A Night of Media, Music, and Community Benefiting Two Major Projects in Development
It’s not every day that there’s the opportunity to make a lasting impact and co-develop queer art, but this Thursday, November 13th, Site-Specific Dances (S-SD) will host a special fundraiser at the legendary Stonewall Inn, and tickets are now on sale. The evening will be more than a party — it will be an activation of Stonewall as a historic and living site of queer gathering to raise money to help continue two pieces in the S-SD repertory. With queer DJ William Francis, an open bar and opportunities to meet the company’s dancers, musicians, and creative team, the event will celebrate S-SD’s queer-centered performance work and raise funds for two major projects currently in development: Love Letters: Cage to Cunningham and Erosions.
You can purchase tickets here. All proceeds will directly support these two projects, the artists involved, and the company’s ongoing mission to create interdisciplinary performances that bridge the gap between art and life, exploring the real world, on stage, and beyond the stage.
The first project, Love Letters: Cage to Cunningham, reimagines the private correspondence between John Cage and Merce Cunningham as a meditation on queer intimacy and creative partnership. Developed in collaboration with the John Cage Trust and Guild Hall of East Hampton, the piece draws on selected letters from Love, Icebox to reveal the emotional and artistic depth of one of the most influential collaborations in modern art. While Cage and Cunningham’s public work famously rejected narrative and emotion, their letters expose another side — playful, jealous, tender, deeply human, and universal. Following an in-process showing at Guild Hall, the company is now preparing the next phase: refining and expanding the work into a touring stage production and a series of site activations that will travel across the U.S. and internationally. The creative team includes Grammy-nominated pianist Adam Tendler and S-SD artistic directors Michael Spencer Phillips (choreography) and Dino Kiratzidis (stage design and curation), along with an all-queer ensemble of dancers, composers, videographers, and designers.
Erosions explores the parallel between environmental erosion and the erosion of queer collective memory in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The project’s first phase included community workshops and participatory performances along the Cape Cod National Seashore, filmed in sites ranging from dunes and cranberry bogs to tidal pools and forests. The next phase will transform this material into an immersive live music and video experience, combining documentary interviews and dance film with a new orchestral composition by queer elder composer Steven Sametz.
Hosting the fundraiser at Stonewall is both symbolic and intentional. Both Love Letters and Erosions address how personal, social, and environmental histories are shaped, hidden and sometimes eroded, over time. Stonewall itself marks the moment when private identity became public resistance, transforming intimacy into collective action. By openly sharing queer stories and by gathering at Stonewall, S-SD connects the legacy of queer liberation to new creative forms of expression, visibility, and community.
