We caught up with the brilliant and insightful NewBrese Dance Project a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi NewBrese Dance, thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

I think the project we are working on currently has been the most meaningful and exciting. We are currently working on an evening length work inspired by Salvador Dali’s painting “The Persistence of Memory”. I have been fascinated with this idea about the passing of time and the distortion of it. This is one of my favorite paintings and I recently attended a seminar about Salvador Dali and how he came to create this work. I’m really inspired by the showcasing of warped senses of reality and the idea that time is never stopping nor changing yet we as individuals are. We have also begun bringing dialogue into our work with this project and we are all super excited for our work to take on a new meaning with it. We have been researching quotes about the passage of time and creating our own poems/ writings based on that, which will be overlayed in our sound score and/ or spoken on stage. Having these new ideas being added into our work is super exciting for us and I cannot wait to see where this project goes.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

NewBrese Dance Project is a physical contemporary dance company led by founders/ co-directors Rachel Calabrese and Sawyer Newsome. Our work explores the ideas of character development and narrative as a means to showcase the complexity of interpersonal relationships. As creators, we are inspired by our past experiences and how we can showcase the most raw version of ourselves to our audience. We love the art of collaboration and being able to share our dancers’ stories in our work as well, so they have more say in what the work is about and how it can be shown to the audience. Investigating the physicality of movement and how its momentum can be the driving force behind each impulse is at the forefront of our work, doing this through movement practices of floorwork flow, partnering, and storytelling. We love creating a narrative for the audience to follow so they can come on the journey along with us of whatever realm we are trying to bring ourselves into.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I think for us, as well as our collaborators, the goal is to make space for ourselves to share our work and to create a community that we can share it with. We really just love the art of creation and being able to go into a studio and create work that has been on our minds and is meaningful to us.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

That there’s not one way or one road to get to something. I think a lot of the times we look at someone we are inspired by and see their journey and think that in order to get to where they are/ where we aspire to be our journey also has to look like theirs. And when it doesn’t we get frustrated. However, something I continually have to remind myself of, and what i think others do to, is that there are multiple ways to get to the same result. It’s okay for your path to look different from others, that’s the uniqueness of each of our journeys.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://newbresedance.wixsite.com/my-site
• Instagram: newbrese_danceproject
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@newbrese_danceproject/featured
• Other: https://linktr.ee/newbrese_danceproject

Image Credits
John Evans Steven Pisano Mark Harris