Premiered 2023 at Tampere, Finland
Imagine a square. People are passing through — on their way to or from work, to buy groceries, nowhere in particular. Then music starts. House music, warm and insistent, filling the space. And a body begins to move.
People stop. Pause. Someone dances to the beat on the side. Someone else steps in and joins the moving body… that keeps on moving…
The Slide/Glide offers the direct proposition that dancing together generates community, belonging, and strength.
Throughout history, dance has built strength, healed wounds, created belonging, and celebrated life. The Slide works in that tradition. One body dancing in public space, using a choreography that belongs to everyone, generates an energy that others can step into — on their own terms, in their own time. No hierarchy. Just the possibility of being together through movement.
The sole movement material is the Electric Slide — an 18-step line dance that has travelled through clubs, weddings, family reunions, and funerals across generations and continents. It is chosen because it is accessible, widely recognised, and unowned. No one holds the rights to the 18-step version. It belongs to everyone — which makes it an effective choreographic tool for a work about shared space, collective presence, and moving together across difference.
The repetition is central. As the same 18 steps repeat, something accumulates. A shared space opens up where differences can meet through the language of the body. This is how embodied knowledge travels. This is how solidarity forms.
The Slide is an act of resistance. To dance in public space, as a BIPoC woman, without announcement or permission, is a political act. Who can move freely through public space — who can take up space without sanction — is determined by structures of gender, race, and class. The Slide refuses those structures. By dancing persistently, joyfully, and openly, the performer claims space and makes presence visible. The work sits firmly within a tradition of dance activism, where the body in motion becomes a tool for social change.
The performer enters a square, a street, a plaza — and begins to dance. The dancing continues for 30 minutes, with a house music soundscape by DJ Rich LaMotte (NYC).
There is no stage. There is no announcement. The performer has a portable speaker on their body.
People can join or observe, entirely on their own terms. Some people stop. Some step in. Some watch from a distance. The dancing continues regardless. The invitation is issued through the body, not through words.
The Slide/Glide premiered in Tampere, Finland in May 2023, and was developed further during a 40-day durational practice across eight European cities, travelling entirely by train. Performed often daily, in different public spaces with different passers-by, the work accumulated meaning with each iteration. The same choreography. Different ground. Different gaze. The slow travel — city to city by train — was itself a practice of sustainability that became inseparable from the work’s character.
The Slide/Glide is the seed from which two subsequent works grew: Sammankomst (2024, premiered Malmö Sommarscen), a participatory public work with professional dancers; and On and ON and ON ON and ON (2025, co-produced with Dansstationen, MDT and Atalante), for 14 professional dancers indoors. The Slide/Glide remains the original proposition — one body, one dance, one space.