The DECAGON Project at IndyFringe

Help The DECAGON Project get to IndyFringe!

After nearly two years of development, our first public presentation of The DECAGON Project is finally happening! We are beyond excited to have been selected to perform at this summer’s IndyFringe Theater Festival among a lineup of incredible performance works.

We’ve Reached Our Goal!

Thanks to everyone who’s contributed to The DECAGON Project, we’ve officially met our fundraising goal! Because of your support, we can meet both our basic costs and pay our artists for their time and work. We cannot thank you enough, and we’re so grateful to the community that has rallied behind the creation of this work. While we’ve met our goal, we’re keeping this GoFundMe open—anything you donate on top of our $10,000 goal will go towards supporting The 46 Minutes Collective’s work in the long term. The DECAGON Project at IndyFringe is a beginning. And with your help, we’re excited to see what comes next.

Project Description

“It’s order out of chaos. It's all of these things... all of these fundamental units coming together to make something bigger.”

The DECAGON Project explores the relationship between performer and audience via methods of chance that (hopefully) bring about moments of real connection beyond the supposed “fourth wall.” In a unique combination of personal interviews, dance improvisation, and community-driven creation, we ask whether it's accident, fate, or maybe a little of both that bring us together in community.

This piece started as a senior project in choreography for choreographer and lead producer Hannah Littman in their final year at Vassar College. This first iteration—simply titled A DECAGON—was an experiment in audience interaction and live chance elements. The original dialogue came verbatim from two interviews between dramaturg Avi Klipfel and performer Elliot Hoke (with contributions by performer Sloane Burling). Now post-graduation, this piece has been revamped and reimagined for a world outside of the college bubble. All dialogue spoken in The DECAGON Project is still spoken verbatim from interviews with the entire cast and crew on why and how we are drawn to creating art, crazy moments of chance in our own lives, what this piece even is and why are we making it, and more.

The creative process behind this project is unique in that it involves both ensemble-only rehearsals and rehearsals open to local community members. In these open rehearsals, community-audience and performer alike will discover new ways of moving our bodies, share stories about moments of crazy coincidence in our lives, and discuss honestly what it means to build a piece of dance-theater that feels real and relevant to the community in which we perform the work.

The DECAGON Project is a labor of love, sweat, tears, long nights, existential conversations that make us want to pull our hair out and scream and hug each other tightly. But in order to make our goal of getting to IndyFringe come to light, we need your help reaching our funding goal!

What is IndyFringe?

We are beyond excited to have been selected to perform at this summer’s IndyFringe Theater Festival: Indianapolis’s annual three-week-long theater festival. Featuring more than “300 genre-defying local, national & international performances” and “with a community of 15,000 adventurous theatre-goers,” IndyFringe is “one of the most vibrant and vital arts events in the Midwest.” We will present the world premiere of The DECAGON Project August 18th-20th as part of the first weekend of this amazing festival!

Who’s Who?

“These are your words.”

THE 46 MINUTES COLLECTIVE is a non-hierarchical performance collective founded in 2022 with a focus on collaborative physical theater. With members who span multiple disciplines from theater-makers to movement practitioners to filmmakers and podcasters, 46 Minutes aims in every project to find beauty in the absurd by asking big scary questions of the universe and hoping to answer through the joy of collaborative art. The DECAGON Project will be The 46 Minutes Collective’s first world premiere.

CREATIVE TEAM

Hannah Littman - Choreography, Lead Producer

Avi Klipfel - Dramaturgy, Script

Gabby Kimbrough - Script, Marketing

Lev Goldman - Lighting Designer

Erin Mee - Lighting Designer

Aaron Zanabria - Music

Jacob Ettkin - Associate Producer

Elliot Hoke - Graphic Design

Ara Tandon - Stage Manager

CAST

Sloane Burling

Lily Gee

Lev Goldman

Elliot Hoke

Gabby Kimbrough

Avi Klipfel

Hannah Littman

Abigail Lo

Kana Seiki

Aaron Zanabria

Goal: $10,000

How Funds Will Be Used

IndyFringe Venue Fee: $550

Travel: $850

Rehearsal Space (NYC): $10/hr for 10 hours = $100

Rehearsal Space (Indianapolis): $25/hr for 18 hours = $450

Artist’s Compensation: $6,000 split between 13 people + even split of net ticket sales

Donation Guide and Breakdown

$10 is roughly equivalent to the cost of one hour of rehearsal time

$46 is roughly equivalent to the cost of one full rehearsal in the studio

$100 is roughly equivalent to the cost of the entire New York rehearsal process

$250 is roughly equivalent to the cost of one night’s housing in Indianapolis

$500 is roughly equivalent to the cost of one artist’s pay for the entire process

Statement Regarding Equity

“A big element of community is support and leaning on people and finding ways to build this system of minds, system of hearts, system of limbs, system of bodies.”

The 46 Minutes Collective is a new performance group co-founded by Hannah Littman, Avi Klipfel, Sloane Burling, Gabby Kimbrough, and Elliot Hoke. We are just getting our foot in the door, and our financial needs are beginning to emburden our artistic mission. We currently have no institutional funding or support, do not make a salary, and pay for everything out of pocket.

Our goal is to create a radically welcoming artistic space, to be a company guided by the principles of interdisciplinary support, kindness, accessibility, and equity. But a mission of creative equity is utterly meaningless when pay equity is not honored. We have fostered a community of incredible artists whom we so deeply admire and want to pay fairly for their labor. The more money we raise, the better we can pay our team of 13 people for the intense amount of work that goes into rehearsing and producing a piece of this magnitude, some of which happens inside a rehearsal room and much of which happens outside that room in our own time. Even more, show of support for this project may mean we can bring The DECAGON Project to a venue near you in the future! This performance with IndyFringe is an amazing opportunity for us to show our work to a wider audience, to engage with our communities beyond just New York, and to show that a collective founded on equity and inclusion like 46 Minutes can be successful.