WHO WE ARE

I am a choreographer, performer, and visual artist who makes video, installation, sculpture, and live performance.

I am raising $50,000 to support the creation of a multi-year interdisciplinary project that includes: An installation made up of rooms designed to activate sensorial choreographies in viewers/participants, A durational performance/activation inside the installation for a live audience, and a series of videos where Boot Beast leads us in collective practices of breathwork, ASMR, somatic practice and fitness.

We will be in residence at New York University and the Chocolate Factory this year developing the project.

WHAT WE ARE RAISING FUNDS FOR

This phase of the project, which will take place over the next six months, will put systems in place that will keep consistent income coming in to support the project. I am using these funds to build these systems. This is the most important funding phase of the project and will keep us independent of foundation funding, which is rapidly going away in the U.S.

The funds will pay for the launch of a merch line, custom-made prints of my artwork, and producing of the video aspect of the project. It will cover set design, production, and materials for shooting the videos, DP, composer, and other labor fees. It will also allow us to pilot a new program of our studio, where Kate custom makes dances inside people's homes.

Help us launch systems for a more sustainable way of funding my art work and the beautiful collaborators i work with, where we are not dependent on the whims of funding trends or the non-profit sector. Help us make this important transition today!

ABOUT THE BOOT BEAST PROJECT

The work centers pleasure, slowness, sensuality, ritual and ecstatic practices as ways to hold aging, disability, and collective grief.

The piece is a series of collective rituals for healing- expressed through interactive videos online, performances, and installation design– all designed to activate the viewer’s senses.

The research for this piece derives from my experience doing traditionally femme-centered kinds of labor for money, including being an go-go dancer, fitness instructor, and healer, and uses ritual, pleasure and the ecstatic as tools for processing the immense grief of this moment. It reframes the group fitness class and the strip club as religious sites– portals for transformation and healing.

How can we center desire, play, pleasure, and slowness as forms of liberation in a time when our collective safety and wellness is under threat?

Thank you for being part of this journey, and for believing in the power of live art to illuminate, heal, and transform. Whether you are able to give $5 or $5,000, you are helping us bring this work to life.

xoxooxoxox

Kate

WHO WE ARE

Kate Watson-Wallace is an interdisciplinary artist based between New York City and Los Angeles who works as a director, choreographer and movement director for live performance, music videos, and video installation. Choreography credits include: St. Vincent’s performance of “Los Ageless” on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Alex Da Corte’s Rubber Pencil Devil at the Carnegie International & Venice Biennale, St. Vincent’s “New York” video, (dir. Alex Da Corte), choreography for music videos, tour footage and live stage shows for Animal Collective, Panda Bear, Black Dice (dir. Danny Perez), Xenia Rubinos, Elvis Costello, and ManMan, and a re-imagined version of Allan Kaprow’s “Chicken,” by Alex Da Corte.

Described by The New York Times as a place where "Wild Imagination ruled," her performance/installation work has been funded by multiple foundations including, Map Fund, Doris Duke, Creative Capital, Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, with premieres at venues including Summerstage Central Park, Fringe Arts, Redcat, the Gaudeamus Festival in Utrecht (with musician Bakudi Scream), and the Skaftfell Center for Art in Iceland. She has been a Pew Fellow in Choreography, a movement Research Artist-in-Residence, and a Gibney Dance DIP resident Artist. Recent work includes an interactive experience, “Ecology of Care,” created in collaboration with David Thomson that included a performance lecture and sound pieces based on questions around care for Hauser & Wirth in New York City.

She holds an MFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

SUPPORTERS

This research has been developing over multiple years and contexts- starting at a Movement Research residency in New York City, and throughout the pandemic at a Gibney Dance residency in New York City and a Door of the Desert Residency in Joshua Tree, CA. (with collaborator Brook D'Leau).

In the coming year, I will be slowly developing the work through the support of New York University’s Interdisciplinary Research MFA program in choreography at Tisch School of the Arts, and through a residency at the Chocolate Factory in New York City.

No sweepstakes, giveaways, or returns on investment are offered in exchange for any donations made to this GoFundMe.