Dance

Engage with Leading Dance Professionals Each Month Through the Dance Department’s Movement Matters Workshop Series

A workshop for people smart and brave enough to be wrong.

We live in a world full of hot takes, strong opinions, and people who are very sure they’re right. The problem? Certainty makes connection harder. Certainty Is Overrated is an interactive workshop that treats curiosity as a serious (and understanding) superpower. 

Through games, conversations, and thought experiments, you will explore how curiosity fuels imagination, softens snap judgment, and opens the door to empathy, understanding, and freer thinking. 

Dr. Mark Broomfield, Associate Professor of English, Founder and Director of Performance as Social Change™ at SUNY Geneseo, is a London-born, award-winning scholar and artist of Jamaican heritage, with publications in the areas of race, gender, sexuality, dance, and ethnography.

Mahaney Arts Center, Dance Theatre

“Under Earth” Octavio Rose Hingle ‘17 presents under earth, a ritual of devotion inspired by the gardening memoirs of queer English filmmaker and AIDS activist Derek Jarman. Through movement, song, and poetic monologue, the performance maps a personal ecology of pleasure, grief and erotic transformation across the landscapes of the San Francisco Bay.

“Making Noise” A deep practice of listening informed by Graham Shelor’s ‘23 research for his most recent dance project - NOISE REDUCTION. In this session, participants are guided through somatic listening practices designed to tune their internal awareness of the moving body. We will expand our gaze outward, engaging in group improvisational scores that challenge our understanding of what it means to be in community. Together, we will investigate: How can we communicate through our bodies? How do we make space to speak and share space to listen?

What makes a compelling artist statement? How can you make your CV and creative portfolio stand out? In this workshop, Middlebury Dance Program alumni will share ideas, examples, and leading questions to help you present your artistic self to the world in a compelling and authentic way. Feel free to bring an artist statement draft and/or CV with you or just show up with your curiosity and ideas for your post-graduate artistic career. All are welcome!

Sonia Hsieh, MSW ‘10.5, would like to share a message of self-transformation and love. No matter your background, life experiences, setbacks, or challenges, an embodied life is accessible to everyone. For over a decade, Sonia has worked as a psychotherapist in the self-help and inner inquiry space—first transforming herself, then guiding many others through profound processes of change and altered states of consciousness. When mind, body, and soul unite as one, the miracle of love becomes not only possible, but deeply felt and known.

A movement primer by Michael Sakamoto

Butoh and American street dance each grew out of conditions of socio-economic crisis in the post-World War II era in Japan and the U.S. With elements inspired by both movement practices, Michael leads exercises to demonstrate a unique blend of intercultural and self-reflexive performance embodiment.

Creature Creation

This is less of a class and more of a facilitated time to ask ourselves “what else?” We will mobilize the body and generate heat so that we may move through new versions of ourselves. Through prompts, games, and material we can move collectively and have dance do what it needs to do for us.

The Dance Department invites you to join our Pizza Welcome to meet faculty and hear about our exciting semester at from 6-7 pm. Audition to perform this spring from 7-8 pm. No preparation is required.