The stage was carpeted in dried turmeric. As Sanaa Patel, 24, began to move, the spice rose in faint golden clouds, staining her feet and the hem of her costume. In the audience at Paris's Théâtre de la Ville, a Le Monde critic leaned forward. What she saw, she would later write, was "a conversation between ancestral memory and present restlessness."
That November 2023 performance at the International Contemporary Dance Festival marked the arrival of the Vredenburgh Dance Collective on the world stage. But the real story began three years earlier, in a vacant textile mill in a town that had almost nothing to do with dance.
A Town Looking for Its Next Act
Vredenburgh, Maine, sits on a tidal inlet two hours north of Portland. Population: 4,200 and falling. For more than a century, the town's identity was stitched together by the Seabrook Textile Mill, which employed generations of residents until its closure in 2008. After that came the familiar post-industrial drift: storefront vacancies, school consolidations, young people leaving for Boston or Portland.
By 2019, the mill had sat empty for a decade, its windows boarded, its water tower rusting. Lila Montgomery, then 34, had no particular attachment to Vredenburgh—she had been passing through on a coastal drive—but she did have a compulsive habit of photographing abandoned industrial spaces. When she slipped through a loose board and found the mill's soaring beam ceilings and unbroken maple floors, she called the owner that afternoon.
"The light was wrong for anything except a studio," Montgomery said later. "North-facing windows, 14 feet high. It was either this or let the roof cave in."
Building Something from Nothing
The Vredenburgh Dance Collective opened in 2021 with six members, a pay-what-you-can ticket policy, and no guarantee that anyone would come. Montgomery, a former dancer with the Mark Morris Dance Group, had spent her savings on the mill's down payment. She persuaded a retired principal from the Paris Opera Ballet to teach monthly masterclasses in exchange for room and board. She installed space heaters that rattled through Maine winters.
The first year was precarious. The collective's debut program drew 47 people, many of them local rotary club members who had received complimentary tickets. But a 2022 state arts grant, coupled with a viral clip of Patel's Threshold on social media, changed the trajectory. By 2023, the VDC had 22 company dancers and a 400-person waitlist for its youth classes.
The Dancers
Montgomery built the collective around artists she describes as "stylistically homeless"—dancers trained in one tradition who refused to stay there.
Sanaa Patel arrived in Vredenburgh after leaving Juilliard's choreography program. Born in Chennai, she had studied Bharatanatyam from age six and only encountered contemporary dance as a teenager. Her work mines the friction between those vocabularies: the rigid aramandi stance dissolving into spiraling floorwork, the jathi rhythmic patterns stretched across silence rather than percussion. Threshold, her turmeric-dust solo, remains the piece that international presenters most frequently request.
Avery Thompson, 26, grew up 40 miles away in Bangor and never left Maine until the Sydney Opera House invited her to perform in April 2024. In rehearsal, Montgomery has noted, Thompson has a habit of singing under her breath while she dances—wordless melodies that shape her phrasing. Sydney critics called her solo, The Weight of Water, "a private grief made visible."
Javier Morales, 29, trained at the School of American Ballet before a knee injury ended his classical career in 2019. He discovered street dance during his recovery and now works in what he calls "the collision zone" between those forms. His 2023 piece Still Life with Strut features fouettés that collapse into breakdancing freezes, performed in sneakers rather than ballet slippers.
Paris and Its Aftermath
The invitation to the 2023 Paris festival came with no travel budget. Montgomery launched a crowdfunding campaign, and Vredenburgh residents—many of whom had never attended a VDC performance—donated $18,000 in three weeks. The collective's program, Where We Are From, sold out its single Paris showing. Le Monde and Les Inrockuptibles both published favorable notices, with the latter calling the work "provincial in the best sense: rooted, specific, unwilling to please."
Since Paris, the momentum has become difficult to manage. Thompson has performed at Lincoln Center and the Sydney Opera House. Morales is collaborating with a Berlin company on a new full-length work. Patel's Threshold
