We recently connected with Brittany Delany and have shared our conversation below.

Brittany, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Almost every entrepreneur we know has considered donating a portion of their sales to an organization or cause – how did you make the decision of whether to donate? We’d love to hear the backstory if you’re open to sharing the details.

As co-director of GROUND SERIES dance & social justice collective, I work to amplify local justice initiatives in our research, practice and performances. We partner with community stewards and target audiences to receive pointed feedback and accountability before, during, and after the work is shown.We perform in spaces not usually activated by dance, creating opportunities for unexpected audiences and radical accessibility. Our performances redistribute resources to historically marginalized site stewards, community partners, or collective members.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I co-founded GROUND SERIES with Sarah Ashkin in 2012. Our mission is to use performance to practice place-based justice, with accountability to history, land, and body. GROUND SERIES performances use post-modern dance, clowning, performance art, interdisciplinary scholarship, and social practice to diagram the complexities of our social political moment. The works are tender, relentless, funny, compositionally dense, and honor discomfort and failure. Our collective offers tailored educational programming to complement our practice and performance work. I am most proud of our site-specific approach to dancemaking, which endeavors to forge relationships between the people making the work, the people experiencing the work, and the places where the work is made. We have contributed research and scholarship to publications, podcasts and journals. In addition to stewarding GROUND SERIES, I choreograph and dance with a range of artists, musicians, dancers and writers. Hip hop aesthetics such as the break, satire, remix, cypher, one-upmanship, and innovation are key values in my choreography and movement. I have learned from some of the pioneers at hip hop events around the world. Postmodern sensibilities of abstract composition and quirky, gestural movement also underscore my approach and design. Hip hop cyphers and contact improvisation jams continue to inspire me to participate in and cultivate inclusive spaces for creative experimentation and dialogues.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

I met my co-founder Sarah Ashkin at Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut) in the dance department.
While earning my Bachelor’s degree in Dance Choreography & Performance, I studied with Pedro Alejandro and Ronald Burton, and was influenced by visiting artists including Eiko Otake, Bill T. Jones, Brian Brooks, Liz Lerman and Ronald K. Brown.

GROUND SERIES dance collective began to assemble in the mid-2000s, somewhere between Wesleyan University, Joshua Tree National Park, and the Santa Fe River Arroyo. Sharing a background in experimental community-based performance, critical theory, and somatic healing practices, early members Sarah Ashkin, Paolo Speirn, Samantha Sherman, Aine McCarthy, Miles Tokunow, Shayna Keller and I began to gather, project by project, to create site-specific works.

In 2012, while both living in the San Francisco/Bay Area, Sarah and I co-founded GROUND SERIES while producing events at the Temescal Arts Center in Oakland.

GROUND SERIES moved with its founders from the San Francisco Bay Area to Philadelphia, then to Santa Fe, New Mexico, onto London and then to Los Angeles, CA. The collective now exists as a radiant web of artists, partners, and community members throughout the United States. GROUND SERIES has collaborated with upwards of 40 artists to curate, produce, and choreograph over 25 performances, reaching thousands of audience members and students across the US and UK.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

As the product of millennial culture workers, GROUND SERIES was established in the era of the global climate crisis, the Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality and mass incarceration, the #NODAPL action on the Standing Rock Reservation, ongoing war in the Middle East, the #MeToo movement, as well as the rise of ICE, mass deportation, and privatized immigrant detention. By 2016, GROUND SERIES shifted toward social justice and has committed to a creative practice that invites performers, audiences, and students to dismantle colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://brittanydelany.weebly.com/
• Instagram: @brittanydelany
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brittanydelany
• Other: https://www.groundseries.org/

Image Credits

Personal photo is by Labkhand Olfatmanesh.
Additional photos: 1. Photo by Rush Varela Photography, Courtesy of Heidi Duckler Dance.
2. Photo by Jonathan Godoy.
3. Photo by MK
4. Photo by Monica Morones
5. Photo by Angie Rizzo
6. Photo by Brooke Anderson
7. Photo by New Mexico School for the Arts
8. Photo by Monica Morones