our mission

Life is tough. It can be difficult for people to work through and solve their own problems, especially when they feel isolated and alone. We believe that dance can connect people and act as a mirror to the audience helping them to reflect, process, and better understand themselves and others. We make art that matters...not just to us, not just to some tastemaker of what is considered "good" and "beautiful" art. We make art that matters to our audience AND to the dancers bringing it to life. We reject the notion that dance should only be used to entertain, distract, and numb people from their shadowed realities. Instead we make dance that inspires, ignites conversations, questions, deepens understandings, and develops empathy about the world and the people who inhabit it. We believe that dance can create real change in the world. Through our dance-making and community engagement efforts we connect the individual into the collective community. We celebrate the humanity of mistakes, conflicts, glorious failures, and the new exciting movement possibilities and conversations that they lead to. Yes, life is tough, but together we can be Wildly Brave.

history

Wildly Brave’s co-directors, Jessica & Cylene, met in 2014 while attending graduate school at Texas Woman’s University. They instantly bonded over their shared aesthetic values of all things strange and whimsical and their discontent with traditional hierarchical dance-making practices that often ignored the voices of the dancers. Leading up to graduation, they knew they wanted to have their own companies where they could bring dance into their communities and work as part of a collective of makers. Jessica founded Sylvestre Wilde Dance Collective and Cylene founded Brave Art Dance Theatre. In December of 2016, Cylene hosted the first ever Brave Arts Dance Festival as part of her mission to bring edgy, modern dance into the Stillwater, Oklahoma community. Cylene invited Jessica to join the board and show her company’s work at the festival. Over the next few years Cylene and Jessica’s companies began collaborating on more and more projects, including four separate Brave Arts Dance Festivals. Even though Cylene moved back to Oklahoma and Jessica remained in Texas, distance was not enough of a justification to keep working as two separate companies. So, in August 2019 Jessica and Cylene merged Sylvestre Wilde Dance Collective and Brave Art Dance Theatre and officially launched Wildly Brave.