
Photo by Marissa Alper
Join Summer Stages Dance @ ICA resident artists Eiko Otake and DonChristian Jones for a workshop designed for “people who love to move or want to move with delicious feeling.” Explore exercises designed to focus awareness, coordination, and sensing the reciprocal natures of movement and emotion. No dance training is required, and all abilities are welcome.
2025 Summer Stages Dance @ ICA/Boston is made possible, in part, with the support of Jane Karol and Howard Cooper, Carol and John Moriarty, and The Aliad Fund.
Tickets available on Wednesday, June 18, at 10 AM
Making their Boston debut, Canadian contemporary dance company Anne Plamondon Productions explore the body as a source of resilience, beauty, and hope in Myokine. Secreted by muscles when the body is in motion, myokines are often called “molecules of hope” for the sense of well-being and optimism they provide. For Plamondon, this process symbolizes the healing role of the body when faced with the increasing complexities and troubling issues of our time. It embodies the essential function of dance to release tension, emotion, and anxiety—bringing to life the power of our bodies when united in movement.
Tickets available on Wednesday, June 18, at 10 AM
Known for its expansive vision, versatility, and technical prowess, Doug Varone and Dancers creates kinetically thrilling dances that reflect the complexity of the human spirit. From the smallest gesture to full-throttled bursts of movement, Varone’s work takes your breath away. Doug Varone and Dancers returns with highlights from its 30-year repertory including Lux (2006) and the Boston premieres of Home (1988), and Restore (2024).
Each summer the ICA offers residencies for choreographers to develop new work. Get a special sneak peek at their efforts during these work-in-progress showings of their exciting new projects.
Inspired by the ever-changing nature of water and the body as a river of memories, Eiko Otake and DonChristian Jones, who began their collaboration in 2017, will continue to develop and expand their artistic connection at the ICA. In a work-in-progress presentation overlooking the Boston Harbor, Otake and Jones will share new materials and engage in conversations with visitors.
Late seating not guaranteed.
Content advisory: This showing contains nudity.
In July, the museum will host acclaimed choreographer Netta Yerushalmy for a week-long residency as she develops a new interdisciplinary performance centered around female aging and its impact on art-making. Yerushalmy will create the work alongside five other collaborators, including Katherine Profeta (writer), Alla Kovgan (filmmaker), Tuce Yasak (light /space design), Paula Matthusen (music), and Mieke Ulfig (graphic art). Be among the first to see this new work take shape in a special preview showing and learn about their collaborative working process.
2025 Summer Stages Dance @ ICA/Boston is made possible, in part, with the support of George and Ann Colony, Jane Karol and Howard Cooper, Carol and John Moriarty, Andrew and Linda Hammett Ory, and The Aliad Fund.
Urban Bush Women (UBW) burst onto the dance scene in 1984 with bold, innovative, demanding, and exciting works that brought under-told stories to life. Originally founded by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the company, now under the co-artistic direction of Chanon Judson and Mame Diarra Spies, continues to weave contemporary dance, music, and text with the history, culture, and spiritual traditions of the African Diaspora.
A centerpiece of Urban Bush Women’s 40th Anniversary Celebration, This is Risk looks forward and back in celebrating four decades of operating at the vanguard of movement and social activism. At the ICA, Urban Bush Women will perform an evening of iconic works celebrating the Company’s 40-year history including Visibility, Batty Moves, Blues Medicine, and Shelter and will feature live music performed by Grace Galu Kalambay and Lucianna Padmore. This is Risk takes the audience through intentional storytelling to the next space of collective brilliance.
Following Saturday’s performance, members of Urban Bush Women will join Grisha Coleman for a post-performance conversation. Coleman is Professor of Movement, Computation, and Digital Media at Northeastern University and a former member of Urban Bush Women.
Also, catch the Urban Bush Women leading an all-levels movement workshop at Dance Complex on March 19! Learn more
David Dorfman Dance’s truce songs explores how our world might look, and how we might feel, if traditional truces were extended by a day, then a month, then years—ending one small war on humanity at a time. DDD’s trademark risky, frisky, and vulnerable movement, accompanied by an original score by Lizzy de Lise and Sam Crawford alongside text developed by Dorfman and the company embodies truce with self, with others, and with the world, as dancing bodies serve as conduits for a momentary peace.
Boston Dance Theater performs Red is a feeling—an evening of short dance works woven together by the color red that highlight themes of the human experience including love, longing, and the fight to live. Choreographer Roya Carreras Fereshtehnejad presents a work inspired by her cancer diagnosis. Jessie Jeanne Stinnett’s Fifties is inspired by popular tunes of the decade. If As If by choreographer Itzik Galili is a duet in which the color red signifies a personal struggle with body, mind, space, time, memory, and history. Choreographer Marco Goecke’s take on Firebird is set to Stravinksy’s 1910 score and captivates the audience with a nuanced yet explosive journey of companionship.
Renowned quartet Sandbox Percussion joins forces with Gandini Juggling to illustrate how we hear, see, and perform sounds and rhythm. This unique new live collaboration combines percussion music by contemporary composers Steve Reich, Iannis Xenakis, Amy Beth Kirsten, and Andy Akiho performed live by Sandbox with the virtuosic, mind-blowing juggling of Gandini to illuminate music both visually and aurally. With vanishing dots of sound and balls replicating and complementing complex rhythms in the air, Gandini Juggling and Sandbox Percussion make the complex simple and the simple complex. This will be serious fun.
Following the Friday performance, members of the company will join John Andress, Bill T. Jones Director/Curator of Performing Arts, for a post-performance conversation.
Advisory note: This performance includes moments of flashing light.
This performance was developed at a Summer Stages Dance @ ICA/Boston residency in July 2023. Summer Stages Dance @ ICA/Boston is made possible, in part, with the support of Jane Karol and Howard Cooper, George and Ann Colony, The Aliad Fund, and Stephanie and Leander McCormick-Goodhart.
“An enthralling, epically adventurous work”
—New York Times
Choreographer Faye Driscoll’s newest work Weathering is a multi-sensory flesh sculpture made of bodies, sounds, scents, liquids, and objects. Ten people (dancers, singers, and crew) enact a glacially morphing tableau vivant on a mobile raft-like stage surging through the Anthropocene. Their voices generate a score that crescendos and resonates as they clutch, careen, and cleave in a space too small to contain them, spilling off the edges. The audience embanks the performers, close enough to smell the sweat and feel the steam of these central, spiraling scenes. The symphonically active, luminously living work is a breathing, leaking choreography of micro events within a momentum thrusting from just beyond the perceivable. Driscoll and her team of collaborators ask: How do we feel the impact of events moving through us which are so much larger, yet are animating and activating our bodies all the time? How do we get closer to the impact? Can we slow down enough to feel the dust, hurt, howl, absence, spill, plume?
Advisory note: This performance includes moments of full and partial nudity.
Summer Stages Dance @ ICA/Boston presents a special opportunity to see an artist at work. Following a week of residency to develop their newest project Memory Fleet, interdisciplinary artist and choreographer Jasmine Hearn will share with audiences their development process in an open rehearsal featuring movement, improvisation, conversation, and song. In Memory Fleet, Hearn and their collaborators incorporate performance and archive work that centers the remembering of choreographies of care – dances and gestures of Black mothering passed on through generational lineages.
Jasmine Hearn is an interdisciplinary artist, director, performer, choreographer, organizer, doula, and teacher. Hearn has performed with Helen Simoneau Danse, Urban Bush Women, and David Dorfman Dance, among others. Hearn is the recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2023), the Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize in Design with collaborator Athena Kokoronis of Domestic Performance Agency (2023), and a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Performer (2021, 2017).