Dayna Hanson, Peggy Piacenza and Dave Proscia are experts in the hustle, resourcefulness and stamina that are so often required in making art. For the past 25 years, Hanson and Piacenza have worked as dancers and choreographers, both together, with the D-9 Collective and 33 Fainting Spells, and independently. Proscia, whom the dancers first met at On the Boards in 2001, is a longtime lighting designer, technical director, performer, visual artist and musician. The trio has shared credits on many projects, including Hanson’s 2013 feature-length dance-and-music film Improvement Club (which, incidentally, happens to be about a performance group struggling to make art).

The real-life struggle, Piacenza says, is made even more exhausting when it comes to rehearsal space: There’s never enough affordable, available, close-to-home space in which to practice or present new work. “The OK Hotel—remember that?” Piacenza asks, referring to the famous arts venue in Pioneer Square that closed after the Nisqually Earthquake in 2001. “There was also Red, a small space off First Avenue,” she adds. The rehearsal space obits continue: the Polson Building, the Washington Shoe building, 619 Western, Oddfellows on Capitol Hill. (The last still stands, but it used to teem with small theater groups as well as Velocity Dance Center, which has since moved elsewhere on Capitol Hill.)

Piacenza had reached a turning point in her life a handful of years ago. She had completed a degree at Smith College. She was nearing age 50. She had spent a lot of creative energy to make and produce a full-length solo “movement memoir” show called Touch Me Here—renting out Washington Hall in the Central District for performances—and she realized, “I was ready to make a commitment. And that meant finding a space, a space where I could say, ‘This is where I work. This is where I go to create. An actual base.’”

So, the dancer batted around an idea with Hanson and Proscia, a couple, about going in together on their own dance studio so they and others needing space could create their work.