UVA Drama Presents Spring Dance Concert 2026
Exploring Connection, Structure, Memory, and the Tension Between
Water transforms. Clocks measure. Memory distorts. The body remembers. The University of Virginia’s Dance Program and Department of Drama present the Spring Dance Concert 2026, an evening of eight original works by faculty, guest, and student choreographers exploring dance’s power to ground us in our bodies and deepen connections to ourselves, one another, and the world we share.
Click here to reserve your tickets for April 18, 2026, at 8pm in the Culbreth Theatre.
Across works that range from a gesture-based meditation on local waterways to choreographic interrogation of historical frameworks, this spring's concert returns again and again to a few persistent questions: How do we, each of us, experience time? What do we carry from those who came before us? And how do we navigate the tension between structures that constrain and a desire for release?
Faculty choreographer Emily Wright’s Waterbodies, developed in dialogue with the nationwide National Water Dance initiative, draws inspiration from local waterways and the shared material of water itself, incorporating gesture-based choreography and collected river water displayed onstage. “This work explores water’s capacity to transform—carving landscapes, shifting between states, and reflecting the deep connection between water in the environment and within our own bodies,” Wright says. A site-responsive version of Waterbodies will also be performed at the Botanical Garden of the Piedmont on April 18.
Guest choreographer Betty Skeen’s Farther explores communication, signal, and the possibility of being received. Inspired by semaphore flag language, the work considers how meaning is created, perceived, and imagined, blending movement with a soundscape built from everyday recorded environments. “As the legibility of our signals increases, so too does the possibility of being received,” Skeen adds.
Faculty choreographer Katie Schetlick’s new work, an overture, reimagines the concept of the overture as both beginning and reflection—an entry point into performance that signals what is to come while simultaneously shaping perception. Schetlick shares, “This work considers the overture as beginning, reflection, and threshold—a gateway that both prepares us for what’s to come and shapes how we experience it.” The piece draws on and reinterprets historical music, layering past and present in a dynamic interplay of sound and movement.
Student choreographers contribute deeply personal and conceptually ambitious works. Elizabeth Moore, a fourth-year student studying Biology with minors in Dance and Psychology, investigates the tension between measured time and lived experience, drawing on the inner mechanics of clocks to shape a movement vocabulary rooted in rhythm, repetition, and release. “Clocks present time as uniform and predictable—but our lived experience of time is often chaotic, uneven, and deeply personal,” Moore says.
Moore’s choreography is underpinned by an original composition by Maxwell Mitchell, a fourth-year studying Economics and Music, with minors in Entrepreneurship and Data Analytics. The composition was inspired by Moore's ideas of clocks and time. “We kept returning to the idea of three—reflected in the structure, instrumentation, and movement of the piece itself,” Mitchell adds.
Ella Hurlbert, a fourth-year student studying Environmental Sciences with minors in Statistics and Dance, presents Cumulate, a work that reflects on individuality and influence, tracing how identity is shaped through connection with others. “We are never truly self-made,” Hurlbert reflects. “We are shaped by one another, and even in moments of departure, we are never alone.” The piece evolves from solo movement into shared phrases, culminating in a layered exploration of artistic lineage and collaboration.
Lexi Vesselinov, a fourth-year student studying Biochemistry with minors in Dance and Data Science, explores nostalgia and memory, inviting dancers to embody personal recollections that blur the line between comfort and confinement. “Familiarity can begin to feel like a kind of cage, where memory becomes the only way we experience time again,” Vesselinov elaborates. Through a collaborative process, the work becomes a shared archive of remembered experience.
Marlena James, a third-year student studying Cognitive Science with a concentration in Neuroscience and a minor in Dance, examines physical and emotional confinement through breath-driven movement, charting a progression from restriction to release as the body reclaims space and autonomy. James adds, “this piece explores what it means to feel confined—physically and mentally—and the body’s urgent need to move, breathe, and break free.”
Emma Block, a fourth-year student studying Anthropology and Environmental Thought and Practice with a minor in Dance, offers a choreographic response to The Dying Swan that interrogates the historical and cultural frameworks of ballet. “Ballet is not necessarily neutral—this work interrogates the histories and power structures embedded within its most iconic forms,” Block shares. The work challenges assumptions of objectivity and beauty while engaging critically with ballet’s legacy and underlying structures of power.
Together, these works form an evening that is at once introspective and expansive—inviting audiences to consider how bodies carry history, how movement reveals meaning, what confines or releases us, and how dance can both question and restore connection.