merde! Dance Company

After three years of building our company, creating together, and being part of this wonderful, expansive, and supportive community - we have decided to face this big obstacle that seems to always get in the way... After applying to many grants and spending a little more than just our time and effort on our goals, we have decided to turn to our community! Honestly, we have been reluctant to ask our peers for support for many years but right now, we feel so inspired and called to keep creating that we thought you might be inspired too.

For us, creating and dancing together has helped us through some of the hardest parts of our lives. We have seen the power of movement, creation, and friendship, come together in this group in experiences we deeply value. Helping us is supporting the belief in collaborative art as a powerful medium for connection and expression.

A little more about us:

“merde!” is a dance troupe composed of six Vermont dancers and choreographers. We are a fully collaborative troupe that embraces a wide spectrum of dance genres. The passion we each share for dance, performance, and entertainment, paired with a deep love and respect for each other, is the backbone of what we do.

We have seen an increase in attention since putting out videos and we love the connections we create when we perform and post random silliness from rehearsals on social media - However, these projects and videos have always come at a cost to us, and we recognize that this is not a sustainable way to continue to create the content we need and know we are capable of. We have had to limit our ideas to be able to afford each project. While this has led to us getting creative, we also know there is room for so much more creativity if we had more financial wiggle room. Since we believe in compensating artists for their time and talent, this funding would help go towards compensating collaborators such as a videographer who could help us hone in on our visions in a more specific way. Funding would help us create content in a more monetarily sustainable way, allow for more visibility that will land us opportunities to contribute to fun and meaningful experiences in our community and events that also compensate us for our time and energy.

Whew! We know that is a lot, but really- any amount helps us to achieve our dreams and we look forward to sharing more about the project we are currently working on as the weeks go by. Thank you for considering - we are so grateful to be a part of this community.