Previous Works
"Eat Well” (2019)
Concept and choreography: Community Dance at Reed
Music: Joe Janiga and Courtney Von Drehle
Inspired by Langston Hughes’s poem “I, Too,” we ask: What resources do we have, who has access to them, and how are they used and misused? How are we tied to the people, beings, and land that we share the earth with? What is the common good? What would it be like if we all had enough?
“Building a Movement” (2017)
Concept and choreography: Community Dance at Reed
Music: Joe Janiga
This piece celebrates and honors the role that bodies in motion play in protest. Through the support of a grant from Project Pericles, we had the honor of working with Teressa Raiford of Don’t Shoot Portland (http://dontshootportland.com), a community organization dedicated to addressing racism in Portland. Raiford organizes nonviolent protests and politically engaged art installations across the city. While the theater is not the street, we offer this dance to express that Black Lives Matter at Reed and in Portland. That we are ready to dismantle the ideological and physical construction of border walls. And that we acknowledge the difficult, unfinished, and imperfect process of working for change.
“Is the Dancing Ready?” (2017)
Concept and choreography: Community Dance at Reed
Music: Joe Janiga
“How can a community politics that keeps openness, provisionality and respect for difference alive be mobilized?” ~ Petra Kuppers
Is the dancing ready? formed out of a series of improvisational reflections on the power of ephemeral communities. It embraces—and enacts—a fluid community that comes into being in the here and now through movement.
“Adventure Run” (2016)
Concept and choreography: Community Dance at Reed
Music: Joe Janiga
“Playfulness is, in part, an openness to being a fool, which is a combination of not worrying about competence, not being self-important, not taking norms as sacred and finding ambiguity and double edges a source of wisdom and delight.” ~ María Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception”
Adventure Run is a danced reflection on the political, world-making possibilities of play.