About Garet&Co: Led by Garet Wierdsma, Garet&Co is a professional contemporary dance company based in Northern CT working to strengthen and celebrate the contemporary dance community in their local region. Garet&Co's mission is to create a safe, sustainable and uplifting space for local dancers to train and perform at the highest level of contemporary dance. Garet&Co has created a home for contemporary dancers, where dancers can gain both training experience and paid work opportunities in a positive environment, while being supported as both dancers and humans.
Garet&Co has performed across the Northeast, most notably at Symphony Space, Ailey Citigroup Theatre, The Warner Theatre, Dixon Place, and TADA Emerging Artists Theatre.
Garet&Co’s choreographic work dissects emotions on the stage, dealing with themes of struggling mental health and the search for peace within chaos. Pulling from her own experiences first and then collaborating conceptually and in movement with the dancers, Garet hopes that her work gives audiences the opportunity to fully experience the joy, devastation, and catharsis of contemporary dance. Garet strives to create art that comes from a place of personal truth; work that is both guttural and beautiful. Garet&Co believes that art changes the world, and the company is passionately and actively working to be generators of light. Inspired by her own experiences, both positive and negative, in the dance world, Garet works to create safe and positive environments where art and humanity can be at the forefront.
Garet shares her experience at Kinsella:
I attended Kinsella for middle school, 2012-2014. Attending Kinsella, especially at this age, really shaped the goals I continued to pursue, even after middle school. Attending Kinsella allowed me to have a strong understanding of the performing arts world, and instilled in me that pursuing performing arts is a legitimate and important career path. The school also opened my eyes to costume and set design, both of which have served me extremely well in my life as a company director. I still remember being in the sewing room with my teachers, learning how to sew hemlines on costumes for Kinsella's production of "The Little Mermaid.
Without attending Kinsella, I am not sure I would have realized how strongly I wanted to pursue dance. It was during my time at Kinsella that I was inspired to create a binder called "My Future Plans" where I wrote that my dream school was NYU Tisch. 4 years later, I was accepted to that school and later graduated with my BFA!