Everett: Company, Stage, School

Everett is a cross-disciplinary, cross-generational, and cross-cultural ensemble of dance and theater artists creating, performing, teaching and engaging a diverse community through the arts. Guiding Everett’s mission is a deep belief in collaboration, experimentation and the artist’s role in creating a just, equitable and joyous future. Our Company, Stage and School work in concert to build and support this vision.

The Company

At the center of Everett’s activities is The Company, a diverse ensemble of professional artists. The Company was founded in Providence in 1986, and has since gained substantial national recognition for its unique creative vision, social consciousness, and effective youth programs. The Company creates original dance theater performances, produces film and video, carries out a wide range of educational programs, and mentors new generations of young artists.

Productions are developed through a research-driven multi-year process that is improvisational, collaborative, and curious: the process is a tool to examine questions of urgent interest to the ensemble. The Company’s original works use dance, theatre, and video to explore themes ranging from science to labor to family. Over the past 25 years, Everett’s concert works have toured throughout the country to critical acclaim at venues including Dance Theatre Workshop (New York, NY), Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival (Becket, MA), the Spoleto Festival (Charlestown, NC), the Skirball Cultural Center (Los Angeles, CA), and the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN).

The Stage

The Stage serves as both a community gathering space and a laboratory for the Company and the School, a site where ideas are explored, concepts are tested, and discoveries are made. Everett’s Stage provides an intimate and inviting space for the community to come together to tell and hear stories, learn from experimentation, and celebrate our lives together.

Activities include regular events such as Friday Night Live a weekly comedy improv series, and Open Stage, a monthly forum for a broad variety of local performing artists, as well as an evolving roster of special events and programs. Everett’s Stage frequently hosts work from partners and collaborators including Case Closed!, our resident hip-hop theater company.

Everett’s Stage also serves as a resource for our partner artists and organizations, as well as others in the Providence community seeking an intimate space for artists and audiences to gather.

The School

The School is a three-tiered education program that offers free ongoing classes in the performing arts to underserved youth, and mentorship and apprenticeship opportunities to those who want to pursue the arts in a deeper way.

Classes are taught by Company members and other professional artists and include: ballet, hip-hop, improvisational theater, filmmaking, scene study, musical improvisation, and Polynesian dance. Everett builds long-term relationships with youth through our mentorship and apprenticeship programs, which offer opportunities to create and perform original work, gain experience as assistant teachers, and perform in the community. At every stage, students are taught and advised by members of Everett’s professional Company, who model their work in the School on the processes and principles they value as artists.

We believe that through rigorous arts training, students learn to value and nurture their inner resources and to speak with their own voice. Through this training, students’ unique qualities and life experiences are treated not as obstacles to be overcome, but as valuable material, which they can own and use. Some will come to see themselves as artists and pursue more professional training; others will simply come to see themselves as a person with something of value to contribute to the world, pursuing a wide range of interests with passion and confidence.

Educational Entertainments

Everett’s repertoire also includes educational K-12 performances and workshops that are interactive, entertaining, and tied to students’ curriculum. The Company specializes in team-building and leadership development programs, which have been used for teacher and principal retreats and by schools for a range of purposes such as freshmen transition and health programs.

Everett designs educational programs based on concepts researched for their concert works. Their programs integrating science principles and the arts have been heavily utilized in schools, museums, and community centers. Tour destinations include the American Museum of Natural History (New York, NY), Liberty Science Center, (Jersey City, NJ), Cleveland Museum of Natural History (Cleveland, Ohio), and the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, (Burlington, VT).