What else might a body be capable of? What happens when it moves beyond the lines it knows, beyond the forms it has learned? Dance Company Middlebury (DCM), directed by Visiting Assistant Professor Meshi Chavez with guest choreographer Jimmy Joyner, invites dancers ready to explore, experiment, and discover in a preprofessional ensemble.
This inquiry into What is a body? asks how we show up, respond, and create in a world full of expectations and uncertainty. We explore how movement, attention, and imagination allow bodies to connect, adapt, and reveal possibilities often hidden.
This season, movement unfolds in unexpected ways—stretching, folding, shifting, blurring, inventing, dissolving. Each rehearsal is a space to move, respond, and play with others, noticing what surfaces when bodies meet and shift together.
In Winter Term 2027, the ensemble will work in Atlanta with independent, working artists who are actively creating, adapting, and inventing outside the academy. Material developed at Middlebury will be opened, transformed, and reimagined. Returning to campus, the ensemble will refine and perform the work, creating a piece that embodies the company’s collective inquiry into What is a body?
The final performance will reveal what we discovered, how bodies move, respond, and converse with each other, with space, and with materials. It reaches toward fleeting gestures, unexpected connections, and moments of shared discovery, perhaps toward hope, making visible something often hidden or unseen.