Red Clay Dance Company is proud to announce our debut residency at The Yard on Martha’s Vineyard.

This two-week creative immersion culminates in the first-ever theater staging of REST.RISE.MOVE.NOURISH.HEAL and a special work-in-progress showing of Freedom Square: The Black Girlhood Altar.

Performance: REST.RISE.MOVE.NOURISH.HEAL
Friday & Saturday, July 25th & 26th at 7:00 PM | Patricia Nanon Theater

REST.RISE.MOVE.NOURISH.HEAL is a site-responsive dance ritual—an embodied journey of reclamation, healing, and spiritual return. Developed in partnership with ART ON THE FARM, a Chicago-based urban farm led by Erika Allen and Urban Growers Collective, this work confronts the ongoing impact of food apartheid and racial inequity in Black farming communities.

It honors Black/African-Indigenous traditions, technologies, and ancestral tools of nourishment as a decolonized practice of collective care. This marks the first time the piece will be staged inside a theater.

Work-in-Progress Showing: Freedom Square – The Black Girlhood Altar
Friday, August 1st at 7:00 PM | Patricia Nanon Theater

Freedom Square is an interdisciplinary altar-space that envisions a liberated world for Black women and girls. Featuring choreography and direction by Vershawn Sanders-Ward, music by Jamila Woods, costume design by Shaqui Reed, and visual environment by Scheherazade Tillet, this immersive project centers storytelling, song, and Black girlhood dreams.

Afro-Contemporary Dance Workshop
Wednesday, July 23rd at 11:00 AM | The Yard Studio, Chilmark

Experience Red Clay Dance Company’s signature movement language in a 75-minute intermediate/advanced-level workshop. This class explores the intersection of Dunham technique and Chicago House, rooted in Africanist aesthetics: supple spine, liberated pelvis, polyrhythmic expression, and dynamic range.

Red Clay Dance’s Yard residency is funded in part by the New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project and the Jerome A. and Estelle R. Newman Assistance Fund.