Join the Department of Performing and Media Arts for LIMINAL: 2026/2027 ANNUAL DANCE PRESENTING SERIES, on Friday, November 20, and Saturday November 21, at 7:30 pm, in the Class of ’56 Flexible Theatre, Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. Get your free tickets here.
LIMINAL is an evening of original dance work to be witnessed in the round featuring choreography by acclaimed guest artist Jie-Hung Connie Shiau and Assistant Professor of the Practice Danielle Russo, alongside projects produced by students in PMA 2300: Dance Composition.
I dwell in possibility is a direct reference to Emily Dickinson’s poem, rooted in both its metaphorical imagery and the felt experience of dwelling, poised between inhabitation and lingering at its very edge. Often read as her manifesto on the inexhaustibility of imagination and the creative process, it reminds us to approach our own work from infinite points of view. Yet possibility also carries weight. To navigate a liminal world is to contend with its suspended matter: environmental, psychic, and political conditions, phenomena, and holding patterns, within which time, perception, haptic memory, and the boundaries of simply being are elastic, multiple, and perpetually unfolding.
Rainbow Body explores the space in transformation. What takes place in the dark phase of liminality is a process of breaking down. Additionally, the work is inspired by artist Ugo Rondinone's exhibition, in which he drew inspiration from the spiritual rite in Tibetan Buddhism in which the body is transformed into light upon death. In each work, being is not a fixed condition. It is porous, mutable, and implicated in the conditions and the world it both registers and contests.
Moved by the questions and provocations of poet and cultural critic Charles Baudelaire, and dance and performance scholars Randy Martin, Erin Manning, and Fred Moten, among others, LIMINAL and the 2026/7 Annual Dance Presenting Series lives within Subject to Change, a yearlong series of live performances and activations, guest artist residencies and symposia, and extra/curricular experiences that engage artists, students, and communities in the unfinished, the fugitive, the minor, the contingent, the not-yet-legible.
Bodies in the act of becoming otherwise.
Stage as sensorium, in a felt field of flux.
At the edge of recognition, something else begins.
Photo credit: Madeline Wilcox; Image design: Danielle Russo; In dialogue with Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life”; Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture; Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons.
