Line Dance Club

Pre-global pandemic, I had been thinking a lot about how to create new public spaces that were inclusive to everyone but also incorporated what I do – which is make dances. There is something really special about how dancers all take class together and I wanted to find a way to open that up to the theater community (rehearsal isn’t quite the same, because it has an end goal, like a finished show).

So Fall 2018, Designated Movement Company launched a monthly community building thing called LINE DANCE CLUB. It’s an inclusive space where we get together, learn existing line dances and even make up new line dances. Everyone gets to create a move, it can be anything, and I put them all together and we learn it as a group. This springs from a physical practice that my company does with every show we make and I’ve started to do it with my freelance theater and musical theater work as well. So it’s all these communities and vocabularies melded together, and it has the capacity to grow and evolve with each session, as we keep on adding new dances and revisiting old ones.

A week into the pandemic, Broadway casting director Kate Lumpkin asked me to lead LDC as part of her program NOMARKING. On Facebook Live, I spent an hour dancing with people from all over the country and sharing this practice with them. It was thrilling! I thought, well, let’s keep doing this. So I hosted a free (on)Line Dance Club once a week for three months in an attempt to keep the creative juices flowing and to come together in movement. We even had Line Dance Club while I was in South Korea and were featured in Annie-B Parson's brilliant book The Choreography of Everyday Life.

Reach out if you’d like to join us for a Line Dance Club in the future or if you would like me to bring that physical practice to your school or theater.

Let’s dance!