Bri Blakey

remembering future mornings - again and again

Portals through memory, a dream made under a blanket, daily little travels through time, a weary and hopeful reach toward futures. Generated from processes of grieving and the reimagining that comes after, this piece is a collage of movement, textile, and text.

Bri Blakey is a Twin Cities-based interdisciplinary artist and dance/movement therapist whose work is rooted in somatic practices and philosophies of care. Drawing on a variety of other mediums—including fiber art, poetry, and collage—her work acts as a form of world-building and archiving, particularly through the lens of Black and queer identity. Through her creative process she seeks to foster experiences of restoration and connection between people, other creatures, places, and times. Her work has been supported by and presented at Arts On Site, Remy Theater (NY), and Minnesota Fringe Festival. She studied Dance at St. Olaf College, and earned an MS Dance/Movement Therapy from Sarah Lawrence College.

Taylor West

Langiappe Yearning

Sound collaborator: Farai Malianga

A journey through time(s), ecosystems, and selves. An unearthing and an unraveling. 

* Lagniappe: A Cajun word meaning "a little something extra." 

Taylor West is a Black dancer, choreographer, and teacher originally from Chitinacha (New Orleans). She holds a BFA in dance from Florida State University and has performed works by Millicent Johnnie, Christopher Huggins, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. Taylor has also worked as an artistic and production collaborator with Brownbody and was a dancer with Ananya Dance Theatre for two seasons. She was a dancer for Theatre Mu’s 2025 world premiere of Ankita Raturi’s play Fifty Boxes of Earth, directed by KT Shorb and choreographed by Ananya Chatterjea. Taylor’s own work is rooted in explorations of identities and embodied histories, with Blackness forever at the core. She’s presented her work at the Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn New York, MODArts Dance Collective’s Collective Thread Festival in Harlem, and most recently at the Black Dance Improvisation Festival 2025 presented by Leslie Parker Dance Project at Mixed Blood Theatre.

D Hunter

It's Inside

It's Inside is watching you watching it unravel itself. A dancer in red (or maybe it's webs?) is coming. Don't worry—they're more afraid of you than you are of them.

D Hunter (they/them) is a Minneapolis-based performance artist from Tempe, Arizona. D’s work is interested in how surveillance and voyeurism affect the queer body, and the horror and ecstasy and absurdity of having a body at all. They are inspired by yarn bombers, powerlifters, zombies, and more. Since moving to Minneapolis, D has had the opportunity to perform for Shane Larson in Arena Dance’s Candy Box Dance Festival, Morgan Thorson in the Great Northern Festival and the Dark Sky Festival, and for Taja Will and Mathew Janczewski in the Cowles Center Merge in March.  They are excited to be involved in the Works-in-Progress program.

snem DeSellier

talk to me like THIS:

Collaborators: onionn, focus group participants

A seed of artistic research: What could a body be? How do I talk to myself? What do I wish I could put in your mouth to say back to me? This work focuses on self-advocacy in asynchronous forms, disability amid a carceral state, reflecting on and aiming to shift our body’s chronic “crises” and others’ responses to them. It is built alongside a wider project of hosting focus groups aimed at creating more nuanced emergency contact forms, as a starting place for testing what else is possible.

snem DeSellier is a wiggly idea raised by the long tidal river and ghosts of western massachusetts. They are stubborn, they are slow, they are blowing a million seasons through their body at any given moment. Here along these rivers they have created/designed/performed work in various rhythms with Lightning Rod, 20% Theatre Company, Body Watani Dance, Red Eye Theater, 9x22 Dance/Lab, Playwrights’ Center, Pillsbury House + Theatre (2023 Naked Stages Fellow), and Wonderlust Productions. They build for a future of transdisciplinary stretching and translational medicine that has capacity for the wide and complex bodies of those they love, those they are, and those they don’t yet know. They are here for the misaligned misattuned immeasurable ones.

Jess Kiel-Wornson

Hymn to Elsewhere(s), an iteration

Collaborators: Alice Shindelar, Erika Hansen, Emma Dvorak

Here, attend story the first: An invitation to celebrate the regular task of playing make-believe. Let us delight in the lyrical transmutation of flaccid morals, particularly attendant to old tales for young ones. Let audience and performer entwine, lines tangle, dull things sparkle, and daily relations become storied strangers. 

Jess Kiel-Wornson is, among other things, an interdisciplinary artist. Grounded and rescued by feminist and performance theories, she considers the everyday stuff of our lives: the regular, low-brow, foolish, and forgotten, as tools to reimagine a deeply oppressive systemic world. In visual art, performance, and text, she gathers and merges unfinished and broken pieces into webs, considering, as Audre Lorde said, how old ideas might feel in new situations. She and her artwork demand criticality and emotionality in enormous measure, as forms of essential resistance to supremacist culture. Recent collaborations include Echo: We are Imperfect Mortal Beings (April Sellers Dance Collective, 2025), It's Physical (Jennifer Glaws and Jagged Moves, 2024) and Mariology (Nancy Keystone and Critical Mass Performance Group, 2023). Jess is delighted by the exercise of being a trusted but unreliable narrator of her own life.