Leave No Trace is a new site-specific performance and visual installation by JoAnna Mendl Shaw and The Equus Projects, created with local dancers and artists during a weeklong residency at Pillow Fort. Movement, sound, fabric, and found materials transform the landscape as performers move through the forest and hillside around the audience.

Leave No Trace is a new site-specific performance and visual installation by JoAnna Mendl Shaw and The Equus Projects, created with local dancers and artists during a weeklong residency at Pillow Fort. Movement, sound, fabric, and found materials transform the landscape as performers move through the forest and hillside around the audience.

Join JoAnna Mendl Shaw for a movement workshop rooted in her Physical Listening practice, exploring how we listen and respond to one another and to the natural world through movement. Part of JoAnna’s weeklong residency at Pillow Fort, culminating in Leave No Trace, a site-specific performance and visual installation.

Join JoAnna Mendl Shaw for a movement workshop rooted in her Physical Listening practice, exploring how we listen and respond to one another and to the natural world through movement. Part of JoAnna’s weeklong residency at Pillow Fort, culminating in Leave No Trace, a site-specific performance and visual installation.

Join JoAnna Mendl Shaw for a movement workshop rooted in her Physical Listening practice, exploring how we listen and respond to one another and to the natural world through movement. Part of JoAnna’s weeklong residency at Pillow Fort, culminating in Leave No Trace, a site-specific performance and visual installation.

As summer winds down, we're opening up the Dance Deck for an evening of shared improvisation and art making. Musicians, movers, visual artists, and curious humans of all kinds are welcome to join in. Bring an instrument, a sketchbook, your body, or whatever you're working with and see what happens!

Free to participate or just come hang out and watch. Light snacks provided.

Every Sunday at Pillow Fort, starting August 2nd through September 6th, join us on the deck for six weeks of dance and movement workshops and performances, featuring local and internationally recognized artists!

Every Sunday at Pillow Fort, starting August 2nd through September 6th, join us on the deck for six weeks of dance and movement workshops and performances, featuring local and internationally recognized artists!

One choreographer brings a piece. Two “wreckers” take it apart and rebuild it as their own. In the end, all three versions are performed live.

Every Sunday at Pillow Fort, starting August 2nd through September 6th, join us on the deck for six weeks of dance and movement workshops and performances, featuring local and internationally recognized artists!

Confluence: an experimental shadow puppet show with Pillow Fort Artist-in-Residence Milo Whitson. Workshop at 6PM, show at 7:30PM

Every Sunday at Pillow Fort, starting August 2nd through September 6th, join us on the deck for six weeks of dance and movement workshops and performances, featuring local and internationally recognized artists!

Every Sunday at Pillow Fort, starting August 2nd through September 6th, join us on the deck for six weeks of dance and movement workshops and performances, featuring local and internationally recognized artists!

photo by Robbie Sweeney

Move like a cat stretching in the sun. Through imagery and largely slow movement, Eiko guides participants to develop a personal taste for their own moving body.

photo by Qian Min

Experience Eiko's hauntingly still, ferociously alive movement as she inhabits the histories, energies, and terrain of Woodland Cemetery in a free, one-time outdoor performance. Saturday June 27th | 7pm

photo by Wm Johnston

Join us on Friday, June 26th for a screening of NO RULE IS OUR RULE (Eiko Otake and Wen Hui, 2023, run time: 1 hr 15 min), followed by a talkback with Otake at the Bushel Collective.

Doors at 6:30, screening at 7:30.

No Rule Is Our Rule (2023) is a deeply personal video diary of friendship and collaboration between two independent female artists. Eiko Otake grew up in postwar Japan; Wen Hui came of age during China's Cultural Revolution. Together, they explore the political histories, personal memories, and body memories each willingly carries.

For over 25 years, JoAnna Mendl Shaw has created original performance works in collaboration with horses. This workshop draws from that practice, using tools developed through working with horses to explore connection and communication with other people in the studio. You'll move through guided exercises to sense, interpret, and respond to another person’s energy—using your body to make decisions in the moment.

After an ample and enjoyable warmup that prioritises connection to self and others, we’ll get up to some juicy dancing that honors the individuals present and addresses some of my current choreographic and spiritual questions: For a witness/audience, what is the benefit offered by improvisational choice that is made from a place of not-choosing and radical withness; which prioritises pleasure, radiance, and responsiveness? How can we find and develop joy while doing the hard, sometimes deeply uncomfortable work of actually being at ease with ourself in offering ourself? We’ll get into these questions with the light aspiration to create a “something” together that brings each of us deeper inward and closer to each other.

Sheshi is a duet between choreographer and interdisciplinary artist lily gold and her mother, with sound support from artist dani derks and surprise guest performers. Tuning to ancestral resilience and reviving parts lost to assimilation, their scores are transparent with tensions and explore family stories they’ve been told, as well as ones their bodies have begun to tell. While Sheshi rekindles reverence for elders it also embraces back-handed humor, working to coax exiled-aggression into balance. Leaning into play to tether the immensity of looking at ancestral trauma through a multi-generational lens, lily and Sheri offer their intimacies for resonance.

This will be Sheshi's first public in-progress showing, join us!

Improvisation, to Raven, is a means by which any human, of any age, any ability, any experience, can connect with their body and discover what expansive feelings and possibilities exist in themselves. She believes that learning to move with freedom, with ourselves, is world changing. Thus, Raven is devoted to bringing the possibility of movement and self acceptance to any who wishes to listen.

Double Feature with works by zay thurgood & dani derks and Christy Funsch

dani and zay take on a brand new collab with their debut performance, between a rock and a soft place. The work will explore the edges of impulse, hope, desire, tension, and inescapable tenderness. 

Set List (2025) collides two of Funsch Dance’s works-in-progress from 2024: PastPerfect, created in the spring in San Francisco, and experimental shards made throughout New York State over the summer. Set List careens through the debris fields of the two processes, nourishing vestigial desires from these past explorations. The past processes are embedded in the structure of the new work, where their tattered edges provide undercurrents of tension. Set Listis a work in conversation with its component parts. It values tangents over accumulation.