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An empty well lit back stage space, with flats, and other equipment leaning to each side.
  • thINKpieces

The Adrenaline Cliff

Surviving the Dance Gig Economy

The West Philadelphia High Dance Ensemble performs in front of an audience seated around the perimeter of the room. The dancers stand close to each other with their arms raised mid-clap overhead. Some dancers wear long evergreen or rose colored dresses, while others are dressed in black pants and a white button-down shirt. One dancer stands in front of the group wearing a preacher’s robe. The ensemble resembles a lively church congregation.
Photo: Courtesy of Black Dance Confab
  • News, Reviews

Celebrating Philadelphia’s Black Dance Legacies

Caitlin Green

“Without [them] we wouldn’t have had a portal to come through.”

Dancer KJ Holmes, leans onto her left hip, legs folded behind her, and both hands planted on the hard wood floor. She wears a blue t-shirt, white pants, and her grey hair is pulled back from her face. Newspapers are scattered about the floor around her, and she watches the pieces she has just thrown at the camera as they fly away from her. They are blurred by their motion and closeness to the camera.
Photo: Rachel Keane
  • thINKpieces

Serious Play

Brendan McCall

Cathy Weis prioritizes experimentation over commercialism in her “Sundays on Broadway” series.

Historic postcard image from the 1930s–1940s showing the Flagler Memorial Bridge illuminated at night, spanning the water between West Palm Beach and Palm Beach, Florida.
Photo: courtesy of the Tichnor Brothers Collection, Florida Postcards Series
  • thINKpieces

Dancing Across the Bridge from Epstein: A Beautiful Place of Horrors

Lauren Berlin

A reckoning with girlhood, dance, memory, and power in Palm Beach County

Four dancers move in front of a large abstract painting rich with textured color, their bodies reaching, extending, and twisting in multiple directions. Their hands and feet reach upwaerds, downwards, and away from us, creating dynamism in the air. Along the edges of the painting, bystanders stand and look--some at the dancers, others at something unseen.
Photo: Maria Baranova
  • Reviews

Perception is Participatory

Brendan McCall

John Jasperse frolics amidst fields of perception in this site-specific collaboration with artist Julie Mehretu.

Three people sit in an oblique triangle that fills the frame. To the left, a musician, Aabeizer, sits on a black bench in carpenter jeans and a dark t-shirt. His eyes are closed and his feet bare. He moves his hands around a circular plate and wooden dowels that extend from a wood board he holds against his chest. To the right, a saxophonist, Bhob Rainey, sits on a folding black chair in a black cardigan and grey pants, blowing into the mouthpiece and pressing the keys. Between them, a person with short red curls, Kayliani Sood, crosses their legs on a white stool, sitting higher than the musicians beside her. They wear brown shorts over grey pants and a black t-shirt with a blue square patch in the center. She rests one hand on her knee, and the other over their forearm, closes her eyes and tilts their head pensively to the right.
Photo: Loren Groenendaal
  • Reviews

Unscored Improvisation, H-O-T or Not?

Xander Cobb

Does dance need meaning to be meaningful?

Participants in a Write Back Atcha talk together and write in a theater lobby. On top of the image, the logos for Art Philly's What Now Festival and thINKingDANCE's Write Back Atcha series are displayed.
  • News

thINKingDANCE hosts “Write Back Atcha” series at ArtPhilly’s What Now Festival

Noel Price-Bracey
In a close up photograph, ten dancers in spaghetti-strap leotards lean in, their eyes covered by a sheer black cloth. The middle dancer, closest to the camera, is mid-scream. Behind the dancer is the newly engraved building signage reading “The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center.” Some words are covered by the dancers’ heads.
Photo: Courtesy of The First Amendment Troop
  • Interviews

The Epstein Files and Redacted Bodies 

Megan Mizanty

An interview with choreographer Matthew Steffens on ResistDance vs. Redaction

Two dancers in long-sleeved red tops face away from us with arms round one another’s waists as their free arms reach outwards. There are singular, red feathers extending from their heads many feet into the upwards space. To the left of the duet, we see a large Taiko drum.
Photo: Mike Hurwitz
  • Interviews, thINKpieces

Afterglow: The Dancers of KYL/D Take a Final Bow

E. Wallis Cain Carbonell

‘Anticipating something and hoping it will be everything you wished for’

A group of five dancers, three women and two men, form a circle around a female soloist. The soloist, wearing a vibrant pink vest over a black top paired with light blue, wide-legged pants, moves exuberantly with her arms out akimbo while standing on her left toes with her right leg out to the side. A live five piece jazz band, including a piano, drums, a bass trumpet, and trombone, is visible behind the dancers upstage. A projection on the brick wall in the back displays a collage of sheet music and colonial artwork of a scene from a pub.
Photo: Jano Cohen
  • Reviews

Scats off the Score

Nadia Ureña

Lauren and Brent White breathe new life into Francis Johnson’s suites from the Antebellum.