Eve's Elixir was created to provide a platform to aspiring choreographers of contemporary world dance.  Inspired by the mythological Eve who at the apple, they are taking risks with tradition, bringing new ideas to established forms, and raising the question of what constitutes "authentic" world dance.

Eve’s Elixir is an annual project bringing together different choreographers of contemporary world dance in collaboration and feedback sessions, culminating in an evening length performance of their efforts.  Eve's Elixir was created out of a need for practitioners and choreographers of ethnic dance to have a collaborative environment where they can innovate and exchange feedback with their peers in order to grow as choreographers, and a platform on which to display this work. The assignment to each group of Eve’s Elixir choreographers is to approach their respective “traditional” forms of dance from a more personally authentic place as opposed to focusing on cultural authenticity.  All too often, the mission of practitioners of ethnic dance is to re-create the dance form with the highest level of accuracy.  While this is a vital part of preserving cultural legacy, Eve’s Elixir sees this as only the first step in the artistic process and challenges artists to go one step further in making dance their own and moving beyond the restrictions of re-creation. Eve's Elixir is a vital project because it is an opportunity for creative experimentation in traditional dance forms where previously the goal has been to reproduce them perfectly.

Eve’s Elixir’s mission is to move beyond making a display of the cultural uniqueness, and rather, turn an eye to that experience of the dancer which is personal and thus, authentically human. This year’s Eve’s Elixir will focus on a dual exchange: approaching ethnic dance from a more authentic place, and re-infusing modern dance with the gestures, genuine emotion, and fine internal detail that traditional dances are so loaded with, thus making contemporary dance more visceral.

All of the dancers involved have spent many years training in their respective dance forms, learning about the culture, sometimes learning a special language, often traveling to the country of its origin, and devoting themselves to this art form which isn't necessarily their heritage. Eve's Elixir is powerful because it is the next chapter of that story. It is asking the artists to go one step further now that the traditional form is fully internalized and make it part of their own story.  The irony is that this next step will actually help to preserve the traditional dances because it will make them relevant to those people dancing them and to their audiences. Innovation will make them come alive, if not in the exact form as they were originally intended, certainly in the same spirit.