Name: Book Dances
Start: 2025-12-08T19:30:00-05:00
End: 2025-12-08T22:30:00-05:00
Location: Hartford Stage

Monday, December 8, 2025 • 7:30 pm at Hartford Stage
Justice Dance Performance Project continues its 36th year of dance/theater performance with a new work celebrating books as touchstones of freedom and justice, in partnership with Hartford Stage.
Books and literacy are among humankind’s greatest achievements, allowing the preservation of story, the transmission of knowledge, and the creation of community built on shared ideas. Against a cultural backdrop of increasing challenges to intellectual freedom, JDPP will celebrate the power of the book and the right to read freely with a new dance theater performance called ‘Book Dances.’ This timely work explores how books enlarge our vision and build human connection, juxtaposed with the darkness of a world in which books are banned and literary freedoms curtailed. The performance elements include movable vertical shelves of open-faced books, music by composer Robert Een, and spoken words by the dancers that add poetic nuance and further meaning to the choreography. ‘Book Dances’ will be performed by five members of JDPP’s professional Ensemble, who collaboratively developed the choreography under executive and artistic director, Judy Dworin. Visual design is by Marcela Oteíza, on faculty at Wesleyan University. Following the premiere, the dancers will perform additional repertory newly restaged and updated for the 2025-26 season.