By Angelina DiFranco 

The Movement Project’s Cleveland Dance Fest (CDF) is returning for its 9th season at Cleveland’s Ariel LaSalle Theater starting Friday, November 22nd through Sunday, November 24th. The annual three-day festival will feature the work of local and visiting artists in a multitude of events, including a Professional Concerts Series, a Youth Showcase, a free Virtual Dance Film Gallery, and masterclasses for professional and pre-professional dancers. 

Cleveland Dance Fest was created by The Movement Project in 2015 to provide Cleveland dance artists with a platform to create and share new work. CDF also provides artists with resource access and fair compensation for their participation while bridging the gap between artists and the community by offering accessible and affordable dance performances to residents. The festival has expanded and engaged with new audiences and artists across Ohio, the regional Midwest, and beyond since its inaugural year, serving over 600 patrons, 150 professional artists, and 100 pre-professional artists. 

This year, Cleveland Dance Fest will present the work of 46 choreographers within five performances, five dance films, and five master classes. 

The festival will open with the Professional Concert Series Show 1 on November 22nd at 7:30 p.m. The choreographers and companies featured include Kora Radella (she/her), Natya Nirvana, Leslie Dworkin (she/her), Ajayi Dance, The Movement Project, and commissioned artist Morgan Walker (she/her), who will be presenting and performing in her newest work Happily Ever Never.

The Professional Concert Series Show 2 will hit the stage on November 23rd at 4:00 p.m. with dance works from Sujatha Srinivasan (she/her), Blissed Out Human Collective, Elyse Kassa (she/her), Kylie Karam (she/her), and Renee Clippinger (she/her). 

Elyse Kassa, a Columbus-based choreographer, performer, educator, and founder of all our friends collective, will be returning to Cleveland Dance Fest for her third consecutive year to perform this and a spare room. Kassa is invested in process, research, and keeping it light. Her work incorporates improvisation, contemporary dance technique, text, comedy, and props to explore how physical spaces and boundaries mitigate our interactions with ourselves and one another.  

Kassa’s nine-minute solo is performed to “In The Park” by Sofie Royer, “Cutting Branches for a Temporary Shelter” by Penguin Cafe Orchestra, and “Excess Straussess” by The Books and incorporates the use of a chair, a suitcase, and light sources such as lamps, string lights, overhead lights, and more. 

this and a spare room “is a frantic meditation on movement and rest,” says Kassa. “It reflects my relationship to the concepts of ‘home’ and ‘settling down.’”  

The prompts that guided the creative process reminded Kassa of her mother. “I reflected on our relationship and why I still believe that home is wherever my mom is,” says Kassa. She says the work was also informed by the “near-constant process of arriving, creating, undoing, and leaving” that has come with moving for the eighth time in ten years. 

Kassa describes the movement of the piece as “frantic” and continuously “moving through several lines of thought.” She says that a mildly humorous undertone persists throughout the work while small gestures, direct interaction with the audience, and indirect energy allows this and a spare room “to live in a disorienting place— somewhere between anxiety-inducing and comedic.”

Kylie Karam, a Cleveland-based dancer and choreographer, will be making her professional choreographic debut with the premiere of her solo bare. Karam recently graduated with a BFA in Dance and a minor in Arts Entrepreneurship from Kent State University. Most recently, she served as a Seasonal Company Member with The Movement Project and is currently beginning her first season with the Dancing Wheels Company. 

Karam’s five-minute contemporary dance solo mixes elements of dance theater and is performed to “Piel” by Venezuelan musician Arca. The song, sung in Spanish, is driven by a haunting dissonance of piercing chords and deep-sounding bass that heavily inspired Karam’s creative process. It invited inward reflection and unveiled the weight that tumultuous experiences can carry. 

bare invites the audience to witness how a poignant memory plagues the performer, resulting in the unraveling of the mind and body until they are forced to come to terms with it, says Karam. 

Choosing not to disclose the specific memory that inspired the work, Karam leaves space for the audience to form their own conclusions about bare. “I have always appreciated when a choreographer allows for that. I want viewers to take away what they need from my work,” says Karam. 

Day two of CDF commences with the Professional Concert Series Show 3 on Saturday, November 23rd at 6:00 p.m. It features works by Natalia de Miguel Annoni (she/they), Elliot Reza Emadian (they/them), Chloe Napoletano (she/her), Paige Cunningham Caldarella (she/her), and Anna Peretz Rogovoy (she/her), and Joel K. Linebach (he/they). CDF then concludes with Show 4 of The Professional Concert Series at 8:00 p.m. with performances by chitra.MOVES, Sara Hook Dances, Angelina DiFranco (she/her), Caribe Conexion, Emily Duggins Ehling (she/her), Take Root, and Anthony Alterio (he/his). 

chitra.MOVES is a dance collective founded by Chitra Subramanian (she/her), an Indian American dancer, choreographer, and educator based in Washington, DC. Subramanian’s choreography focuses on community and showcases the fusion of different cultural movements and dance styles to create non-mainstream dance works.

Subramanian will be presenting an excerpt from Linked, a larger work that recently premiered in Washington, D.C. The eleven-minute duet between Subramanian and Sarah Laughland (she/her) will be performed to a unique score that blends the song “Disparate Youth” by Santigold with a soundscape of captured voices sharing narratives on having and losing connection. 

Linked explores the duality of connecting and disconnecting and offers a “snapshot of the up and down journey we might feel in trying to find meaningful connection,” says Subramanian. 

Subramanian describes Linked as an “intimate, dynamic, full-body experience” that “incorporates narrative and storytelling components.” The aesthetic of Linked is grounded in bringing together the foundations of Bharatanatyam Indian classical dance and Hip Hop, a blend that Subramanian says has “nurtured [her] voice in dance and storytelling.” Linked also works beyond its choreographic framework to engage the dancers for who they are by inviting collaboration, exploration, and celebrating movement that feels organic to the performers. 

Subramanian wants Linked to remind the audience “how important it is to use community as a way to care for yourself and find belonging and purpose.”

Cleveland Dance Fest’s final performance, The Youth Showcase, will take place on Sunday, November 24th at 5:00 p.m. Patrons can support and celebrate the work of Beck Center for the Arts, Cleveland School of the Arts featuring Cass Dunn-Helton, Fairmount Center for the Arts, The Dance Centre by Kayleigh with choreography by Ahna Bonnette, Titans Dance Company, Tuscarawas Dance Arts Center, Miller South School for the Visual and Performing Arts, Natya Nirvana, MUCAI Academy, Nrithyanjali Dance School, and The Movement Project Summer Intensive Guest Artists. 

CDF’s free 2024 Virtual Dance Film Gallery is currently up and running. The gallery runs through December 31st and includes unlimited access to TMP dance films, CDF 2024 dance films, and artist snapshots. The 2024 Dance Film Artists include Mansee Singhi (she/her), Padma Chebrolu (she/her), Keely Cobb (she/her), Daniel Roberts and Dancers, and Megan Bryars (she/her). 

Also back again with this year’s festival are CDF’s offering of professional and youth masterclasses that provide teaching artists, professionals, and pre-professionals with an opportunity to network, engage, move together, and learn from one another. 

The professional masterclasses for advanced dancers above the age of eighteen will be offered on Saturday, November 23rd, from 9:00 a.m. to 11:35 a.m. Elliot Reza Emadian will teach Contemporary Releasing Techniques, inviting participants to access sensations of falling, exploding, and harnessing momentum while exploring repertory from their choreography. Chitra Subramanian will be teaching Bridging Stories and Cultures: Indian Classical Dance & Hip Hop. Subramanian’s classes are dynamic, full-body, relational, and high-energy experiences that bring together rhythmic footwork, bounces, grooves, and social connection. “I love making the classes feel like a community experience where we share moments to dance with each other while also feeling challenged to push our body in different ways,” says Subramanian. 

The youth masterclasses geared towards intermediate/advanced dancers between the ages of twelve and eighteen will take place on Sunday, November 24th, from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. The classes offered include Merce Cunningham Technique with Paige Cunningham Caldarella, Contemporary Flow & Improvisation with Morgan Walker, and Bhangra: A folk dance from Punjab in North India with Sukanya Chand (she/her). 

The Movement Project presents the 2024 Cleveland Dance Fest, Friday, November 22nd through Sunday, November 24th, at the Ariel LaSalle Theater, 823 E. 185th Street, Cleveland, OH. Tickets for each Professional Concert Series Show are $18 (pre-sale) and $21 (at the door). Visit themovementproject.org for tickets and more information, including schedules, artist bios, masterclass registration, and access to the CDF’s free Virtual Dance Film Gallery.  

Angelina DiFranco is a dance artist, writer, and choreographer. She graduated from Kent State University with honors in May 2023 and holds a BFA in dance and a BA in English with a concentration in professional writing. Throughout her tenure at Kent State, Angelina has received the May O’Donnell Memorial Dance Award, the Eugenia V. Erdmann Dance Award, and the dance faculty award for outstanding achievement as an emerging artist and dance scholar for three consecutive years. She is currently working as a dancer and teacher in her third season with the Dancing Wheels Company. Working with Dancing Wheels has given her the opportunity to earn the Dementia Friends Program Certificate and the Dancing Wheels Teacher Certification, providing her with the knowledge and certification to teach people with dementia/Alzheimers and instruct in the Dancing Wheels’ method of physically integrated dance. As a choreographer, her dance for film has been commissioned by students and faculty at Kent State, nominated by KSU faculty for the American College Dance Association, was presented at Cleveland Dance Festival’s Virtual Dance Film Gallery in 2022, and won best experimental film at the Highland Square Film Festival. Her concert choreography has been performed professionally at Cleveland Dance Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and OhioDance Festival. Alongside her work as a dance artist, she has taken part in See Chicago Dance’s critical writing fellowship and has been published in See Chicago Dance, Luna Negra, Brainchild, and artsair.art.