We offer this performance ritual with great respect to the Lenape, original stewards of this Manahatta land —
past, present, and future — including our honored mentor Joe Baker of the Lenape Center.
… an offering created by Dancing Earth’s constellation of associate artists : Rulan Tangen, Jade Whaanga, Xeric Tlaloc Meraz, Gabriela Wachi SharpFish, Humlåo Evans, Shakaya McFarland, Alekzeta Cantu-Hensley, Tara Bucknor, Raven Bright , Amy Lee, Clarence Brooks
I was never born between worlds.
I was born from the same earth,
named twice.
Before there was a border,
there was breath.
Before there were flags,
there were songs.
Before there were nations,
there were footsteps that remembered
the shape of the desert.
I carry those footsteps.
The world keeps asking me
to separate my blood,
to choose which ancestor deserves my voice,
as though memory can be divided
by a line carved into a map.
But rivers do not stop
because someone drew a border.
Neither do I.
I am the echo of those who remained.
The prayer that refused to disappear.
The language still spoken by the body
when words have been taken away.
My father lives in these bones.
My mother lives in this heartbeat.
Together they remind me
that I do not inherit contradiction—
I inherit continuity.
I am not half of anything.
I am the child of a people
who survived every attempt
to be renamed,
relocated,
forgotten.
The desert knows my footsteps.
The wind does not ask for my papers.
The mountains do not question my belonging.
Only people do.
So I walk as my ancestors taught me—
not searching for permission,
but remembering what the land
has always known.
I have never crossed the border.
The border crossed us.
… a poem by Xeric Tlaloc Meraz …
“WEAVING WORLDS
we dream in multiverses ..”
… an offering created by Dancing Earth’s constellation of associate artists … To LenapeHoking /Manahatta, we bring a reflection of the city’s own bold courage, intercultural and intergenerational vibrancy, multi lingual and multi dimensional, beyond borders , beyond binaries …
This performance ritual is a collective pulse from which emerges diverse individual perspectives .. Ancestral memories , rhythms of the future, continual migrations, interpreting community responses to “ what is your relationship to america “, interrogating injustice and colonialism , conjuring compassion …
WEAVING WORLD : we dream in multiverses … Some of us are ancestral to this land, some chosen, some forced here — together we dance a memory longer than 250 years, for a future. Generational migrations are navigated by stars, ancient umbilical cords tracing back to the far corners of the world — roots of a tree of life connecting living lands, waters, and skies. From this layered realm, every being and every relationship between us is world-making. From that collective pulse, diverse individual stories emerge: who we are, how we came to be, why we are here now, what we are dancing for — as an offering to humans and more-than-humans, to ancestors seen and unseen. We give our dance as a gift to this place at this moment, a convergent ritual to embody collaborative ways of being — to gather broken fragments, heal with the breath of compassion, and weave worlds
About Dancing Earth : we create from the pulse between roots of ancestral memory within the body and the blossoms of re-imagined futures, moving in rhythmic relationship with the living, breathing earth and all living beings, in resurgent diversity ...
