photo: Dominic Delore
photo: Dylan Ladds
Eight Feet Tall
photo: Brennish Thompson
photo: Dylan Ladds
Boston Celtic Music Festival 2025
photo: Jason Jong
Rising Step
photo: Olivia Moon Photography
In Spring Celebration, a Kieran Jordan Dance production
photo: Zarmik Moqtaderi
photo: Dylan Ladds
photo: Dylan Ladds
When the Music Starts, I’ll Know (2026)
Oral history and live performance co-created with Jackie O’Riley
When the Music Starts, I’ll Know is both an oral history project and live show that offers reflections of what it means to be a dancer. Told through the voices of 13 lifelong movers, we explore the paths dancers forge to sustain a lifelong practice: How do artists who are community builders also make time and space for their creative work? What does it mean to rely on your body as your mode of expression? How is identity tied to artistic practice over the course of a lifetime? This project was shaped over time by the stories these women were telling. So many things stood out to us: themes of dance as a calling, dance as sanctuary, and dancing and identity evolving together. We are thrilled to share the recordings of these conversations here, and encourage you to take your time to hear each person telling their stories in their own voice.
photos: Louise Bichan
Eight Feet Tall
Featuring instrumentalists Dan Accardi (the Ivy Leaf) and Armand Aromin (the Ivy Leaf, the Vox Hunters) and dancers Rebecca McGowan and Jackie O’Riley (co-creators of From the Floor, 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellows in Choreography), Eight Feet Tall approaches steps and tunes with both intense respect for tradition and keen sensitivity to the shared rhythmic experience of music and dance. Instruments, shoes, voices, and whole bodies enter into conversation with one another to create complex sonic textures amid vibrant visual interplay.
photo: Dylan Ladds
Sound Shadows (2019)
Knitting together dance and music, visual imagery and song, light and shadow, Sound Shadows draws details into relief and shows the unseen. A collaborative creation of Veronica Barron (theater artist, puppeteer, storyteller, singer), Julia Friend (banjo player, singer, visual artist), and Rebecca McGowan (Irish and percussive dancer). Against a backdrop of Americana music and ballad singing, our movements, songs, and narratives carry myriad histories. We want to open our audience to dimensions that otherwise pass by unnoticed. We combine our art forms to celebrate how they enrich our experience of the world: tapping feet give dimension to banjo melodies; shadow pictures bring old stories to life; songs infuse emotion into movement. These dimensions inspire us to look for the invisible presence of where we came from and how it informs where we are going.
created in a Catalysts Residency at the Dance Complex, Cambridge MA
Photos: Bill Parsons/Maximal Image
