Caitlin Trainor lives and dances in New York City. She fell in love with the art form at Skidmore College and hasn't looked back since - we're proud to have her dedication and energy as part of the RocketHub community. Today she directs Trainor Dance and is on the faculty at Barnard College/Columbia University.

Trainor Dance is a small dance company getting ready to produce its first independent show. This is where crowdfunding and RocketHub have come in. I spoke with Caitlin about her project and the uniqueness of crowdfunding in the dance world.

There are two pieces on the program for the fall concert - and each is quite different in terms of inspiration. The first piece, Digital Origami, began with a scrap of movement that intrigued me. That scrap was something that I "found" years back, on another dancer, who moved in a completely different way than I do. His slender, delicately muscled body appeared to be collapsing as he moved; his actions appeared simply as a folding of the joints, each movement the inevitable outcome of the previous. In my robust, muscular body this silky movement felt foreign. I wondered what it would feel like to be in his skin, and began experimenting with this idea of folding, collapsing, inevitability, eventually developing a movement phrase around it.   

Fast forward 8 years. While on artistic sojourn in Northern England, I found myself returning to the phrase. Only now, this bit of material started to take on a testiness, an insistent push and pull with the floor, not unlike what I was feeling as an outsider living in a traditional society. Coincidentally or not, I became interested in tight, traditional ways of organizing movement, such as unison and canon movement, which can be very satisfying visually but are considered somewhat passe in NY art dance circles.  

From within this detailed and structured movement, some wild, uncontrolled outbursts of movement began to emerge. These were primal and loose, textured with vibration and full bodied partnering. As the piece began to take shape, the dancers appeared more and more to me to be like cogs in some kind of great machine on the verge of combustion. Animalistic impulses strain against precise, structured movements, not unlike the the individual pressing into a stratified society, or the human being interacting with technology. The functions of computers depend on sequencing of ones and zeros, yet human beings, for whom these machines have become so indispensable, are driven by appetite, impulse, and desire. 

Also on the program for our concert is ORBit, a visual odyssey based around the use of giant meteorological balloons. In terms of inspiration, I just thought the idea of using these giant colorful balloons would be so incredibly fun! I have always been fascinated by the movement of cosmic bodies, and so we have used the ideas of planetary motion, black holes, shooting stars, magnetism and gravity as a springboard for creating the piece.  

As for why the work is important to me, that is hard to say!  After survival, love and dance are the most important things in life for me. Like many artists, I suppose that on some level, I am on a quest for meaning. Somehow making art makes sense, despite it's utter impracticality. The fact that art, something so unessential to physical survival, exists in cultures rich and poor, ancient and modern, amazes me. The persistence of the arts though out history and across the globe points to something very fundamental in the human spirit. And that unnameable something is what I am chasing when I get up every morning and pack my sweats for another day in the studio.  

Your spirit comes across very powerfully. How have you translated this inspiration into your crowdfunding campaign?

My experience as a crowdfunding pioneer has been great!  Supporters have been stepping forward to help out and we are off to a great start. My advice to anyone who wants to give it a shot is to be prepared to do the work that goes into making the campaign happen. In a sense, you really earn the money contributed to the project because the campaign takes a lot time to organize and implement properly! However, the process can sharpen your ability to write and speak clearly about your work, which is very useful in engaging audiences and potential contributors.

That's great advice. Thank you Caitlin for bringing your project to the world and the RocketHub community. Get your tickets and other rewards, here.

-Vlad