OSU Dance

02/25/2025

Doug Varone Residency Open Rehearsal
Friday, February 28, 2025
6:00PM - 7:00PM
Barnett Theatre, Sullivant Hall, 1813 N. High Street, Columbus, OH 43210

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

H.A.T.CH. (Holistic Approaches to Transformative Choreography) Guest Artist Doug Varone culminates his Spring Semester residency in the Department of Dance with an open rehearsal of Double Octet, which he is setting on Ohio State Dance students for the upcoming Spring Concert: Together, We Move, April 10-12, 2025.

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLICH.A.T.CH. (Holistic Approaches to Transformative Choreography) Guest Artist Doug Varone culminates his Spring Semester residency in the Department of Dance with an open rehearsal of Double Octet, which he is setting on Ohio State Dance students for the upcoming Spring Conc...

02/20/2025

MFA Film Screening: The Top Deck
February 20-22, 2025 at 7:00PM
The Motion Lab at ACCAD, Sullivant Hall Room 350
Free admission with registration via the link, below.

MFA Student Kierra Williams premieres her dance film The Top Deck, which is a reimagination of a performance aboard the ships of the Middle Passage, where enslaved individuals were forced to dance for the gaze of Europeans. Through a disturbing chant, “It’s a Friday,” rooted in her childhood, The Top Deck transforms a narrative of objectification into one of resistance, self-expression and celebration.

MFA Student Kierra Williams premieres her dance film The Top Deck, which is a reimagination of a performance aboard the ships of the Middle Passage, where enslaved individuals were forced to dance for the gaze of Europeans. Through a disturbing chant, “It’s a Friday,” rooted in her childhood, ...

02/19/2025

MFA Concert: Unstable Footing
February 20-22, 2025
Tickets: https://dance.osu.edu/events/mfa-concert-unstable-footing

Showcasing the culminating dance MFA projects of Isa Bowser, Lucy Dillon, and Alisha Jihn, Unstable Footing is a mixed-bill dance concert that dreams and reimagines next steps in embodied movement.

For their capstone experience, MFA students complete and present a substantial MFA project demonstrating a synthesis of craft, artistic vision and conceptual rigor, as well as professional competence in their selected research area. Showcasing the culminating dance MFA projects of Isa Bowser, Lucy D...

02/15/2025

Welcome to Experience Arts and Sciences Day prospective students and guests! Stop by table 4 this morning to meet our External Relations Coordinator Damian Bowerman to discover all the amazing ways to keep on dancing at The Ohio State University! Arts and Sciences at Ohio State

02/14/2025

Holly Bass, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Jennifer Harge, Ursula Payne, Crystal Michelle Perkins, and Vershawn Sanders-Ward

Archiving Black Performance: Roots and Futures

Saturday, February 22 at 7PM and Sunday, Feburary 23 at 3PM
Wexner Center for the Arts Performance Space

Archiving Black Performance: Roots and Futures is an intimate performances by Holly Bass, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Jennifer Harge, Ursula Payne,...

02/13/2025

Dr. Nyama McCarthy-Brown, the fifth faculty member in the Department of Dance to win a Ratner Award in April 2023, aims to grow and strengthen connections between Ohio State and students in Ghana in collaboration with Associate Professor Crystal Michelle Perkins. Bolstered by Perkins’ work on the the Archiving Black Performance project, they are creating a sequential dance curriculum that will further help the department develop African diasporic dance skills and equip students with meaningful experiences of curricular development. In her Ratner proposal, McCarthy-Brown said she will work to be a “change agent – changing the way people think about dance through disrupting historically privileged canons of teaching dance technique, unlocking new pathways of learning and creative processing for movement, and embodying and demonstrating a value for other culturally-informed movement practices.” In May of 2023, McCarthy-Brown and Perkins led a group of students on a creative research trip to Brazil and made numerous intersections of their respective research trajectories, many of which were explored on this research trip to Ghana. In June 2024, they brought Ohio State dance education students to the University of Ghana to work with Professor David Quaye and dance students there to support a process of dance preservation through codification of the Agbekor dance.

“In 2021, the Ohio State University Department of Dance joined a small number of dance programs (less than ten out of over 600) across the country that have expanded the primary curriculum to be inclusive of African diasporic dance forms,” says McCarthy-Brown. “Thus, projects that bring students into deeper study of dances of the African diaspora are essential in providing a solid foundation for a new and developing part of the Ohio State Dance curriculum. This research project signals to students, faculty, and the field, that dance research in-country is an integral part of working with dances of the African diaspora. Further, this research will provide us with the opportunity to continue the development of our new and budding African dance curriculum and teaching approach. Perkins, McCarthy-Brown, and select Ohio State Dance students learned the Agbekor dance in Ghana. Students also learned how to develop a sequential curriculum that can move in both vertical and horizontal learning pathways. This experience equipped students with traditional/indigenous African dance skills, engaging the body as archivists, additional archival field research, and tools for curriculum development. This culturally engaging and motivating experience aligns with our research vision and learning trajectory for continued growth; more significantly, it ensures the acquisition of and development of research skills, and high impact learning for students.”

02/13/2025

02/13/2025

PhD Student Sidra Bell featured in Dance Magazine

How Pivoting to Choreographing Full-Time Changed 3 Former Dancers’ Lives, Creative Processes, and Work
by Lauren Wingenroth

Excerpt: "After years away from the stage, Bell recently started dancing again, performing in a series of collaborations with the sound artist Sita Chay. “That’s been really liberating for me,” she says. "It’s on my own terms.'"

"Bell appreciates that it’s becoming more common for dancers to start choreographing earlier in their careers, and that the categories of “dancer” and “choreographer” have somewhat collapsed. 'I think there’s a paradigmatic shift happening now, where things are more fluid,' she says. 'There’s more softness around dancing for much longer, and you can leave and return. I love that fluidity—I think it can create a more sustainable model for young artists to know that it doesn’t have to be so fixed in these categories.'"

Read more--> https://dance.osu.edu/news/phd-student-sidra-bell-featured-dance-magazine

Photos of Sidra Bell's exhibit and performance G R A P H at The Met, New York, NY

02/12/2025

Dance 5211: Dance Film I first projects were due last week! Students were asked choose a vignette from the film “Pina” directed by Wim Wenders, then re-envision the scene using their own creative voice and choreographic research interests. Video stills by Deena Almokhalafi, Eve Kelley, Jiara Sha and Kaylon Sithixay.

02/11/2025

Q&A Chat with Doug Varone Dancers Courtney Barth and Ryan Yamauchi

Open to all!
Tomorrow, Wednesday, February 12, 2025
2:15-3pm
Barnett Theatre

Courtney Barth (she/they) is a New York based dancer originally from Las Vegas, NV. Courtney received their BFA in Dance at SUNY Purchase where they performed works by Kyle Abraham, Martha Graham, and James Gregg. While in school they studied abroad at London Contemporary Dance School where they performed Crystal Pite’s ‘Polaris’ at Sadlers Wells. Since graduation she has worked with Shannon Gillen at NYC fashion week, Kensaku Shinohara at the Queens Museum, and is currently a company member with Hannah Garner’s 2nd Best Dance Company. They joined Doug Varone and Dancers in 2017 and also act as Costume Manager and Workshop Coordinator for the company.

Ryan Yamauchi (he/him) was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii and began his dance training at the Mid-Pacific Institute School of the Arts. He later moved to New York and received his BFA in Dance from SUNY Purchase. Ryan is currently a dancer/rehearsal director for Doug Varone and Dancers and is a dancer with 2nd Best Dance Company. He has also had the pleasure of working with Loni Landon Dance Projects, NVA & Guests, Sidra Bell Dance New York, Gibney Dance Company, Santa Fe Opera, and Santa Barbara Dance Theater. As a choreographer, Ryan has been commissioned to create work for students at San Jose State University, SUNY Purchase, and The Juilliard School. Ryan is currently on faculty at SUNY Purchase and Peridance Center.

02/10/2025

Emerita Professor Melanye White Dixon's essay and afterword published

Dr. Dixon's essay on dancer Mary HInkson ("Black Body Between the Lines: Mary HInkson Dancing Graham and Transforming White Spaces") and several other dance essays have been published in the extremely inclusive Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance. This book is the companion publication for exhibit Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance, 1900–1955 that was on display at the The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in Lincoln Center in New York City June 8, 2023–March 16, 2024.

Dr. Dixon also wrote the afterword for Skin Colored Pointes Interviews With Women of Color in Ballet by current Ohio State Dance Associate Professor Nyama McCarthy Brown.

Dr.

02/07/2025

PACHANGA E PODER: A LATINX, LATIN AMERICAN, AND CARIBBEAN SOCIAL DANCE INCUBATOR
MARCH 18-22

Developed by Department of Dance Assistant Professors Irvin Manuel Gonzalez and Alfonso Cervera, Pachanga e Poder is community-driven research incubator. The event brings together artists, activists, scholars, and dancers to investigate the multiple intersections within Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean social dance forms, analyzing social dance as social justice. The incubator hosts experimentations with aesthetics, sensibilities, ontologies, ecologies, and knowledges located in social dance forms that emerge from African and Latin American diasporas to consider how these intersections have emerged as and continue to foster tools for resistance, power, belonging, and justice. Between March 19-21, bodies will convene to analyze and cite connections in social, folk, and spiritual dance forms from Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Haiti, and Puerto Rico, digitally archive artistic experimentations, and theorize the im/material spaces revealed in the practice of dancing. Invited artists/activists/scholars include Beatrice Capote, Alfonso Cervera, Dr. Colette Eloi, Carne Viva Dance Theatre (Chachi Pérez & Lazco), Irvin Manuel Gonzalez, Marina Magalhães, Jade Power-Sotomayor, OSU students, and more!

Join us between March 18th and 22nd for workshops that are free and open to the public.

The incubator culminates with a public presentation on March 21st at 7:30pm in ACCAD’S Motion Lab located on the third floor of Sullivant Hall. This open community sharing invites participants to witness and share in the week’s findings, intersections, play, and experimentations.

This event is funded by the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme Grant and the Ohio Hispanic Heritage Grant, with support from The Ohio State University Department of Dance, the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, the Latinx Studies Program and the Center for Latin American Studies.

March 18 - 22, 2025

02/06/2025

Post-MFA Fellow Ryan Johnson (Ryan Johnson) is providing an opportunity for OSU Dance students to engage with his company SOLE Defined () for a seven week internship for those interested in non-profit leadership, and art education leadership. Apply Today!

02/06/2025

Save the date for "Medicine Poems & Confessions for Every Apocalypse," a performance with the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. They'll present medicine poems, rituals, and confessions to incite resistance and resilience in the face of every apocalypse. March 1st at 7:30 pm in the Blackbox Theatre in Sullivant Hall. Find more information: https://bit.ly/4gw1MDg
Barnett Center for Integrated Arts and Enterprise Department of Spanish and Portuguese at The Ohio State University Arts and Sciences at Ohio State
OSU Dance

02/05/2025

Professor Ann Cooper Albright to give Performative Reading of Simone Forti: improvising a life
March 19, 2025
2:45PM - 4:15PM
Sullivant Hall 225, 1813 N. High Street, Columbus, OH 43210

Free an open to the public
With support from: Department of Dance, Melton Center for Jewish Studies

A dancer, scholar, and a 2019-2020 John Simon Memorial Guggenheim fellow, Ann Cooper Albright is professor at the Department of Dance at Oberlin College. Simone Forti: improvising a life is her latest book. She is also co-editor, with David Gere, of Taken by Surprise: Improvisation in Dance and Mind. She is a veteran practitioner of Contact Improvisation, has taught workshops internationally, and facilitated Critical Mass: CI @ 50 which brought 300 dancers to Oberlin from across the world to learn, talk, and dance together in celebration of the 50th anniversary of this extraordinary form. Encounters with Contact Improvisation is the product of one of her adventures in writing and dancing and dancing and writing with others, as is the new collection Resistance and Support: Contact Improvisation @ 50.

A dancer, scholar, and a 2019-2020 John Simon Memorial Guggenheim fellow, Ann Cooper Albright is professor at the Department of Dance at Oberlin College. Simone Forti: improvising a life is

02/04/2025

MFA Concert: Unstable Footing
February 20-22, 2025
Tickets: https://dance.osu.edu/events/mfa-concert-unstable-footing
Featuring PALIMPSEST by Alisha Jihn

Drawing from personal and collective intercultural encounters, PALIMPSEST meditates upon ideas of hybridity. Evoking images of what is found within and betwixt culture, human and creature, physical and digital, each dancer's movements and pathways layer and create meaning. Thus, the choreography mimics a manuscript where each layer of embodied text cannot exist without the others and insistently communicates that new understanding lives within this integration.

02/04/2025

Professor Cervera will join FUSION for a three-week residency, during which he will create a new work premiering in Japan in 2025. This piece will explore the intertwined histories of Japan and Mexico through the choreographic lens of the Poc-Chuc technique. By blending cultural narratives, theories of queered humanism, and movement, the work will reimagine methods of migration and uncover shared experiences of displacement and connection.

Professor Cervera will join FUSION for a three-week residency, during which he will create a new work premiering in Japan in 2025. This piece will explore the intertwined histories of Japan and Mexico through the choreographic lens of the Poc-Chuc technique. By blending cultural narratives, theories...

02/03/2025

MFA Concert: Unstable Footing
February 20-22, 2025
Tickets: https://dance.osu.edu/events/mfa-concert-unstable-footing
Featuring soft belly/steel by Lucy Dillon

soft belly/steel is a group work in which six dancers work collaboratively through a structure of games and competitive tasks, playing within an invisible, kinetic logic. Moving through states of power, precarity, delicacy, and brutishness – the collective performing body exposes the precarious tendrils of support that connect bodies together to create structures of survival.