MFA Dance Concert

NORTHAMPTON, MA The Smith College Department of Dance presents the 2026 MFA Dance Concert featuring choreography by 2nd-year MFA candidates Chavi Bansal, Dimitri Kalaitzidis, Hannah Littman, and Sarah Young. Performances will take place on February 5, 6, and 7 at 8:00 PM in Theatre 14 in the Mendenhall Center for the Performing Arts, with Sarah Young’s piece shown only on February 14 at 1:00 & 3:00 PM in the Crew House Dance Studio. Tickets are required for both performances at SmithArts.ludus.com.

The four contemporary pieces explore themes of choice and consequences, risk and reward, the ephemerality of dance work, and the creative play between dancers and audience. The pieces range from a duet to a 7-person ensemble and feature student and professional dancers. Sets are a collaboration between the choreographers and Technical Director Amy Putnam, with costumes by Emily Justice Dunn, and lights by Kathy Couch. Chris Aiken is the Faculty Advisor.

Inspired by Moksha Patam, the ancient Indian game known today as Snakes and Ladders, The Path- Moksha Patam by Chavi Bansal explores life as a cyclical journey of ascent, descent, choice, and consequence. Drawing from movement, gesture, rhythm, and embodied philosophy, this work for 5 dancers is a reflection on the cyclical nature of life. Chavi Bansal is a dancer, choreographer, and educator based in Massachusetts. Her work draws from modern dance, Indian martial arts, yoga, and philosophy, exploring cycles of life, identity, and lived experience through gesture, rhythm, and structure. She is the artistic director of Vimoksha Dance Company, established in 2010.

Dimitri Kalaitzidis’ piece for two dancers We will be changing the name. is a probe of the liminal. Exploring the risk and reward of betweenness, ambiguity, and reorientation, the work is a reflection on the potency of change. Kalaitzidis hopes his thesis stimulates the audience to reimagine how they relate to the unknown.  Dimitri Kalaitzidis is a performer, teacher, and creator originally from western Massachusetts. Co-founder of the project Los Little Guys, alongside Mexican artist Erik Elizondo, he has created both original and collaborative projects which have been presented at platforms such as b12 Festival, Casa Abierta Oaxaca, Festival Internacional Kinissis, A Cielo Abierto, Toihaus Theater Salzburg, and the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought.

In Take. Shape. Go. Hannah Littman presents a historical reimagining of Merce Cunningham's Scramble (1967), questioning the ephemerality of dance work, exploring the meeting point between past and present, and attempting to offer one's archive an afterlife through embodiment. The piece for 7 dancers is a modular dance consisting of sixteen sections that can be re-ordered as desired. As such, Take. Shape. Go. will be presented in different sequences on the three evenings of the performance. Littman explains, “It has been a fun challenge to use elements of Scramble's archive as ‘scores’ to develop material that honors the work's legacy while still bringing a fresh, modern individuality by way of transmutation and re-interpretation.” Hannah Littman is a dance artist originally from Los Angeles, working in western Massachusetts and New York City. Their research draws on a lifelong fascination with American media institutions to investigate to-be-looked-at-ness through ordinary movement, surreal landscapes, and audience participation, which, in turn, has led them to question archival praxes in dance. 

Sarah Young explores the dialogue between dancers and audience in close proximity in her thesis event, Experiments in Improvisation, which she is hosting in the Crew House Dance Studio on February 14 at 1pm and 3pm. The piece for 6 performers includes a tap dancer and a live musician and uses improvised scores with inspiration from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Sarah Young is a dance artist living in Northampton, Massachusetts and at Ponderosa Tanzland in Stolzenhagen, Germany, teaching, performing, and researching dance nationally and internationally.  In recent years, she’s been most engaged in research inspired by Contact Improvisation instigator Nancy Stark Smith, especially the Underscore and Nancy’s “States of Grace.” She is a coordinator for the Global Underscore and part of the Underscore +/- research group in Northampton. She is a Guild Certified Feldenkrais® Practitioner and former director of Earthdance in Plainfield, Massachusetts.

Reservations are required for both shows. Tickets range from $0-10 and can be purchased online at smitharts.ludus.com or by emailing boxoffice@smith.edu.