How Gheremi Clay Is Building Clay Collective with Werk

The LA-based choreographer and director founded Clay Collective in 2024 with a conviction that's equal parts artistic and personal: dance companies should feel like families.

We're trying to build a family, a family needs a home. Werk is that home."
— Gheremi Clay, Founder, Clay Collective Collective

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Gheremi Clay didn't set out to start a company. He just wanted to put on a show. A Saint Louis native who stumbled into dance at sixteen — after spending years learning steps from High School Musical and Cheetah Girls in his grandmother's living room — Clay went on to train seriously at the Center of Creative Arts under teacher Lee Nolting, and never looked back. By the time he landed in Los Angeles, he had the skills of a professional dancer and the mind of a director. In 2024, he pulled together a group of artists he genuinely loved and said: let's just see what happens.

What happened is Clay Collective — a performance company rooted in community, built on trust, and powered, in part, by Werk.

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The Dancers of Clay Collective: Artistic Muses & Administrative Leaders

At Clay Collective, the line between dancer and collaborator is intentionally blurry. Clay doesn't just choreograph on his company members — he builds with them. And when he talks about each of them, it's clear this isn't corporate team-speak. He genuinely means it.

"I always want it to feel like a family," he says. "And although family has its challenges, its ups and its downs, most importantly it's rooted through love."

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Savian Rain

OG Member · Movement Anchor

Clay calls Rain "the blueprint of a lot of my Clay Collective movement." He doesn't just execute the choreography — he pushes Clay as a creator and holds down the room when Clay isn't in it. "He offers me space and time to create on him, and I trust him to run rehearsal if I'm not there." That kind of trust takes time to build. With Rain, Clay found it early.

Kayla Anise

OG Member · Management & Artistry

Anise does double duty — she keeps the operational side of Clay Collective moving while serving as one of Clay's primary creative muses. "She really emphasizes what it means to be a muse to me whenever I'm creating more feminine work or more hard-hitting work. She connects herself to those spaces completely, no complaints. She's just there."

Maddie Skaronic

OG Member · Technical Lead

Clay's "technical queen." For the company's April show, Skaronic learned an entire solo — Acceptance, performed to Robert Glasper's "Better Than I Could Have Ever Imagined" — almost entirely from video, after just one partial rehearsal together. "She made it her own while staying true to what I was creating. It's my favorite piece in the show." High praise from someone who choreographed 14 of the 17 pieces himself.

Macyo Sikkum

Newer Member · Storyteller

One of the company's newer additions, Sikkum brings an intellectual depth that Clay finds hard to stop talking about. "He hears something in the music that nobody else hears — something in the background — and he just goes there. Every time, I'll send him a message after: I heard that. I saw that." That kind of musicality isn't taught. You either have it or you don't.

"I try my best to make sure it's not just a space where they're learning steps. I want to help build who they are as people, as artists, within their careers."

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Show Ticketing on Werk Pro: No More Runaround

Clay Collective's April 2024 show, Collision, was the company's biggest swing yet — 17 pieces, a two-month rehearsal process, and for the first time, real sponsors at the table. The concept? What if it was your last day on earth? Clay was on the phone with producer Kayla when the idea landed, and from that one question, an entire world of sound, movement, and emotion came rushing in.

For ticketing, he chose Werk Pro. And the difference, he'll tell you, was immediately obvious.

"I love how straight to the point it is," Clay says. "How clear, how concise. I can see everything right off the bat — no extra searching, no figuring things out." Writing descriptions, setting prices, uploading the flyer, generating a shareable link — all of it just worked. On phones. On laptops. For everyone.

For Clay, the real proof came from the people in his corner. "I can figure things out technically. But my mom sometimes needs extra time with tech. She figured it out without any confusion. Finally — a platform that doesn't make her feel lost." And every time someone bought a ticket, he got an email. Sending updates, thank-you notes, and announcements to his audience became genuinely easy.

"Using Werk as our ticketing platform, there were no questions. People understood everything. They knew where to go. It was just so easy, so breezy."

The contrast with Eventbrite, which the company had used before, was hard to ignore. "We weren't hitting major problems," Clay admits, "but there was a lot of runaround. We were still fielding a ton of questions." With Werk, that stopped entirely. No questions. No confusion. Just people showing up to the show.

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Master Classes & Workshops: Community Is the Business Model

Shows are just one part of what Clay Collective does. From the jump, Clay has operated with a core belief: this company exists for the community, not just the stage. That belief has a real, tangible form — a growing program of master classes and workshops, all open to the public and free for Clay Collective members.

"We're trying to reimagine what the dance industry and community looks like," Clay says. The workshops run up to six hours, bring in multiple guest teachers, and reflect Clay's deeply personal approach to curation: he's not booking names. He's booking people.

"I operate from a Southern Black diaspora. Everything I do comes from my culture, my connection, the people I truly feel are making a difference — not just in the community, but within themselves. I don't care about follower counts. I care about what they're actually doing in the space."

When Clay brings guest teachers into the fold, he also brings them onto Werk — not as a sales pitch, but as a practical hand-up. "Why should they have to post a Venmo link and give out their personal information?" Instead, teachers create profiles on the platform, manage their own class listings, and get discovered by students who find them through Clay Collective's events. It's a small thing that adds up to something real: a networked creative ecosystem where everyone benefits, not just the organizer.

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The Werkspace: A Blessed House

For a company that defines itself as a family, "where do we rehearse" is never a purely logistical question. It carries weight. Clay Collective has made the Werkspace their base of operations — and for Clay, the difference between a useful space and a meaningful one isn't subtle.

"I believe a physical space isn't just a physical space," he says. "There are spirits and energies. We have a blessed house."

The relationship between Clay Collective and the Werkspace runs through the entire arc of Collision. Their first gathering — not a rehearsal, but a meeting to connect as humans before connecting as artists — happened there. Rehearsals followed. After the show, a watch party brought them back one more time. "It felt like an entire storyline," Clay says. "Starting somewhere, feeling good there, and then not really ending it — just continuing it." The moment the watch party wrapped, he was already reaching back out to book more time.

"If we're trying to build a family," Clay says, "a family needs a home." In Los Angeles — where studio availability is competitive and nothing comes cheap — having a space that genuinely feels like yours is not something to take lightly. Clay doesn't.

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The Highest Dream

Ask Gheremi Clay where he wants Clay Collective to go, and he doesn't hesitate: everywhere. "I don't want us to be a one-city company. I want us to inspire and be inspired everywhere we go. I want us to travel. I want us to go everywhere."

He knows the companies he's measuring against: Alvin Ailey, Complexions, Lines. Companies that have crossed oceans, built audiences across generations, and made dance feel like something that belongs to everyone. He wants that reach. But he also has something more specific in mind — a direction the next show is already moving toward.

Rather than a series of standalone pieces, Clay is building toward a full-stage narrative: one continuous story with a beginning, middle, and end. Something that could hold a marquee. Something that could tour. Something that, in the version of the future Clay is already picturing, could run on Broadway.

"My degree is in musical theater. I've always wanted to be on Broadway. Imagine bringing what I'm doing now with Clay Collective to a Broadway stage — fusing the commercial and concert worlds in a way that opens doors for everybody. Not just our age group. Everybody."

Clay Collective is, by the numbers, a young company. One year in, one major show under their belt. But spend any time with how Gheremi Clay talks about his dancers, his community, his vision — and "young" starts to feel like the wrong frame. This company knows exactly what it is. It's just getting started.

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