Group Acorde Celebrates 10 Years, But Don’t Call It an Anniversary Show
Group Acorde has been making dances in and around Houston for a decade now, a collaboration between two dancers, a musician, and a rotating roster of other collaborators. But before we dive into their upcoming show, Gone, let’s visit the origin story of a friendship.
Once upon a time, Lindsey McGill was working in the office of the late great Hope Stone Studio. Roberta Paixão Cortes comes in and says she wants to go to New York and take some classes, and did Lindsey want to go along? “We weren’t like great friends; we just danced together and I was like, yeah!” McGill says. “So we just bought a plane ticket and stayed at the YMCA and took classes for a week together. And look at us now!”
“It was exactly like that,” Cortes confirms. “We did different classes and stayed at the YMCA. We had our very first fight-slash-disagreement because we didn’t know each other that well. Every place we would go I would have to ask for a pack of ice because my ankle was injured, so we would go into a deli and I would put my leg up. So that was a significant trip for us because it was not planned as friends. We became friends.”
This was still well before they teamed up with musicians Thomas Helton and Seth Paynter to officially form the collaboration-based Group Acorde. In the intervening years, the two dancers performed for a number of choreographers and companies (a list that looks a bit like a Houston’s who’s who of dance), as well as with companies beyond both Houston and Texas. But when I mention that they were experienced artists when they began the company, McGill is quick to talk about the way GA stretched her.
“I’ll just say that I felt experienced as a dancer,” she says, “but I hadn’t had as much experience in choreographing; I had some but not a lot, and definitely running a company was a whole new thing. I don’t think those skills translated naturally. I have some aptitude for certain things like organization and financial books, and I love spreadsheets, so that’s great for me for the parts that we need that, but a lot did not prepare me for what it is to run a company or write a press release.”
“I think we have grown so much, as a company, as an organization, and also as artists, as collaborative artists,” Cortes says. “When we set this up, we didn’t know how to do a collaboration where musicians and dancers could just talk from the beginning of an idea.”
For Gone, the company is bringing back two of their earliest works. The very first work they ever created together, “Fear: a work in progress,” on which Cortes took the lead, is being recreated. Within this work, three artists’ fears are explored via movement and sound.
“Subject: see attachment,” is another early piece, this one led by McGill. For them, a recreation is a repeat of a process, not a reset of previous choreography. When first created, the performers were set to be two dancers and two musicians. McGill sent emails to the other three, asking for 10 things that they were interested in right then—photos, quotes, videos, etc. Then McGill interviewed her collaborators about these “things” and began making movement ideas for everyone without revealing anything about what she learned from these emails and conversations. The new iteration has three dancers and one musician, which changes the dynamic right away, and even though Helton and Cortes had done the exercise before, McGill asked them to do it again. “It was neat which things were the same, because they didn’t remember what they sent me 10 years ago, and which things had evolved a little bit differently,” McGill says. “And of course, I’ve been friends with them these last 10 years and colleagues forever.” Through the process, McGill interprets what she learns and gives the other performers movement or spoken text, without revealing the origins of the material. “The piece itself is absolutely a collage.”
For a new piece, the group invited choreographer Andrea Dawn Shelley to create “Every Root Is An Anchor.” Inspired by the relatively recent discovery and study of the underground, microscopic, fungal network that connects trees via their root systems, Shelley is exploring the ways trees form an interdependent community of support and mutual aid.
Running through all the pieces are themes of grief and loss, hence the evening’s name, Gone. I mentioned this seemed an ironic theme and title for a 10th anniversary show.
“To me, it’s the 10 year anniversary show because it’s 10 years,” McGill says. “It’s the next show we’re making and it happens to be the 10 year anniversary show. We’ve been interested in bringing these pieces back for several seasons.” Describing the developing themes to Shelley, animated her imagination in the direction of the trees, which carries its own share of loss.
“One of the things we’ve also talked about for the evening was the idea of community loss and that came up from all the stuff we’ve been through in Houston with natural disasters. I think the community aspect was also what [Andrea] got inspired by with the trees,” Cortes continues. “We have lost pets, people we love, houses, places that were significant to us. For Group Acorde, specifically, our very first production in 2017, which was called Unemojional at the Rec Room, that was the very first time we were producing an evening, and Hurricane Harvey hit. So, we had our opening night and we couldn’t do the show anymore. This is a running joke between us. We were in the parking lot after opening night and Lindsey said, ‘There’s a hurricane coming.’ And I’m like, no no no no no, it’s going to be fine. And she looked at me. ‘There’s a hurricane coming.’ I was very much in denial about it. So, I think there was a lot of trauma in our very first production and we can argue about the loss of that, too, for us.” Tying it all up, Cortes says, “So I think the communal conversations created inspiration for Andrea with the trees and how there’s so much loss in nature as well.”
A decade is and isn’t a long time. “Time is just interesting. It doesn’t feel like it’s been 10 years in a lot of ways, McGill says.
“We have grown a lot,” Cortes says. “Our relationships have grown as well and that shows in the work and how much we trust each other and how much we trust in the work we’re doing.”
In a broad invitation, Cortes concludes, “We just hope that people come. We hope that people who have seen our work before come to see the growth and that people who have never seen us before will come and check it out. We’re about collaboration, so we’re always talking to people. That’s how guest appearances happen, that’s how guest choreographers happen, it’s all about relationships.”
Groupe Acorde
Gone
November 12-16, 2026
Midtown Arts and Theater Center Houston (MATCH)
Tickets: https://matchouston.org/events/2026/gone
Recent Comments