Every nonprofit has a mission, but not every nonprofit has “NATIONAL CENTER” in its name. Those words have confidence and a fair amount of formality and gravitas, but those words also come loaded with expectations. You’ve put a stake in the ground when you choose that name, and if you’re the “National Center for Choreography” then artists, arts leaders, and audiences across the country will have opinions about what your programs should be.
This year, the National Center for Choreography–Akron (NCCAkron) is celebrating ten years as a national hub for dance research and development. This 501(c)3 organization traces its origins to a three-year feasibility study that launched in 2013. The study explored the possibility for a new National Center for Choreography through a Blue Ribbon Panel that included interviews, surveys, asset mappings and pilot residencies. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation funded the study.
In 2015, the Knight Foundation committed a $5 million endowment to establish NCCAkron in Northeast Ohio. In 2016, Christy Bolingbroke relocated from San Francisco to Akron, becoming NCCAkron’s Founding Executive / Artistic Director. Bolingbroke had been the ODC Deputy Director for Advancement and the ODC Theater curator for nearly six years, and she explained to her Bay Area colleagues that “I’m not going away, I’m just going national!” Under Bolingbroke’s leadership, NCCAkron has collaborated with over 800 choreographers from 100 U.S. cities, and Bay Area artists have played key roles in NCCAkron’s accomplishments.
So what is NCCAkron? Bolingbroke describes the organization as “an incubator for artists and a hyperagent for the national dance field.” Both incorporated companies and project-based artists benefit from shared knowledge, time, space, and increased operating capacity. Reflecting on the organization’s ten years of programs, Bolingbroke explains, “When I first got here, it was so liberating that I could look at our mission statement, and the word ‘residency’ didn’t appear anywhere. It really has been a journey to redefine what research, development, and residencies in dance can be.”
“a space for experimentation, for gathering, and for asking questions”
– Daiane Lopes da Silva
“where people come together in designed chaos:
the whole system has a frame – time, a rough subject as a starting point, and people with a range of perspectives – and a lot of things happen within the frame.”
– Weidong Yang
NCCAkron is a cultural matchmaker. Kinetech Arts co-founders Daiane Lopes da Silva and Weidong Yang partnered with NCCAkron on three Dancing Labs: Immersive Media through Cunningham (2019), Art Speaks 2.0 (2021), and Technology (2024). Dancing Labs are multi-day environments that bring together artists who normally do not have the time or opportunity to be in dialogue.
Through NCCAkron’s Dancing Labs, Lopes da Silva and Yang have connected with over 35 artists and technologists from across the country, and neither had worked with any of these individuals before. Yang says, “NCCAkron opened up everyone’s horizons. Kinetech Arts is a grassroots organization in San Francisco, and I’m a scientist coming from my own experiences in academia and research. Going to NCCAkron Dancing Labs, we’re suddenly exposed to all these people from the East Coast who are very rooted in the dance community and with vastly different approaches from ours.” Lopes da Silva explains, “In many ways, we are very isolated in San Francisco. I can go to New York, and I can go see someone’s show, but I never get a chance to really talk to these other artists. And when we go to a residency, we’re always focused on making our own work – the exchange between artists is an afterthought.” Yang continues, “Even if you go to a conference, you meet other people, but the conversation is very much on the surface level.” Dancing Labs prioritize time for artists to delve into shared points of inquiry. Lopes da Silva adds, “We aren’t just talking about our artmaking or sharing our work through a short presentation. The thinking is so much bigger than that. It’s deliberate, dedicated space to figure things out together.” For Dancing Lab: Technology, NCCAkron designated two to four hours per day for cohort discussions, while also providing daily studio time for Kinetech to continue their research on electromyography devices in dance.
In February 2026, NCCAkron will connect its Creative Administration Research (CAR) program with DanceHack, Kinetech’s annual festival where movement artists, engineers, technologists and researchers come together to exchange knowledge, challenge assumptions, and co-create. NCCAkron launched the CAR program in 2020, challenging dance artists to reimagine the business of creating art.
“a dual commitment to both the art and administrative practice”
– Hope Mohr
NCCAkron supports the work that artists do beyond the studio or the stage. Hope Mohr’s 2019-2021 Research Residency provided her with time and space to write about activist curatorial practice.
The outcome was Shifting Cultural Power: Case Studies and Questions in Performance (2021), published by the University of Akron Press as the first book in the NCCAkron Series in Dance. Part archive and part workbook, Shifting Cultural Power reflects on Mohr’s ten years at the helm of The Bridge Project and the organization’s shift into distributed leadership. Mohr later collaborated with Cherie Hill and Karla Quintero to co-author the essay “Embodying Equity-Driven Change: A Journey from Hierarchy to Shared Leadership” for Artists on Creative Administration: A Workbook from the National Center for Choreography (2024, edited by Tonya Lockyer), the second book in the NCCAkron Series in Dance. Through first-hand stories, over thirty artists and arts workers describe how they create new approaches to the business of art, addressing themes like agency, activism, pay equity, leadership, family, and ethics.
Mohr was also a 2024-2025 Thought Partner in the Creative Administration Research program. NCCAkron paired Mohr with slowdanger, a Pittsburgh/Washington DC-based multidisciplinary performance entity led by co-artistic directors anna thompson and taylor knight. CAR Artists and Thought Partners participate in intensive Investigative Retreats designed to reflect on the Artist’s body of work, examine their current operating environment, and imagine new ways forward. NCCAkron believes there isn’t one way of making dances, so there should not be one way of doing arts administration. Mohr remarks, “NCCAkron’s Creative Administration Research program – there is nothing like it in dance. . . NCCAkron has a commitment to field building. Not just incubating individual artists, but strengthening the field.”
“an embedded residency experience”
– Lindsay Gauthier
NCCAkron provides a national lens for regional artists. For Dancing Lab: Screendance (2018), NCCAkron partnered with Dance Film SF (DFSF) to create a national iteration of the San Francisco Dance Film Festival’s Co-Laboratory (Co-Lab) program, and Lindsay Gauthier was the DFSF Creative Producer for the project. Gauthier explains, “Co-Lab is a unique collaboration between choreographers and filmmakers who are given the opportunity to create a short dance film in a week. I had spent five years with SFDFF doing the Co-Lab program, pairing choreographers and filmmakers to create screendance films, usually with one day of rehearsal, two days of production and then post-production. The Dancing Lab was ten days of living and working together in Akron.” Previously, Co-Lab had only created films in the Bay Area and with local artists. Through Dancing Lab: Screendance, Gauthier was able to share the Co-Lab program and its methodology with production crews from Akron and Cleveland as well as with choreographers, filmmakers, and dance artists from Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Gauthier adds, “NCCAkron put a national spotlight on Dance Film SF and its Co-Lab program.” Chrysalis was directed by Nicole Klaymoon in collaboration with Morgan Wise. But First was directed by Erin Brown Thomas and choreographed by Mike Esperanza. These Dancing Lab: Screendance films premiered at the 9th annual San Francisco Dance Film Festival at the Brava Theater.
“a blueprint for liberation”
– Sean Dorsey
NCCAkron is artist-centric. Sean Dorsey was the lead artist for NCCAkron’s Dancing Lab: LGBTQ+ Dream Lab (that pivoted to a Satellite Residency in 2020) and a Creative Residency (2025). Creative Residencies provide resources for artists to experiment and play with new work. NCCAkron created Satellite Residencies as a program shift from 2020-2021 in response to the artists’ needs amid the pandemic’s travel restrictions.
For the Satellite Residency, Dorsey met virtually with company members to develop “The Lost Art of Dreaming” that premiered at San Francisco’s Z Space in 2022 and then toured across the US in 2023 and 2024. For the Creative Residency, Dorsey brought five dancers to Akron for one week of developing new work.
Dorsey explains, “From the very first moment Christy approached me with a residency invitation, I was blown away by the extraordinary depth and breadth of NCCAkron’s expansiveness! It was a huge ‘wow!’ moment (again and again) for me. I was always asked, ‘what do YOU want? What would most serve your process, your creativity, your practice? What would most push and challenge you?’ NCCAkron does not operate on a one-size-fits-all residency model: I was invited into a year-long, iterative dreaming process to build a residency that would best serve and challenge my practice. This is unparallelled in our field. As a transgender artist, as someone who grew up poor, as a disabled artist, I am so used to being told ‘no, we can’t do it that way’ or ‘yes, but….’ — but with NCCAkron it was always an enthusiastic ‘YES! Let’s find a way together to do that!’”
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Which Bay Area artist’s experience most clearly exemplifies NCCAkron? Over the past ten years, this National Center for Choreography has continued to evolve alongside its artists. Bolingbroke explains, “Since our beginning, NCCAkron’s curatorial values have included operating from abundance and inviting questions that challenge the status quo. This nimbleness and openness to change enables us to support each artist’s individual needs, to include more diverse perspectives in our programs, and to push for change within and at the forefront of the dance ecosystem.” NCCAkron has co-designed every program – budget, schedule, and creative partners – with each artist to aggregate resources and build something larger than what either entity could do on their own.
Rather than choosing a single description or definitive answer, let’s embrace NCCAkron’s curatorial values. We can challenge ourselves and others with questions, “What is a National Center for Choreography? What is NCCAkron? Which Bay Area artist’s experience most clearly exemplifies NCCAkron?” while also knowing that the purpose of questioning might be to get to the next question, instead of the next answer. We can also operate from abundance: Daiane Lopes da Silva, Weidong Yang, Hope Mohr, Lindsay Gauthier, and Sean Dorsey all had experiences that exemplify NCCAkron. Because sometimes the right answer for a multiple choice question is “all of the above.”
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Want to learn more about NCCAkron?
Each year, NCCAkron offers at least one creative opportunity through an open application. These open applications are a great way to introduce yourself to NCCAkron. Even if you aren’t accepted for that program, you become an artist on their radar, and all applicants receive an opportunity to meet with program staff. Bolingbroke adds, “Artists can also email us directly, and we can begin a conversation. When I joined NCCAkron in 2016, I embarked on a listening tour of U.S. dance markets. I and the Program Managers continue to conduct these listening sessions (virtually and in-person) with dance artists from across the country. NCCAkron is based in Ohio, but we are a national center, and we are committed to learning about all regions, identities, and genres across the national dance ecosystem.”
- Watch their artist talks at https://www.youtube.com/@nccakron
- Listen to their podcasts Inside the Dancer’s Studio and How People Move People
- Subscribe to their e-newsletter https://www.nccakron.org/engage
- Send an email inquiry directly to [email protected]
NCCAkron has also collaborated with many more local artists, such as Bear Graham, Brandon Graham, Cherie Hill, David Le, Héctor Jaime, Joti Singh, Karla Quintero, Katerina Wong, Megan Lowe, Nicole Klaymoon, Nol Simonse, Patrick Makuakāne, Rebecca Chaleff, Rebecca Fitton, SAMMAY Peñaflor Dizon, Sima Belmar, and Yayoi Kambara (partial list). Additionally, many NCCAkron artists were previously based in the Bay Area, such as Alice Sheppard, Ben Needham-Wood, Byron Au Yong, Gerald Casel, Marc Brew, Ryan Smith, and Wendy Rein (partial list).
