Trinidad-born and US-based chore­o­g­ra­ph­er and dancer Make­da Thomas has un­til the end of Jan­u­ary to raise US $20,000. To foot the bill for her next project Make.Be­lieve. she has turned to the crowd fund­ing ap­proach via the pro­gramme Unit­ed States Artists Projects. USA Projects will match funds raised via an In­ter­net cam­paign.

The cam­paign's Web page de­scribes Make.Be­lieve. as "an evening-length, mul­ti­me­dia move­ment" in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Brook­lyn-based po­et and per­for­mance artist Queen GodIs, with whom Thomas worked in last year's New Waves! In­sti­tute, a cross-cul­tur­al in­ter­na­tion­al dance fel­low­ship pro­gramme Thomas' Dance and Per­for­mance In­sti­tute start­ed two years ago.

The new work, which will de­but in March, grew out of last year's work and is sched­uled to in­clude three res­i­den­cies in Brook­lyn and Port-of-Spain over the next year. In an email, Thomas said, "Us­ing sci­ence fic­tion as a sto­ry­telling tool, Make.Be­lieve. will cre­ate a dream state of dance, po­et­ry, vi­su­al art, mu­sic and food, en­gag­ing the au­di­ence in a jour­ney through the un­told his­to­ries be­tween our bod­ies... and bod­ies of work.

"Tech­ni­cal­ly, Make.Be­lieve. utilis­es light and sound as fu­el for move­ment be­tween worlds," ex­plains the fund-rais­ing Web page. "Chore­o­graph­i­cal­ly, the work de­vel­ops through a set of frac­tal phras­es that treat each move­ment as a vari­able and in­tro­duces a host of pa­ra­me­ters, ie, cur­rent events, his­tor­i­cal facts, per­son­al sto­ries, au­di­ence re­ac­tion and in­ter­ac­tion.

Make.Be­lieve. is most in­ter­est­ed in how each per­former seeks to max­imise/ com­pli­cate the ben­e­fit for every­one in the space. Lyri­cal­ly, Make.Be­lieve. shape-shifts par­a­digms by blend­ing re­al­i­ty with pos­si­bil­i­ty and dis­cuss­es the com­plex­i­ties of hu­man spir­it in ways that on­ly dreams can."

USA Projects will fund Make.Be­lieve on­ly if the goal of $20,000 is achieved by Jan­u­ary 31. To do­nate, go to: us­apro­jects.org/project/make_be­lieve