When I founded EgoArt, Inc in 1999, my goal was to NOT do dance concerts. I was weary of the traditional performance form where audiences arrived at a theater, sat down obediently, and passively watched. I wanted to change that experience and so I began to mix dance with other art forms - theater, video, comedy, live music - and provoke audience participation. An evening at a typical “Ego Show” was a crash of traditions and media: we presented an original dance; I churned out a comedic monologue with naughty words; I played a Beethoven sonata on the piano; we performed another dance or two; we showed a video; we covered the audience with soap bubbles and marched them out the door with costumed escorts. These rollicking cabaret-style shows effectively explored the themes I was interested in for about 6 concerts, and then I realized that this mix of the sacred and profane wasn’t working for me any more. My audiences were split – the dance fans wanted less talk and more dance, and the comedy/theater fans were bored stiff by the dances. I also came to realize that the dances, on which I worked more diligently than any other part of the show, were not truly seen. My first reaction was to stage an all-dance concert. I did that and it was an illuminating process, and one that I intend to repeat, but it still didn’t satisfy my need for a more visceral experience.

Meanwhile, I went to graduate school and majored in Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM) at Massachusetts College of Art. For my MFA thesis, Empirical Laws, I built a 70-foot walk-through installation that began in a tunnel lit with video projection. Viewers/participants proceeded through a doctor’s study and a hall of projected family film footage into a room with a piano. I sat at the piano and played Chopin until drowned out by loud noise. Participants moved out to the front of a white room where they watched a short dance. Next, I performed a dance solo which ultimately led to a black box with a peep hole in which a pregnant woman sat with video projected on her 8-month-along belly. The installation took about 30 minutes to go through and felt like a journey. What I loved about this work was that it was absolutely experiential. It wasn’t a gallery exhibit nor was it a concert. It was a real experience that put viewers right in the center and moved them physically in space. It also blended all the forms I love so much – dance, theater, film, and sound design. It was a profound discovery for me to realize that a physical structure that I build can provide the armature for my work and for an audience’s experience.

So, nowadays EgoArt, Inc has one mission, but works in three genres. We perform pure dance concerts, we mount large scale multimedia installations, and we do comedy. It's not strange for us to dance in a theater one weekend and then don wigs and pleather and march into a party as hired entertainment the next. I like to think we do it all - and very well, if I may so.

- Nicole Pierce, Artistic Director