We had put off naming our ensemble, again and again. Several weeks into our residency, a deadline loomed. We wanted to apply for a grant, and the grant required that we have a website. A website required that we have a name.

So we made an exhaustive list. Scratched early on: “Cauldron,” “Feral Cricket,” “Sparkle Pony” and worse. At a certain point, whittling down the list became more difficult. It was a Saturday, normally a free day, and we’d been meeting for four hours already. Sophia and Claire kept proposing opposite ways of narrowing our options. Eleanor had already maxed out on her daily tolerance for meetings (about 60 min) and her mood was souring. I wasn’t sure we even had the right name on the list at all, and wanted more time to think about it. Claire argued that people would accept our name whatever it was, so we should just pick one and go with it. The. Meeting. Dragged. On.

Finally we got to a list of fewer than ten names that most of us could live with. Realizing that we needed fresh ears, I called a couple of trusted loved ones for their reactions. “I don’t know what that means.” “That sounds like a nerdy band name.” “A little bit dramatic.” “It sounds like an overpriced restaurant.” “It reminds me of that paperclip animation in early versions of Microsoft Word.” Hmm. We agreed to sleep on it, and the next day we settled on Spoke.

I was thrilled with the choice. Spoke was a name that could reflect something meaningful about our group. To me (and to the loved ones I polled in that never-ending Saturday meeting), “Spoke” evokes both speech and the spokes of a wheel.

Speech. Simply put, we aim to have something to say with our work and hope that our audiences feel we have spoken to them.

Spokes of a wheel. A wheel needs multiple spokes to work—one or two is not enough to make the wheel function. The spokes must be in balance with each other, all similarly strong and in tension. If one spoke is too tight or too loose, the integrity of the wheel is compromised. In our group, all the members are critical—we train and create together as a group, deliberately working as a tight-knit unit rather than individually. We must all be in balance with one another, without anyone too dominant or too withdrawn, in order for the wheel, the group, to function.

Our full name, Spoke Movement Ensemble, is deliberately ambiguous about our genre of performance. At times we are clearly drawing from circus, dance, or theater, and at times, we are clearly not these things. “Movement” keeps our options open without alienating or embracing any single genre. “Ensemble” is perhaps the most important part of our name. An ensemble is defined as “a group of items viewed as a whole rather than individually.” This group mentality is at the core of what we do. We are not a loosely knit collection of individuals, or a company with a single leader. The level at which we operate is the group.

I am pleased and proud, whenever someone asks me the name of our group, to tell them that we are Spoke Movement Ensemble.

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