We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Payge Lecakes. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Payge below.

Alright, Payge thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

My personal creative process, whether relating to a specific project or my practice overall, is and will continue to be an ongoing journey. I have choreographed since I was a kid, beginning with small performances for my parents with the help of my sisters and friends and then more formally through smaller opportunities offered by my dance studio. Although I have always been passionate about movement generation, I only really started honing in on my craft and individual voice in high school when I was given the chance to choreograph for a showcase through the summer intensive that I was attending, Earl Mosley’s Institute of the Arts. The chance to present a work I had created alongside actual working professionals was a new experience for me and brought with it a lot of conflicting excitement and pressure. It taught me that, as a choreographer, it is as much a part of your job to facilitate a space as to create a composition, and really drove home how instrumental leading with empathy and openness would be if I were to pursue this further. I knew I needed to learn how to establish a community that would allow the dancers in the space to freely express themselves as well as the ideas I was trying to get across, a multitude that I saw as being mutually beneficial to my work and the individuals I was working with.

I stayed consistent with my practice while I attended the Conservatory of Dance at SUNY Purchase College, where I pursued and attained a BFA in Dance with a concentration in Composition. There, I began to unlock the potential that an interdisciplinary approach would bring to my work. I gained experience working with non-dancers, having worked as a co-choreographer/movement director for a couple of plays produced by Purchase’s Conservatory of Theatre Arts, and deeper academic knowledge on the themes and constructs my work tended to explore through my second degree, a BA in Gender Studies. It was also during this time that I began experimenting with dance films, brought on primarily by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. When faced with the volatility of the career I had chosen, seeing how the emergence of COVID-19 had impacted the job security of many within the performing arts field, I sought to widen the ways in which I was creating my art, leading me to expand my capacity for communication through movement via film. This not only heightened my craft by allowing me to access a different form for it but also enabled me to remain active within it when in-person performances were unavailable, ultimately leading me to participate in the Dance is Activism Film Festival where I received the accolade of “Best Choreography”. My time at Purchase was highly instrumental to the development of my craft, giving me the time, space, and resources I needed to grow in my choreographic voice while also equipping me with formal knowledge of compositional methods and practices that allowed me to develop a strong foundation on which to build my professional career and collective, Not a Dance Company.

Although I technically established Not a Dance Company during my time at Purchase, the collective only really blossomed after graduating. It became the home for my choreographic pursuits, a safe space to build, share, and expand upon my craft. To this day, a human-first, interdisciplinary approach remains the cornerstone of my artistic practice, allowing me to actively avoid many of the pitfalls of the traditional dance company, who, oftentimes, encourage homogenization of the individual for the sake of salable uniformity. To me, dance is unique in its communicative ability, one that is only heightened by allowing the free expression of a diverse array of perspectives and experiences. By encouraging this within my work, I believe that it gains the ability to transcend my personal vision and experience to become more wholly representative, diversely accessible, and universally relevant. This not only strengthens the efficacy of my mission but also my craft itself, providing me with a strong sense of purpose within my art and a steady guiding light in my continual journey toward developing and improving it.

Payge, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Not A Dance Company’s work strives to unpack, explore, and critically analyze societal patterns, constructs, and impacts as independent movement artists within a communal structure, utilizing a human-first, interdisciplinary but dance-centered approach to art-making. Our past repertory has been focused on themes of socialization and the institutions that implement such, queer identity, and the impact of capitalism on the individuals subject to and living under it, to name a few. As a strong believer in dance as a form of communication, I seek to create somatic explorations of the human condition, picking apart the more deeply rooted yet relatively unquestioned aspects of modern life through the use of movement, text, and physical theater in a way that can be shared and understood by all who take part in and observe it. I hold Not A Dance Company as an extension of this compositional intention, challenging the institution of ‘the dance company’ by seeking and practicing more equitable alternatives that safeguard the autonomy and identities of each artist as separate individuals, most notably through the provision of space for personal experience and expression through the work produced within the collective. By operating within this mode, I hope for the work created within NADC to surpass the limits of my own perspectives and experiences, ultimately allowing for such to be more universally and diversely accessible, representative, and relevant.

As a collective, we have participated in Alpha Omega Theatrical Dance Company’s STUDIO TO STAGE Residency Program (2025) and have performed at such venues as Dancing Beyond (2024, 2025), presented by Earl Mosley’s Diversity of Dance in support of Dance Against Cancer and the American Cancer Society, and the Uptown Rising Performance Series (2021, 2023, 2024), presented by Bridge for Dance. Our dance films have been featured at DAD ICE (2021), an independently organized interdisciplinary movement arts festival for students at SUNY Purchase College, and the Dance is Activism Film Festival (2021), presented by Earl Mosley’s Diversity of Dance, Bridge for Dance, and the Producers Club, where we received the accolade of “Best Choreography”. Our latest dance film, FUNHOUSE, has recently been accepted into Dance Source Houston’s Barnstorm Dance Fest (2025).

Outside of my work with Not A Dance Company, I have presented work during Earl Mosley’s Institute of the Arts (2018-2020) and in Dance Against Cancer: THE YOUTH MOVEMENT (2017-2019) and was also a co-choreographer and movement director for the Conservatory of Theatre Arts at SUNY Purchase’s 2023 production of Good Goods, directed by Stephanie Weeks, and Back County Crimes, directed by Leon Addison Brown. I am also a freelance movement artist; having worked with the Joyce King Dance Company, Cat Cogliandro’s cat.astrophe!, and Fredrick Earl Mosley, to name a few; a dance teacher, and currently work as the Digital Media and Communications Manager for Earl Mosley’s Diversity of Dance in addition to offering affordable freelance dance support services to assist other artists with media-related, administrative, and performance preparation needs that are conventionally only accessible to larger dance institutions.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

As I have mentioned, I see dance as an art form that is uniquely suited for communication. Especially within the currently ruling attention economy, where anger and division are rewarded and empathetic connection is getting harder and harder to come by, I believe that dance can make pathways to enable a deeper understanding of one another and, subsequently, real social change. As a physical form of communication, it crosses boundaries that would otherwise be preventative, tapping into our innate humanness and raw emotions and allowing us to be more receptive to perspectives outside our own. With NADC and my work within it, I wish to harness this power in order to spark more critical thinking of the systems that we all both consciously and unconsciously operate under, encouraging open conversations on the many ways in which they maintain hegemonies that limit the autonomy and power of even those that supposedly benefit from them. My ultimate goal is to use my creative process and its products to slowly chip away at the walls that have been constructed to divide us, paving the way for a future wherein we all are able to freely and safely exist and be in community with one another as our true and authentic selves.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

It is and is, further, becoming even more difficult to pursue dance, as well as art generally, as a full-time profession. I personally have to maintain multiple, more traditional sources of income to enable my artistic practice and know that I am not within the minority in that. In order to establish a creative ecosystem that is not only thriving but consistent in its stability, there needs to be more reliable and accessible funding for dance and movement arts. As it stands, the majority of funding in the dance field is delegated to a handful of dance institutions, oftentimes falling within the category of traditional dance companies that do not necessarily represent the changing trends of the field and the needs of the majority of dance professionals. Existing resources for freelance artists, which make up this majority, are relatively scarce and unstable, reliant on adherence to the whims of powerful individuals and government entities and without the basic benefits that are associated with professional careers in non-artistic fields, such as job security and health insurance. This is not an environment that encourages the freedom of expression that dance is capable of, much less the stability that dance professionals need in order to live off of their art, and rather bolsters a scarcity mindset that is highly detrimental to real community formation within the field. For these reasons, there needs to be more established and reliable resources for dance professionals, financially and in terms of professional benefits and information sharing, that are openly accessible to all who wish to pursue the field. Conversations within the field also need to be had regarding existing financial and social barriers to dance training, establishing a more equitable entrance into the field at the pre-professional level. Although these conversations have begun to happen in small pockets of the dance community, there needs to be more foundational adaptations made to how it is structured and operated in order for any real change to be made. Lastly, the field as a whole needs to become adaptable to the changing landscape of what being a dance professional looks like now, reevaluating existing systems of support to ensure that they are representative of and equipped to maintain the current demographics and needs of dance professionals. Although these are by no means the only solutions to the existing systemic issues in the dance field, they are a few examples of what needs to be done in order to support dance artists and the dance community at large.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.paygelecakes.com/notadancecompany
• Instagram: @thatdancerpayge, @notadancecompany
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thatdancerpayge

Image Credits

All credits are included in the separate file names but, for your reference, all photos were taken by Aidan Rivera.