Third Coast Dance Company

Third Coast Dance Company (TCDC) is a mid-Michigan based dance company that is committed to creating local, quality, accessible modern dance. The goal of TCDC is to make dances about the people, place, and community that they inhabit while taking an experiential and collaborative approach to dance creation, education and performance. 

Third Coast Dance Company began in 2016 as a conversation between two dance artists: Kristen Harrison and Lynn Bowman, who were both on faculty at Alma College in Michigan. Both artists have traveled far and wide teaching and choreographing and both agreed that mid-Michigan was an ideal place to live and work. Hence, they wanted a platform for making dance, teaching and sharing in the middle of the mitten. They chose the name "Third Coast” because of the colloquial reference to the fact that Michigan has the greatest  length of coast outside the east and west coasts of the US. 

Lynn and Kristen envisioned a company that took a collaborative and democratic approach to dance making. Refusing to embrace a single idea of what a dance company should be, Lynn and Kristen are a constantly evolving and sharing in the teaching, choreographing, problem solving, and leadership of the dance company.  

The TCDC is interested in keeping a local focus (“locavores”) and aims  to connect artists and art consumers in the same geographic region so as to develop a more self-reliant and resilient dance community. Third Coast Dance Company is a Michigan non-profit organization and a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization under federal law.