Watch Out for the Big Grrrls

Most of my life I told myself I was too fat to have short hair.

Traveling and Touring

2017 was a big year for us, with our first large-scale domestic tour. Together with choreographers Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener we premiered Tesseract at EMPAC in January and went […]

In Practice: Out of Practice

One of my jobs is college admissions essay coach. The most popular platform for college admissions is called the Common Application. Over 900 colleges and universities use the Common App as their gateway for admission. The Common App requires the usual stuff:

SPEAK

I’d like to think I have become a mature dancer. After a 12-year professional career, I don’t get nervous anymore. As I perform, I enjoy the clarity of being on […]

Notes From a Suitcase

MAY 2009 – In A Dance Studio In America During a recent rehearsal I rediscovered a recording of my young Ethiopian students singing. It transported me back to the village […]

The Etcetera Preview: Upcoming Conferences & Festivals

Summer offerings for dance professionals don’t end with training intensives and seasonal performances. From the rigorous and scholarly to the imaginative and whimsical, conferences, symposiums and festivals serve as exciting […]

Tenderloin Gold: NAKA Dance Theater Partners with Skywatchers to Reveal Stories from the Tenderloin

On Wednesday, July 6 at 3:30 in the afternoon, San Francisco police are in a three hour standoff with an armed and suicidal man lying on Market Street with his […]

Adapting Instead of Excluding: a Conversation with Nadia Adame, AXIS Dance Company Artistic Director

At age 14, I had a car accident which left me with a spinal cord injury. The doctor said, “You can’t do this anymore. You can’t dance anymore. You have to find another career.”

BRIDGING THE GAPS: Challenges and Opportunities for US-China Cross-Cultural Exchange

WHEN I FIRST VISITED CHINA to perform in the Beijing Dance Festival in 2012, I arrived assuming that modern dance in China was a relatively new, underdeveloped phenomenon. I had no […]

Juneteenth: A Celebration to Remember

It was June 19, 1865 in Galveston, Texas. Union soldiers led by Major General Gordon Granger arrived with news that the Civil War had ended and that the enslaved were […]