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 bkSOUL, Lower Left, Michelle N. Gibson, Resident Artists (Tami Stronach, Rosalynde LeBlanc, Margaret Sunghe Paek, Lanette Costas-Stampley, Dahlia Nayar), setGO (Sarah Konner, Shura Baryshnikov, Bradley Teal Ellis, Aaron Brando, & Paul Singh), and Gabriel Forestieri’s water opera BREATHE.
2026-2027 Dance Series
This Everyday Hour
Friday, October 2, 2026 • 7 p.m.
Saturday, October 3, 2026 • 2:30 p.m.
Esch Studio, Warch Campus Center
Free admission
Movement composition, performance: Mauriah Donegan Kraker
Sound composition, performance: Nat Evans
A choreographic and sonic practice calling to familial and terrestrial histories of place, specifically midwestern grassland. Working with durational scores, deep prairie root systems, tectonic shifts of grief, and absence as landmark, performers stay in the space between arrival and departure. They catch and call to each other in moments informed by land time, sky and memory of place. The work calls to a universal expansiveness that we are all experiencing, whether we are awake to it or not.
Made possible through fellowships at MacDowell, Volland, and Ucross Foundations, residency time at the Museum of Loss and Renewal/Orkney Islands and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
U.F.O. (Uncharted Forms of the Occasion)
Saturday, January 23, 2027 • 3 p.m.
Esch Studio, Warch Campus Center
Free admission
U.F.O. (Uncharted Forms of the Occasion) is an improvisational performance practice bringing together musicians and movers to spontaneously compose for an audience. Inspired by a lineage of improvisational performance formats such as Hyperlocal MKE and Lower Left’s Available Space in San Diego, U.F.O. is a site for artists to gather and create – relying on their individual and ensemble histories of improvisational research and practices to support this delightful and sometimes precarious community endeavor. This year’s iteration of U.F.O. will include LU faculty, students, and local artists.
Marjani Foré-Saunders + Everett Saunders
Saturday, April 17, 2027 • Time TBD
Venue TBD
Free admission
float. Pleasure is a three-hour durational performance installation by Marjani Forté-Saunders, accompanied by sound designer Everett Saunders. It unfolds as a slow choreography of memory, listening, and sensation. The work drifts through R&B classics once carried in the backseat of Saunders’ mother’s car, singing bowls that attune her present body, and prophetic texts that collapse ancestral memory with imagined futures. There is no fixed audience. Viewers are invited to enter, linger, wander, return, or simply pass through. Every arrival is an encounter. Every departure leaves a trace.
float. Pleasure refuses the urgency of spectacle and the expectation that Black embodiment must always perform its wounds. It is a discipline of tenderness, slowness, sensuality, joyful rigor, and straight up joy. In this enduring occurrence of sound, movement, space, and impermanence, pleasure becomes a way of knowing and a living archive through which Saunders re-members herself, into her future.
Tickets!
Dance Series events are generally non-ticketed, however tickets to special ticketed dance events and other events can be purchased online or over the phone at 920-832-6749.
