PROGRAM INFORMATION

Gun 滚 (2025)

Choreography: Yu-Ling Yeh

Sound Engineering: Yu-Ling Yeh

Lighting Design: Nick Rainey

Video Projecticon: Nick Rainey

Costume Design: Yu-Ling Yeh

Performers: Company

Gun (滚), meaning “roll” or “boil,” explores the tension between control and freedom, conformity and individuality. Using the silk fan as both weapon and vessel, the work captures the moment when pressure can no longer be contained—when opposing forces finally collide. It asks a simple but powerful question: when faced with resistance, do we yield, or do we rise and create our own rhythm?

Casual Malice (2025)

DANCE | HUNGER | ACTION Commission Project

Choreography: Abby Williams Chin

Costume Design: Abby Williams Chin & Yu-Ling Yeh

Performers: Company

Casual Malice considers the moment after something is said that cannot be taken back. The work follows how that rupture reorganizes the room, how proximity shifts, how bodies adjust, and how relationships quietly realign. Grounded in reflection and lived experience, the piece sits in the tension of what remains unspoken, asking how we move through harm that has been named but not resolved.

Fault Lines (2025)

DANCE | HUNGER | ACTION Commission Project

Choreography: Terrill Mitchell

Costume Design: Terrill Mitchell & Yu-Ling Yeh

Performers: Company

Fault Lines unfolds in three sections that move from unity to individuality to renewed connection. The work begins with rhythm and collective energy, then shifts into moments of vulnerability where each dancer’s unique voice emerges. In the final section, those individual strengths reform the group, revealing harmony through difference. Fault Lines celebrates resilience, trust, and the power of coming together after breaking apart.

15 MINUTE INTERMISSION

Joy Is Resistance (2025, excerpt)

presented in collaboration with Urban Souls Dance Company (excerpt from Dear GENX)

Choreography: Elijah Alhadji Gibson

Costume Design: Elijah Alhadji Gibson

Lighting Design: Nick Rainey

Projection Design: Nick Rainey

Score: Ashley Watson

Lyrics: Terrence Crosby, Elijah Alhadji Gibson, Britney Crosby

Vocals: Terrence Crosby, Ashley Watson

Performers: Company

Joy Is Resistance began as a reflection on power and disenfranchisement, examining how prosperity in America has often been built at the expense of marginalized communities. While rooted in the lived experience and legacy of Black Americans, the work acknowledges a broader pattern in which communities pushed to the margins have endured not only through protest, but through joy. Across generations of displacement, violence, erasure, and systemic neglect, survival has required more than resilience. It has required gathering, music, ritual, movement, celebration in the face of restriction. Joy, in this context, is intentional. It is inherited. It is defiance. The work moves through remembrance and tension before arriving at a quiet but steady truth: continuing to exist fully, culturally, and collectively is itself an act of resistance.

“Thank Ya” (Excerpt from Dear GENX: A Love Letter)

Urban Souls Dance Company

Director & Choreography: Walter J. Hull, II

Co-Collaborators & Dancers: Dunia Baruarni, Lauren Burke, Alexia Jones, Jasmine Burns, Toba Montana-Atkins
Poet Laureate: Ebony Stewart

Music: We Fall Down (Ube’s Ones Thank Ya Remix) by Maurice Joshua & Joyce Hurley

Thank Ya is an excerpt from the finale of Dear GENX: A Love Letter, a dance-theater work honoring the memory and lived experience of Generation X. This closing piece is a gesture of gratitude, recognizing the joy, resilience, and survival carried in the body, and what it means to still be here.

Desired to Discard

Choreography: Bailey Zettler & Lenzy Zettler

Costume Design: Bailey Zettler & Lenzy Zettler

Lighting Design: Jam Martinez

Music:

Performers: SMCDT Apprentices

Without End-Gain (Restaged 2026)

(Originally choreographed 2014, SMCDT Premiere 2019)

Choreography: Elijah Alhadji Gibson

Costume Design: Elijah Alhadji Gibson

Lighting Design: Joshua Paul Weckesser

Performers: Company