Today we’d like to introduce you to Sophie Gray-Gaillard and Olivia Passarelli.
Hi Sophie and Olivia, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
We met when we both started working with a New York-based contemporary dance company, Yu.S Artistry, in the summer of 2021. In the first couple of rehearsals, we were partnered up for a duet and instantly clicked. We found out that we both shared an interest in choreographing and were ambitious to make work of our own.
One day in a Yu.S Artistry rehearsal, Sophie joked that we should start a dance company and call it “five two” because it’s the average of our heights (Sophie is 5’3” and Olivia is 5’1”- on a good day). We were not necessarily expecting to follow through with the whole company idea, but were excited to make work together. Olivia had recently been asked to create a work for an upcoming showcase, so the timing of everything seemed meant to be.
Soon after that, we got into the studio and choreographed a short duet. The process was pretty effortless, and we found that we worked really well together. Two months later, we premiered our duet at the Steffi Nossen Dance Foundation’s 2021 Showcase in December. We got great feedback from the show and were both inspired to keep creating. We knew we wanted to expand the duet into a longer work and bring more dancers into the process. You can’t submit to festivals without a name, so we decided to run with “five two.”
Jumping forward to today, we’ve created four full works with our six dancers, performed in 25 different showcases across four states, won multiple awards and residencies, choreographed and performed in a music video, collaborated with a fashion brand, set works on multiple pre-professional and professional programs, taught masterclasses and workshops, and we’re currently in the process of gearing up for our biggest performance yet in the fall. Neither of us thought all of this would come from a joke about our height.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
We have been so lucky to collaborate with incredible artists and have strong support systems around us, who have all made this process, and the growth of our company feel like a natural progression. The generosity from artists in other mediums like graphic design, costume design, photography, and more, have given us the tools and ability to take these steps forward. The smoothest part of creating a company has been the unwavering support of everyone around us, who so readily believe we can do it. This has kept us going through the learning curves of running a business- which haven’t been too big thus far. We both naturally gravitated towards different aspects of running the company, which easily allowed us to split the work. We trust each other’s artistic and business-related judgments.
We would say our biggest struggle, like many arts organizations, is funding. Over the past two years, we have participated in many different showcases and festivals across the Northeast. These showcases have been instrumental in getting our name out there, gathering a following, and gaining performance experience as a collective. One of the difficult aspects of starting out is that, for the most part, these showcases and festivals don’t involve any compensation. The organizers of the showcases are almost always fronting all the production costs and marketing, and they absolutely deserve to get paid for the work they put in. But as a company supporting six performers, we then have to front the costs associated with paying our dancers, renting rehearsal space, and more out of our own pockets. We have been incredibly lucky to have been given so many opportunities to share our work, but it is not a sustainable model long term. This is common across the entire dance industry because there is a remarkable lack of funding. We actively apply for grants and crowdsource donations to help subsidize our work. Most recently, we are incredibly lucky to have generous supporters whose donations will help pay our dancers and cover production costs for our upcoming self-produced performance in September 2023.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Five two is a women-led dance collective that shares highly physical contemporary movement rooted in feminine and queer perspectives. Our dance practice strives to unearth deeper understandings of physical and emotional intersubjectivity. Drawing on the human experience, our movement language balances strength, individualism, and tension with softness, symbiosis, and malleability. We think our athletic female-female partnering sets us apart from others as our choreography tends to push gender norms, challenge heteronormativity, and reject traditional partnering roles. Lastly, we aim to present legible and accessible work that inspires empathy, imagination, and reflection, imparting movement with great expressive agency and exercising viewers’ innate kinesthesia.
We are most proud of how true we’ve stayed to our artistry and creative process and the standard we’ve continued to hold the company to in the way that it credits and values everything each individual brings to the space. We feel that our constant play with the balance of physical fervor, performative vulnerability, and connection between artists and audience sets us apart. We hope to continue to push these boundaries while maintaining the integrity of our mission to provide legible dance for all audiences.
How do you define success?
In terms of running a dance company, there are a lot of quantitative metrics for defining success in the arts, such as: revenue, ticket sales, social media engagement, etc. It can feel hard at times to see past all of that when it is very time-consuming, but being in the studio with each other and our collaborators always grounds us. To us, success with five-two is primarily predicated on staying true to those motivations we mentioned earlier. We pour in so much time, energy, and creativity to make five two happen. It gives us an unmatched outlet to express ourselves and a really energetic community of artists. We loved the people we work with and the audiences we engage with, and at the end of the day, that’s the most important thing to us. So, in our eyes, five two is super successful (even without any official, long-term source of funding…but hopefully, that’s to come)!
Contact Info:
- Website: fivetwodance.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fivetwodance/
Image Credits
Paul DuBois
Paul B. Goode
John A. Fleming
