This photo is upside down as if the five female dancers are reaching down from above. They wear oversized pink t-shirts with a black long-sleeved top layered underneath. They reach their arms overhead with palms facing forward. Photo by Nir Arieli.
WHAT IS RACHEL:dancers?
RACHEL:dancers is a multi-medium, multi-modal, multi-sensory performance company making dance about the little things. RACHEL:dancers is committed to advancing a disability aesthetic in contemporary concert dance, and exploring ways to cultivate access for visually impaired audiences and artists through an access-based creative process.
A RACHEL:dancers work is a warm hug, a compliment from a stranger, a hot cup of coffee on a chilly morning. We are inspired by the things that make us human: intimacy and points-of-connection. Works are created through a collaborative process with a rotating group of multi-disciplinary artists. Some recurring collaborators include Enya-Kalia Jordan, Mijkalena Smith, Cate Christiansen, and Christian Bleach. Please, click on their individual names to learn more about them!
Check out this video reel of RACHEL:dancers’ most recent work, If I Could Just Reach Out and Touch It (2024).
Without access offerings:
With audio description and captions:
PERFORMANCE PROJECTS
View a full list of choreographic works in my CV ︎ click here.
Cate and Dalia, two women, sit criss-cross-apple-sauce with an arm extending outwards. Leah, a woman, reads from a journal. The dancers wear oversized hot pink t-shirts and cream or black pants with green socks. Photo by Nir Arieli.
If I Could Just Reach Out and Touch It
RACHEL:dancers, 2024
If I Could Just Reach Out and Touch It is an intimate multi-sensory performance exploring girlhood, grief, and how to make the perfect pot of coffee. Utilizing experimental approaches to audio description and accessibility as creative praxis, the cast invites audiences to be immersed in their world.
Performers/collaborators: Cate Christiansen, Annie Cox, Dalia Engelberg, Peyton Eidle, Leah Moses, Rachel DeForrest Repinz, Tabitha Stewart
Past peformances: La MaMa Experimental Theater (2024), Brooklyn Art Haus (2024), Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (2024), Dixon Place (2023), Brooklyn Arts Exchange WIP Showing (2023)
RACHEL:dancers, 2024
If I Could Just Reach Out and Touch It is an intimate multi-sensory performance exploring girlhood, grief, and how to make the perfect pot of coffee. Utilizing experimental approaches to audio description and accessibility as creative praxis, the cast invites audiences to be immersed in their world.
Performers/collaborators: Cate Christiansen, Annie Cox, Dalia Engelberg, Peyton Eidle, Leah Moses, Rachel DeForrest Repinz, Tabitha Stewart
Past peformances: La MaMa Experimental Theater (2024), Brooklyn Art Haus (2024), Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (2024), Dixon Place (2023), Brooklyn Arts Exchange WIP Showing (2023)
Mijka, a woman wearing red silk pajamas, leans into a cool lit fridge. The room is a rich, deep, red, and the cool blue fridge light shines a sharp contrast onto her face.
ALL YOU CAN EAT!: Midnight Snack
RACHEL:dancers, 2022
ALL YOU CAN EAT! is an ongoing interdisciplinary process-based project which explores global mealtime traditions and their relationship to community and the individual. This work pulls from several reemerging ideas: mealtimes and eating, gesture, repeated routines, ephemerality, intimacy, and community/relationship building. Together, we explore how mealtime rituals and relationships are essential to the human condition, both as an act of survival and intimate shared experience.
ALL YOU CAN EAT! was originally conceived in 2019 as a choreographic inquiry of interpersonal relationships and their connections to routine. Ultimately, these connections were developed through movement-based investigations of American Sign Language, everyday aesthetics, and the disability aesthetic. This project has taken on many forms including live concert performance and dance film. Midnight Snack is a film iteration of this project.
Performers/collaborators: Peyton Eidle, Gabriella Galvan, Lindsey Garnhart, Lena Josef, Mijkalena Smith, Megan Vo
Director of Photography: Alexandra Mettler
Editor: Cate Christiansen
Music: Christian Bleach
Writer: Nicky B
Click here to watch the film and learn more.
RACHEL:dancers, 2022
ALL YOU CAN EAT! is an ongoing interdisciplinary process-based project which explores global mealtime traditions and their relationship to community and the individual. This work pulls from several reemerging ideas: mealtimes and eating, gesture, repeated routines, ephemerality, intimacy, and community/relationship building. Together, we explore how mealtime rituals and relationships are essential to the human condition, both as an act of survival and intimate shared experience.
ALL YOU CAN EAT! was originally conceived in 2019 as a choreographic inquiry of interpersonal relationships and their connections to routine. Ultimately, these connections were developed through movement-based investigations of American Sign Language, everyday aesthetics, and the disability aesthetic. This project has taken on many forms including live concert performance and dance film. Midnight Snack is a film iteration of this project.
Performers/collaborators: Peyton Eidle, Gabriella Galvan, Lindsey Garnhart, Lena Josef, Mijkalena Smith, Megan Vo
Director of Photography: Alexandra Mettler
Editor: Cate Christiansen
Music: Christian Bleach
Writer: Nicky B
Click here to watch the film and learn more.
Mijka and Davis, a man and a woman, lay upside down on a couch, with their feet danging over head. One leg is stretched long while the other crosses behind meeting their opposite hands. They wear complimentary army green loungewear.
NOTHING, TOGETHER
RACHEL:dancers, 2021
NOTHING, TOGETHER is a short dance film about the joys of doing nothing, together. Sometimes the simplest things are the sweetest.
Performers/collaborators: Mijkalena Smith and Davis Witmer
Director of Photography/Editor: Sean Higgins
Music: Cen and Seth’s Ego Garden
Click here to watch the film.
RACHEL:dancers, 2021
NOTHING, TOGETHER is a short dance film about the joys of doing nothing, together. Sometimes the simplest things are the sweetest.
Performers/collaborators: Mijkalena Smith and Davis Witmer
Director of Photography/Editor: Sean Higgins
Music: Cen and Seth’s Ego Garden
Click here to watch the film.
Megan, Tori, and Xiaomeng, three dancers, balance on one leg with the other behind in attitude while the arms reach out from above their heads and to their sides. They wear sheer purple tops and black pants, and they dance on stage in front of a purple cyc. Photo by Brian Mengini.
PLEASE HOLD
RACHEL:dancers, 2019
Please Hold is a reflection on waiting. Feelings of perpetual pause, frustration, and hope drive this choreographic study. This work reflecs on on the oh-so-familiar 21st-century experience of being put ‘on hold’, but also connects this experience with more expansive frustration with the systems in which we exist.
Performers/collaborators: Megan Bridge, Xiaomeng Ma, Tori Sexsmith, Mijkalena Smith, Lindsey Garnhart
Past peformances: Endings at Conwell Dance Theater in Philadelphia, PA (2019); Taylorsville High School in Salt Lake City, UT (2019, performed by the Utah All-State Dance Ensemble)
RACHEL:dancers, 2019
Please Hold is a reflection on waiting. Feelings of perpetual pause, frustration, and hope drive this choreographic study. This work reflecs on on the oh-so-familiar 21st-century experience of being put ‘on hold’, but also connects this experience with more expansive frustration with the systems in which we exist.
Performers/collaborators: Megan Bridge, Xiaomeng Ma, Tori Sexsmith, Mijkalena Smith, Lindsey Garnhart
Past peformances: Endings at Conwell Dance Theater in Philadelphia, PA (2019); Taylorsville High School in Salt Lake City, UT (2019, performed by the Utah All-State Dance Ensemble)
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