Join the Department of Performing and Media Arts for PENUMBRA: 2026 ANNUAL SPRING DANCE PRESENTING SERIES, an evening of original dance work featuring choreography by Babatunji Johnson and Assistant Professor of the Practice Danielle Russo, on Friday, March 20, and Saturday March 21, from 7:30 pm - 8:30 pm, in the Class of ’56 Flexible Theatre, Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. Get your free tickets here.
PENUMBRA presents two ensemble dance works that delve into the shadow self and the tensions between impulse, restraint, and the ego. Layers surface and recede as dancers move through the many selves they carry—some revealed, others concealed, held close or kept sacred as acts of survival during an era marked by fear, surveillance, and uncertainty. The evening draws on the psychoanalytic thought of Carl Jung, who understood the shadow as parts of the psyche that remain unseen or outside conscious awareness, alongside Sigmund Freud’s interplay between id and ego, where instinctual drives meet the forces that shape and restrain them. The title evokes the penumbra—the luminous edge of shadow—an image of the threshold where darkness thins and the possibility of light emerges, honoring the quiet persistence of our own.
PENUMBRA is the culmination of DANCING HOME/LAND, which is a yearlong series of live performances and activations, guest artist residencies and symposia, and extra/curricular experiences that engages dance and performance artists, students, and communities in dialogue around memory, migration, and place—and where fantasy can serve as a site for reworlding belonging and futurity. Participating students are enrolled in PMA 1611: Rehearsal and Performance, which is a project course designed to give Cornellians the experience of working with choreographers, companies, designers, and production staff in a professionally modelled setting.
Film work by Associate Professor Jeffrey Palmer. Costume design by Senior Lecturer Sarah Bernstein
Photo credit: Jini Li, Architecture '27
