On the Move: Choreographer Diana Movius
By • November 25, 2024 0 9
“It’s just a matter of having two loves,” explained Diana Movius, speaking at The Georgetowner’s Nov. 21 Cultural Leadership Breakfast at the President Woodrow Wilson House in Kalorama. The two: dance and the environment.
Founder and artistic director of Moveius Contemporary Ballet — pronounced “MOVE-ee-us” — and of Dance Loft on 14, her company’s base of operations in Petworth, Movius became the second choreographer-in-residence at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery this year. (Her predecessor was Dana Tai Soon Burgess.)
Famed former New York City Ballet principal dancer Patricia McBride, now 82, “shaped who I am as a dancer,” said Movius, who trained under her in Charlotte, North Carolina. Inspiring Movius’s somewhat untraditional approach to choreography, also in her home city, was the late Salvatore Aiello, artistic director of North Carolina Dance Theatre (renamed Charlotte Ballet in 2014). Movius cited as another influence the late modern-dance pioneer Merce Cunningham, whose tall, slender build, she noted, matched her own.
At Stanford University, where her graduate studies in anthropology included fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon, Movius minored in dance and arranged to license works by George Balanchine for student performance. Pursuing her second “love,” she began working on environmental policy in D.C. But when she wasn’t away at climate conferences, she would “Metro off to ballet class” from Capitol Hill, she recalled.
A dozen years ago, Movius leased rehearsal and performance space above a discount furniture store housed in the defunct Park movie theater — “without telling my parents.” Only at the end of last year did she decide to focus solely on dance. Her mother’s response to the news? “Oh, Diana, you really deserve a break after the drudgery of trying to change the world.”
With a Washington Area Community Investment Fund loan, a Great Streets grant from the District, contributions from dancers and dance lovers and Movius’s own savings, the company was able to acquire the whole building in 2021. The new Dance Loft on 14, she said, will be a 20,000-square-foot arts center in a five-story mixed-use development with affordable apartments. When Movius specified that the building will be net-zero and “entirely free of fossil fuels,” attendees applauded.
One of her mottos, she said, is “Go big or go home.” (Another: “Keep the lighting designer close.”)
Movius was motivated to launch and now expand this facility for rehearsal, performance and training in response to a pressing need. “Art space has been dwindling in the District,” she said, a trend that began pre-pandemic. After-work rehearsal space is especially hard to come by, since companies generally schedule income-producing classes in the evenings.
She credited her choreographer-in-residence appointment partly to “our success with ‘Glacier.’” When “Glacier,” subtitled “A Climate Change Ballet,” was part of the National Portrait Gallery’s Earth Day programming this year, 700 people watched it in person and hundreds more streamed it.
Movius’s depiction in dance of melting and calving glaciers — set to minimalist music with a video backdrop (in one section, a dancer portrays a polar bear) — has made a splash since its premiere at the Atlas Performing Arts Center’s 2015 Intersections Festival. Families have told her that the ballet reinforced what their children were studying. After seeing “Glacier,” Movius’s climate policy colleagues continued to attend performances; some have even joined her board, she said.
The 18-month Portrait Gallery residency began last July with a program based on the lives of biologists Rachel Carson and E. O. Wilson. Movius’s next project, “Atlantic Paradox,” to be presented in early February, is a response to the exhibition “Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900-1939.” She shared that she is working with fabric, both as a screen and to show Black women such as Josephine Baker fleeing the social constraints of American society.
In July, Moveius Contemporary Ballet will premiere a work in the Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard connected with the Portrait Gallery’s Pop Art exhibition, opening next summer. Movius said her aim will be to elevate everyday movement the way that Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and other artists elevated everyday objects and images.
Upcoming performances at Dance Loft include “The Nutcracker” in December; “Springtime Variations and Tales,” featuring the Moveius company’s youth program, in May; and “Muse,” a season-closing benefit, in June. The company will also return to the month-long Atlas Intersections Festival, which opens on Feb. 15.
