our story
projectALCHEMY began in 2018 as part of Founder and Artistic Director Alexander Jones’ independent study while completing his MFA in Dance at Hollins University. What started as an investigation into choreography, process, and transformation became a contemporary dance company rooted in St. Petersburg and built around a simple idea: the work is never finished changing.
The name projectALCHEMY comes from the ancient philosophical and protoscientific tradition of alchemy—the pursuit of transformation through matter, energy, and the self. Its ideas of creating and transforming became the foundation for the company, while collaboration became our third principle: connecting artists to one another, dance to other disciplines, and the creative process to community.
Today, those ideas remain at the core of how we work.
We are interested in what happens to movement as it passes through different bodies, spaces, collaborators, and moments in time. Rather than treating choreography as something fixed, our works are created and recreated for the spaces in which they live. A work presented in a theater may transform when it enters a gallery, museum, park, or another unexpected environment. The architecture, audience, artists, and energy of each place become part of the choreography. The form may change, but the questions, intentions, and scope at the heart of the work remain.
Mission
projectALCHEMY creates collaborative contemporary dance experiences that engage audiences, cultivate artistic curiosity, and strengthen community through movement. Rooted in choreographic process, we support dance artists as makers, create accessible opportunities for movement and artistic development, and bring dance into conversation with other disciplines, spaces, and communities.
More Than a Show
We are interested in creating dance experiences that viscerally engage the people who enter them.
That means interrupting the traditional relationship between performer and viewer. Dance might happen in front of you, but it might also happen beside you, behind you, around you—or invite you to move through the same environment as the artists. You may encounter a dancer from only a few feet away, follow movement from one space into another, discover an installation before the dancing begins, hear sound shift as you move through a room, or find yourself participating in the experience in ways you did not expect.
Sometimes the audience sits. Sometimes they stand, wander, follow, gather, witness, or participate. Sometimes the work happens in a theater; other times it lives in a museum, gallery, neighborhood, park, or unexpected corner of the city.
For us, these are more than shows. They are experiences.
By bringing the viewer into closer proximity with movement, we hope to make dance something that can be felt as much as it is watched. The audience becomes part of the environment surrounding the work—and their presence, attention, movement, and perspective become part of how that experience lives.
Choreography as a Shared Practice
At our core, projectALCHEMY is a dance company invested in choreography and the process of making dance. We believe dance making does not have to belong only to the person at the front of the room. Company artists, apprentices, emerging choreographers, collaborators, and members of our community are invited to question, experiment, contribute, and develop their own creative voices.
That philosophy moves throughout the company. The Momentum Choreographic Mentorship, culminating in the Momentum Choreographers Showcase, creates space for dance makers to investigate and strengthen their choreographic voices. MIXed, our company artist new works series, gives the artists within projectALCHEMY opportunities to move from interpreter to dance maker and bring their own ideas into form. Community Class opens the practice outward, creating an accessible space for movement, experimentation, exchange, and shared discovery.
Our Spring Collab extends that same curiosity beyond our own medium. Each collaboration brings projectALCHEMY into the creative process with artists and organizations working outside of dance—allowing choreography to meet theater, visual art, music, installation, storytelling, design, and other forms of practice. Rather than placing disciplines alongside one another, Spring Collab asks what new work can emerge when we genuinely make something together.
These programs and experiences take different forms, but they return to the same curiosity that started the company:
How can matter, energy, space, and the self transform through dance and the creative process—and what becomes possible when we experience that transformation together?
For projectALCHEMY, choreography is not only about making dances. It is a way of researching, gathering, exchanging, and continually becoming.
projectALCHEMY is a nonprofit contemporary dance company and registered 501(c)(3) organization based in St. Petersburg, Florida.
