2023-2024 Performances & Events

District Choreographers Dance Festival

September 9-10

Dance Place kicks off our 44th season with year three of the DC (District Choreographers) Dance Festival! This ticketed event is a two day festival in celebration of DC’s rich dance community, featuring choreographers and dancers specifically based in the DMV area. 

Featured Artists include:

Malik Burnett

Gerson Lanza 

Revision Dance Company 

Claire Alrich 

Orange Grove Dance 

Kyoko Fujimoto 

Daché Green

haus of bambi: Haus Coming 

September 20 at 8pm

Haus Coming is the official opening event of haus of bambi’s 3rd season. Hosted by Bambi, Haus Coming will honor performer and producer Bumper, the recipient of haus of bambi’s annual HAUS AWARD, who will join the previous awardees, artists Greg David and King Molasses, in an evening of performance premieres and celebration. Come see what we have in store for this coming year! After the show, join us at the official afterparty at Dewdrop Inn just down the block with beats by DJ Lemz! 

KanKouran West African Dance Company

January 13 at 7pm & January 14 at 4pm

KanKouran‘s 40th Anniversary performance will be an exciting journey through 40 years of presenting and preserving traditional West African Dance in the U.S. The performance will feature KanKouran’s Senior Company dancers and drummers, our Juniors, the Children’s company, as well as our community class performers. 

Edisa Weeks/DELIRIOUS Dances: 3 Rites: Liberty

March 9 at 7:30pm & March 10 at 4pm

3 RITES: Life, Liberty, Happiness by DELIRIOUS Dances / Edisa Weeks is a trilogy featuring three interactive performance rituals that integrate dance, live music, text, visual installations, community discussions and shared meals to humorously and poignantly interrogate why life, liberty and happiness were included as unalienable rights in the United States Declaration of Independence. 3 RITES explores what the right to life, liberty, and happiness means today, who has access to these rights, and how they manifest in the body.

The Liberty rite begins with an installation of roots made out of paper and twine that hang from the ceiling to floor. The audience moves through the maze of roots to eventually meet the Liberty character (Weeks), whose hair is braided to resemble the Statue of Liberty’s crown. Each spoke of the hair crown is connected via tie-lines and pulleys to specific objects, (Bible, black dick, blonde wig, gun, lightbulb, sneakers, watermelon) that represent the Black experience in America. In this rite, Weeks alternates between black face, white face, storytelling and visceral dance to dig into the pathologizing of African-Americans and the foundations of Liberty in America.

3 RITES is produced by Marýa Wethers, and commissioned and presented by 651 ARTS, with co-commissioners Billie Holiday Theater, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Mount Tremper Arts, and National Performance Network.

This engagement of Edisa Weeks / DELIRIOUS Dances is made possible in part through the ArtsCONNECT program of Mid Atlantic Arts with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Javier Padilla/side projects dc

March 15 at 8pm

NORA and The Lighthouse is a sci-fi immersive dance theater experience that takes us through the coastal town of Shenoa Creek on a journey of loss, hope, grief and transformation. Through vignettes of audience participation, projections, vocal looping and choreography, NORA questions what actually waits for us at the end and how far we’re willing to go for the ones that we love.

This presentation is supported by the Dance Place Co-Presentation Series.

Louisa Mejeur

March 16 & March 17 at 4pm

The Family Ballet is barely a ballet but is fully a family affair. Children and adults of all ages are welcome to join for a family excursion like never before. The audience will see hard-hitting and relevant issues expressed through dance such as, “Toddlers getting dressed” in which we encounter the dreaded: Shoes With Laces and Jackets With Buttons as well as “Mealtime with babies” where the floor becomes an abstract canvas. Remember a father’s finest moves in a celebration of Dad’s disco moves and honor mom in an unfinished piece about Mother’s unfinished conversations…Lastly, enjoy the magic of a wee fairytale, expressed through dance as has been done for centuries. This performance invites in the chaos of families and helps them feel seen, heard, and joyful. 

This presentation is supported by the Dance Place Co-Presentation Series.

Sydnie L. Moseley Dances: Purple: A Ritual in Nine Spells 

April 27 at 7pm & April 28 at 4pm

PURPLE: A Ritual in Nine Spells is an evening-length ritual choreopoem that embodies the power of deep sisterhood for social change through storytelling and movement. Inspired by beloved ancestor, playwright, poet, and feminist Ntozake Shange (best known for her Obie Award-winning play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide), and the public housing communities in San Juan Hill via the stories of its decades-long residents, PURPLE amplifies women and nonbinary voices and captures the radical joy in a place. The world premiere is devised and performed by Sydnie L. Mosley Dances, an NYC-based dance-theater collective that works in communities to organize for gender and racial justice through experiential dance performance. Danced by a multi-generational ensemble of twelve, the piece was developed in part through engagements with Lincoln Center Education and in connection with our neighboring community and the Amsterdam Houses. The work premieres alongside a pre-show multimedia art installation in the lobby; What Does PURPLE Sound Like? spotlights older adults from our local communities.

This engagement of Sydnie L. Mosley Dances (SLMDances) is made possible in part through the Special Presenter Initiatives program of Mid Atlantic Arts with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

Ronya-Lee Anderson – AIR Presentation: Black Madonna and Miss Amerika

May 4 at 7pm & May 5 at 4pm

Dance Place presents 2022-2024 Artist in Residence (AIR) Ronya-Lee Anderson’s Black Madonna and Miss Amerika.

Black Madonna and Miss Amerika is an investigation of socio-political happenings in conversation with the positioning of the Black female icon in the church, on the stage and in the streets. It is cinematic in nature, employing a familiar series of still and moving images tied to a complex historical canon. Black Madonna and Miss Amerika tackles the tension between the public and private; the doing and being of the Black female iconic body. The work confronts the worship of the Black female body in popular culture; worship undone in the political and economic treatment of that same body. Using popular culture, live music, comedy, interviews and portraiture, equal attention is given to the various aspects of production, including, but not limited to sound, costuming, projection design, and of course, movement. Black Madonna and Miss Amerika is interactive in nature, inviting the audience to engage with the world created in the space through sound, sight, smell, touch and taste.