On a weekend in June, 2025, dancers and an audience gathered on the Monroe County Courthouse lawn. Utam Moses, the organizer of the performance and one of the dancers, invited the audience to close their eyes and feel the air – the humidity, the wind – on their bodies. As cars drove by and a percussionist played a slow beat, she talked about activating the horizons of our imagination as we activate our imagination of this place. Soon, the dancers would be moving across the lawn in an improvised dance as two musicians improvised music alongside.
The performance came out of a practice called “authentic movement,” which Utam had introduced to a group of practitioners. We invited Utam, Nonie Daniels, one of the dancers, and Kourtney Jones, a poet who also worked with the group, into the studio to talk about authentic movement and what it meant to bring this practice into the public.