About Us

Rock Dance Collective (RDCo) is a collaborative performance company founded in 2016 by Cleo Mack, Kelli McGovern, and Blair Ritchie—three artists whose combined expertise in choreography, visual art, dance education, and embodied research informs the company’s interdisciplinary, process-driven work. Based in the greater New York City area, RDCo creates large-scale, immersive performances that merge movement, sculpture, installation, and sound to examine materiality, memory, agency, and the shared human experience.
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RDCo has been presented at venues such as Joe’s Pub, NJPAC, NY City Center, St. Mark’s Church, SteelStacks, Grounds for Sculpture, South Orange Performing Arts Center, Montclair Dance Festival, Rutgers University, DeSales University, and Muhlenberg College. The company has also been granted commissions and to support the creation of site-specific installations and interdisciplinary works by the Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership, Grounds For Sculpture, Ten Hairy Legs, and CoLab Arts. Most recently, RDC artist Cleo Mack was featured in the New Jersey Arts Annual at the Morris Museum, a Smithsonian affiliate.
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Mack, McGovern, and Ritchie bring together distinct but deeply complementary practices. Mack, a visual artist and award-winning choreographer, guides the company’s aesthetic direction through an integration of movement, material, and space. McGovern, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University’s Teachers College and Arnhold Fellowship recipient, leads the company’s strategic development and outreach efforts, expanding RDCo’s impact across educational and community contexts. As Executive Director, McGovern is particularly adept at charting the practical and organizational pathways needed to realize large-scale, conceptually ambitious works—an essential asset in RDCo’s ability to consistently deliver fully realized, complex installations. Ritchie, whose national and international touring experience spans multiple contemporary companies, serves as the company’s dramaturg—a critical role in shaping the intellectual and emotional architecture of RDCo’s work. Her contributions ensure that the company’s research-based processes remain cohesive and resonant, helping to translate complex ideas into layered, embodied experiences for audiences.
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Together, Rock Dance Collective builds performance environments that collapse disciplinary boundaries, value both inquiry and product simultaneously, and invite audiences to engage with dance not only as performance, but as a reflective and spatialized form of research.