Platform 2026: Secret Gardens, co-curated by Judy Hussie-Taylor and Seta Morton, tends to the relationships between plants and dance; strategic seedings, subterranean root systems, medicinal blossoms, rituals and rabbit holes.

In the wake of a threatening economic and political climate, dance in New York City continues to survive,
grow, and flower new possibilities. Like the underground mycorrhizal network of a forest, communities of artists and artworkers forge symbiotic connections to enact vital artistic transmission, share resources, and produce knowledge. Secret Gardens gathers individual and collective blooms from artists that have planted roots at Danspace Project. Each work is a bloom and a garden; a world of the artist’s making.

Platform 2026 celebrates a commitment to tend both new and long-term artistic relationships and the
dissemination of ideas that occur within and beyond our soil.

Can dance and performance be medicine in tumultuous times?
What ephemeral and alchemical rituals are necessary to counter homogeneity?
What curative remedies can we unearth? What secrets remain hidden underground?

Many of the events, performances, and ideas of this 2026 Platform were seeded by curators, organizers, and artists during Platform 2020: Utterances From The Chorus (co-curated by Hussie-Taylor and Okwui Okpokwasili), which was prematurely closed due to the onset of Covid-19. 

Included in this Journal issue is a poem by Omar Berrada, one of the Writers-in-Residence of that Platform. In this new poem, Berrada reflects on the last performances of the 2020 Platform by Algerian artist, Nacera Belaza and Moroccan artist, Meryem Jazouli. Six years later, we are all still tending the weeds of work, unfinished.

Platform 2026 activities include indoor and outdoor performances, afternoon conversations, fairy tales, rituals, resource sharing, community partnerships, and more. New works will be premiered by Jasmine Hearn, Stacy Matthew Spence, and Marjani Forté-Saunders. An evening of original songs will be performed by Okwui Okpokwasili with Peter Born. Joan Jonas will present a reimagining of her iconic performance The Juniper Tree (originally performed at Danspace in 1977). There will be a Conversation Without Walls (CWW) with Hearn, Victoria Awkward, Myssi Robinson, and Charmaine Warren on Black femme dance writing and archiving. A day of lectures, conversations, and workshops on financial gardening will be co-organized by Danspace Project and LiveARC (Artist Resource Collective) and facilitated by David Thomson. An afternoon sound garden experiment will be shared by Samita Sinha with Sunil Bald, Ash Fure, Sunder Ganglani, Sunny Jain, Darrell Jones, and Daniel Neumann. The Platform will close with an outdoor performance of MAJOR by Ogemdi Ude.

Alongside the Platform performances and events, Writer-in-Residence, Myssi Robinson will be generating a visual and written apothecary and creative archive of the Platform. Please find the beginnings of this poetic apothecary here. As Myssi Robinson writes, “Let’s share medicines. It’s wild out here.“

Footnote: Platform 2026: Secret Gardens is the 17th Danspace Project Platform to date and is co-curated by the Danspace Project’s curatorial team: Judy Hussie-Taylor (Executive Director and Chief Curator) and Seta Morton (Program Director and Associate Curator) with special thanks to our Platform Writer-in-Residence Myssi Robinson and Communications Director and graphic designer, Allison Hsu.