Photo by Peter Born

Marjani Forté-Saunders and 7NMS: float.: Phase I

Thursday, May 7 | 7:30PM
Friday, May 8 | 7:30PM
Saturday, May 9 | 7:30PM

Open Dress Rehearsal*
Tuesday, May 5 | 7:30PM

To RSVP for Open Dress Rehearsal, Click Here

Created by Marjani Forté-Saunders in collaboration with Sound Designer Everett Saunders (7NMS)
Performed by Marjani Forté-Saunders, and more to be announced

float. is a multi-phased performance project that unfolds across solo, ensemble, and durational forms, attending to the dance of Body, Mind, and Will as a meditation on the Wondrous. Rooted in the Zen Buddhist concept of Clouds and Water, the work considers impermanence as a lived condition, asking how one moves through disruption, grief, and change by yielding, shifting, and advancing without resistance.

float.: Phase I is the ensemble iteration of float. that centers the dance of the Body, Mind, and Will. Unfolding as a meditation, in changing form, shifting, and advancing- steadily. It is the first phase of this three part project that is unfolding over the next two years. These performances at Danspace Project are the first public sharing of float.: Phase I.

float. is made possible in part by the MAP Fund, Movement Research, Barnard Movement Lab, Jacob’s Pillow Lab Residency, The Center for Provocative Thought, and the City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs.

*About Open Dress Rehearsal: Tuesday evening’s dress rehearsal will be free with RSVP and open to the public at limited-capacity. Open dress rehearsals are a mask-required, community-minded program prioritizing our immunocompromised and low-income audiences. Staff and audiences will be required to wear masks (N95 or KN95) and performing artists (if unmasked) will be required to test for COVID-19 (rapid tests provided by Danspace Project). This is a first-come-first-served event. Danspace will not hold late seating or a waitlist during Open Dress Rehearsals. Thank you for your understanding.

BUY TICKETS

Before you visit:

Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project

Marjani Forté-Saunders (she/her) is a 2023 United States Artists Fellow and recently presented the restaging of heralded choreographer Blondell Cummings’s solo Chicken Soup, re-imagined for Danspace Project’s 50th Anniversary (Chicken Soup 2025). In 2024, Marjani also celebrated her choreographic debut with the New York Metropolitan Opera, El Niño. Marjani is a 3x Bessie award winning choreographer, performer, teaching artist, and Mother. She is an awardee of the prestigious Dance Magazine Harkness Award (2020) and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship (2020). She is an inaugural recipient of 3 distinguishing fellowships in dance, including Urban Bush Women’s Choreographic Center Initiative Fellowship (2017), the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2018), and the DanceUSA Artist Fellowship (2019). Her performance installation Garden of Unicorns- a Surrealist Ode to Blondell Cummings unfolded in The Getty Gardens as part of the Ever Present Series, curated by Kristin Juarez and Sarah Cooper. Saunders is a founding member of the collective 7NMS, alongside composer/sound designer Everett Saunders. They are recent recipients of New Music USA and the National Dance Project Production & Touring award for their latest work Prophet: The Order of the Lyricist. In 2022, Saunders made her off-broadway debut as choreographer of Dreaming Zenzile, written and starring grammy-nominated jazz vocalist Somi Kakoma, and directed by Drama League Founder’s Award winning artist Lileana Blain-Cruz. Saunders is the Visioning Founder of the Art x Power a platform, dedicated to fostering purpose and innovation by investing in and building resilient futures for Black radically experimenting artists. Humbly, Saunders defines her work by its lineage, stemming from culturally rich, vibrant, historic, loving, irreverent conjurers!

Photo of Okwui Okpokwasili by Michael Avedon

Malcolm-x Betts + Okwui Okpokwasili

Friday, May 22 | 8PM

Co-presented with Poetry Project

Malcolm-x Betts and Okwui Okpokwasili are both interdisciplinary artists who work in and around dance. Each of them, in their own ways, makes performances that articulate the expansive vision of the Black radical tradition, while simultaneously grounding that vision in everyday intensities of desire, grief, love, and rage. They both approach movement as a site of textual experimentation and language as a bodily material, working at the limit of what seems possible, approaching scenes of abandonment with abandon. For this shared evening, co-presented with Danspace Project, Betts and Okpokwasili will have an opportunity to highlight the presence of writing in their respective practices, each reading from new and in-progress works.

BUY TICKETS

Before you visit:

Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project

Malcolm-x Betts is a New York based visual and dance artist who believes that art is a transformative vehicle that brings people and communities together. His artistic work is rooted in investigating embodiment for liberation, Black imagination, and directly engaging with challenges placed on the physical body.

Okwui Okpokwasili (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based performer, choreographer, and writer creating multidisciplinary performance pieces. The child of immigrants from Nigeria, Okpokwasili was born and raised in the Bronx, and the histories of these places and the girls and women who inhabit them feature prominently in much of her work. Her productions include the Bessie Award-winning Bronx Gothic and the performance installation Sitting on a Man’s Head. In 2018, she received a Princeton University Hodder Fellowship, a Herb Alpert Award in Dance, a Doris Duke Artist Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. She was the inaugural artist for the Kravis Studio Residency program at MoMA in 2022. In 2025, she received an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Photo by Ian Douglas

Samita Sinha + Guests: Tremor

Saturday, May 23 | 3PM

Tremor is an energy system of voice, body, sound and vibration brought to life through processes of attunement, emergence, resonance, and the ecstatic. This iteration of Tremor is created by Samita Sinha in collaboration with Ash Fure, Sunder Ganglani, Sunny Jain, Darrell Jones, and Daniel Neumann, with Sunil Bald conceiving space and design.

BUY TICKETS

Before you visit:

Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project

Samita Sinha is an artist, composer, researcher, and educator whose practice is rooted in the voice and body. She has trained in Indian vocal traditions (North Indian classical and Bengali Baul folk), and has unraveled them through the body to create a new and multivalent language of vibration and transformation. Sinha has performed her work nationally and internationally, and received awards from the Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, National Performance Network, New York State Council on the Arts, and the Fulbright Foundation. She is a Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College.

7–9