Contemporary Ballet at the Portrait Gallery
By • March 12, 2026 0 408
This Saturday, March 14, at 3:30 p.m., 16 ballet dancers — in dark costumes at first, then in increasingly vibrant colors — will perform in the National Portrait Gallery’s glass-roofed, Norman Foster-designed Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard.
The premiere of the 30-minute dance piece is the closing event of the gallery’s Portraiture Festival, a family-friendly day of tours and art making in the magnificently restored Old Patent Office Building it shares with the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The free festival, with Eventbrite registration encouraged but not required, begins at 11:30 a.m.
“Forever is a Feeling” was created by choreographer Diana Movius, founder and artistic director of Moveius (with an e) Contemporary Ballet. She is the Portrait Gallery’s second choreographer-in-residence; Dana Tai Soon Burgess was the first.
Set to music by German-born British composer Max Richter — whose music for the film “Hamnet” may win the Academy Award for Best Original Score on Sunday — the commissioned piece is Movius’s choreographic response to “The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today.” On view through Aug. 30, the exhibition displays the three prize-winners and 31 other finalists from the most recent Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, held every three years.
“Rather than portraying specific portraits,” reads a program note, “the choreography captures fleeting moments — chance encounters, quiet resilience and acts of defiance — creating a living dialogue between visibility and erasure, exploring how portraiture can preserve not just likeness, but memories.”
The evolving costumes were designed by Kami McCracken, who joined the company in 2019 and will dance “Forever is a Feeling” with 15 other company members, apprentices and trainees. According to the company, the colors of the dancers’ outfits “mirror the emotional arc of the work — moving from shadow into illumination.”
“Forever is a Feeling” is the third work Movius has choreographed inspired by a Portrait Gallery exhibition. The two earlier works were “Atlantic Paradox,” based on “Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900-1939,” which had its premiere in the Kogod Courtyard in February of 2025, and “Marquee,” based on “Star Power: Photographs from Hollywood’s Golden Age by George Hurrell,” which premiered there last August.
“Portraiture — like dance — has the power to freeze time, to confront and to connect,” says Movius. “A great portrait captures both a moment and something essential about a person. As visitors to the gallery, we may only look at a portrait for a minute — but the feeling it leaves behind can stay with us much longer.”
Her appointment as a resident artist followed the presentation of her piece “Glacier” as part of the Portrait Gallery’s Earth Day celebration in 2024. The decision to create a dance on the topic of climate change was far from incidental.
Before devoting herself to dance full-time, Movius, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Stanford University, doing fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon, worked in environmental policy on Capitol Hill. A Charlotte, North Carolina, native, she continued to study dance and perform as a dancer both in California and in D.C., where she would “Metro off to ballet class,” as she told attendees at The Georgetowner’s November 2024 Cultural Leadership Breakfast.
Moveius Contemporary Ballet’s 10th anniversary season will conclude on June 12, 13 and 14 with “Flourish” at Dance Loft on 14, the performance space and dance school at 4618 14th St. NW that Movius launched in what was once the Park movie theater in Petworth. The venue also presents performances by other D.C. companies, with the remaining spring events on April 3 and 4, April 18 and 19 and May 2 and 3. Details are available at danceloft14.org.
National Portrait Gallery
800 G St. NW
Open daily, 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m.
