Dancers Niall Jones and Rachel Warren in guest artist Maria Bauman's Concerning Proximity.

Mission   About   2000   2001   2002   2003   2004   2005

Mission:

Ground Zero Dance was formed in the spring of 2000 by three choreographers and one dancer/administrator, with a goal of enriching and broadening the modern dance scene in Richmond and Central Virginia. Ground Zero Dance seeks to bring live performance to diverse audiences by creating and producing the work of company members; collaborating with and presenting local, regional, national, and international artists; and offering experiential education through community participation.

About:

GZDC had its beginnings in a dance group in Richmond, VA called Steve's House Dance Collective. Co-founded in 1992 by Rob Petres and Ray Schwartz, Steve's House was a loosely formed group of dancers and choreographers who collaborated with each other and took turns staging concerts. Steve's House became a well-known name in the Richmond performing arts community, even though it was not formally organized or incorporated. By 1999, through self-funding and donations, the group was staging up to two major performances per year.

After successful production of a concert of his own choreography entitled Transgressions, in the fall of 1999, co-founder Rob Petres determined to create a formally organized company with two choreographers who had also done work with Steve's House over several years, Pam England and Victoria Fink. These three, in collaboration with dancer and Executive Director Lea Marshall, incorporated Ground Zero Dance Company in August of 2000.

Since that time, GZDC has regularly presented new and repertory work by company choreographers and guest artists, at venues throughout Richmond, including the Grace Street Theater, Artspace Gallery, St. Catherine's School, the Tredegar Iron Works Gun Foundry Building, and the Valentine Museum. In addition, GZDC has twice been presented at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival (2000, 2001), and at the Charlottesville Festival of Contemporary Dance and Improvisation in Performance.

The company currently serves as an umbrella organization for Performática, a festival of contemporary dance directed by GZD Artistic Associate Ray Schwartz at the Universidad de las Americas in Puebla, Mexico. Company members Rob Petres, Kat Legault, Damion Bond and Lea Marshall have traveled to perform and teach at the festival. The success of this project, supported by both private donations and a grant from the United States Embassy in Mexico City, ensured its return in 2008, and again in 2009.

During the last two years, GZD has built a partnership with Dogtown Dance, LLC, (DTD) who purchased a stand-alone gymnasium building in Manchester, within Richmond city limits. Through renovation of the Bainbridge Gymnasium, DTD seeks to provide affordable office/studio space for smaller-scale organizations and individuals focused on but not limited to the performing arts, design, wellness, social change, and with a commitment to community outreach. In partnership with tenant GZD, Dogtown Dance will provide a venue for a range of performing arts, focused on but not limited to dance, in a flexible, mid-sized facility. Look here for project updates.

2000

2001

Victoria Fink's Between Eros and Psyche performed at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in September, and later in the fall in Richmond and Charlottesville as part of Polarity, a concert of Fink's choreography presented by GZDC.

2002

In March, GZDC performed Pam England's COURT at the Tredegar Iron Works Gun Foundry Building in Richmond. Five dancers, two singers, three musicians, and a Fool.

In May, Rob Petres premiered a new short work entitled Other Things at the 3rd Annual Charlottesville Festival of Contemporary Dance and Improvisation in Performance. The piece was also accepted and performed in the Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Dance Alumni Concert in October.

After an October Repertory Concert featuring work by choreographers Pam England, Victoria Fink, Tommy Parlon, Rob Petres, and guest artist Julie Mayo, the company finished out the year in December at the Grace Street Theater in Richmond with Finger of the Sun: an intriguing and entertaining evening of choreography and improvisation by Rob Petres and Ray Eliot Schwartz, along with special guests Karl Anderson of Brooklyn, NY and Gionatan Surrenti of Rome, Italy. The performance week was documented in an online journal (see article) by Lea Marshall.

2003

May 16 & 17, GZDC presented new work by Pam England and Tommy Parlon, in collaboration with violinist Laura Roelofs, pianist Charles Staples, and cellist Teresa Bjornes at St. Catherine's School in Richmond. The Richmond Times-Dispatch spoke favorably of the evening (see article).

In September, members of Ground Zero Dance Company performed with Chris Burnside and Dancers in a concert of original choreography by Chris Burnside at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Grace Street Theater.

October 24 & 25: At the Williamsburg Art Nexus in Brooklyn, NY, Brooklyn-based SLAMFEST and Richmond-based Ground Zero Dance Company presented 3-Sided Void, an evening of choreography and improvisation by Karl Anderson/Kate Weare, Rob Petres, and Ray Eliot Schwartz.

2004

January: Company co-founder Rob Petres was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship in Choreography by the Virginia Commission for the Arts, to assist in the creation of his new work, Moment of Flight.

February 13 & 14: At the Grace Street Theater in Richmond, GZDC presented Lovers, Singers & Bugs, a concert of choreography by GZDC’s Tommy Parlon and Pam England, as well as by guests Incidents Physical Theater, of New York.

Summer: GZDC partnered with Richmond-based The Performance Initiative to help present ENGAGE, a bipartisan project that seeks to remedy the current crisis of low voter participation among young adults and disenfranchised voters through collaboration between social action workers, artists, and community members.

2005

January 7 & 8: GZDC presented Company Assembled, a benefit concert of choreography by colleagues from near and far: James Frazier (VCU Dance, Richmond); Karl Anderson/Kate Weare (Brooklyn, NY); Paule Turner (Philadelphia, PA); Ray Eliot Schwartz (Austin, TX); Heather Maloney (VA); Katharine Birdsall, of the Zen Monkey Project (Charlottesville, VA); Allison Waddell (Chapel Hill, NC) at the Grace Street Theater in Richmond. Proceeds benefited GZDC’s ongoing fundraising efforts for Moment of Flight; twenty percent of the total proceeds were donated to the Hand Workshop Art Center, now the Visual Arts Center of Richmond.

April 1-9: Rob Petres's Moment of Flight premiered at Live Arts Theater in Charlottesville, VA, as a co-production of Live Arts and GZDC. The world premiere work was paired with Petres’s popular Rope (1999) for an evening of extraordinary physical theatre.

Summer: GZDC offers ongoing open Modern class for company members and dancers in the community. In July, benefactor Bob Petres purchases an old gymnasium building in Manchester, just across the river from downtown Richmond. He forms an LLC, Dogtown Dance Theatre, which will partner with GZDC to transform the gym into an accessible, affordable dance space for rehearsals, classes, and performances by Richmond artists and visiting choreographers and companies. A long road lies ahead, but what a space!

Mission   Beginnings   2000   2001   2002   2003   2004   2005

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