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Storied Dance Company Reaches for the Cloud
by Martha DeGrasse 4/06/2026
Mark Morris Dance Group, described by Yo-Yo Ma as “the preeminent modern dance organization of our time,” is entering its 45th year of touring and teaching. The company has orchestrated an impressive arrangement of donations, ticket sales, and studio rentals to keep its art in motion.
But it has never been easy. “Like all performance art organizations, we are just getting by,” said Elizabeth Fox, the company’s CFO. The company's home base is a 25-year-old Brooklyn building called The Mark Morris Dance Center. The building's exterior is sleek and modern, but until recently the operations inside were crippled by legacy technology. The peer-to-peer network relied on equipment donated by Fox’s husband’s company, and there is very little ethernet cabling in the building. The laptops were a decade old and the server was crashing twice a month . The troupe’s technical director doubled as the IT support person after the grant that had funded a full-time IT director ran out.
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“It was very hard to find funding for the non-sexy stuff,” said Fox. “All the resources go into the art.”
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The outdated technology was taking a toll. Guests were sometimes unable to connect to WiFi, and the scheduling of studio time was cumbersome. “We rent about 10,000 hours of rehearsal space per year to 500 artists, and that was all done through email exchanges. The dance company had no visibility,” Elizabeth remembers. She suspected it was only a matter of time before the organization would need to come up with $1M or more for a full technology refresh. But technology had never been a top priority for the dance group, or its donors, who were much readier to fund scholarships and tours than routers and switches.
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The Mark Morris Dance Group performs "The Look of Love" in Austin, Texas
One donor was different. Jeff Budge, founder of Peng Productions and father of Mark Morris dancer Karlie Budge, donated his time and expertise to rearchitect the group’s network and move operations and archives to the cloud.
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Budge started by listening carefully to Fox. He learned the staff was expert in securing grants, not securing files. “They had a variety of Box, OneDrive, Dropbox, different parts of the company were using different things,” he remembers. And the onsite server was old and unreliable.” The company had previously tried a managed service solution, but in Budge’s opinion the arrangement didn’t work because “you had a CFO of a non-profit trying to talk to a tech guy and they spoke different languages. … The CFO looked at it with a risk profile outlook.” Fox perceived change as a potential threat to operational continuity, but realized that the status quo was risky as well. The staff was struggling with 10-year-old laptops, and a server that was crashing twice a month. It was too old to qualify for regular maintenance and upgrades, and could only quality for “reactive support,” according to the provider.
But not all the company’s data was on the server. One unique element of Mark Morris Dance Group is its extensive video library, managed by professional archivists. These files were already in Azure and AWS, leading Budge to consider whether more cloud storage made sense. He quickly determined the answer was yes, because he saw how valuable Sharepoint would be for the studio booking operations. The application the company was using to book studio time was available as SaaS delivered from the cloud.
A $3,000 grant from Azure helped jump start the migration, but the process was “not all sunshine and roses,” Fox remembers. “The staffer who handled the room booking app was nervous about moving to SaaS. We ran it in parallel, mirrored the data, and the vendor helped with replicating it. Then we could start moving off the server to Sharepoint,” she explained.
Eventually Mark Morris Dance Group moved all its operational files to Sharepoint. Fox said the change has represented a big learning curve for the staff, but the payoff is undeniable. She can collaborate with other staff members in real time and studio booking is more profitable since customers can access the cloud-based app to book and reschedule their time independently. “It is has cut our staff member time in half,” Fox said.
The company was able to forego the investment in a new server in exchange for some ongoing operational expenses, including $300/month for Microsoft 365. The migration did come with some capital investment, as Budge oversaw a network upgrade to ensure reliable connectivity to Azure with Cisco gear. “They have network attached storage so they can edit video locally and then move it to the cloud,” he explained.
The video edited at the Mark Morris Dance Center will be part of dance history. Morris, who turns 70 this year, is still a prolific producer of new works. Not too far from the Brooklyn building where the Dance Center operates, he recently debuted “Via Dolorosa,” an interpretive dance which represents the Stations of the Cross. The show, which opened to critical acclaim, comes on the heels of Morris’s successful Burt Bacharach tribute, “The Look of Love,” which toured earlier this year.​The Mark Morris Dance Group technology refresh was also a successful launch for volunteer Jeff Budge's Peng Productions. After he saw the financial and operational impact of his work, he left his job as a director at Accenture in order to devote more time to helping small businesses succeed with technology