In Dance

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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!’”

* * *

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.”

* * *

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).

Every once in a while, someone asks me what I think the Bay Area performance scene needs. More often it’s a funder on a grant panel, a table of self-producing directors over a meal, or one of the many gaggles of performers I find myself in on any given project.

And honestly, I never know how to answer that alone.

Not because I don’t have opinions (I have too many), but because everything I long for, struggle with, or dream about isn’t mine uniquely. It’s shaped by hallway conversations, late-night decompressions, coffee catch-ups, and half-delirious tech-week ramblings we’ve all had with each other. And the truth is this: the way artists actually talk to each other is so different from the way we talk in public.

In grants, we’re polished.
In press releases, we’re inspirational.
In show postcards, we’re seductive.
In interviews, we’re careful.
On social media, we’re brands.

But privately?

We’re messy, funny, blunt, exhausted, hopeful, opinionated, and deeply, weirdly devoted to this place and to each other.

So instead of answering alone, I asked people: performers, choreographers, devised-theater makers, drag artists, directors, elders, newcomers.

What’s on your wishlist for Bay Area performance?

The responses poured in.

Imagination. Desire. The kind of world-building artists do when we stop trying to sound impressive and actually spill tea.

This piece is a curation of those longings: mine, theirs, ours. Sometimes I’m speaking as me, and sometimes I’m speaking as the “we” I gathered, a chorus stitched together from all those conversations. It’s written from inside a scene already full of magic: festivals, residencies, collectives, experiments, and long-running efforts that keep so many of us here.

Spaces like Bridge Live Arts, Queer Cultural Center’s National Queer Arts Festival, WorkMORE, FACT/SF’s Fieldwork, Crip Ecstasy, Fresh Meat Festival, Oaklash, Performance Primers/House Party, Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival, Tito Soto’s Princess, Una Productions’ Glimpse, ROT (fka Fresh Festival), Dance Mission’s wild multi-bill weekends, Gravity’s access services, Queering Dance Festival, Deb Slater’s Studio 210 residencies, Nicki Jizz’s Reparations, RAWdance’s Concept Series, Accessible Futures, SAFEhouse, Mary Vice and Glamamore’s Pillows, and affinity and peer spaces like Asian Babe Gang, Rupture, and Latinx/Hispanic Dancers United.

Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera.

This list isn’t comprehensive. It’s proof that the wishlist already has roots.

This isn’t a policy proposal.
Not a call to action.
Not a strategic plan.

Just a dream-text.
A message in a bottle.
A collective inhale.

A zhuzh.

What follows isn’t a single answer, but a loose atlas: a collection of systems, thresholds, and pressures that could shape how art gets made here. Call them cities, if you want (a la Italo Calvino). They’re already familiar to anyone who’s tried to build a life in this scene.

xo

Cities of Rooms

We dream about space.

Not just more rehearsal space, but ecosystems: studios we can afford without doing math that makes us cry; residencies whose applications don’t require more labor than the residency itself; rooms booked for weeks with people making strange, tender work that might never become a “show.”

We dream about buildings we don’t have to give back. Big warehouses. Old hotels. Former burger joints turned into performance halls. A West Coast immersive production that runs for months or years, evolving like a queer Sleep No More meets Beach Blanket Babylon meets every beloved space we’ve ever lost in the Bay.

Week-long rentals? Be gone.

We imagine multiple floors: a drag bar, a set and props workshop, dance class in a sunlight-filled room, a co-working table near a coffee pot and a fabric stash. So much storage. Places – palaces – where people rehearse, perform, teach, nap, scheme. Places we can point to and say: those are ours.

The Bay’s creative landscape has always been slippery, impermanent, shimmering. Spaces come and go, but the spirit stays. That feeling that somewhere, in a loft or borrowed corner, something unruly and brilliant is happening. We miss that density of surprise.

A constellation of infinite, secret happenings.

We dream about venues that don’t feel like we’re squeezing ourselves between corporate events. Green rooms. Heat and AC that work (I repeat: heat and AC that work). Unionized crews who are well-paid and well-slept. Buildings nurtured with possibility instead of disappearing through neglect.

We dream of civic investment in culture. Not billionaire-branded street fairs, but a city known for its actual artists and events.

Our home-grown sanctuaries deserve to be resourced enough to last. And then some.

Rooms change what’s possible simply by staying.
When a room lasts, relationships thicken. Work stacks. Memory accumulates.

xo

Cities of Mess

We dream about structures that let experimentation deepen.

Not mess that exists only to be “refined,” “tightened,” or “positioned.” Not labs that quietly pressure work toward legibility, outcomes, or a future pitch deck. We’re talking about rooms where artists are trusted to not know, and where that not-knowing is understood as labor.

No grant language required.

We want time that isn’t auditioning for its next phase. Play that doesn’t need to justify itself as research. Studios where artists can wander, repeat themselves, contradict themselves, follow impulses that go nowhere, and circle the same question for weeks because it won’t let them go.

Mess as professional development.
Mess as training.
Mess as a legitimate use of resources.

Processes that trust that flailing, wrecking, and wandering are not failures of rigor, but evidence of it.

We want mess that actually risks change — not aesthetic déjà vu dressed up as process. Not safety masquerading as experimentation. Not career maintenance disguised as curiosity.

Same piece, different name? Be gone.

Showings where half the audience is other makers scribbling notes, gasping, laughing, recognizing themselves. Rooms where people feel permission to try the thing they’re embarrassed by, the thing that doesn’t fit their “brand,” the thing that might never be seen again.

Pin-drop quiet spaces full of stuffy, homogeneous audiences? I don’t think so, honey.

We dream about a Bay-wide mixed-bill convening that isn’t hell for those involved. Something Association of Performing Arts Professionals-ish. Twenty-minute slices from as many Bay companies as possible. You go for one artist and accidentally fall in love with five.

We dream about long-term labs and intensives where the goal is to work and witness: composition for grown-ass artists, creation sprints with strangers, wrecking more frequently (shoutout Susan Rethorst), process valued as much as product. More opportunities. More auditions.

More ways of agitating insular companies, cliques, and circles — loosening their edges, interrupting sameness, and letting new people in.

Mess isn’t the opposite of rigor.
It’s one of its homes.

xo

Cities of Thousands of Bridges

We dream about actual next steps.

You do SAFEhouse. Then what?
Pilot at ODC. Then what?
Show your work at a handful of mixed-bill festivals. Then what?

Self-produce for X number of years in hopes of… something?

(I know. I’m oversimplifying.) But right now, the path kind of stops.

Right now, too many bridges lead back to the same shoreline. We want more rungs. A showing that leads to a local theater producing you. A tour exchange. A residency across the bridge. Cross-pollination with other cities. Curators swapping lineups with Minneapolis or Havana or Manila, saying: let’s share that brilliance.

xo

Cities of Masterpieces

A resounding battle cry: we dream about spaces to fail as artists.

We’ve covered this. (See: Cities of Mess, above.)

Yes, aaaaaaaaand.

May I contradict?

I’m ready for spaces to succeed as an artist. Ooooop.

We want places to finish things. Not everything — but some things.

We want rooms where a piece can be taken seriously enough to be held all the way through. Where there is time and funding to refine, deepen, structure, rehearse, tech, and polish. Where collaborators can stay with a work long enough to let it become more than a sketch — to let it become an event.

Some of us have tasted this. A residency that really held. A co-production that didn’t rush. A room that asked more of us — and gave more in return. Once you experience that kind of support, it sharpens the desire.

This matters especially for artists in the big, messy middle — no longer “emerging,” not yet anointed as legends — who are ready for rigor, scale, and commitment, but rarely offered the conditions to grow into them.

We want an ecosystem, not lone wolves. Immersive companies. Devised collectives. Drag-theater hybrids. Peers who challenge us, push us, and stay in the room long enough for something to ripen.

Rooms where artists are paid well, treated well, challenged well. Where directors can direct, performers can perform, and no one has to also be their own fundraising department, HR team, producer, strategist, influencer, and janitor.

Infrastructure that lets artists succeed, not just survive.

xo

Cities of Care

We dream about how we show up with one another.

Leadership and collaboration are being questioned. Beautiful. Challenging. You can feel the growing pains.

Hierarchy is one option. Non-hierarchy is another. Neither is inherently virtuous. Neither is inherently harmful. And neither is the only way.

What we want is a culture that balances freedom with responsibility. Saying yes actually means yes. Questions asked early, not after weeks of confusion. Discernment replacing guesswork. Entitlement named and interrupted. Rigor, roles, and structure understood as care, not control.

Those are the rooms we’re trying to build: places where people bring their full presence because they know what they’re stepping into. Where the task is clear, the structure fits the moment, and the container is chosen with intention. Empowerment and accountability side by side — not as buzzwords, but as practice.

xo

Technical Cities

We dream about robust training that reflects the work we’re actually making. We want training in devising, immersive performance, physical theater, dramaturgy, consent practices, audience care, drag, site-specific dance.

What makes a lipsync breathtaking?
How do you improvise responsibly inside free-roaming audiences?
How do you hold a five-story building in your body for a two-and-a-half-hour performance track?

University programs partnered with off-site hubs so students and non-academic artists share space. Intergenerational workshops led by lil babies and elders, where nobody is reduced to “emerging” or “legend.”

xo

Cities of Bread and Salt

We dream about time and money, obviously. Stability that doesn’t require giving up art. Regular funder checks. Recurring donations. Pattern. Predictability. General operating support.

We dream about long-running shows. Not just one Pompeii, but seven or twelve immersive beasts employing local artists for months or years. Imagine what people could make if they weren’t starting from zero every twelve months because the ecosystem rewards short cycles instead of long arcs.

We dream of rest built into the ecosystem. Stipends that let you breathe. Health insurance. Retreats not reserved for people with savings and day jobs. Universal basic income, honestly.

We don’t want “everyone self-produces” to be the Bay’s long-term business model. Artists can self-produce. We’ve proven that. But we shouldn’t have to forever.

More small grants like CA$H. Financial fluency. Budgets as creative tools. Knowledge-sharing about how people actually make it work: fiscal sponsorship, co-ops, LLCs, nonprofits. Not one path, but many, often at once.

And behind the spreadsheets is something brutally simple. We want to be able to live here. Not couch-surf indefinitely. Not move every year because rent spiked. Not watch brilliant friends pack U-Hauls because they’re done trying to make rent on inconsistent, shitty stipends.

Affordable housing is arts infrastructure.

Right now, the salt in our mouths comes from working so hard to stay. We’d love for it to start doing something else — to become seasoning, folded in over time, so The Work is irresistibly delicious.

xo

Cities of Teeth

We dream about a different relationship to impact.

We’re tired of forcing every idea into a neat social-justice elevator pitch just to get basic resources. We want grants that don’t require us to pretend we’re public health departments, superheroes, politicians, or social workers.

Let’s create work that can be legible or illegible on its own terms, without flattening itself to fit a rubric.

We want space for work that bites, purrs, lingers, echoes, is referenced years later; work that is fierce without being defensive; work that gives audiences genuinely excellent experiences; work that holds community without explaining itself; work that stretches form until it moans; work that shows its teeth and its underbelly.

Because when justice-driven work is real, you can feel it before the lights even come up — in who’s in the room, in how the crowd leans in, in the artist’s larger life and commitments. The work tells on them. It hits your body, not just your politics. Something rearranges inside you. Something unclenches. Something gets tended to. You can feel it comes from a life, a lineage, a practice — not from a grant rubric. It’s who the artist is outside the show, too.

What isn’t cute is when politics feel trendy, obligatory, or hot-glued on after the fact.

Be gone.

We want more disabled and QTBIPOC artists leading the way in philanthropy.

xo

Critical Cities

We dream about how we witness each other.

We want people to go to each other’s shows more. Not out of obligation, but because it’s alive to witness.

We imagine critics who actually see the work, understand the artists, and write from varied racial, cultural, disability, and aesthetic perspectives. Criticism with lineage and curiosity, not Yelp-style opinions.

We want more clear contracts, even between friends. More professionalism that doesn’t cancel softness.

Feedback cultures that aren’t whispers in a lobby or saved for three blocks away. Let’s normalize feedback that is specific, brave, and kind, the kind that helps a piece grow rather than just pass or fail. Let’s normalize staying in conversation even when our tastes or aesthetics don’t line up neatly.

Let’s get comfy with each other. Let’s get real with each other. Let’s lift each other while we climb.

xo

Cities of Portals

We dream about Access being baked in from the beginning.

Not retrofitted. Not last-minute. Not optional.

Rehearsal rooms with airflow, seating, quiet corners, and schedules that don’t assume superhuman stamina. Processes that center access as dramaturgy. Producers who understand sensory, mobility, and pacing needs as artistic needs.

Access as a standard, not a line item. Captions that are beautiful. Care teams as common as lighting designers.

Directors who know how to build a room where everyone can actually stay in the work. Companies that don’t treat access like a burden or branding strategy — but like creative practice. A politic. A love language.

Permission to move 


slowly, 


rest often, 

and make art in ways that honor bodyminds across the spectrum. A Bay Area where disabled artists are not an afterthought, a sidebar, or an annual heritage-month feature, but central to who we are, how we work, and what we imagine.

Because Access isn’t a constraint. It’s a portal.

xo

Cities of Breath

Underneath all of this is a simple, stubborn truth.

We deserve abundance. Not because we’ve suffered enough. Not because we’re resilient. Because imagination deserves room.

So this isn’t a complaint letter. Not a to-do list. Not a manifesto.

It’s a wishlist.
A group text.
A late-night rant that turns into a prayer.

A collective inhale. A lungful of possibility.

If this wishlist sounds naïve or impossible, good. Art has always been unreasonable.

Performance lives in the tension between reality and desire. We know the struggles: vanishing venues, shrinking grants, burnout, cost of living. And we know people are still making brilliant work anyway.

This isn’t about pretending the Bay isn’t struggling. It’s about refusing to let struggle be the only story, or to forget the decades of innovation, care, and brilliance that got us here in the first place.

What does it feel like to dream boldly?
To imagine an industry shaped by abundance, not austerity?

Maybe none of it will happen like this.
Maybe all of it will.

If nothing else, consider this an offering:
a reminder that the Bay still holds a wild, collective imagination,
one that refuses to shrink to fit the moment,
one that knows the difference between weighted exhales
and inhaling with possibility.

Wishlist Contributors: Natalia Roberts, Erin Mei-Ling Stuart, Jocelyn Reyes, ChingChi Yu, Jess Bozzo, Helen Wicks, Ann DiFruscia, Mama Celeste, Jeffrey Flynn Gan, Liv Schaffer, Fuchsia, Charlie Boyd-Brown, Meat Flap, Florida Man, Bruxa/Will Power, and many anonymous folks.

Jhia Jackson in Down on the Corner. Photo credit: Brooke Anderson.

This morning I listened to a Facebook Live Chat between historian Heather Cox Richardson and New York City Mayor Zorhan Mamdani. They talked about expanding the definition of democracy. That it’s not just at the ballot box. It’s on the street; it’s with childcare; it’s the rent and it’s what’s on the shelves at the grocery store. For 30 years I have described my work as the democratization of public space. In 2025, my artistic team and I created Down on the Corner, to honor the site of the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot and conjure its liberation and a just transition for the future.

Two years ago, the Artistic Director at CounterPulse shared a letter with me that was put out by the TurkxTaylor Initiative (TxT). The letter asked for community support to help liberate the building at 111 Taylor Street by organizing a grassroots social justice campaign. TxT stewards the Compton’s x Coalition, the coalition working to protect and liberate the building. 111 Taylor Street is the original site of the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, a response to the violent and constant police harassment of trans and gender variant people. The cafeteria itself was a “thriving after-hours ecosystem of the down-and-out.” The campaign’s goal is to unsettle the structure. In less poetic language, the goal is to remove GEO Group from ownership, acquire the building via community land trust, and “transform it into a forever home for trans, immigrant, and justice-impacted communities.”

GEO Group is one of the largest private prison companies in the United States. Through one of their subsidiaries, they own and operate the building at 111 Taylor which they call Taylor Street Center and claim is a reentry center for incarcerated people, but run like a de facto private prison. They own detention centers across the country. As I.C.E. advances its caging here in the US, GEO Group is growing. They own 97 prisons, detention centers, and reentry centers encompassing 74,000 beds including the facility in Louisiana that was holding, illegally, Mahmoud Khalil—a Palestinian Green Card holder and graduate student from Columbia University. For the third quarter of 2025, GEO Group reported its total revenues of $682.3 million, an increase of approximately 13% from the third quarter of 2024 .

TxT’s community letter moved me. It offered me a chance to be a part of something, and to use my artistic skills to cultivate justice on a street corner. I’ve brought together over a dozen artists—trans, queer, female, systems impacted and survivors of violence. Together we worked with film, projection mapping, original music, and new choreographies to howl, shriek and demand change.

I am prison systems impacted. This has meant raising my son alone; paying long-term fines and fees necessitated by pretrial, prison, and probation; being judged and rejected by communities for choosing to believe that those who cause harm can heal; and enduring the prison industrial complex in my living room every month during five years of my partner’s probation. I’m also a cisgender woman working inside an intersectional coalition blessed with significant trans leadership.

To the coalition I’ve promised a piece of public art that speaks to the “mythopoetic crossroads” inherent at the corners of Turk and Taylor Street. I’ve called this project Down on the Corner. Because so much living takes place on street corners in the Tenderloin. Because I want the building to come down and go up again as a living space that actually cares for people. Because divesting from a prison economy and investing in community well-being is ripe for this corner. Because years ago trans historian Susan Stryker dug up the unknown fact that in August of 1966, late at night at Compton’s Cafeteria, someone had had enough of police violence and threw the coffee in her cup at a cop who was treating her badly. Because GEO Group needs to go down and this history of resistance needs uplift.

What’s deep for me is the timing. I’ve never before created public art about a political struggle while that struggle was being activated in real time, side by side with my creative process. Or no. I have that backwards. The transgender community is in the lead, within a collective framework via the Compton’s x Coalition. I have created the work in real time alongside the transformation of 111 Taylor Street, as justice is being conjured there right now.

The totality of Down on the Corner is born from coalition building. It’s been an honor to be a part of the coalition. The Jurisdiction Hearing I attended and spoke at on May 7^th, 2025, in front of the SF Board of Appeals was one of the most inspiring moments of participatory democracy I’ve ever experienced. We packed the hearing. We cut through the belittling that GEO Group’s attorney served up to the appeals board. In small public poems—as we were each only allotted one minute each to speak—the community named some harsh and beautiful truths. That GEO Group treats people with punitive and dehumanizing methods that do not add up to real reentry. That what GEO Group offers is worse than prison. That the legacy of trans resistance on the corner deserves more than erasure. That the Trans Cultural District in the Tenderloin is the only one in the world and what glory it will be when GEO Group is gone. When GEO Group is replaced, via a just transition, to something the city can actually be proud of.

To compound the trauma at 111 Taylor and in the surrounding community, Melvin Bulauan a 44-year-old man, died in July 2025 after being placed at GEO Group. “Less than a week after his arrival at the Taylor Street Center, Bulauan was dead. His body was found on July 14, just a block away,” Eleni Balakrishnan reported in Mission Local. Bulauan’s death has sparked an ongoing investigation by the SF Board of Supervisors into the neglect, abuse and civil rights violations at 111 Taylor Street.

There is controversy about how GEO Group defines its facility at 111 Taylor. Are the people there inmates or residents? Are they there voluntarily? How did Melvin Bulauan die in their care? Halfway out and half way in. I know a lot about halfway houses. My partner lived in one for 6 months, even though he had a welcoming home to come to. They get you that way. They make money off your body. Your bed. For a long time, GEO Group took a percentage of residents’ wages while they lived in a halfway house. GEO has apparently stopped that practice.

There has been a lot of consideration toward inclusion in the coalition. There has been meticulous listening to people who lived in 111 Taylor who are both transgender and cisgender. For me, this is crucial listening. I‘m curious how this effort will seed itself long term, when the task of buying a building, and blending care for trans, prison impacted and Tenderloin folks is daunting. I’m moved by TxT’s robust beginnings.

I directed the process from the street. I used a walkie talkie to stay connected to both the dancers and the rigging crew on the roof. All in, over 6000 people witnessed the process and the shows. A few people ignored us. Some have seen us working in the neighborhood for years. Most people were excited that something cool was happening on the corner. Lenny was one of them.

Lenny arrived here five months ago from Kansas City. He’s been a welder all his life. But his hands cannot do manual labor anymore. He is taking some computer classes at the main library, to shift his work options. He recently moved to SF to be near his sister. He didn’t know anything about the history of the corner. I had a long chat with him at one of our evening technical rehearsals. It was a difficult night. There had been a shooting up the block on Taylor and Eddy. Our street was closed off. Police threw pepper balls to discourage more shooting. There were SWAT teams on the fire escapes at the other end of the street. There was a stink in the air. A sting in the air. No one cares much about violence in the Tenderloin because the people are brown, poor, already discarded. Our current mayor’s strategies for change are carceral and reinforce the Tenderloin as a containment zone. The hostage situation and police action went on until 6:30 AM the next morning. The crew, Lenny and I got stuck behind a barricade, so we had a long night to talk. He is thinking now he may do his final computer project exploring Black history, maybe the corner’s history. It was odd to have such a sweet connection with a stranger amidst gun violence pouring out of an SRO Hotel.

My role with the coalition has been as a cultural worker. I brought together a team of dancers, riggers, designers, as well as composer Melanie DeMore and film maker Leila Weefur. In a month-long residency on the street and via two weeks of live performances, we danced on two sides of the Warfield Hotel, right across the street from 111 Taylor. Using projection mapping technology, we projected Leila’s film onto the Turk Street side of the building and projected onto 111 Taylor as well.

We opened the piece with Nat King Cole’s ‘Nature Boy’ reinterpreted by Melanie DeMore. I chose that song to honor B Dean’s experience as a transmasculine dancer. I asked Sonsherée Giles to listen to what the building saw over the last 60 years, and bring those ghosted stories to us via the sinewy powers of her body.

While researching for the project, I attended a protest at Turk and Taylor Street, as Trump was just taking office and the trans community was standing up for itself. A Two Spirit, transmasculine elder named Holy Old Man Bull opened the event, grounding the participants onto the land. “I don’t want my story to be a sad story,” he said. I took this to heart as I conceived Down On the Corner. We didn’t dwell in sorrow. Instead, I invited the ghosts from Compton’s to speak to us from the strength of their resistance to police brutality. Still, on opening night, as we gathered back in the green room after the first show, dancer Gabriele Christian let me know that tonight they felt the sadness of the story we are telling. In the act of dancing, they felt echoes of brutality and condemnation for not fitting a gender norm.

We hung coffee cups from the fire escape just across from the original entrance to Compton’s. Dancers Jhia Jackson and Gabriele Christian shone like royalty as they tossed those cups around, as if getting ready for the rebellion. We evoked the rebellion of hair fairies who walked the streets in the 60’s. Until 1974, it was illegal for those assigned male at birth to wear women’s clothing. So they decked out as women from the waist up and then wore pants, in order to comply with the law. They were called hair fairies. We evoked smoke and fire, to metaphorically burn down GEO Group and seed in its place a building laced with care. Members of TxT and I interviewed people who had been incarcerated in 111 Taylor. From their stories we culled together a kinetic call for “good food, good music and good company,” which is a far cry from what GEO Group offers people just out of prison.

We met at the crossroads. Melanie offered us an anthem for connection. B, a transmasculine dancer, and Megan, a systems impacted dancer, met in the airspace in front of the building’s center fire escape. Via ropes, harnesses and years of skill building, they dodged railings, window panes and crumbling cement. They spiraled with split second timing. They embodied a connection that was contagious to the audience. They fell in love with each other and audiences fell in love with them. They crossed their own histories with the ghosts of Compton’s, and modeled fearless conviction to the activists now working to transform 111 Taylor.

For our finale we borrowed from the Gullah tradition of stick pounding. Melanie has a deep practice of stick pounding and she gifted us with its power: the faster you go, the more you are in your truth. Nine dancers pounded fast on 3 stories of the fire escape right across from 111 Taylor. They thumped. They stomped. They called self-determination in. They sweat. They invoked communion. They broke free and came back to the rhythm as it got faster and faster. TxT organizer Chandra LaBorde had introduced me to the phrase “Liberate Compton’s.” With our bodies, speed, height, suspended coffee cups and a defiance of gravity, we sought liberation. For the neighborhood. For the building. And for the pulsing of democracy itself on the corner of Turk and Taylor.

What if, rather than writing a review, a critic went to a dance show and then had a conversation with the artist? After seeing Bhumi B Patel’s premiere “wild light” at ODC Theater, freelance dance critic Rachel Howard decided to resurrect “Critical Dialogues,” a series she initiated at In Dance more than a decade ago.

Patel is a queer, desi artist/activist, dance scholar, and director of pateldanceworks. She earned her MA in American Dance Studies from Florida State University and her MFA in Dance from Mills College. A Dance/USA artist fellow and YBCA 100 honoree, she describes herself as “pursuing liberation through dancing, choreographing, curating, educating and writing/scholarship.”

Howard is a novelist, memoirist, and creative writing teacher who has written dance criticism for the San Francisco Chronicle. She also contributes to the international magazines Tanz and Fjord Review. She is currently editing an anthology, Dance Criticism for the Twenty-First Century: Towards New Practices and Relationships.

Patel and Howard met on Zoom two weeks after the December 4, 2025 premiere of “wild light,” danced by Patel and movement collaborators Ai Yin Adelski, Catalina O’Connor, Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş, and monique jonath, with original compositions performed live by singer-composer Rachel Austin and visual design by Sa’dia Rehman.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Howard: I want to start with your dance writing program, “imprint.” You selected four writers who have been receiving mentorship, going to shows, and writing for your dance company’s blog. How’s that going?

Patel: It’s incredible. When I was working on my dissertation, I focused on pieces created since about 2015, which was when amara tabor-smith started “House/Full of Blackwomen.” And as I was looking for writing about each of these works, specifically “This Bridge Called My Ass” by Miguel Gutierrez, and Gerald Casel’s “Not About Race Dance”—I did reference your work in Fjord Review on that—there were only a handful of writings. So that’s where the idea of “imprint” came from—combined with my being a pretty public and vocal proponent of queer and BIPOC voices being added to the canon.

During the “imprint” fellowship, we’ve discussed, where did dance writing even come from? Where did this divide of uptown and downtown in New York come from? And can we also think about Jill Johnston and Deborah Jowitt and all of these people who were trying to move dance writing forward, with care towards people who experience marginalization or oppression?

Howard: A question from my position as a freelance critic, speaking to you, a Ph.D. and a scholar: Do we still need criticism or do we only need documentation and scholarship?

Patel: I think there is a place for dance criticism. Also, dance criticism has done harm over time, right? Something I often ask when I’m reading criticism, especially when I’m reading historic criticism—because I think there’s something different happening in the present moment—I find myself asking, “How can we afford both the critic and the artist humanity?”

Howard: Agree. We need to have a new kind of relationship in which we are equal human beings.

Patel: So, in between my MA and my MFA, I lived in New York City, and for a semester, I did a program now called Arts in NYC through Florida State University. One requirement was seeing five shows a week. And something happened over that six months that changed the way I was seeing dance.

Howard: I relate to that. I had a formative period when I went to five or six shows a week, and then served as a panelist for the NEA. That level of saturation was very formative, although it also ended up, for me, being unsustainable.

Patel: It felt like a crash course in training my eye, because although we didn’t have to write criticism, we did have to write journals as part of the program, for every single show that we went to. There is value in having someone who sees tons of dance look at my work and not only put it in context of what’s happening in the field right now, but also offer that keen eye and attention. I think that training one’s eye and becoming expert on watching dance is a skill.

Howard: So you think there are things that come out in criticism that can’t come out to the same degree in previews or interviews or scholarship?

Patel: In my fantasyland, we have critics who are able to really get the lay of the land. They’re able to see patterns, to see common interests, to see trends, or questions that many artists are asking right now.

But something that I’ve noticed for a long time is that there aren’t many critics who are willing to say “I didn’t get it. I can’t be the expert on this.” Willing to say, “My training is A, B and C, and I truly don’t understand the performance. I enjoyed myself, but I can’t contextualize it for you.” Maybe that’s where the question of humanity comes in: We can be humans that aren’t expert on everything, right? We can have that trained eye while still having gaps.

Howard: I agree. About your premiere “wild light,” I did go see it with the possibility of writing about it. But I think, and maybe you can tell me if I’m making the wrong choice—as I mature, I am much less inclined to write a review unless I connected with the art in a passionate way. If it’s a performance that doesn’t scream “newsworthy” in a way I can explain to the reader and my editors, and I didn’t fall in love with the work . . . perhaps it’s cowardice on my part, but rather than write a negative or lukewarm review, I don’t write. Is that wrong?

Bhumi: Oh, I don’t know if I know about right and wrong. I think collectively as a society, there are some eggshells that we walk on, right? There have been times I’ve written reviews that were generally negative—not so much not liking the piece, but I didn’t think the piece did the thing that the program said the piece was going to do. I have seen the way that landed for the artist, and it has made me have a little bit more trepidation about what I want to say.

Howard: You were also a creative writing major in undergrad, and I teach creative writing, and have become much more comfortable leading workshops . . . does workshopping happen in the dance world? Some dance artists, when I’ve suggested that dance doesn’t have enough workshopping, pushed back and said workshopping happens in the studio, with the dancers giving feedback as the work is created. But if the dancers are already in your work, they can’t really see it from outside, you can’t have that same kind of conversation, right?

Patel: I love work in progress showings. I love open rehearsals. [But] when it comes to receiving feedback—this sounds terrible, but I’m not necessarily invested in whether someone likes it or doesn’t like it, right? We like what we like and we don’t like what we don’t like. And we’ve all had a million experiences that have brought us to this moment [of encountering the art]. We could have been sitting in the theater and been too hot or too cold, or had a bad day, or the seam on my shirt is itching my shoulder and it’s driving me crazy, right? I want to hear from people outside the process, but I want to know: What do you understand about this work at this point? What feelings are coming up for you? What is the story or the narrative that you see unfolding? As an artist, I often create an abstract story, or have my own storyboard for what’s happening on stage, an emotional arc that I want my viewer to go on.

Howard: This sounds similar to how I approach leading creative writing workshops. I feel it’s much more important to simply reflect back to the artist what your experience was—more important than offering judgments. But oftentimes, tough conversations happen: The writers who make the most out of workshop want to know more about the parts of the writing that didn’t connect with readers. I do ask workshop respondents to start by pointing to the passages and elements in the work that they were drawn to. So to transition to your work “wild light,” I thought that the music was a strong point. The live singer (composer Rachel Austin) was incredible. She created a really interesting soundscore, with the shifts between many genres and traditions. And I especially appreciated the ensemble movement. It was textured and propulsive, and compositionally layered. Also, a wonderful connection between the dancers.

And yet . . . maybe this is me being the audience member who’s got the itchy sweater on . . . but 90 minutes, no intermission felt very long. Was that something you anticipated?

Patel: I struggle in the sound bite, hyper-techno world we live in right now. Someone who I feel really inspired by is Eiko Otake—learning from her is a master class in patience—and I want to push people in that way. Could the piece have been shorter? Absolutely. But I wanted the viewer to have to enter that state of patience.

Howard: Interesting, because I also tend to like dance works that cultivate patience. And you know, a lot of butoh that I’ve seen, and postmodern work like Anna Halprin’s, can push you in that way. About your opening solo in “wild light,” I took that as your figure going through a cocoon birth under the white material you were wrapped in. And the pacing was certainly deliberate. Is it okay to say that it didn’t hook me the same way that, say, Eiko Otake’s dances have in the past, and it’s hard to explain why?

Patel: Sure. I don’t think slowness has to work for every viewer in every context.

Howard: Let’s get into the Donna Haraway material you were working with in “wild light.” She’s a feminist scholar famous for her “Cyborg Manifesto.” I did look her work up in general before I went, and I read the articles you’ve published about how you were inspired by “The Camille Stories.” I guess you expect a critic to come with a certain level of preparation from having looked at those sources. What do you expect from an audience member?

Patel: I don’t necessarily expect an audience member to have the context for my source material. I don’t necessarily know that people needed to know “The Camille Stories” to have a journey [through “wild light”], to stay with the narrative arc.

Howard: Mm, yeah, that’s where I was having a tricky time—staying with the narrative arc. I felt in touch with it in the beginning, with the birthing, and through the solo in the dress that you lip synched to the song, “If I Were a Man.” Very funny song, by the way. When the ensemble came in, there were gestures that I was intrigued by: standing on tiptoe, and peering with one eye through the hands. I saw shifts in how the dancers interacted with each other, but I wondered how much more of the arc would I have experienced had I read the actual story ahead of time.

Patel: I will say that the piece itself was my speculation on what happens at the very end of the story: it’s sort of a coda to Donna Haraway’s work, which is why it doesn’t feel so relevant to have read the story.

Howard: Okay, interesting. Just to recap what I know of “The Camille Stories:” the Camilles are symbionts between human beings and monarch butterflies. And Haraway’s idea here, from her manifesto, is that symbionts and cyborgs can blow open binaries because the binary between the human and the animal, the technological and the non-technological, the natural and the technological, and also male and female has been exploded. And with cyborgs and symbionts comes the potential to blow open even more binaries. Is that right?

Patel: And “The Camille Stories” is published in a text called Staying with the Trouble. An overarching idea is that, when we think about revolution and changing the world—what if it’s not about burning everything to the ground, but working with the troubles that we already have, in order to create the new?

Howard: So tell me more about how you were thinking about the arc of the “wild light,” because I didn’t catch on to it.

Patel: The story ends with Camille five. She dies in 2425, 400 years into the future. And by that time, we understand that this experiment with human-animal symbionts still has the potential to fail. So we’re still on this very troubled planet, trying to navigate our way through. That is where the dance starts. What I imagined is that the moment Camille five dies in 2425, she has to be revisited by Camilles one through four. She has to be ushered into ancestry. The arc is how do they, individually and together, grapple with the trouble that they left?

Howard: I’m wondering if you played with bringing in flashes of text or some anchor, perhaps an introduction of Camilles one through four, extra-textual clues. I tend towards thinking of art as creating a game between the creator and the person who’s taking it in. If the viewer has enough cues about the “game” that’s being played, the viewer has an extra level of engagement to read meaning into the work’s patterns. So did you consider using more cues, or was it difficult to reconcile that with your other aesthetic priorities?

Patel: I did think about using text and projection. And I ultimately decided to not be so explicit about the story. Selfishly, I have experienced a lot of satisfaction in hearing people develop their own narratives. Over the four performance nights, I heard so many stories that people had made up. I was so moved by the way people were receiving the story and placing it within the context of their own lives and struggles.

Howard: In that spirit, then, a comment on the costumes. I thought that the colors suggested both monarchs and Tibetan Buddhist monk robes. Is that something you intended?

Patel: I don’t know that I was specifically thinking “monk robes,” but we did want to create clothing for when you go through the veil to the other side. There is a sameness in the ghostliness of spirits that I was hoping to convey . . . [The Camille ancestors], they’re a team.

Howard: I see. So . . . I asked you all the questions today. Are there any questions you want to ask me?

Patel: I’m curious about where you land with these questions around the responsibility of critics. What are ethical practices of criticism?

Howard: Well, I think a lot of critics when they start out—or maybe this was just my personal fault—they want to prove themselves, as though making digs is going to give them authority. You grow and you get over that. But there is also a pressure that comes from some of the institutions themselves. If you’re writing for the New York Times or even for the Chronicle, they want you to state opinions from on high in an impersonal, quote-unquote “objective” way. I’m coming to believe it is a spiritual matter: It’s about claiming the subjective in such a deep way that you can make honest statements about your responses without pretending to be objective. I think it’s very important that a critic have an individual, particular voice. And then as a reader, what you’re interested in is not so much the thumbs up or thumbs down, but to follow this person’s mind and how they think about the work. But today there’s less cultivation of individual voices going on, and that’s a major problem.

Patel: Years ago, I had a mentor who told me she used to sit next to a critic at shows in New York City, and because that critic was making a midnight deadline for their review, they got up halfway through the show to go write. The purpose of that review was to publish it the next morning to encourage people to go to that show that weekend, right? I think we’re holding onto some conventions we don’t need.

Howard: I agree.

Patel: I also think it helps to recognize that I have a particular relationship to dance. My subjective view is the result of everything that I’ve experienced in my life, right?

Howard: Well, and all the things that you haven’t lived: You can be aware of your blind spots and honest about them, without making the review about you. That’s the sweet spot. And it’s tricky.

Patel: It is hard. And I’m not a magician, nor do I create utopias. But I do appreciate that these conversations are happening with the “imprint” fellowship. I don’t think in a year we’re going to solve the problem, but we can have conversations about how we might move towards addressing these questions.