Austin's Early Era Collective is throwing open the doors of Zach Theater's Topfer Grand Lobby on November 9 for an evening meant to look back on nine years of boundary-pushing dance and look ahead to what comes next. The Next Era: A Celebratory Night of Art & Giving runs from 6 to 8:30 p.m. and doubles as both a birthday party for the company and a push to fund its future.
The celebration marks nine years of the Austin dance company's work, according to stephaniepatrick.me, and is designed to let guests learn more about the organization and meet the artists behind it. As CultureMap Austin reports, the event takes place at Zach Theater, with attendees gathering in the venue's Topfer Grand Lobby for a night that blends fundraising with performance.
Jen Cregar and Andre Bradford, both Early Era board members, are hosting the gathering, per the same stephaniepatrick.me listing. Guests can expect cocktails, mocktails, and light bites alongside pop-up performances and statements from company artists, rounding out an evening built around both celebration and connection with the dancers themselves.
A Sneak Peek at Brute
Among the night's highlights is a first look at Brute, Early Era Collective's upcoming dance film, offered as a sneak peek for attendees before its wider release. The combination of live pop-up performances and a film preview reflects how the company has long worked across mediums, folding dance, film, and spoken word into a single creative practice.
That multidisciplinary approach traces back to the company's origins. Early Era Collective is an evolution of Stephanie Patrick Dance, which existed from 2012 through 2018, according to NowPlayingAustin.com. The current company debuted with three new works in the fall of 2018, the listing notes, before formalizing its nonprofit status.
Exactly when that happened depends on which record you check. NowPlayingAustin.com states the organization formed its board and became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in January 2019, while CTX Live Theatre's listing says Early Era was founded in fall 2018 and became a 501(c)(3) organization in March 2019 — a discrepancy the available records don't resolve.
A Company Built on Mixed Styles
Early Era today is a dance company comprising performers from contemporary, hip-hop, tap, and ballet backgrounds, according to CTX Live Theatre, and it regularly collaborates across artistic disciplines. The organization describes its mission as presenting multi-form art featuring diverse perspectives for diverse audiences, per its NowPlayingAustin.com profile, and its catalog spans dance, film and video, nonprofit programming, and poetry and literature.
The company's film work has drawn national attention. Its dance film Milez was accepted into eleven film festivals nationwide during the 2022-2023 season, including the Dance on Camera Festival at Lincoln Center in New York City, CTX Live Theatre reports, and it also won the Local Favorite Award at the 2022 Austin Dance Festival. An earlier film, They Go Wild, was featured in three national and international festivals in 2019.
Early Era's live programming has carried a similarly collaborative spirit. The company's third iteration of its Say That Again show, reviewed earlier this year, featured eight sets showcasing Black dance styles alongside other artistic mediums, according to The Austin Chronicle. That performance blended hip-hop, contemporary, and street dances with poetry and spoken word, and closed with an all-inclusive freestyle in which eight audience volunteers joined the dancers onstage. “Dance is contagious,” co-producer Daniel Broxton told the Chronicle of that night.
The Next Era event on November 9 continues that community-facing thread, pairing celebration with a direct appeal for support as the company looks toward its next chapter.
