Fall Faculty Dance Concert: Movement of the People Dance Company

Friday, November 21, 2025 at 7:00pm
CFA Theater

Saturday, November 22, 2025 at 7:00pm
CFA Theater

Assistant Professor of the Practice in Dance and African American Studies Joya Powell’s Movement of the People Dance Company returns to Wesleyan to celebrate their 20th anniversary. Since 2005, Powell’s company has been dedicated to connecting cultures, community engagement, and composing multidisciplinary, immersive, socially-conscious choreography.

Movement of the People Dance Company will share viscerally engaging excerpts from three of their repertory works: for <—> from, a reimagined interpretation of their piece (For) Those We Left Behind (2010); Aconteceu (It Happened) (2012); and their newest works-in-progress A Re-Remembering Project. Each piece is grounded in the creative ways the company roots the body as archive and joy as a bridge towards tomorrow.

The performance will feature Joya Powell; Wesleyan students and alumni Ruby Cullen '27, Alyssa Hodge '27, Adriana Alfaro Liendo '26, Ivan Lopez '26, Visiting Instructor of Dance and Program Coordinator for the Center for Prison Education Shirley Sullivan ’21, and Mariema Tall '26; and Movement of the People Dance Company's collaborating choreographers Tyrone Bevans, Camilla Davis, and Brittany Grier.

Featuring music by Alex Shaw, The Lost Tribe, and Wesleyan PhD candidate Jocelyn Pleasant MA '20. Lighting and media design by Assistant Professor of the Practice in Dance Chelsie McPhilimy. Set design in collaboration with Suzanne Sadler, Technical Director/Manager of CFA Theater and Master Electrician for the Theater Department.

Arrive early to engage with a retrospective installation journey of Movement of the People Dance Company’s past 20 years, as the CFA Theater lobby is transformed by artistic archives.

In for <—> from,Movement of the People Dance Company channels their ancestral stories and unanswered questions in a new iteration of this immersive contemporary dance theater piece. The choreography delves into the recognition of our vulnerability, and a surrender into morphing transformations. A visceral multilived experience grounded in lessons of resilience our ancestors echo into our individual and collective journeys.

Aconteceu (It Happened) (2012) is based on the Candelária Massacre of 1993 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where the lives of eight youths who lived on the street were taken by men including police. The work provocatively fuses contemporary dance and pedestrian movements with Afro-Brazilian dances, including dances of the orixás, capoeira, and samba. The excerpt chosen for this performance is of the beginning of the piece which focuses on the tension between hustle of life on the street and being a kid.

A Re-Remembering Project is an intergenerational oral-history multimedia dance project evoking the stories of one neighborhood in Harlem, as told by three generations of Black women who’ve lived there for nearly a century. Witness their stories and their descendants’ stories, moving in deep relationships to place and lineage. The piece fuses African diasporic dance from the U.S. and Caribbean and poetry; and uses audience immersive engagement to go on a journey shifting through portals of time. It’s a love letter, in the form of a performance, to our community.

Iterations of A Re-Remembering Project have been made possible in part with funds from the Creative Engagement and UMEZ Arts Engagement, a regrant program(s) supported by the funding agencies the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corporation administered by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and with support by Harlem School of the Arts, The School for Contemporary Dance and Thought, and the Bates Dance Festival.

Image: Tyrone Bevans (Photo by Alyssa Rapp)