Virtual Dance Festival Update
Thank you for your interest in the Festival. Here is some more information.
Still in a strong research and development stage, the Virtual Dance Festival is narrowing in
on a number of possible venues in New York City, San Francisco, Santa Fe and Western Massa-
chusetts for Spring2000. These venues are small(100-500 seats) but are suited to the main purposes of the festival project: namely, to provide a high-visibility public profile to a select group of dance
artists who qualify as master teachers and who are seeking to extend their following.
The themes of the festival revolve around the oldest sources of dance--dance as community
celebration, dance as spiritual practice or ritual, dance as healing, dance as personal creative
journey. The model guiding the festival’s organizers is the dance as it has been personally wit-
nessed by them in the Native American cultures where it serves all of the above functions as well as art and entertainment. This absolutely, repeat, absolutely, is no reflection on the styles or backgrounds of the festival’s desired participants, only the spirit in which they present their
work and their instruction.
The festival is independently funded, is not governed, nor will be, by any arts institution, federal
agency, corporation or other group. It is a co-operative venture bound by trust and the enthusiasm of its participants to share their skills and wisdom directly and be paid outright. Individual con-
tracts are available. The financial arrangments are simple--the festival organizers receive a pre-
determined per centage of the both performance and teaching revenue in return for their outlay
(overhead,publicity,etc.) to establish the paticipant’s PRESENCE in a given festival site at a
given time within the overall festival period.The initial festival will occur in a two or three week
period in Spring2000 at three or four sites.
The Virtual Dance Festival WEBSITE (to be up and running by Summer’99) is to be a totally new
experiment in dance event "self-organization."It will allow visitors to the site to use the site’s
proprietary software to find out WHO else is interested in doing WHAT, WHERE and to connect
with them in order to pool limited resources for maximum effect. For example, using the site
could allow two or more teachers who discover they are planning workshops in the same region
in the same timeframe, to get together on publicity and even studio rental. It would also provide lists of people who have expressed interest in particular types of classes in a given locality. The same logic could be applied to performances. The website will continue after the Spring2000 festival and hopefully will greatly contribute to it and possible later festivals.
My name is Steven Malkus and I have been dancing and teaching for thirty years. I have an MFA in choreography, worked with the PBS series Dance In America, and most recently was the director of a non-profit branch of a major film/video editing company called the Montage Group. My wife,Georgiana Holmes, my key collaborator, danced with Louis Falco, Pauline Koner and Pilobolus and has also taught in colleges and schools.
What we are looking for in terms of the Spring2000 festival is roughly 5 to 8 other artists with a similar passion to share their work more directly and who feel they could increase their student following through such exposure.
If the festival as described does not interest you, don’t hestitate, however, to look for and use the
Virtual Dance Festival Website later this Summer for dance or body-arts classes, performances or other similar gatherings.
Steven Malkus
Project Catalyst