Where Performing on the Subway is Legal—and Encouraged!
March 13, 2015

A dance scene from last year’s PLATFORM

On April 1, New York City–based dance group Shakedown Dance Collective will perform at the New York Transit Museum on a vintage subway platform that’s no longer in use. Maybe this sounds like a typical day in NYC (where it’s not unusual to have your subway commute interrupted by singers, musicians, rappers, amateur gymnasts and break dancers), but this performance is actually part of a really cool program put on by the museum called PLATFORM. The Transit Museum invited people from all disciplines—visual and performing arts, academic fields, you name it—to submit a proposal for this year’s PLATFORM series, which will showcase the selected performances for the public. (Check out this New York Times article to get an idea of what last year’s PLATFORM looked like.) The only requirement is that the performance has to be inspired by or about public transportation.

What makes Shakedown Dance Collective’s inclusion in this year’s PLATFORM all the more sweet is that the company had originally planned to perform a short routine on some Manhattan subway trains and platforms last winter, but a preemptive phone call from NYC’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, citing insurance and liability issues, shut it down before it even happened. Now, in a cool twist of events, Shakedown dancers (who are a mix of professionals and complete novices) will get to perform—on a subway platform, no less—as part of a curated showcase!

You can find out more about Shakedown and its unusual mission here.

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