esperanza spalding in collaboration with dancer, theater and filmmaker Kayla Farrish, presents an evening of new dance and music – crafted live and in real time.  

Growing from spalding’s years of study and experimentation around how to re-merge “jazz” music & dance, and Farrish’s multi-disciplinary work of transforming feeling, story, and humanity through dance, this is a unique first public sharing of their creative collaboration.

The ensemble of three musicians and three dancers has been in workshop throughout 2026, developing shared grammar and vocabulary to musically and movementally compose a story, engage in improvisational dialogue, and translate the vibrant energies, sensations, and ideas coursing between, within, and around them. Alchemizing and manifesting what could be, through and with one another…

Presented by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in partnership with Battery Park City Authority.

esperanza spalding is an eaabibacliitoti* artist, trained and  initiated in the North American jazz lineage and tradition. Her  work interweaves various combinations of instrumental music,  improvisation, singing, composition, poetry, dance, therapeutic  research, storytelling, teaching, restorative urban land & artist sanctuary custodianship, and growing in love as a daughter,  sister, cousin, niece, auntie, great-auntie, friend. 

She founded and serves as co-director of Prismid Sanctuary, a  non-profit that creates and stewards restorative artist residency &  workshop space in Portland, Oregon (Prismid.org). 

  With her dance project “Off Brand gOdds” and the Songwrights  Apothecary Lab she leads multi-week performances, workshops,  teaching, and therapeutic-arts research residencies. She is a  2024 recipient of the Doris Duke Foundation Artist Award and a  2016 Ford Foundation “Art of Change” Fellow. 

*European-African ancestored being influenced by American cultures living in Indigenous Territories of Turtle Island

Photo by DaniMialdea. Headshot by Rob Lewis.