in residence at LEIMAY’s Incubator Program, Wassaic Project, Van Noord Van Noord, Casa Tagumerche, Stoneleaf Retreat, and ARTHA Project. She’s hosted workshops at Abrons Art Center, Performance Space NY, Flux Factory, Zimmerli Museum of Art, and coLAB arts. She has a BFA in Photography from Pratt Institute and an MFA in Visual Art from Mason Gross School of the Arts.

In September 2024, she will premiere a new piece called PINCH as part of Philly Fringe x Cannonball Festival. PINCH is an experimental dance work that blurs the fine (story)line between preparedness and chaos in the American psyche. This is not a drill. With humor, poetics, and absurdity, a trio of characters keep asking: Who taught you to move safely? What contradictions are held in your sense of security? Performances are on September 19th at 6:30pm and September 20th at 9:30pm at MAAS Studio Building. PURCHASE TICKETS

Lucy Flippen

Lucy Flippen is a choreographer, dancer, and educator whose work explores boundaries, borders, and middle spaces. She was born and raised in Ellicott City, Maryland and received her BFA in Dance with an Art Therapy minor at University of the Arts, under the direction of Donna Faye Burchfield. During her formative years, she studied dance at Kinetics Dance Theatre and Wilde Lake High School, under the direction of Christine Estabrook. At UArts, she worked with and danced for Katie Swords Thurman, Kim Bears-Bailey, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, Jung-eun Kim, Lily Mello, and Kali Petrizzo. She has performed in restaged productions of Connect Transfer (Shen Wei Dance Arts) DMan in the Water (Bill T. Jones), and Changing Steps (Merce Cunningham Trust). Lucy has presented work with Koresh Dance Company Artist Showcase, Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers Inhale Performance Series, and Philadelphia Fringe Festival via the Cannonball Festival.  In March 2024, she founded her own dance collective “sharedelusion” alongside Magaly Gallagher. As a collective, they premiered an evening-length work "see me to see you" at Philly PACK. In this work they researched: the understanding of one's own identity through relationships with friends, with family, with oneself.

ANNE-MARIE MULGREW: Founder of Anne-Marie Mulgrew and Dancers Company (AMM & DCO)

Known in the city since 1986 for its "visually arresting,"  "highly imaginative," dance theater works, Anne-Marie Mulgrew and Dancers Company, (AMM & DCO)  under the artistic direction of Philly native, Anne-Marie Mulgrew, has created 80 works for the company. These works have been seen in concert theaters, alternative spaces, site specific locations, schools, festivals, collaborative projects and for film and TV in the United States and Canada to critical acclaim.  Fusing modern dance, theater, music, technology and art, the company charms, provokes and informs audiences of all ages with its insightful and wacky views of the world. AMM & DCO consists of 5-7 professional dancers and esteemed peer collaborators.  Additional performers are used on a project basis to flesh out materials and involve new communities.  AMM & DCO believes in dance education and offers residency programs , classes, and workshops tailored to the needs of the community for people of all ages, skill levels, and backgrounds. 

“I am tempted to describe Ms. Mulgrew as our own Margaret Mead of Dance.” Philadelphia Inquirer

• Visit the AMM & DCO Website

• Check out the AMM & DCO Facebook Page