About Us
Sylvestre Wilde Dance Collective is a collaborative group of dance makers who join forces to create works together that they cannot make on their own. To do this, we let the dance lead the way and try to keep our rehearsal structure as level and non-hierarchical as possible. Naturally, this way of working lends to more conflict, but we think this allows for more creative possibilities as multiple creative minds converse together.
Our Philosophy |
We reject the entertainment culture of brain washing viewers into passive numbness and acceptance of the way things are. Instead we seek to inspire and ignite conversations, questions, deeper understandings, and empathy about the world and the people who inhabit it. The dances we collaboratively create are not “preachy” but instead make use of subtle images from pop-culture translated and weaved into contemporary modern dance movements and phrases. Like the stories of the popular children's author, Dr. Seuss, our works are structured in layers, from the simplest concrete understandings to the more abstract metaphorical meanings, so that they are accessible to a range of audience members. We value movements that are awkward and whimsical; movements that respond to gravity with honesty and movements that make us question the existence of that natural force entirely. In a battle against perfectionism, we are learning to appreciate mistakes, conflict, glorious failures, and the new exciting movement possibilities that they lead to.
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Our History |
Jessica Murphy, the founder of SWDC, completed her undergraduate degree in an education program that focused on differentiation, which is an approach to teaching where curriculum, instruction, and assessment are manipulated to best fit the needs of each learner. Developing her teaching style in this program, it was natural to admire the progressive educational philosophies of John Dewey and Paulo Freire for their ideas about how to make education more student-centered and non-hierarchical. She modeled her teaching philosophy after these ideals; however, this philosophy did not translate into her dance-making practices. As she developed her culminating project for her MFA in Dance degree, she wondered how she could lessen the hierarchical structure of her dance-making process in order to strengthen and empower the voices of the entire cast to create a body of equals. Murphy and her cast collaborated to create a system of working that allowed for them to maintain a more horizontal power structure while creating a world for the audience that highlighted their collective vision. Murphy felt it was too selfish to name the group and the work they had created after herself as that would go against their collaborative mission. At a project brainstorming dinner with collaborator, Cylene Walker-Willis, she began to scribble company name ideas on a napkin. After many terrible ideas, Cylene suggested the Latin adjective "sylvestris" which in English means "wild". The word seemed too short to stand alone so Murphy added the English translation behind it and played with the spelling a bit so it would seem more like a name, and thus the collaborative alter ego, Sylvestre Wilde was born.
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