Red Clay Dance Company Makes Its Evanston Debut with Freedom Square
Three evenings of movement, memory, and collective care honored Black women and girls while imagining a freer future for Black girlhood.
From October 1–3, 2026, Red Clay Dance Company brought Freedom Square: The Black Girlhood Altar to the Josephine Louis Theater at Northwestern University’s Wirtz Center, marking the company’s first performance series in Evanston.
Following its sold-out world premiere at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2025, the work welcomed new audiences into a space for remembrance, reflection, and joy. Created by Founding Artistic Director and CEO Vershawn Sanders-Ward, with original music by acclaimed Chicago poet and musician Jamila Woods, Freedom Square brought Afro-contemporary dance, storytelling, poetry, and visual art together to honor missing and murdered Black women and girls.
From Memory to Movement
The work draws inspiration from The Black Girlhood Altar, a mixed-media installation created by A Long Walk Home artists Scheherazade Tillet and Robert Narciso. Its living altar preserves the memories of Black women and girls through objects that hold personal meaning—reminders of their interests, relationships, and everyday lives.
Sanders-Ward’s choreographic research centers how families remember their loved ones and the significance of the objects placed upon the altar. Those memories inform an exploration of how grief moves through the body, how love endures, and how remembrance can become an act of collective care.
That work responds to an urgent reality. In their 2023 Missing in Chicago investigation, City Bureau and the Invisible Institute analyzed Chicago police missing-person reports from 2000–2021. They found that Black girls and young women ages 10–20 accounted for nearly one-third of reported cases, despite representing approximately 2% of the city’s population in 2020.
Freedom Square invites audiences to encounter the lives behind those numbers: their personalities, their dreams, the people who love them, and the futures they deserved.
Remembrance, Healing, and Joy
Throughout the performance, Red Clay Dance Company’s ensemble of Artivists moved through grief, affirmation, play, and freedom dreaming. The altar remained a place of connection as dance and Woods’s music carried the work toward a vision of Black girlhood protected and celebrated.
Writing for Third Coast Review, Julia Rademacher-Wedd highlighted the dancers’ versatility and the collaboration between choreography and music. Her review traced the production’s progression toward joy, including moments of childhood play and a closing celebration of each performer’s individuality.
The Chicago Reader captured that emotional range in its headline, describing the work as “a soul-stirring elegy and affirmation.”
The overwhelmingly positive audience feedback we received added another meaningful dimension to the Evanston debut. For the company, sharing this work creates an opportunity to gather around stories that deserve sustained attention and care.
Continuing the Conversation
On opening night, audiences were invited to remain for a post-performance conversation with Sanders-Ward and creative collaborators, moderated by Northwestern University Professor Thomas F. DeFrantz in partnership with the university’s Black Arts Consortium.
The conversation extended the evening’s invitation to reflect on memory, responsibility, and the possibilities carried by the work.
Ahead of the engagement, Freedom Square also received regional attention through the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times entertainment roundups, alongside a place in Newcity’s Dance Top 5 for October and the Daily Herald’s Best Bets. These previews helped introduce the work and its purpose to audiences across Chicago and the North Shore.
We thank everyone who joined us in Evanston: our audiences, presenting partners, collaborators, and the families whose loved ones are honored through this work.
Freedom Square carries forward Red Clay Dance Company’s commitment to Artivism—the joining of art and activism to inspire social transformation. At its heart is an invitation to remember, to care for one another, and to imagine a world where Black women and girls can live fully and freely.
