One night last month at Pageant, a performance space in Brooklyn, a line of people poured down a flight of stairs and onto the sidewalk below. The opportunity? A dance from a choreographic start-up called SECT, inc. It was the group’s first ensemble work and it had a specific purpose: to explore the individuality of the dancers as well as the space.
The space was getting smaller by the minute. By the time all the people on the waiting list were in their seats—that is, scattered across the floor—the stage had lost quite a bit of depth.
But when the lights went down, the dance came to shimmering life as the performers filled Pageant with emphatic footwork and low kicks to create a hypnotic rhythm. They looked like enchanted folk dancers as they etched linear patterns and lines on the floor with razor-sharp precision. Within this tightly choreographed tapestry was exuberance and urgency, but also a sense of confinement.
That feeling of walls closing in on you? It was intentional and made possible by the place where the dance was created: Pageant – “a dream of a theater handed down to us by these truly generous and special friends,” Josie Bettman, who runs SECT, inc. directs with Lavinia Eloise Bruce, said later.
What is pageant? It doesn’t seem right to pin it down. It’s a lot of necessary things: an artist-run performance space on Graham Avenue in East Williamsburg. A community. A celebration of fantasy and craft.
And it is a life saver: a much-needed destination for dance, born from the mind and body of a new generation of choreographers and performers.
Dance has felt stuck in a set pattern, still trying to overcome pandemic adversity, with institutions large and small programming more or less the same choreographers from season to season. When presenters Doing try a less established dance maker, the pressure for that artist is great. How can that be good for the freedom that artistic experimentation requires? Choreographers need rehearsal space to experiment, and that too has become scarcer.
That said, it was especially energizing to witness the progress at Pageant, which is celebrating its one-year anniversary this month with a gala and fundraiser.
Formed by Sharleen Chidiac, Jade Manns, Owen Prum and Alexa West – young dance artists who have showcased intriguing and invigorating work in the space – Pageant was born last April as an alternative to the shared work-in-progress showcases typically provided to emerging dance and performance artists.
Over the past year, the crowds in front of the building have increased. A group of people cautiously approached the nondescript door beneath a conspicuous sign, “Color Beauty Supply,” almost shaped like a candy cane. Now it seems just about everyone knows where Pageant—a long, skinny space above that beauty supply store and, until recently, a nail salon—is. (While the space, up two flights of stairs, isn’t accessible to people with disabilities, subscribers to the crowdfunding site Patreon can access Pageant’s performance archive, filmed by Kayhl Cooper.)
At Pageant, dance artists fuse demanding technique with everyday movement to create work in which nothing seems to be left to chance. They don’t like the somatic experience; they don’t really improvise. Composition and choreography are important.
Theater too. Make-up and hair are integral, as are costumes, which all too often seem like last-minute decisions in experimental dance. At Pageant, the appearance of a work is just as important as the dancing. It’s an aesthetic of the mundane — at least as it manifests itself in this part of Brooklyn, where people embrace sparkle and skin. That look is cultivated and yet has the air of carelessness. That is also the Pageant aesthetic. You could call the brand of experimental dance everyday spectacle.
“We’re interested in the presentation,” said West, 31. “There’s something about Pageant that felt almost so strong and brutal, but also stark.”
That expansive, candid aesthetic contrasts with spaces and settings that value process and practice, “which we love,” West added. “But we wanted to go the other way. We’re like, we’re all presentation, baby. We Are a parade.”
In addition to performances – usually every two weeks – Pageant organizes talks with established choreographers, such as Mariana Valencia and Beth Gill. And it offers practice space in the form of memberships: for $200 a month, dance artists get 20 hours of rehearsal time.
The founders each pay a dues and volunteer their time for various Pageant tasks. And each has different jobs — Manns, 25, teaches dance in public schools; Prum, 27, is a part-time dancer and restaurant worker; Chidiac, 31, does freelance motion directing. West, due to her success in producing Pageant’s Instagram account, moved into marketing. Juggling everything is not easy.
“Nobody’s parents give us money,” Manns said. “We really earn all the money ourselves. I think sometimes people think we’re just rich kids. That’s not how we do it.”
When they present work on Pageant, they get a cut from the door, as all artists do. “We’re really giving early career artists the space to get a fairly high-quality experience showcasing their work, which doesn’t really happen anymore,” said Manns. “It feels like you’re at the beginning of your career. You have to sign up for these little showcases and you get 15 minutes and you just do that for years.”
For her lively, captivating “Procession” at Pageant in February, West was able to pay her dancers $230 each. “Usually I go broke after a show,” she said. “It was nice not to be.” Most of the money came from ticket sales.
At least at Pageant, dance sells – and not just to dancers. On some evenings it is mainly an audience from the dance world; on others the dance-curious also come. It’s a warm environment – festive yet focused – and fashion and design, on and off stage, is something to behold. While the audience is often youthful, the founders want to make Pageant more intergenerational. “It feels like it’s very young, and we’re aware of that,” said West. “We’re really excited and welcoming the older generation because we love all that stuff so much and it’s part of our interest.”
“We are not like, mehManns said.
“We’re not punks,” West added.
And when more established choreographers come to Pageant, there’s excitement. “When Tere O’Connor asked to rehearse here,” Chidiac said, “I was like, Yes! He had one rehearsal here and I was like, it worked!
The roots of the space grew as many creative bonds in the dance world do – through friendship. Manns and Prum both attended NYU Tisch School of the Arts, but didn’t get to know each other until they landed a gig together. And Chidiac performed in a work by West, who later asked Prum to perform in a dance.
“And then,” Chidiac said to West. “You danced with us all.”
Then came the pandemic, which strengthened their artistic collaboration. The four worked from a space known as 464 – the address of the apartment where Chidiac and Manns lived in Ridgewood, Queens. It functioned as a performance rehearsal space or, as West put it, “a studio where we had shows.” But it “had a lot of limitations,” she added, “because people lived there.”
They had no internet presence and did not advertise the space. They didn’t want it to explode. It certainly had a following. Shows would invariably turn into parties. “And the police would come,” Prum said.
When Manns and Chidiac left 464, they all agreed they needed a new space: 464 had opened a door for them to become artists in New York. How could they give that up?
Chidiac, who grew up on competitive cheerleading, not dancing, thinks Pageant would have sprung up without the pandemic, but the shutdown has precipitated it. “I think everyone learned how to self-produce during the pandemic,” said West. “We were all like, we want to keep doing this. We don’t want to wait for our applications to be approved or feel like if my application doesn’t go through, I won’t be able to show work.
“We have to work to grow, and we can also help other people with that.”
Pageant is at an interesting point in his young life: There are so many people asking to have shows there that, Chidiac said, “we need to figure out how to fit everyone we care about,” as well as “the other new people who we want to invite in. It’s more than we can handle.”
Times are not easy to establish an artist-run space. When the four founders — who run the place with Lili Dekker — came across the Graham Avenue loft on Craigslist, they loved it, but the price was prohibitive. “We were fine, never mind,” Chidiac said. “We kept looking and saw other more affordable but really sad spaces.”
Two months passed and Graham Avenue was still available. “We’re like, that’s a sign,” Chidiac said. “No one has taken this beautiful, empty room – it should be ours.”
They raised almost $20,000 on GoFundMe in a week and a half. “That also shows how many people really liked 464 and wanted it to continue,” Manns said.
And the 464 ethos is still at play. While performances have been successful, both artistically and in terms of ticket sales, Chidiac said it’s not so much about the final product as much as the opportunity. “Whether you make a good play or a bad play, it’s important that you have that experience,” she said. “It’s not about being the venue that just showcases a certain caliber of work.”
“There’s so much more to it,” Chidiac added. “Even if it’s a somewhat disappointing show, there’s something about that. And that, I think, is the big difference between Pageant and other spaces.”
As word of Pageant spread, other institutions have reached out. “People contact us and say, ‘Is Pageant coming to do something in our space?'” West said. “We are first and foremost a space. We talk a lot about how we’re not really curators or presenters. We are more producers who want to show our own work, but also want to contextualize it with other people’s work.”
West said it doesn’t even feel like they curate much. “We just sort of choose people,” she said. “Most of all, it’s the people who come to us and who make up our community.”
Pageant, the founders say, is not a collective. It’s a physical space. “I think the easiest way to think about how people can work with us is for them to come here,” said West. “The room is Pageant, and the room may change one day, but it will be a physical space, because I think the biggest asset and resource for dancing is the big empty room.”