August 2022 - June 2023
Rest. Rise.Move.Nourish.Heal is a site-responsive dance ritual created by Founder and Artistic Director Vershawn Sanders-Ward in collaboration with composer/music director avery r. young, filmmaker Jovan Landry, and with costumes by Kelley KFLEYE Moseley and Evelyn Danner. This new work was developed in response to the urban farm, ART ON THE FARM in GRANT PARK, a space stewarded and visually designed by Erika Allen and Urban Growers Collective. Sanders-Ward visions this work as "a practice, a process, an uncovering of the beautiful labor of bringing us ALL home to land, reclaiming ancestral cultural traditions, technologies, and tools that can lead to individual and collective healing."
June 1, 2025
Freedom of Freestyle - A tribute to the roots of hip-hop, an embodied celebration of Black cultural expression. It begins grounded in legacy, bringing to life the energy of the streets where dance became the language of release, resistance, and joy.. As the rhythm opens up, dancers arrive as they would to a public session—one by one and in community. They enter the space with care, moving to honor and share with awareness and respect. This is a living, breathing spontaneous exchange. It is an invitation: to show up, to witness, and to move together in rhythm, recognition, and reciprocity.
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Movement Lab - Drawing from the heart of hip-hop culture, the Movement Lab was a playspace for people to explore their own unique motions. Facilitated by myself and three other BIPOC dancers of healing-centered communities, this activation invited the audience to feel and to dare to experiment. This space was all about letting go of judgment and connecting with the body, the soul, the music, and the external world, recognizing that every movement is a powerful form of expression, and here, all are uplifted to be free.
November 2018 - March 2019
This piece was created as my Musical Theater thesis with a cast full of collaborators and good friends as the director and writer. It was a devised work that used poetry and movement to highlight the experiences of Black women on Princeton’s campus. The content was created by compiling creative writing and movement exercises created by the cast in a workshopping process held in the Fall. As the choreographer for the piece, much of the movement was rooted in childhood games such as tag, tug of war, or red light green light as a means to highlight the ways joy and disposability intermingle within the embodied experiences of Black women. Having a cast that included multiple races and genders in addition to Black women allowed us to physically explore and witness the differences in our experiences while simultaneously building empathy for and supporting each other through the pain from these differences.