One year ago today Amy, Lindsay, Tawnya, and I (along with the help of a zillion volunteers and friends and family we talked into helping) produced our first show as Atelotorque. It was called Transmission, and was a community show in which our local sphere of aerial artists told their personal stories of relating to other humans in a time where barriers were necessary between us. Since then we’ve successfully obtained 501(c)(3) Non-profit status as a Performing Arts Organization, written, developed, and produced Animals After Dark, as a fund-raiser for The Phoenix Zoo that netted them $64k, and performed for several other local events. It’s been a crazy year.
I listened to a podcast this morning with a story about billionaires in this country and thought about what it would be like to literally not be capable of spending all the money I had. It sounds… less stressful than my current life? But also, I cannot imagine we would have accomplished what we did with infinite money. It’s weird how you need money to get shit done, but also, if you have all the money, you’ll probably do less shit. I think I’m not mad I’m not a billionaire. Money is a construct. 🤷🏻♀️ (Is a thing my children will never not roll their eyes when I say.)
That said, our hardworking (exhausted) non-profit org is always suffering from lack of funds to do the things we want to. We want to do our next community show (where we give local performers of all abilities, ages, bodies space to tell their own stories) in a theater. And we need to not do alllll of the labor ourselves (Tawnya’s sewing fingers will fall off, and while Amy is now a master animal mask-maker, her boyfriend isn’t going to put up with giving up half their home and most of her sanity to that shit again). It’s a problem lots of well-meaning, hardworking organizations have.
If you want to help us figure out our next community adventure, one way you can, and also experience our art, is to buy a ticket to watch our last show, Animals After Dark, online. Our wonderful videographer, Glen, captured it for us and it’s streaming for the next few weeks. Link is in my bio. $15!
