Shoestring Dance RESIDENCY 2025

A Note from the producer

This residency grew out of a single choreographer’s desire for time and space to focus on research, process, and creating something new without the pressure of fund-raising, grant applications, and producing a polished, high-production value (Big-D) Dance. The commodification of art often prioritizes some income-generating final product over creative discourse, but I believe this particular moment of increasing censorship and diminishing arts funding additionally necessitates a critical thinking practice and exchange of ideas. The very act of investigation is so valuable, and dance has the capacity to investigate what it means to be human on the most elemental level.

Shoestring was started on a whim, thrown together last-minute, and has blossomed over the last couple weeks into a beautiful whirlwind of sharing resources and rediscovering community. Thank you all for being a part of it, for entertaining your curiosity, for participating in slow viewership, and for being present in the same space and time as these thoughtful performance works.

-Jakki Kalogridis

maybe just one ruby(ies)

Choreography by Bayleigh Breanne

Dancers: Jakki Kalogridis, Tink

Sound/Music::

Lotsva Prayer by Gori Women’s Choir & Shalva Mosidze

Fantasy by Kyle Walker

Bitches Brew by Miles Davis

Psalm of David No. 62 by Gori Woman’s Choir & Shalva Mosidze

Thank you Aleah Hyer and Kevin Belnap for help acquiring a church pew

The Kind of weary sleep don’t fix

Choreographed and performed by Sara Green

10 minute intermission

Music by Aleah Hyer

Available for purchase here

1972: Berger, Brown, Rainer

This work was created from choreographic strategies developed by Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer; facilitated in this residency by a.r. havel, but all of the movement scores were collaboratively produced by the dancers

Dancers: Jamie Neumann, Amos Distefano, a.r. havel

Owen Ever as John Berger

I’m not daedalus yet

Choreography by Jakki Kalogridis in collaboration with the dancers

Dancers: Bayleigh Breanne, Aleah Hyer, Elijah Krieger

Music: Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd, covered by The Bad Plus

Resident choreographers

A woman with long curly brown hair stands in front of a blue and white abstract mural, wearing a multicolored knitted sweater and black top, looking at the camera.

Bayleigh Breanne

Bayleigh Breanne is a movement artist and researcher based in Houston, TX and New Orleans, LA. She has trained with artists and choreographers around the United States and internationally, performing with New Orleans-based companies and choreographers including ELLEvate Dance Company, Mélange Dance Company, Artivism Dance Theatre, Arouna Guindo in residence with Binge Dance Festival, and Jakki Kalogridis. Her choreography has been presented at Brigham Young University, The University of Texas at Austin, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Most recently, she completed her MFA in Dance as Social Justice at The University of Texas at Austin. Her current work explores themes of feminism, high-demand religion, and faith through an ever-unbalanced process of embracing faith and kissing blasphemy.

a.r. havel

a.r. havel is a multidisciplinary artist working in stage-craft, dance, photography, and film. He was born and raised in the subdued Catholic theatricality of San Antonio, Texas before trying to be an intellectual at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. His current research explores queer temporality as theorized by José Esteban Muñoz and Elizabeth Freeman by playfully investigating ideas of nostalgia and why queer people are so obsessed with archives. He made the ill-informed choice to get an MFA (from the University of New Mexico), which he is still ambivalent about completing.

A smiling black woman with glasses, wearing a navy top and a vibrant red and blue floral skirt.

Sara Green

Sara Green is an artist, organizer and minister living in New Orleans. She imagines liberation/salvation/beloved community as communities that have the ability to eat good food together, experience pleasure in our bodies and regularly put their hands in soil—all the while free from fear and violence by way of all of the cultural and legal changes that must happen in order for this world to exist. She understands herself as part of a legacy of cultural workers, healers, maroons and creoles, southern queer freedom fighters and artists trying to shape god.

A femme, Greek person with long hair and bangs smiles while looking over her tattooed shoulder towards the camera. The room is dark, but her face is illuminated with warm lighting.

Jakki Kalogridis

Jakki Kalogridis is a dancer, choreographer, visual artist, and writer. Her work synthesizes cultural history through a contemporary lens and questions ableist assumptions about dance and dance-making. She holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her recent choreographic and collaborative works include SALT of the/earth/ (2024), I’m Thoreau Waiting (2023), Fast-Paced World (2023), TANGENT SPACES (2022), Untitled (Ode to a New Atlantis) (2021), Negative Space Project (2021), Elements (2021), Beats (2018), and Emergence (2018).