Sydnie L. Mosley is a choreographer and the founder of SLMDances. Roxi Victorian is a choreographer, scholar, and dance educator. They became collaborators through Mosley’s The Window Sex Project, which uses dance-theater performance and community workshops to address gender-based sexual harassment. Justice is not always loud. Sometimes it looks like two Black women—choreographers, educators, and […]

I love dancers. I love them for their capacity to engage deeply with the materials of the present—what is here and where we are. What I love most is that dancers recognize this work isn’t about creating fixity or permanence, but instead the vital practice of renewing connection with ideas daily—figuring out how they might […]

In November 2022, choreographer and director Jacob Jonas was diagnosed with stage four lymphoma, developed as a side effect of a drug he’d taken to combat Crohn’s disease. Jonas chose to document his treatment process in a series of journal entries and photos, which ultimately became his new book, Cemented Beauty. (“Each time I tried […]

Black dance has always been more than movement—it is survival, resistance, and healing in motion. It is a defiant act of existence in a world that continually seeks to silence Black voices, erase Black histories, and dismantle the very initiatives designed to promote inclusion. In this moment—when Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs are under […]

From The Pathway to Flow, by Dr. Julia F. Christensen. Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Julia F. Christensen. Published by Square Peg on July 25, 2024. Excerpted by permission. Learning to express through an art is a little like learning a new language. As we learn the steps of a dance, we first learn the […]

The reality of a dancer’s life is often more complicated than what we imagined as young students. We must become not just powerful artists but also skilled marketers, social media managers, and self-care experts. This, coupled with the need to pay rent and buy food, can create a heavy schedule of work and art. Time […]

What does dance bring to a conversation about creative administration? Well, to start, dance artists have an embodied understanding of dynamic systems. The human body is a magnificent example of a dynamic system. Dances are dynamic systems, happening in the exchange between people, ideas, and perceptions, each new creative process and context generating new results. Many dance artists bring to creative administration a propensity for investigating underlying ideas and relationships, versus patching up problems without questioning the systems that gave rise to them.

When you’re in the role of leading, it’s a hard job. You have to manifest success while listening to everyone. I think women leaders are perhaps judged more harshly than our male counterparts. What I would like to see is more opportunities, more communication. I see more women leading in academia, and that is changing.