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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.”
Eight dancers, all wearing loose white fabric, lean into one another and stare directly at the camera. Some rest their heads on one another’s shoulders; all lean inward toward the middle dancer, who sits in a casual seated position.
Photo: Artur Gevorgyan
  • Reviews

Sips of Stories: A Testament to (Short) Time

Megan Mizanty

Three Years, Boundless Connections

A dancer dips into a low second position, leaning over her right knee, chest and chin lifted, an open right hand reaching. Her silver top and the billowing folds of her skirt shimmer in the blueish light. Behidn her a row of dancers standing in gowns of different constructions and colors, sparkling and reflecting as behind them a video of a field path plays, one dancer in a yellow dress walking on screen.
Photo: Maria Baranova
  • Reviews

Multilayered Memory in a Feminist Timescape

Emilee Lord

Jasmine Hearn’s Memory Fleet: Beloved, Let’s Cross

A photo from Nami Yamamoto’s work of an Asian femme with blunt bangs and a shoulder-length haircut, standing open-mouthed. This image is translucently superimposed onto another image of two dancers wearing colorful tshirts and sweats, engaging in physical scores.
Photo of Nami Yamamoto by Elyse Mertz
  • Reviews

40-years-old and still kicking

ankita

Opening night at the Performance Mix Festival

thINKingDANCE is a consortium of dance artists and writers who work together to provide critical coverage for dance, to build audiences for dance, and to foster the art of dance writing.

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The Latest from thINKingDANCE

At the RISE 2025 Summit held at the New York Library for the Performing Arts, panelists for a discussion entitled “Data is Revolutionary” gather in black office chairs with silver legs in front of a large projector screen that reads “Dance Data Project, Harriet Tubman Effect Institute, & Women Count” in a pastel blue above the title “Data is Revolutionary” in a light yellow. Six circles containing the headshots of the panelists dot the rest of the projection. Amidst the other seated speakers, Nancy Owen stands holding a microphone in her right hand. She leans forward toward the audience, eyes alight, mouth open in speech that slips through an excited smile. In the lower left corner of the frame, a bald man in a crisp blue suit brings the crook of his thumb and second finger to his chin at stage right. He looks out toward the audience with his chair angled away from the six panelists.
Photo by Victoria Detres
  • Interviews

Dance Leadership by the Numbers

Jennifer Passios
  • A Conversation with Elizabeth “Liza” Yntema of Dance Data Project®
Andrew Skeels, a White man with buzzed hair, wearing a black T-shirt, stands against a black background. He is turned to the side but looks directly out with a soft smile.
Photo: Damian Siqueiros
  • Interviews

Meanwhile, in an Indoor Meadow: An Interview with Andrew Skeels

Caedra Scott-Flaherty
  • A new dance and exhibition explore growth and change in an intimate setting.
Awash in a red light, three femme presenting performers dressed in black hold a boat constructed out of tape and twigs. They are putting two halves of it together: one looks like several apartment buildings all together and the bottom is a clearer boat shape. An oversized coat hangs in the background, along with many different puppets from previous moments scattered along the back of the stage.
Photo: REC Philly
  • Write Back Atchas

The Stories We Steal and the Stories We Make

Zoe Farnsworth
  • A rich performance of Kea Tawana’s life and how constructing reality can be both advantageous and destructive.
A black and white bust shot of Bempa looking forwards with a serene and powerful expression. He is black and wears his hair short cut in a fade. His chest juts out forwards proudly in his collared cross hatched shirt.
Photo: Vessel Day
  • Reviews

Afrofusion, Bempa’s Way

Zoe Farnsworth
  • “Untitled” explodes with queer black joy as Bempa gives the audience his own version of a good time.
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From the Archives

A collection of featured work from our archives across the years

Photo: Intellect Books
  • Reviews

Dialoguing Ethics in Dance

Leila Mire
  • It is often taken for granted that dance, a field that proclaims to celebrate humanity, places ethics at the forefront of its
Photo: Amber Johnston
  • Reviews

I present a present presently

nikolai mckenzie ben rema
  • Stacking on bones like a winter blizzard...time can accumulate/elongate and backflip on itself.
  • Reviews

A Dance of Attention

Megan Bridge
  • Presence isn’t about acting, or charisma, it’s about directed and specific consciousness.
Photo Credit: Robert Eticheverry
  • Reviews

Everyone’s Dancing in “Le Grand Continental”

Jonathan Stein
  • The post-moderns not only asked “what is dance?” but also “who can or should the dancer be?”. The latter question will soon receive the resounding answer--“Everyone!"

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thINKingDANCE gratefully acknowledges support from the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and from our readers and other individual donors like you! thINKingDANCE is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in cultural critics of color cofounded by The Nathan Cummings Foundation and The Ford Foundation.

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