Switch '12 begins with a sample at Uit Festival!

Charity;  choreography;  community;  career transition;  collaboration;  sharing opportunities;  art.

The Switch team tried to combine a lot of our values and ideas into a single message.  This year's team leader Celia Amade came up with a single and clear expression:  

To connect people to each other through art.

Switch is a yearly charity event created and organized by the dancers of Nederlands Dans Theater.  It is a performance, celebration and art evening built around works choreographed and performed by the dancers of NDT.  All proceeds go to the charity.  Begun in 1988 by NDT dancers to raise money for their HIV infected colleague, Switch has since become a regular, developed and anticipated show.

After raising 23.000 euros for Care and Share India last year through Switch'11 we are now focusing the good will on  Jeugd Cultuur Fonds - www.jeugdcultuurfonds.nl. 
Jeugd Cultuur Fonds is a dutch organization providing art and culture experiences to children in Holland who don't otherwise have such opportunities.  This charity seemed to be an obvious choice for this year's vision since we wanted to focus attention on giving back to our community, and being more involved with the place where we live and work.

And so we begin the work!

This year's project committee consists of Celia Amade (our leader),  Carolina Mancuso, Roger Van der Poel, Spencer Theberge, and Heather Myers.  We also have an important intern provided us by the company to help out - Manon Zoer.

After our first meeting of the season we have gone our separate ways to work on Switch in our free time between regular rehearsals. We all have our separate areas to take care of including sponsorship, scheduling, marketing, charity, promotional events, outreach workshops, internet and communications, merchandising, party planning, etc.

Celia and Manon have been busy preparing flyers and postcards in preparation for our Uit Festival presentation this Sunday September 4th at 16:00. It is at Theater aan het Spui in the Grote Zaal and will consist of 2 pieces from Switch '11.  The choreographers and their dancers have been preparing these re-stagings for you to see.

We hope to see you there for the season's first public taster of what Switch is and to share with you information about our activities!
Check back here for more updates on what we get up to and the connections we make!


See below a photo of our 1st meeting - Manon is clearly saying something VERY interesting...