West Palm Beach, FL
Ericka Squire and Branndi Lewis, co-founders of the inaugural Banyan Dance Festival, have a shared history of creating opportunities for connection through dance. The two women, leaders of the Natural Movers Foundation and Grounded West Palm Beach respectively, began Banyan in an effort to bring together a rich variety of dance experiences over a relatively short period of time. Their one-week festival boasts an intensive training program, a gala showcase, a ticketed final performance and a series of free, outdoor classes that are open to the public.
When I first met Lewis at Ballet Florida, she was facilitating one of the many open rehearsals of the festival’s dance intensive participants and the “Banyan Company,” a cohort of dancers (separated into “professional dancers” and “apprentices”) from around the country who applied for, and were selected to participate in the rehearsal and performance aspect of the week. Throughout the week, both the company and intensive participants assembled for daily technique classes led by nationally-recognized choreographers and teachers. After class, the intensive students and professionals split off and worked with the choreographers to generate an evening of mixed repertoire, to be shared in a formal concert after the five days of rehearsal.
Ideas of interconnectedness and the building of a strong community web threaded throughout the week. At the Festival’s culminating performance at the Norton Art Museum, Squire and Lewis shared a microphone to give thanks during their opening address. Squire, who trained with Philadelphia-based artist, Dr. Kariamu Welsh, the legendary creator of Umfundulai technique, reminded the audience that “We must remember on whose shoulders we stand,” adding that she stands, amongst others, “on the shoulders of [her] eight (soon-to-be nine) children.” She referenced the Ubuntu proverb, “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu,” which means “I am because we are.” Not coincidentally, I noted the huge banyan tree standing outside the venue, a physical embodiment of interdependence reflected throughout the evening’s program.
In the performance, Guest Choreographer Babatunji’s “We Together,” created on the group of intensive participants, exemplified this communal spirit. The dancers energized the space, like asteroids popping out for a party. Watching them float through freezes and shoulder rolls brought me back to the open rehearsal I witnessed earlier that week where Babatunji and his partner, Charmaine Johnson, encouraged the dancers to meet the choreography’s level of intensity. “Hard stuff brings up emotions,” they said. “We are going to learn how to get delicate and intricate.”
Ballet Florida’s Artistic Director, Lauren Carey was both hostess for most of the festival’s rehearsals and one of the choreographers who set work on a mixture of professional dancers, apprentices, and intensive participants for the show. Her piece, “The End. And Again,” opened the show with expansive terre à terre footwork and musical flurries of skillfully repeated balletic movements projecting the dancers across the wide expanse of floor. As she stated during the previous night´s preview event, her inspiration originated from Nature´s cycles of new beginnings.
Another highlight was Guest Choreographer Loni Landon’s duet “the shared word,” which featured intensive participants Lila Hodgin and Nonye Brantley. The dancers exuded maturity, channeling a calm wisdom beyond their years as they used their fingertips to pull my gaze from the air to the floor and back out again. Watching them use simple pointing gestures to trace small orbits of recollection on the vacuous museum floor, I almost heard the invisible words:“We do this together. We play it over and over.”
The Miami-based group STYX The Company was a guest on the bill and performed“Club Study Pt. 1 & 2,” in which reverb and action + reaction were featured prominently. The dancers seemed propelled by a mysterious centrifugal force that hurtled them into contact with one another before releasing their physicalities toward the periphery. I wondered about the sudden stripping away of clothing which came next, but when a soloist violently tossed the garments to the sides of the stage, her body seemed to clearly declare, “Let Go!”
“Elsewhen” by Choreography Fellow Beatriz Garcia Diaz showcased the talents of a large, all-female ensemble of intensive dancers. Weighted and rebounding partnerwork gave a sense of shared experience as the dancers skillfully wove between one another in alternating states of percussiveness and flow. The eventual dissolution of “Elsewhen” was in the form of a flowing solo where the melody was made visible, arms reaching and retracting in a beautifully melancholic simmer of resolve, which seemed to sum up the group’s shared experience.
The Festival’s final piece was the only one to feature the entire “Banyan Company”. A rhythmic anti-war jammer, Resident Choreographer Sean Aaron Carmon’s “One Battle After Another” opened with a dramatically raw solo danced by Nicholas Garlo, who free-wheeled through chest rolls and saut de chats. He evoked the madness of a man forced to enact violence, driven by the words of Rudyard Kipling’s poetry:
Don’t—don’t—don’t—don’t—look at what’s in front of you.
An’ there’s no discharge in the war!
Daniela Cepero wielded Armando Brydson’s hyper-flexibility like a weapon, drawing audible gasps from the audience. Dancer Emily Caravella infused the space with both freedom and control , her body bubbling upright as if miming James Baldwin’s words, “artist, integrity, courage” and then suddenly hinging to the floor, only to draw herself upright and transform her leg into a gun as if to remind us that she was in complete command. The dance’s tension reflected the struggle of being an artist, which Carnon likened to battle.
The Banyan Company Dancers were powerful planets in charge of their constellation of havoc. They provided a fitting finale to a week packed full of connections, bound tight in the embrace of South Florida’s famed humidity.
Banyan Dance Festival, Banyan Dance Festival Concert, Norton Museum of Art, August 8, 2026.
