Luna Dance celebrates 30 years of questioning what is and what can be

Today is Luna's 30th Birthday

a message from our founder

What if all children learned to choreograph their own dances?
What if classroom teachers and teaching artists engaged together in professional learning?
What if the family reunification process included dance? How might dancing together strengthen the reunion?

These questions and many like them informed the creation of Luna’s programs, pedagogy, and practice since our founding on March 8, 1992. Today, at age 30, Luna is perched on a cliff composed of questioning how dance is taught, who dance is for, and where dance might live and is ready to leap into a new level of possibility for our organization and our communities. Changes are afoot at Luna, but the sense of what if… remains at our core.

Following two years of COVID responsiveness, Luna emerges with a new sense of what is imaginable when boundaries become mutable in efforts to serve children, teachers, and families as they are now. Our leadership team has grown from the two founders, myself and Nancy Ng, whose partnership has steered Luna through nine homes, 2000 teachers and artists, and approximately 300,000 children, to a collaborative leadership of four. This team is guiding Luna toward what we refer to as the de-centered center that is poised to be a beating heart for dance education in Berkeley with connective tissue and neural pathways extending beyond.

At the end of our birthday month, Luna closes escrow on a long-awaited home in West Berkeley while we continue our fundraising efforts to turn a building that we own into a center for creativity research, community engagement, and child-centered pedagogy. We have already begun to pilot new courses that will focus next-gen Luna. The Teacher as Creative Practitioner Scholar series uplifts teaching artists and classroom teachers as active investigators. This year’s group has an abundance of questions that will direct changes in their teaching practice and influence the field of dance education. Questions such as, can the emotional nature of fiction help tell better stories about dance? Are we positioned for the next Sputnik moment—can our government finally prioritize children’s creativity? How do we broaden our ability to see and to serve children with talent who carry labels of disability? and How can we better support student autonomy so that they become agents of their own learning? As children and families return to the new Luna space and the classrooms and studios of these educators, possibility expands.

A pearl is the traditional 30th wedding anniversary gift—a piece of grit becoming a thing of beauty. It is my birthstone, yet it represents the tenacity of my partnership with Nancy Ng which has created something both transformational and enduring. It is through the art of the question that personal transformations become revolutionizing.

Please join us as we celebrate our 30th birthday in a myriad of ways. We will post 30 stories over the next 10 weeks on all Luna’s social media. Please follow us or attend one of our upcoming hosted events, below.

In the spirit of dance,

Patricia Reedy

Luna Founder & Co-Executive Director