BRIDGE PROJECT 2025
Applications Due | SEP 1 at 11:59 PM
Velocity invites Seattle-based emerging choreographers to apply for Bridge Project 2025, presented this year in partnership with Base Experimental Arts + Space.
Bridge Project is the first step on Velocity’s ladder of core residency programming and is designed to bridge an initial connection between Seattle’s emerging dance artists and Velocity and its audience. Every year, this six week residency offers three choreographers up to 50 hours of rehearsal space each to research and present a new 20 minute dance work. Velocity provides each choreographer with an artist stipend, rehearsal space, + creative, financial, and administrative support during the research and presentation process.
This program is for movement-based artists who have been making work in the greater Seattle area for 5 years or less and self-identify as an emerging dance artist. Ideal applicants are interested in connection, mentorship, and challenging/deepening their choreographic process.
This program aims to expand their skills on the following:
- Artistic mentorship: mentorship and community support to make artistically innovative projects.
- Financial resources: fees to pay yourself, your collaborators, and your project expenses
- Reciprocal Relationship building: understanding your part in the larger ecology, and how to work collaboratively to connect and sustain your career within your ecosystem of artistic collaborators, local and national presenters, funders, and audiences.
- Business development: how to manage projects and undertake long-term collaborations and career planning.
Selected choreographers will receive:
- 50 hrs of rehearsal space at Base
- Artist Stipend of $1500
- Lighting design by Velocity technical staff
- Mentorship and production support from Velocity staff and Curating Artist in Residence
- 4 in-person performances that are fully produced
- Documentation + Photos of the new work
PROGRAM COMMITMENTS
Important Dates [selected choreographers must be available for all of the following]:
- Sun, SEP 1 | 11:59pm – Applications Close
- Fri, SEP 27 | 12-1:30pm – Production Meeting about Budget, Funding, Rehearsal/Audition Collaboration
- Fri, OCT 18 | Production Meeting- Framing, talking about your work and contextualizing.
- JAN 1-FEB 2 | Artists will schedule their own times with Creative Producer no less than 50 hours for the 5 weeks– Intensive residency @ Base
- Sat, JAN 18 | 12-4PM – Production showing @ Base
- 1 hour for each artist – showing and then discussion with designers
- All artists present for each artist
- FEB 3-4 | TBD – 2-hr tech rehearsal @ Base
- Tues, FEB 4 | 6:30pm – 3-hr tech run @ Base
- Wed, FEB 5 | 6:30pm – 3-hr dress rehearsal @ Base
- FEB 6-8 | 7:30pm [Saturday 2pm + 7:30pm] – Performances @ Base
THE APPLICATION
This application will close on September 1, 2024 at 11:59pm, and we are not able to accept late applications.
If you have questions or would like to speak to someone about your application, please contact Amy O’Neal: amy@velocitydancecenter.org
All received applications will be reviewed through a panel process. The panel will be comprised of Velocity Curating Artist in Residence Amy O’Neal, Creative Producer Shane Donohue, Nia Amina Minor, and Hannah Simmons. Panelists will review each application and score proposals using the below criteria, with scores from strongly meets criteria – somewhat meets criteria – does not meet criteria.
The highest scoring applications will be advanced to a discussion stage, where the panel will curate three projects to select for this year’s cohort. Velocity staff + CAiR will be available to provide feedback on unsuccessful applications upon request.
MEET THE CURATORIAL PANEL
SHANE DONOHUE
VELOCITY CREATIVE PRODUCER
Shane Donohue (he/they) is a Seattle based dance artist currently working as co-top with Drama Tops and Creative Producer at Velocity Dance Center. He works closely with zoe | juniper as a dancer and rehearsal director. He has set work with, and for, Zoe Scofield at the University of Washington, Strictly Seattle, Whim W’him, Bard Summerscape’s production of “Le Roi Arthus” in 2021. His work has been seen in Next Fest Northwest. He also works as an artistic collaborator and performer with Kim Lusk, Kinesis Project, Scott Shoemaker’s “:PROBED”, and BenDeLaCreme and Jinkx Monsoon’s Holiday Special in the live, national tour and on Hulu. Shane graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point with a BA in Dance.
NIA-AMINA MINOR
VELOCITY ARTIST CIRCLE/ GUEST CURATOR
Nia-Amina Minor is a movement artist originally from Los Angeles. She approaches her physical practice as an imaginative space grounded in rhythm where improvisation, Black vernacular movement, and choreography meet. Her creative work focuses on the body and what it carries, using physical and archival research to explore memory and history.
As an independent artist, Nia-Amina has performed and presented original work at University of Washington, MOHAI, The Luminary St. Louis, Seattle Art Museum, WaNaWari, CD Forum, Seattle Black Film Festival, Reflections Festival, Seattle International Dance Festival (SIDF), and Pacific Northwest Ballet. From 2016-2021, Nia-Amina was Company Artist and Community Engagement Coordinator at Spectrum Dance Theater. She performed in acclaimed works created by Donald Byrd including Rap on Race, Shot, and Strange Fruit receiving a Seattle Dance Crush Award for her performance in Shot. Prior to relocating to Seattle, Nia-Amina was a co-founder and former curator of Los Angeles based collective, No)one Art House.
Nia-Amina has taught, guest lectured, and been a visiting artist at CalArts, University of Washington, Saddleback College, Cypress College, and UC Irvine. She holds a MFA from UC Irvine and a BA from Stanford University.
In 2021, Nia-Amina was recognized as Dance Magazine’s 25 Artists to Watch. Currently, she is a Velocity Dance Center Made in Seattle Artist in Residence.
HANNAH SIMMONS
VELOCITY ARTIST CIRCLE/ GUEST CURATOR
Hannah is a multi-disciplinary performer, creator, and educator living and working in Seattle. She holds a B.A. from Bennington College in dance and mathematics. Her choreographies and installations are centered around queering forms and hybridizing reality and fiction, in service of giving viewers a dynamic and unusual perspective on their own bodies. Her recent work has been supported by Velocity Dance Center, NWFF’s Collective Power Fund, MAP Fund’s inaugural microgrant initiative, Jack Straw Cultural Center, Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture, 4Culture, and the Freeway Park Association. She is passionate about communal care, collaboration, and building sustainable and reciprocal systems of support for artists.
AMY O'NEAL
VELOCITY CURATING ARTIST IN RESIDENCE
Amy O’Neal (she/they) is a dancer, choreographer, curator, and dance educator merging contemporary and hip-hop dance since 2000 to challenge notions of race, gender, and the sampling nature of innovation. She teaches and performs nationally and internationally and choreographs for concert dance, experimental performance, dance film, music video, and virtual reality. From 2000 to 2010, along with musician and composer Zeke Keeble, O’Neal co-directed locust, a dance/music/video hybrid performance company based in Seattle. From 2010 until now, she works project to project creating dance experiences merging practices and values of hip hop and house dance culture with experimental performance. O’Neal is a grantee of Creative Capital, National Performance Network, National Dance Project, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts among others. She is a two-time Artist Trust Fellow, DanceWEB/Impulstanz scholar, and Herb Alpert Award nominee with a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts, where she earned the first Distinguished Alumni Award in 2014. After 20 years in Seattle (15 of those teaching and creating at Velocity Dance Center) O’Neal moved to Los Angeles in 2016. She joined the faculty of the University of Southern California Glorya Kaufman School of Dance in 2018 where she teaches hip-hop, house, contemporary, composition, improvisation techniques, Pilates mat, and lectures on Black social dance history, practices, and media literacy. She is currently working on her next evening length work A Trio and developing a research and performance platform called The Hybrid Lab: Conversations in Merging Dance Cultures.