Our Dance Series brings nationally and internationally renowned dance artists from diverse backgrounds and styles to perform, teach workshops, and give artist talks. Supporting the artists’ innovative movement research, the Dance Series also provides unique opportunities for students and local community engagement.

Past performing artists include Resident Artists (Tami Stronach, Rosalynde LeBlanc, Margaret Sunghe Paek, Lanette Costas-Stampley, Dahlia Nayar), SET GO (Sarah Konner, Shura Baryshnikov, Bradley Teal Ellis, Aaron Brando, & Paul Singh), and Gabriel Forestieri’s water opera BREATHE.

2023-2024 Dance Series

Kenneth Herrera profile portrait

U.F.O. (Uncharted Forms of the Occasion)
An evening of improvised movement + music with Lawrence faculty and special guest, Kenneth Herrera


Performance:
Monday, September 25, 2023 • 7 p.m.
Esch Studio, Warch Campus Center
Free admission

Open hip hop workshop with Kenneth Herrera:
Thursday, September 28, 2023 • 4:30-6:00 p.m.
Esch Studio, Warch Campus Center

Free admission


 

SetGO profile portrait

set GO


Performance:
Friday, January 19, 2024 • 7 p.m.

Esch Studio, Warch Campus Center
Free admission

Contact Improvisation Workshop:
Saturday, January 20, 2024 • 12:00 - 4:00 p.m.

Esch Studio, Warch Campus Center
Suggested: some prior contact improvisation experience
Free admission
 


 

Michelle Gibson profile portrait

Michelle Gibson

Community Event - Second Line
with live music by Lawrentians

Sunday, April 14, 2024 • 3 p.m.
Lawrence Memorial Chapel
Free admission - be prepared to move!

Michelle N. Gibson is a consummate storyteller, employing body and mind to build a bridge between the arts and academia. On stage and in the classroom, Gibson’s dance, choreography, and associated scholarship evoke the social, political, economic and spiritual understandings central to building bonds within and across cultures.

Employing pedagogical practices deeply rooted in both her New Orleans upbringing and the Black church, Gibson provides cultural narratives and historical context for Diaspora and African American dance forms, music, and communal gatherings. Her embodiment of jazz music, traditional funeral processions, Congo Square gatherings, the Black church, and Second Line parades celebrating community, deeply informs her understanding and instruction of African American vernacular dance forms. In every aspect of her daily practice, Gibson shares her expertise, her passion, her healing practices and her culturally driven spirit with her students, her colleagues, her audiences...and, with you.

Choreographer, cultural ambassador, healer, professor, mother, and performing artist, Gibson, also affectionately known as Mz. G, received her B.F.A. in Dance from Tulane University and her M.F.A. from Hollins University/American Dance Festival at Duke University. Gibson’s teaching and choreographic practice comprises all genres of the African Diaspora, Contemporary Afro Modern, Afro Funk, Jazz, and her own New Orleans Second Line Aesthetic. Her current projects involve sharing her aesthetic and New Orleans culture through a series of workshops she’s coined The New Orleans Original BuckShop LLC. Gibson has created a number of original works, including Takin’ it To The Roots, a work supported by the National Performance Network/Visual Artists Network’s Creation Fund, Displaced Yet Rebirth performed by Dallas Black Dance Theatre, Origins of Life on Earth with the Ashé Cultural Arts Center, and Voices of Congo Square, a work focused on the rich culture and history of the Black New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians. This work premiered in 2018 at the Black Dance USA conference at the Sun Theatre in St. Louis, MO, and the Orpheum Theater in New Orleans, LA.

Michelle N. Gibson’s teaching career is as diverse as her dance practice. In addition to being a 14-year faculty member with the American Dance Festival, Gibson also served on the dance faculty at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas for four years. Her teaching extends beyond the formal classroom to include movement-therapy workshops with seniors in facilities throughout the Dallas Metroplex using a curriculum she created while serving as a resident artist at the Ashé Cultural Arts Center in her hometown of New Orleans. Gibson is currently serving as a Professor of Practice in Dance at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX. 

Expressed in her interview with The New York Times posted July 2022, Gibson clearly states her purpose, which is to heal the world through the culture, and she does so with grace fused with intention.

https://www.smu.edu/meadows/areasofstudy/dance/faculty/gibsonmichelle
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/21/arts/dance/michelle-gibson-second-line-jacobs-pillow.html

 


 

Tickets!

Dance Series events are generally unticketed, however tickets to special ticketed dance events and other events can be purchased online or over the phone at 920-832-6749.

From an unconventional water opera to dance workshops hosted by renowned artists, past Dance Series performances explore contemporary and classic work.