Perceptions Contemporary Dance Company (San Francisco/NYC)
www.PerceptionsDance.org

Perceptions Contemporary Dance Company creates a new, contemporary perception on life through movement and dance. PCDC is a daring group of hard-hitting storytellers - absorbing audiences in compelling tales, and aiming to challenge existing perceptions of life through athletic and theatrical movement. The Company aspires to break boundaries by taking audiences back to the belief that anything is possible, utilizing iconoclastic ideas and strong story lines.

Melissa Gendreau, artistic director & choreographer focuses on engaging audiences in tales that inspire and produce a vivid and clear experience through choreography that demonstrates a physical language for human emotion, passion and thought, challenging social issues and creating imaginative plots. 

PCDC is committed to creating art that contributes to the community in meaningful ways through service and performance. The company has a strong focus on outreach, using performance, education and more to assist charities and non-profit organizations.  PCDC also hosts the Perceptions Dance Festival in New York, which gives emerging and established choreographers and companies an opportunity to present work in New York City.

“Perceiving an opportunity to breathe beauty into a story wrought with grit - Gendreau's perceptions shine… heightened humor, subtle softness, and enough passion to claim NY as home base.” – Eileen Elizabeth, iDanz Critix Corner

Touring Programs

Mixed Repertoire: PCDC currently offers one repertoire selection, touring with 9 dancers and utilizing 5 small-role guest performers from the community.

Program A:
Will / Work
Plus repertoire selections, choice of:
Magnetic Affixion
Ancient Bruises
FLY
The Furthest Distance Between 2 Points
The Secular Self

Will / Work
Tours with 9 main dancers & utilizes 5 small-role guest performers from the community. 
or
Tours with 14 dancers
30 minutes


“Will / Work” is inspired by not only the life and struggles of Artistic Director Melissa Gendreau, but also the lives of the everyday professional human.  In this recession many people have been forced to give up their passion and desires to be able to pay the bills and feed their families.  While some work jobs they hate for years, others make the choice to leave on their own desires to better their souls. While some are laid off from their dream jobs, others scour for any way to make money at all.  “Where there is a will there is a way”, but where there is will is there work?  Do you will to do that work, or does the work take away your will?

“Will / Work” explores the every-day urges and desires of the middle class working force, and the often mundane robotic 9-5 lifestyle and one’s desire to break free.  The piece begins with the initial daily struggle of getting out of bed, and charts the daily grind of getting to work, and the exhaustion of being over worked.  Scene to scene, workers are connected by the repetitive image of the bright orange power cord, trailing from one aspect to another in their mundane routines.  After discovering the power cord is hoarding not only energy but their own passion and energy, tired and weary blue collar professionals discover that by unplugging the power cords they can regain their will and their lifeless, robotic bodies will return to the once zealous, eager and ambitious souls they once knew, embracing the colors of their essence and spirit by stripping off the black and white demands of a working life they never truly wanted.


Magnetic Affixion
Tours with 4 dancers
7 minutes
“Magnetic Affixion” is a short story engaging the child-like imagination in all of us. The choreography is shaped to music by Thomas Newman and other artists.  An animated, fun for all story, “Magnetic Affixion” plays with an imaginary force that creates a playful bond to ourselves, our surroundings, and each other.  Dancers are tossed around, crash to the floor, jump, and leap to avoid the stickiness, while tossing each other around to remove the appearing permanent bond created to each other.



Ancient Bruises
Tours with 5 dancers
15 minutes
Inspired by a true small town story, “Ancient Bruises” brings awareness and the raw emotion behind domestic violence victims to the stage, embodying the love/hate relationship the many endure in such tragic situations.  “Ancient Bruises” is a gut-wrenching story of a woman who endures domestic abuse from her partner - a man who has a long standing history of abusing women.  Though she knows his abusive pattern, the protagonist female initially turns her back on the warnings, trying to coax her partner into changing his ways through love and trust.  Eventually, after enduring too much abuse, the protagonist stands on her own two feet and cultivates the strength to stand up to her abuser and set herself free.


FLY
Tours with 9 Dancers, uses video projection
15 minutes
“FLY” is an experiment of wind, light and flight, challenging the previously deemed "impossible" stigma of human flight to prove that anything is possible when you dream and believe. “FLY” is performed in 3 sections: Feel, Dream and Believe.  Part one, Feel, opens with a clear field of grass with sunny skies, rolling clouds, and a woman lying in the grass feeling the wind. Part two, Dream, takes place under the stars with three women dreaming of taking off into the night sky. Part three, Believe, take place high in the clouds, with one dancer floating through the sky as other join and soar without ropes, cables or wings.


The Furthest Distance Between 2 Points
Tours with 1 dancer, uses video projection
8 minutes
“The Furthest Distance Between Two Points” is an experimental duet about distance and relationship developed by PCDC Assistant Director Molly Fletcher Lynch and Artistic Director Melissa Gendreau.  In a new process of creation and development, Lynch and Gendreau explore collaboration through distance, with Lynch on the West Coast and Gendreau on the East Coast, while utilizing multimedia and social media to ultimately create a duet through two solos performed simultaneously on both coasts to one audience. 


The Secular Self
8 minutes
“The Secular Self” is Studio Anya’s first faculty: our identity, personal profile/public image—the one who has a social security number, finger prints and a birth certificate.  The Secular Self is our human existence as seen from the outside in perspective.  To “affect alchemy” the secular self acknowledges the level of ambiguity associated with the “unseen” realities existing within.  Invoking awareness begins with learning how to make modules (information containers) that allow us to file our points of interest in a way that invites “fidgeting” or conscious micro-movements in & about the macro-movements.