In partnership with Philadelphia Dance Projects, Dances Made to Order will offer up its first Philadelphia edition on August 22, 2012. Dances Made to Order is a dance film/video festival available exclusively online at DancesMadeToOrder.com. Every month, Dances Made to Order features three talented artists who each rise to the challenge to create a five-minute film/video in two weeks inspired by ideas suggested by the web-audience.

Dances Made to Order partners with local artists and arts organizations in 11 different U.S. cities, who in turn each select three artists to highlight their city’s unique dance culture. Now in the eighth month of the 2012 season, choreographer/performer d. Sabela Grimes has curated local dance artists Niki Cousineau.

Gabrielle Revlock and Raphael Xavier for the Philadelphia Edition. Dance enthusiasts may vote on the ideas that will inspire the artists’ work from July 25 through August 2 at midnight. The Philadelphia edition videos will premiere on August 22, 2012.

Dances Made to Order was created by Kingsley Irons and Bryan Koch in April 2011. “We support the work of emerging artists with unique points of view. The choreographers we feature in our series come from diverse backgrounds: from contemporary, modern, hip-hop, Afro-Latin, belly dance and classical Indonesian. We offer a curated, online film program as an alternative to the deluge of un-curated video content on the internet. We recognize that the way audiences consume media is changing. We want dance film to have a place in the changing media landscape by presenting it through a forum that is unfettered by the constraints of geography, time and distance.”

How Dances Made To Order works: Internet browsers may subscribe to the entire season of this innovative online showcase of American dance videos for only $50 and get 33 festival-worthy short films plus bonus content throughout the year. A season subscription includes access to all films from January through November 2012. A single, monthly ticket is $10 and includes 3 film/videos. Artists get 65% of each ticket sold. The new Dances Made to Order website is powered by open source tech and Brightcove for fast, universally supported video. Visit the DMO archives to see all past seasons great dance film/videos from Los Angeles, New York, Salt Lake City, Atlanta, Boston, Minneapolis, Philadelphia,San Francisco, New Orleans and Austin.

About the Artists

Niki Cousineau is a Philadelphia based choreographer and dancer. She is the co-director of Subcircle, a company she founded with Jorge Cousineau in 1998. Her work includes a history of collaborations with choreographer Carol Brown (New Zealand), actor Geoff Sobelle, and the Berlin based Zen in the Basement among others. As a performer she works with Headlong Dance Theater. She is a 2007 Pew Fellow and recently was a choreographic fellow at Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography in Tallahassee.

Gabrielle Revlock, dancer/choreographer, is a “a gifted comedian.” (Philadelphia Inquirer, 2010) She is the recipient of a 2010 Rocky Award and 2011 finalist prize in the A.W.A.R.D. Show. Her work has been shown across the US by presenters including ODC (San Francisco), The Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, Joyce SoHo (NYC), Dance Place (DC), Philadelphia Dance Projects and the Korzo theater (The Hague, Netherlands). Interested in performance as a social art form, she is also the creator of Wear Your Wig to Work Day, a holiday occurring annually the last Friday in January.

Raphael Xavier is an award winning artist and member of the world renown Hip Hop Dance Company, Rennie Harris Puremovement. As a self taught Hip Hop dancer/Breaking practitioner since 1983, he has forged an exceptional approach to improvisation. Brenda Dixon Gottschild deemed Xavier, ‘A fine movement technician’. His extensive research in Hip Hop forms have lead to the creation of Ground-Core, a Somatic dance technique, giving the practitioner a better understanding of the body within all dance forms.

About the Curator

d. Sabela Grimes is a multi-hyphenate artist/educator. His performance work, choreography and pedagogical approach reveal his invested interest in the physical and meta-physical efficacies of Black dance practices; and proactively seeks to expand beyond contemporary notions of Hip Hop culture and aesthetics. He created a technique-based approach to learning Black vernacular dances called Funkamentals. Sabela holds an MFA in Dance from UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures Department, has performed and taught internationally, and continues to work with Rennie Harris Puremovement.