2026 Festival Schedule & TICKETS
WILBURY THEATRE GROUP
475 Valley Street, Providence, RI
Stay for nightly post-show talks & gatherings!
SCHEDULE SUMMARY:
Thursday, February 26, 7:30pm: Small Moves, Big Picture—Live Performances & Dance Films
Friday, February 27, 7:30pm: Double Bill—Leslie Cuyjet’s Blur and Angie Hauser/Chris Aiken’s Soft Rules for Moving Sideways
Saturday, February 28, 7:30pm: Stacy Matthew Spence’s I am here; Here with us; Where we find ourselves
Plus: Saturday, February 28 & Sunday, March 1: Classes at Metamorphosis Studio, Pawtucket!
SCHEDULE DETAILS:
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 7:30pm
SMALL MOVES, BIG PICTURE
A spunky mix of live dance performances on a small stage juxtaposed with dance films on a big screen.
Performances by Darnell “Snoopy” Brown (MA) . Deanna Gerde (RI) . Scott McPheeters (ME) . Raymond Pinto (CT) . Alexis Robbins (CT) . Cassie Wang (MA)
Films TBA!
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 7:30PM
LIVE PERFORMANCES
Blur (2021)
Choreographer / Performer Leslie Cuyjet
A solo performance that experiments with visibility and invisibility, and the relationship between performer, audience, and object. Viewers are invited to navigate a phonetic landscape of Cuyjet’s voice and text, through the lens of race and objectification. Her costume is composed of close-up images of her own skin.
Soft Rules for Moving Sideways (premiere)
Choreographers / Performers Angie Hauser & Chris Aiken
Music Jake Meginsky
These long-time collaborators explore a trio improvisation that seeks to unlock the power and counterpoint of shared resonance and individual actions. The artists consider what it means to tune oneself to be both undetermined and specific, awake to the theater of humans acting creatively.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 7:30PM
LIVE PERFORMANCE
I am, here; Here with us; Where we find ourselves (2024)
Choreographer Stacy Matthew Spence, in collaboration with the artists
Performers Joanna Kotze, Will Noling, Stacy Matthew Spence, Hsiao-jou Tang
Singer/musician Charlotte Jacobs
Percussionist Raf Vertessen
Costumer Athena Kokoronis
Originating Performer Tim Bendernagel
How do we find ourselves? How do we find our place? How do we find each other?
This dance, in triptych form, explores ideas of self, impulse, and sharing.
Spence’s work often explores the exchange between person and environment. This involves playful interactions and movement generated in response to the places he may find himself—studio, home, as well as public spaces. Presently, he brings his attention to the internal space of “me”—as a personal environment to be outwardly created, expressed, occupied and shared.
Spence asked his collaborators to take a journey from their internal finding, to the external expression and wondered how they would bump up against, allow for and possibly join/accommodate/revel in each other’s individual selves.
SATURDAY & SUNDAY, MARCH 1 & 2
COMMUNITY CLASSES
Location: Metamorphosis, 249 Roosevelt Ave (back of building), Pawtucket
Open to all levels except where noted. Class size limited; register to reserve your spot.
$20/class; $5 off 2+ classes
SATURDAY 10–11:30am: Leslie Cuyjet / Moving from Memory
This class offers guided scores and practice sessions grounded in Authentic Movement. After warming the body and senses, we’ll explore movement shaped by memory, impulse, and lived experience. Through moving, witnessing, and reflection, participants engage an emerging approach to autobiographical movement practice. Open to movers of all experience levels.
SATURDAY 11:45am–1:15pm: Angie Hauser & Chris Aiken / Resiliency, Resistance, and Flow
We explore how our practice of contact improvisation can grow when we connect our physical intelligence and poetic sensibilities. Our perceptual skills connect us to ourselves, others, and the environment as we meet the physical, emotional, and creative demands of the moment. We engage our compositional minds, considering timing, proximity, effort, stillness, and the syntax of our movements. We keep the physical principles of contact improvisation at the center of our work—how we move and find support and possibilities through improvisation. We explore ways the event of touch and the ebb and flow of weight exchange can invigorate our dance practice. We seek to create containers for focused dancing that bring energy, care, strength, and resilience.
SUNDAY 10–11:30am: Joanna Kotzke / Starting the Day—Connecting, Stretching, Moving
Slowly and intentionally, we will work on the forces through the legs into the floor to lead us to find more range, opposition and weight in the body. Class involves guided instructions and learning by doing. We’ll concentrate on alignment, direction, and oppositional forces as we take time to come into our bodies, into the space with each other, and into the day.
SUNDAY 11:45am–1:15pm: Stacy Matthew Spence / Experiencing Movement
We will give attention to discovering movement in our bodies, expanding into complex states of movement, allowing for the joy of movement in ourselves and the sharing with others. We will prepare ourselves for full physicality through guided explorations focusing on the range of releasing and using tension, use of weight and momentum, and directing energy. Improvisation will be integrated into class to explore our internal impulses and our responses to the external environment as part of our movement adventure. We will notice our own inclinations, exchanges with others and responses to the space and place around us. I will also share phrase material to emphasize elements found earlier in the class and continue a journey to fuller physicality encompassing the large to the subtle and the personal to the communal.
What to expect:
An intermediate to advanced level of dance experience.
A class that builds upon itself.
A warm-up period to help open ourselves for a variety of moving possibilities. Some improvisation to explore ideas of self, others and the space. Learning phrase material, integrating our experiences into the material, and including each other in the experience.