Dance Place is eager to EMBARK on its 41st year, finding our way alongside YOU – our supportive, lively community of artists, audience members, students, families, and neighbors. We enter the new season with new goals for Dance Place’s creative, educational, and performance programs. We also step into this season with clear and evolving intentions, a commitment to ongoing learning, and our collective wayfinding of the path ahead.
Blazing trails are our teaching artists and faculty in our Dance Place School, which is now home to our adult and youth educational programs, and the incredible artists of the Dance Place Center for Creation and Performance, formerly known as our Presentation Series and Residency Programs.*
This Fall, we welcome more teaching artists, faculty, and students on-site for our Fall schedule of adult and youth classes. We will also navigate the innovative terrain of physically distant indoor, outdoor, and virtual presentations, pending local and federal health and safety regulations. We will host the District Choreography (D.C.) Dance Festival in celebration of the artists right here in our nation’s capital. Internationally acclaimed indigenous dance company Red Sky Performance will grace our stage as we welcome patrons into our theater for the first live performance since March 2020, and this year’s EMBARK Gala will fuse the live and virtual world to create a hybrid evening of celebration.
This is only the beginning of what Dance Place has to offer this season!
Dance Place will EMBARK – with you – on a Fall season of learning, healing, growing, and forward motion!
*In 2020-2021, Dance Place went through a 5-year strategic plan process, and we will begin enacting several aspects of this plan starting this September. These new program titles are part of this plan, and we are eager to share a more in-depth strategic plan outline publicly soon.
District Choreography (D.C.) Dance Festival
Part of National Dance Day 2021
September 18
Free outdoor performance at Dance Place’s 8th St. Arts Park
As we EMBARK on Dance Place’s 41st season, we reconnect with one another at this outdoor dance festival. Celebrating the creativity and strength of the Washington D.C. metropolitan area’s dance community, join us for performances by BANDPortier, BREathe Dance Project, Culture Shock DC, DC Casineros, Heart Stück Bernie, PEARSONWIDRIG DANCETHEATER, and Xing Dance Theater.
Performances at 1pm and 4pm – learn more here!
Red Sky Performance
October 2 – 3
Ticketed indoor performance at Dance Place*
Red Sky Performance is a leading company of contemporary Indigenous performance in Canada and worldwide. Winner of two Dora Mavor Moore Awards and nominated for four Dora Awards, the company presents Trace. We are traceable to the very beginnings of the universe, our ancestral origins stretching across the Milky Way to the atoms burning inside of us in the ‘here and now’ on earth. Trace is a highly kinetic contemporary dance work inspired by Indigenous (Anishinaabe) sky and star stories, offering a glimpse into our origin as well as our future evolution.
jumatatu m. poe & Jermone Donte Beacham
October 28-30
Ticketed indoor performance at Dance Place*
Let ‘im Move You is a series of works choreographed by jumatatu m. poe and Jermone Donte Beacham that stem from their multi-year research into J-Sette performance. Initial research for the series absorbed the artists’ curiosity about the performance of joy and the conundrum of Black joy. This Is a Formation is the latest performance work in the series, bringing together a group of 7 Black dancers for a multimedia work to be alternately performed in black-box/white-box spaces, and on sidewalks and in alleyways in predominantly or historically Black neighborhoods. Compelled by J-Sette’s specific rules around formation and order, the new project confronts meanings, real and imaginary, of black queered bodies in public assembly.
November 12 and 13
Hybrid event: Free virtual and ticketed in-person event at Dance Place
This year’s Gala is a two-night, reduced capacity, in-person event on November 12 and 13 and will feature performances by Dance Place’s current Artists in Residence Tariq Darrell O’Meally & Britta Joy Peterson, national artists slowdanger and Gesel Mason, and artists from our youth programs. To make sure our entire community can access this spectacular program, the Saturday night performance will be live streamed! We look forward to finding our way back together at the EMBARK Gala.
Click here to learn more and purchase your ticket.
Disability Justice Virtual Forum
December 18
Free virtual event on danceplace.org
As an extension of Dance Place’s ongoing equity and inclusion work for people with disabilities, this virtual series will spotlight artists with disabilities.
*Tickets for ticketed indoor performances will go on-sale to the public on Wednesday, September 8 at 10am.
Our donors and members have shown us incredible support through quite a challenging year! As a Thank You to last season’s FORTITUDE Pledge Members and all other donors at the $250+ level, we will send passcode access for a one week pre-sale beginning on Wednesday September 1 at 10am. If you’d like to become a donor in time to receive this special perk, please complete the form linked here by 10pm on August 31. Email boxofficemanager@danceplace.org if you have any questions.
We hope that you’ll join us for an invigorating season of classes with this talented group of DMV teachers! This Fall, we are excited to see you back in our studio spaces with even more in-person classes. The full schedule, including our COVID policies, are available on our website here.
Do you have young dancers in your life? Our in-person Youth enrollment classes start up again this September and are filling up fast! Plus, this Fall the Coyaba Academy is back with youth dance classes that explore the richness of African Dance traditions from Guinea, Mali, and Senegal.
The full schedule of youth classes, including our COVID policies, are available on our website here.