Some of the organizers of Time Share relate the background on how and why this collaboration came to be.
Tatyana describing Time Share to Buck Wanner, Siobhan Burke and Tara Willis in preparation for devising their “panels” :
This past fall, some previous organizers of both CCC and AUNTS (including Jmy Leary, Anna Sperber, Jen Rosenblit, Laurie Berg, myself, Lili Dirks-Goodman, Tess Dworman, Laurel Atwell and Irfana Jetha) had an ad hoc “board meeting” assessing impact that both of these platforms have on the community. With each model, what are the strongest parts, and what are the weakest parts? Where do we feel excited, and where do we feel frustrated? How do we go forward each year with minimal effort, maximal enjoyment and benefit, without becoming this set-in-stone institutional model?
There were concrete issues concerning money. In both cases, a fiscal conduit was needed to receive support. In AUNTS case it was an individual artist’s own fiscal sponsorship. In past years for CCC we used Movement Research, but that relationship seemed to have some implicit difficulties and even competing interests. We talked about pros and cons of forming a joint nonprofit. But generally all agreed that we didn’t have an interest in birthing a new organization to take care of for the next 10 years. There is something freeing in our rebel nature, and also something of a burden.
Moving forward it was the generally agreed that some sort of strategic partnership between AUNTS and CCC made sense. That’s when a sub-committee of me, Jen, Laurie and Lili broke off to discuss something more “radical.” We were talking about localization and visibility. Jen had this crazy idea to rent Danspace for a week! We briefly discussed how we often felt that the festival structure was more work than it was worth, but with our two organizations, we possibly had a leg up because everyone already knows what we do. All we have to do is localize it and create visibility. That’s when Lili and Laurie found the call for proposals for St. Nick’s Alliance, for 3-month residencies where we would have 24-hour access…a dream!
We applied and got the residency. We’re hoping to create a structure for things to be more localized, reliable, communal, casual, etc. The way it’s set up now is that there will be an AUNTS chain curation each Saturday night. During the week, M-F from 10-12 and 12:30-2:30pm there will be CLASS. The afternoons are group open rehearsals. The ideas for the monthly community dinners is to give people yet another opportunity to socialize. And what better way to lead into that, but with stimulating participatory discussion?
This little slogan popped out in our discussions “It’s not a hole, we made it.” Meaning, no one asked us to do this. This was not an existing model, but one we forged together for a joint purpose.
Liliana Dirks-Goodman adds:
One thing that has been interesting about the process for me is how organic our collaborative working process has been. Tatyana, Jen, Laurie and I separated out because of our shared interests and motivation, then things progressed with Tatyana, Laurie and I because of that same reason as well as a certain level of comfort and trust that was being developed. In those beginning stages where we were coming to actualize the idea and flush out what the “project” was going to be it seemed amazing how well we worked together and how diverse our talents were, I felt like we each had a special thing we were good at. We are where we are not because we set out to do something specific, we are where we are simply because we set out.
In the first “board meeting” we also talked a lot about the way we all occupy spaces and our current and past transient nature and if we need/want in the future to establish a home base, another step in formalizing our “organizations.” AUNTS had a sort of home base when I lived in the loft and that was great for providing the flexibility to just do a quick and cheap event but it also kind of locked us into a specific kind of show that performers and audience could get used to and come to expect. We went back and forth on this a lot, liking the ease of doing our business in a known environment but not liking the boringness that comes from being a known. I think the pop-up idea came from this, we could experiment with a partnership between AUNTS and CCC as well as have an established home base for a set amount of time.
Attached photos are of the floor construction last week. Lili was the head engineer on this thing, with construction help from Laurie, Tatyana, Tess, Meredith Boggia and Jim Byrne. Otto (the baby) was there too. We built our own sprung floor for about $1000 and covered it with re-purposed vinyl from Build it Green. It’s almost ready to go!
Check out the various events Time Share is hosting over the next three months at the websites of AUNTS and CCC. The first event is this Saturday, May 11! Next week, Buck Wanner hosts the first Dinner and Discussion with Anna Sperber, Donna Uchizono and Jodi Melnick on Wednesday, May 15.
