Wednesday, August 20 through Saturday, August 23, 2025
Making Moves: The Festival! celebrates the art of movement through performance, film, music, and community exchange. Over four days, Kansas City audiences are invited to experience an array of movement events. From improvised music and dance, a movement session, film screening, and a culminating public sharing of new work.
The festival’s centerpiece is a three-day performance workshop led by choreographer Kim Miller, paired with morning Countertechnique® classes taught by Shannon Stewart. While the workshops are closed to the public, the community is invited to join us for:
EMAS Presents: Improvised Music & Dance
Wednesday, August 20, 7:30–9 PM
An evening of collaborative performance blending experimental sound and movement. Members of EMAS and invited dancers will perform in the Lobby.
GREYaRea w/ Sam McReynolds
Thursday, August 21, 7:30–9 PM
Facilitated by Studio Resident Sam McReynolds, this open session explores improvisational structures for movers of all backgrounds.
Film Screening of “Everything You Have Is Yours”
Friday, August 22, 7:30–9 PM
NYC-based choreographer Hadar Ahuvia examines the roots of Israeli folk dance and the personal, political, and cultural legacies it carries.
Kim Miller’s Social Choreograph: From the Studio to the Street Workshop Public Performance
Saturday, August 23, 6–7 PM, Location TBA
A culminating presentation of new work created during Kim Miller’s Social Choreography: From the Studio to the Street workshop.
ABOUT KIM MILLER
Kim Miller is a performer and choreographer, working with real and self-made obstacles, who has performed and screened work at Sculpture Milwaukee; El Sindicato Centro Cultural Comunitario, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; Anthology Film Archive, New York; The Surburban, Oak Park; Green Gallery, Milwaukee; MOMA, New York City; MASS MoCA, North Adams; and Art in General, New York City.
Miller runs a movement-theatre group, Kim Miller’s Social Choreography, engaging with various forms of social practice. She is the co-founder of Mazzzagine, an artist-based initiative for new works and new collaborations.
Miller has received such awards as the New York Public Library Fellowship in the Dance Division, The Open Fund, Ruth Arts Nohl Alumni Award, an ATLAS Choreographer-in-Residence at ImpulsTanz, Brico Forward Fund, the Rosa Parks Award from the Global Center for Advanced Studies, the Suitcase Grant, the Puffin Foundation, Ltd. Grant, Lynden Sculpture Garden, Artist-in-Residence at Compeung, Doi Saket, Thailand, and the Mary L. Nohl Individual Artist Fellowship
ABOUT SHANNON STEWART
Shannon Stewart was born in the South and came of age as an artist in the Pacific Northwest. She/they make work for stage, screen, and galleries that has been presented throughout North America and Europe. Shannon teaches somatic and released-based contemporary techniques that engender athletic, efficient movement, with the aim to be inclusive and empowering. She holds several levels of certification in the Gyrokinesis and Gyrotonic Methods® and has extensively studied Countertechnique®, completing teacher certification in 2023.
Shannon’s choreography has been presented by DOCK 11 (Berlin, Germany), CONARTE (Monterrey, Mexico), Improspekcije (Zagreb, Croatia) Movement Research at the Judson Church, Future Oceans Festival (NYC), Velocity Dance Center, On the Boards (Seattle), RISK/REWARD, Performance Works Northwest (Portland), Philadelphia Dance Projects, the Hinterlands/Playhouse, Wasserman Project (Detroit), Definitive Figures Festival, Marigny Opera House, Tulane University (New Orleans), Bryant Lake Bowl, Cowles Center (MPLS), the Work Room (ATL), Pivot Arts Incubator (Chicago), Good Children Gallery, the Front Gallery, invited to the V&A Late in London, and John F. Kennedy Center (Washington, D.C.). Her collaborative dance films have screened at festivals around the world.
The development of Shannon’s work has been supported by the National Dance Project, National Performance Network, Foundation for Contemporary Art, UCROSS Foundation, Art Omi, and the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, among others.
An Assistant Professor of Contemporary Dance at the University of Kansas, Shannon has a Masters of Fine Arts from Tulane University in Interdisciplinary Dance Performance and a BA in Urban Design from the University of Washington. They have been a core mentor for ROAR Berlin and a member of the Front Gallery in New Orleans.
ABOUT EMAS PRESENTS
EMAS Presents is an experimental and improvised music series curated by Seth Andrew Davis + Evan Verploegh. An extension of the collective Extemporaneous Music & Arts Society, EMAS Presents highlights local, national, and international music practitioners to grow Kansas City’s improvised music community.
ABOUT SAM MCREYNOLDS
Sam McReynolds is a freelance dance artist originally from St. Louis, MO, where he received his BFA in Dance at Lindenwood University and trained closely under hip hop choreographer/instructor Anthony “REDD” Williams. He expanded his understanding of dance greatly through his experience exploring the movement language known as “Gaga” here in the U.S. and in Tel Aviv, Israel. After moving to LA in 2016, he danced for several notable choreographers and dance companies, such as Sarah Elgart / Arrogant Elbow, Brian Friedman, Marguerite Derricks, Sidra Bell, Roderick George, Dolly Sfeir, Bryan Arias, Christian Warner, Norbert de la Cruz, No)one. Art House, Ate9 Dance Company, The TL Collective, LA Contemporary Dance Company, and more. Sam also has a great passion for choreographing and has presented live works in LA at CONGRESS: Legalize Dance, Club Jete, LAVENDER, and Stage & Screen Show. In May of 2021, he won the Best New Filmmaker Award at the Dare to Dance in Public Film Festival for his dance short film Proclamation, which he conceptualized, directed, co-choreographed, and edited. Currently, Sam is a resident artist with Charlotte Street Foundation here in Kansas City. He occasionally holds “GREYaRea” sessions at CSF, which serve as a space to explore improvisational structures and workshop movement with dancers of all levels and backgrounds. Sam hopes to continue creating space for dancers to expand their artistry and present his own original work to the KC community.
ABOUT JERAMY ZIMMERMAN
I believe that good art draws the viewer in and asks questions. The scenario may be specific, but the questions are universal. The work should make the audience feel part of something larger than themselves. My evening-length dance work always starts with a question of how we come together as individuals to take care of each other (or not). Each dance work has a vocabulary unique to the performers and the question being explored. I always start with an improvised, problem-solving task. Though I know what I want to ask, I do not plan to come up with an “answer,” but rather a lens for viewing the question. My rehearsal process is long – almost always spanning many months and often more than a year. Performers are really collaborators and it’s important that they are willing to explore the themes of the work honestly and authentically. Sometimes we will make an initial, shorter version of the work, perform it and let it “age” for a while before coming back to expand it into a longer piece of theatre. The work is not just dance steps on bodies. Aside from the choreography, each dance calls for a specific setting. Sometimes that can be created in a theater, but often it needs to be done in a less traditional space. My favorite places for dance is where it’s least expected: the library, a ferry, the subway, a busy sidewalk. In these places, I can reach audience members who don’t know to look for dance, who might not obtain a ticket to go to a theater to see live performance.
ABOUT Countertechnique® WORKSHOPS
The Countertechnique® class is a contemporary dance technique class. It stretches, coordinates and strengthens the body, making the dancer sweat, build stamina and really move. The class starts with a recurring set of exercises, allowing dancers to investigate the Countertechnique® principles in detail. The second half of the class consists of changing components, working towards luscious movement combinations and jumping at the end.
The Countertechnique® class results in dancers using less energy, losing their fear of taking risks and gaining speed in changing direction.
By continuously and sequentially directing and counter directing parts of the body through space, Countertechnique® allows the moving dancer to work with an ever-changing dynamic balance. This dynamic balance reduces the pressure on the overall body structure and can be changed at any given moment. The consistent use of the counter direction in all movements is key to the technique; both the awareness and application of this principle is trained throughout the Countertechnique® class.
ABOUT SOCIAL CHOREOGRAPHY: FROM THE STUDIO TO THE STREET WORKSHOPS
This workshop starts with an understanding of dance as a practice of countless decisions made in real time. The score here is open and unfixed, yet supportive.
In the studio, we will move alone and together, responding to a series of provocations, tasks, and compositional tools. Drawing on elements from Viewpoints and the Social Choreography Praxis Score, we will filter these through the body, exposing, disrupting, or reimagining social structures. Participants will generate short improvisations and movement phrases, culminating in a public sharing on the final day. We are rehearsing conditions under which something new—emancipatory, unfamiliar, or destabilizing—can emerge. How can we choreograph emancipation for ourselves? For our audience?
Social choreography is understood here not as an exclusive technique, but as a shared, open practice: a reorganization of bodies in space. It’s an event rather than an object; a fleeting, unstable constellation of movement that resists capture.
