Dance Series – Psychopomp Dance Theater

Psychopomp Dance Theater is grounded in viscerally athletic movement exploring social issues through the structure of Jewish culture and thought. Weaving creativity and community as a form of resistance is a key element of the company’s work. As a tight knit cast of unique dance artists we create original works for live performance, touring, and film. The company offers training classes and community workshops, which prioritize authentic storytelling, virtuosic movement expression, and cultivating trust and teamwork. Psychopomp hosts an online Patreon community focused on injury prevention and choreographic movement education. Artistic Director Shenandoah Harris, in development with Jacob’s Pillow Curriculum in Motion Fellowship, is developing body-based, interactive, and inclusive movement workshops centered on investigating important community topics through movement and choreographic invention.

 Psychopomp’s work pushes the limits of dynamically powerful athleticism and storytelling while remaining grounded in virtuosic dance technique through a ritualistic mental rigor. The movement style is rooted in complex floorwork, powerful acrobatic parkour movements and draws spaciously powerful traveling techniques from Horton and Limon. Director Shenandoah Harris’s ancestral heritage of collaboration and discourse informs the collaborative culture of Psychopomp. For Miss Harris, movement and her ethno-religious Jewish identity are one in the same. Both offer ways to question and challenge standards to fulfill the duty of Tikkun Olam, repairing the world. Psychopomp’s performance at the Brand will include six eclectic dance artists exploring the cyclical nature of ancient Jewish texts. In particular, exploring the Jewish Creation Story text, Beresheet (translation: “In the beginning”) and how the cyclical writing style of this text in conjunction with the ancestral practice of Chevruta (translation: friend or partner) study, a collaborative text study practice which requires debate with a partner, allows us to question and renew our personal and communal interpretations of gender identity. Our performance will be set to an original score composed by our longtime Portland based collaborator Riley Smith, easily played off of any sound system. Movement enthusiasts of all ages, genders and cultural backgrounds support our work and are apart of our community. Psychopomp’s growing audience includes a number of Jewish community members as well as other culturally diverse groups with rich ancestral practices. Our audience also includes a wide range of professional and hobbyist movement artists who practice free running, parkour or prop based fighting styles. Psychopomp strives to engage the general public more deeply with the art of dance through shared choreographic process as a way to investigate and learn more about our communities.