I launched a performance series

The Yellow Room is a salon-style dance happening in Washington, DC. Your host, Blythe, aims to create intimate relationships between artists and viewers with small audience sizes and a structured creative environment.Because The Yellow Room is independently funded by Blythe, artists can perform free of the administrative burdens associated with traditional funding models. By inviting people into their home, Blythe takes the responsibility to enforce rules of engagement and to cultivate a fruitful community of creatives. The events are not strictly secret but private and structured so as to cultivate a safe and comfortable place to stretch artistic boundaries amongst friends and peers.

The Domestic is Political
The Yellow Room is a one-night-a-month affair, but the rest of the time, the room is a functional living space. The floor-to-ceiling yellow curtains that give the Room its name hide a garage’s worth of clutter, the inevitable detritus of four co-habitating adults (and one cat). Art venues in DC are forever changing, shrinking, or disappearing altogether, but the crunch feels particularly tight these days. It feels like it costs $20 just to step outside. Our spheres of influence are shrinking to adapt to our energy. The twisted woman behind the wallpaper is ready to lurch out and slither across the floor. Here, we hope to build up the most essential element of the dance community—not a venue or grant but the people in it. The artists of this city grow so much out of so little, out of their pure imagination. They just need a room to do it in.

A Movement Feast
DC is full of artists whose art Blythe wants to see and wants them to perform free of the burdens associated with traditional funding models. Through the power of steady income (and then more unsteady income on top of that), Blythe is spending one year self-funding the artists they want to see the most, in the place they most want to see them—their house. Inspired by Gertrude Stein’s iconic salon, The Yellow Room dreams of the experimentation and cross-pollination in that 1920s apartment, where different practitioners came together casually to revel in process and in conversation. Seeking to escape the unbalanced structure of dance economies—a year of rehearsals building to a scant two days of performance—the Room celebrates drafts, iteration, and imperfection. Bring your sketches, prepare for feedback.

Join the Club
The imagery of the Yellow Room is the suit of clubs, sometimes called the trefoil. With roots in pagan imagery running all the way up to today’s Girl Scouts, the word is derived from the French trèfle, or “clover.” In the traditional 52-card deck, the clubs represent the peasantry (versus the royal spades or the hearts of the clergy), their hard-work and close relationship to the cycles of nature. Its twin in the tarot deck is the suit of wands, which is associated with fire and symbolizes willpower, passion, and energy. In the Year of the Horse, we are rushing headlong into the future. Come with us.