Photo of Lysis by Natura Collective

Secret Night Garden

Saturday, May 2 | 7:30PM

A secret evening, a surprise, a garden at night.

This spontaneous shared evening, as a part of Platform 2026: Secret Gardens, features performances by Lauren Bakst & Kris Lee, Lysis, and Platform 2026 Writer-in-Residence Myssi Robinson.

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Before you visit:

Accessibility at Danspace Project
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Lysis is a trans-disciplinary caretaker and nightdancer based in New York.

Myssi Robinson is a Bessie award-winning performer, multi-disciplinary maker and activated caregiver raised on and recently returned to Powhatan lands / Richmond, VA. She has interpreted many dances and dances through many interpretations. Her practice quilts together imaginative archiving, mixed-media marking / design, ritual curiosity and her own improvising body. Memory flows through photography / words / responsive visual art / video poetry / affirmative instinct into material altars that uplift arrival, embodiment and spirit sight. In all her working, intuition and empathy play with maximalist instinct to give life to what comes. Gratitude to Carolyn, Darrin and all that is unseen for her life and the protections to create freely within it.

Kris Lee & Lauren Bakst live and work in New York. Their shared performance practice is dedicated to the embodied transmission of queer archives and erotics.

Photo by Peter Born

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

Unfortunately, the performances of Marjani Forté-Saunders and 7NMS’s float.: Phase I from May 7–9 at Danspace Project have been postponed. If you have purchased a ticket, you will receive an email with information about your refund. Thank you so much for your understanding. We look forward to sharing more information with you at a later date.

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

Created by Marjani Forté-Saunders in collaboration with Sound Designer Everett Saunders (7NMS)
Performed by Marjani Forté-Saunders, Jasmine Hearn, and Ny Opong
Sound by Everett Saunders in collaboration with Marjani Forte-Saunders
Lighting by Tuce Yasak
Stage Design by Peter Born

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.

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!

Danspace Project Gala 2026

TICKETS + MORE INFO

Tuesday, May 12, 2026

HONORING REBEL ANGELS

Phong Bui Portraitist, writer, curator, and vanguard of New York City artistic life through the Brooklyn Rail and beyond.

Anne Delaney Artist, philanthropist, and social activist fiercely committed to artistic and cultural expression

Charmaine Warren Performer, historian, producer, and writer radically championing Black Dance Stories nationwide

CO-CHAIRS Melissa Levin and Michelle Coffey

HOST Paul Lazar

SPEAKERS Mikki Shepard, Michelle Coffey, and Joan Jonas

PERFORMERS Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar, Brass Queens Band, Jasmine Hearn, Henry Threadgill, Kyle Marshall, Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born

BENEFIT COMMITTEE (as of April 2026)

There’s still time to join esteemed artists and colleagues on our Benefit Committee, please contact Miranda Brown at miranda@danspaceproject.org for more details.

Kyle Abraham, Marina Abramovic, Bjorn Amelan, Pi-Isis Ankhra, Charles Atlas, Yona Backer*, Jeff Barnett-Winsby, Kevin Beasley, Eve Biddle, Philip Bither, Black Dance Stories, Suzanne Bocanegra*, Linda Brumbach, Barbara Bryan, Antuan Byers, Amy Cassello, Kim Chan, Patricia Cruz, Molly Davies, Quinn Delaney, Maura Ngyuen Donohue, Douglas Dunn**, Kristy Edmunds, Dr. Indira Etwaroo, David Fanger*, Susan Feder, Joan Finkelstein, Simone Forti, Terry Fox, Eleanor Friedman, Boo Froebel, Olga Garay-English, Jon Gilman, Danni Gee, Jilian Cahan Gertsen**, Philip Glass, Molly Gochman, Indira Goodwine-Josias, Miguel Guiterrez, Susan Harris, Ishmael Houston-Jones**, Judy Hussie-Taylor*, Colleen Jennings-Roggensack, Bill T. Jones, Nunally Kersh, Tommy Kriegsman, Amy Lamphere, T Lax*, Brad Learmonth, Ralph Lemon**, Melissa Levin*, Babette Mangolte, Kyle Maude, Cynthia Mayeda, Dianne McIntyre, Joseph V. Melillo, Bebe Miller**, Rashaun Mitchell*, Meredith Monk, Carol Mullins, Linda Murray, Sarah Needham*, Eiko Otake*, Nicky Paraiso, David Parker*, Tiffany Pittman, Yvonne Rainer, Brian Rogers, David Rousseve, Legacy Russell, William Staso, Pat Steir, Elizabeth Streb, Lucy Sexton, Pamela Tatge, Jennifer Tipton, Julie Tolentino, Muna Tseng**, Laurie Uprichard, Helen and Peter Warwick**, Wendy Whelan, Nina Winthrop**, Janet Wong, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, Bowie Zunino, and more TBA

*Danspace Board member **Danspace Board Emeriti

Before you visit:

Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project

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.

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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.

Photos of Darrell Jones, Ash Fure, and Sunder Ganglani by Alice Feldt. Photo of Samita Sinha by Rachel Topham. Photo of Daniel Neumann by B Heldy. Photo of Sunny Jain by Adrien Tillmann.

Samita Sinha & Collaborators: Tremor: ongoing performance research, 2026

Saturday, May 23 | 3PM

Audience is invited to experience the practice(s) of six artists in their collaborative performance research of Tremor, initiated by Samita Sinha, following an extended fall residency in Zanzibar.

Tremor is a living system of vibration encompassing voice, body, sound, and space. The practice and performance unfolds through processes of attunement, emergence, and resonance, traversing a vast range of states of aliveness uncontainable by language.

This shared practice and research is enacted by Samita Sinha, Ash Fure, Sunder Ganglani, Sunny Jain, Darrell Jones, and Daniel Neumann, with Sunil Bald conceiving space and Sarai Frazier designing light.

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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.

Photo by S.K. Dunn

Honoring Carol Mullins

We are mourning the loss of Carol Mullins, our longtime residential lighting designer and true force, who passed away on March 24. Carol dedicated so much of her life and energy to Danspace Project and to all the artists, neighbors, and partners at St.Mark’s Church. Her passion is infused into the floor, the lights, the walls, the windows.

Please save the date for a memorial celebration for Carol Mullins on Saturday, June 13th at St. Mark’s Church in New York City. A reception will begin at 6:15PM in the Parish Hall, and the memorial celebration will begin at 7:30PM in the Sanctuary. More information will be shared soon.

If Carol Mullins lit your work at any time over the past five decades please send us the ‘title, company/artist name, year, and venue’ (if not Danspace) and any photos to info@danspaceproject.org so that we can begin a record of Carol’s Lighting Legacy!

If you would like to make a donation to Danspace in honor of Carol and her ‘high voltage’ legacy, you may do so at the link below.

DONATE IN HONOR OF CAROL MULLINS

Photos of MAJOR by Maria Baranova

Ogemdi Ude: MAJOR

Friday, June 19 | 6PM

MAJOR is Ogemdi Ude‘s dance project exploring the physicality, history, and interiority of majorette dance. These Black femme teams accompanied by marching bands created a movement style that requires master showmanship with allegiance to count, undulation, groove, and sensual yet strong performativity.

MAJOR had its NYC premiere at New York Live Arts in January 2026. This celebratory Juneteenth performance will take place at the Prospect Park Boathouse as a co-presentation between Danspace Project’s Platform 2026: Secret Gardens and Prospect Park Alliance’s ReImagine Lefferts initiative. This outdoor iteration kicks off MAJOR‘s summer tour of outdoor performances that delve into how technique, effort, and mastery can be attempted, achieved, and abandoned in pursuit of cultural belonging. Ude’s cast of all Black femme dancers and collaborators embraces majorettes as a form and fundamental relic of Black girlhood. Together they pursue the intimate journey of returning to bodies that they thought were lost. A fierce investigation of physical memory, sexuality, sensuality, and community, MAJOR is a nuanced love letter to the folks who taught the team how to be proudly Black and proudly femme. The Chord Archive is showcased alongside performances, a physical and digital documentation of the creative process and personal historical accounts from former majorette dancers.

Prospect Park Alliance is the nonprofit that sustains, restores and advances Prospect Park, Brooklyn’s Backyard, for the diverse communities that call Brooklyn home. The Alliance’s ReImagine Lefferts initiative is transforming the park’s historic house museum to explore the legacies of resistance and resilience of the Indigenous people of Lenapehoking, whose unceded ancestral lands the park and house rests upon, and the Africans enslaved by the Lefferts family. Learn more at prospectpark.org.

Danspace Project presents new work in dance, supports a diverse range of choreographers in developing their work, encourages experimentation, and connects artists to audiences. Platform 2026: Secret Gardens, co-curated by Executive Director and Chief Curator, Judy Hussie-Taylor and Program Director and Associate Curator, Seta Morton, is the 17th Danspace Project Platform to date.

MAJOR was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. MAJOR is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council.

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Before you visit:

Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project

Ogemdi Ude is a dance and interdisciplinary artist, educator, and doula based in Brooklyn. Her performance work focuses on Black femme legacies and futures, grief, and memory. Her work has been presented at Kampnagel, The Kitchen, Gibney, Harlem Stage, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Recess Art, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Center for Performance Research, and for BAM’s DanceAfrica festival. As an educator, she has taught at The New School, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, and University of the Arts. She is a 2025 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Choreography, 2025 Princess Grace Honoraria in Choreography, 2025-2028 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, 2024 NEFA National Dance Project Production Grant recipient, and a Live Feed Residency Artist at New York Live Arts. She has been a 2024/2025 BAX Artist-in-Residence, 2024-2025 Leslie Lohman Artist Fellow, 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, 2021 danceWEB Scholar, 2021 Laundromat Project Create Change Artist-in-Residence, and a 2019-2020 Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU Resident Fellow. In January 2022 she appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine for their annual “25 to Watch” issue. Most recently, she has published a book Watch Me in a collection edited by Thomas DeFrantz and Annie-B Parson: Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study published by Dancing Foxes Press and Wesleyan University Press.