Connecting Dance and City Planning

April 21, 2025

BY BRITTANY DELANY; PHOTOS BY JONATHAN GODOY

Note: This article was first published in Stance on Dance’s spring/summer 2025 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

Grounding, a site-specific dance performance, illuminated sites and monuments representing the civil rights movement in the city of Riverside, CA. The intervention enlivened the histories of each monument, reflecting the struggles and strides, and animating hearts and bodies into action. This activity engaged urban planners in how creative expression, embodied in the form of dance, can be a powerful vehicle to draw them into advocacy and lively participation. The dance piece was choreographed and performed by GROUND SERIES co-director Brittany Delany in collaboration with dancers Ana Cruz, Crystal Edwards, Edwin Sigüenza, and Aisha Stewart, with music by Malik Mayne. The performance emphasized social dance, improvisation, collective joy, and resilience. Conceived by Miguel Vazquez, Health Equity Urban and Regional Planner for Riverside University Health System, and Brittany Delany, this event was part of a mobile workshop held during the American Planning Association’s 2024 California Chapter Annual Conference ‘Cultivating Our Future.’

Co-founded by Sarah Ashkin and Brittany Delany in 2012, GROUND SERIES is a dance and social justice collective. Their mission is to use performance to practice place-based justice, with accountability to history, land, and body. GROUND SERIES performances use post-modern dance, clowning, performance art, interdisciplinary scholarship, and social practice to diagram the complexities of our social political moment. The works are tender, relentless, funny, compositionally dense, and honor discomfort and failure. GROUND SERIES was developed somewhere between a national park, a living room, and a community performing arts center. These fields of belonging share a love of the outdoors, a love of hospitality, and a love of creative exchange. Grounding embraced these fields of belonging and engaged the practice of planning.

What is planning? The American Planning Association (APA), the largest association in North America intended to elevate and unite a diverse planning profession, offers a few definitions:

• Planners help government officials, business leaders, and citizens create communities that offer better choices for where and how people work and live.
• Planning is a collaborative, dynamic field that offers the chance to really make a difference in the communities you care about.

Using a “planning toolkit,” planners often:

• help communities to develop their own vision of the future, preparing plans responsive to shared community objectives.
• analyze qualitative and quantitative information, evaluate and suggest possible solutions to complex problems.
• present recommendations to public officials and citizen groups in a comprehensive and understandable way.

These values and skills provide a framework for how dancers may engage planning practices to strengthen their work and impact. In their site-specific dance projects, GROUND SERIES always has plenty of material to work with because they ask:

• What is the history of this place, and how does it translate into storytelling, character development, and images?
• How do the formal and energetic elements of this place generate our original gestural vocabulary?
• What is the history of bodies of my particular political identity in this place, and how might I abide with those histories living in me through movement, task, or weight study?

Grounding emerged from research in connecting dancers and planners. In 2019, Miguel invited Sarah and Brittany to present their dance-theater duet task at the 2020 APA California Chapter Annual Conference. The conference was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic; however, GROUND SERIES continued to learn about planning. In June 2020, Miguel invited Brittany to co-present at the Americans for the Arts Annual Convention and Public Art & Design Conference for the webinar session ‘Using Arts and Culture to Create Healthy Open Spaces During Recovery.’ Through the summer of 2020, Sarah and Brittany worked with GROUND SERIES member Miles Tokunow and artists Nikesha Breeze, Lazarus Nance Letcher, and MK to present a COVID-19 compliant site-specific production Stages of Tectonic Blackness in New Mexico, which was also streamed live on Instagram and edited into a film. This work tarries with the paralleled processes of dehumanization and extraction, emergence and rebellion, as sustained by Black bodies and rock bodies. Through 2024, Brittany participated in the Planning for Health Equity, Advocacy & Leadership collective and the APA. With Miguel, Brittany helped launch the Arts & Planning Division of APA in collaboration with artists and planners from across the country at the APA’s 2021 National Planning Conference in San Diego, CA. Brittany engaged San Diego-based dance company Continuum Dance Project led by Alyssa Junious, who offered a live dance performance and facilitated interactive social dance for planners with a live DJ. The joyful environment felt special amidst the timing of shutdowns and re-openings due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many had been experiencing a range of isolating conditions from sheltering in place, remote working, masking, and other measures to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. Gathering on the dance floor in person felt so fun! The APA Arts & Planning Division continues to integrate dance into their programming.

Miguel reflects, “When I think about dance and planning, I can clearly see how the actions of orchestrating and choreographing are at the core of the two disciplines…perhaps this is why I gravitated towards the work of GROUND SERIES.” In 2024, Miguel and Brittany revisited the idea of organizing a session that would bring creative movement and dance to the planning conference in Riverside, and found an opportunity to integrate the original concept into a mobile workshop. After discussing the concept with Ken Gutierrez, a planner who presides over the Civil Rights Institute of Inland Southern California, they promptly began to work on a mobile workshop proposal, refining the concept to: How can dance respond to sites and monuments in downtown Riverside that represent the civil rights movement? Once the workshop was confirmed, Brittany reached out to Riverside-based choreographer, dancer, and dance teacher Sue Roginski, who generously gave Brittany an in-depth tour of downtown Riverside, sharing examples of how dancers activated monuments or sites, and providing a rich overview of local artists and key civil rights related community histories. Brittany then met with Miguel for a research day on-site, where they mapped out the mobile workshop route. Miguel, Brittany, Ken, and collaborators Nabeeha Said and Sandy Chandler developed the workshop plan. While Ken and Miguel were focused on crystallizing the educational program, Brittany developed the dance work. With the support of local dancer recommendations from Sue, Brittany engaged four Riverside dancers: Ana Cruz, Crystal Edwards, Edwin Sigüenza, and Aisha Stewart. All brought dynamic talents and artistic backgrounds to the process. Rehearsals consisted of a combination of developing the work on-site and in the dance studio. Brittany balanced several goals in the creative process to fulfill her vision for Grounding:

• Practice democracy in creative decision-making to build trust and ensemble cohesion.
• Make space for joy, play, and resilience through social dances such as salsa, hip-hop, freestyle cypher, and Afro-Brazilian dance techniques.
• Practice contact improvisation, everyday pedestrian gestures of care and connection, and subtle somatic partner studies to highlight the significance of slowing down to listen, rest, and cultivate trust of human touch, breath, and connection.
• Practice building homes in dancemaking: in hugs and rhythms, in offering a place to rest, in witnessing each other, in supporting one another, and offering shade, comfort, and nourishment.

She brought a mix of tools to rehearsal: movement studies, choreography, site-specific dance techniques, historical research, narrative prompts, and music. Rehearsals were documented through video and excerpts were shared via the GROUND SERIES website, e-newsletter, and Instagram posts. After sequencing the choreography into specific sections and into a full performance, Brittany collaborated with Malik Mayne, a Riverside-based composer, to create the accompanying music score. Ana and Aisha led costume design and received in-kind support from the Riverside City College Dance Department. Friends and donors of GROUND SERIES contributed to the project with financial gifts and resources. The organizing team received additional support from staff from the Riverside Main Library and from the Civil Rights Institute of Inland Southern California, volunteer stage manager Lauren Bright, and volunteers from the conference.

The workshop kicked off with Miguel, Brittany, and Ken welcoming participants at the Riverside Convention Center. During the program, guest speakers emphasized the importance of the sites in a historical and cultural context, highlighting a specific civil rights issue and including other issues of interest to planners. First stop was the Harada House with Michiko Yoshimura, President of the Japanese American Citizen League, and Robyn Peterson, Director of the Museum of Riverside. Next, attendees gathered at The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture to learn from Moises Lopez, former Deputy City Manager of the City of Riverside, Drew Oberjuerge, Executive Director of the Riverside Art Museum, and Esther Fernandez, Artistic Director of The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture.

GROUND SERIES offered their first pop-up dance activation outside the museum, where they danced in relationship to the architectural features and established their ensemble in motion. Next, the group gathered at Riverside’s Pedestrian Mall, beginning at the statue of Eliza Tibbets, abolitionist, suffragist, spiritualist, and considered the mother of navel oranges and of California’s orange industry. To honor this legacy as part of their pop-up activation, Brittany and Edwin passed slices of navel orange to participants and then made way for the dancing to begin. Crystal recited the poem from the statue while Ana and Aisha performed a duet around the statue and two trees. The statue titled Sower’s Dream was sculpted in bronze by Guy Angelo Wilson and dedicated on August 5, 2011. The workshop continued down the Pedestrian Mall, with Hon. Phillip Falcone, Council Member of the City of Riverside Ward 1, and Margie Haupt, Deputy Director of the City of Riverside Parks, Recreation and Community Services, leading visits to several statues and monuments. Participants gathered outside City Hall in front of a monument to freedom of speech, where the GROUND SERIES pop-up activation unfolded.

Entering from the ramp, the dancers articulated gestures expressing the quote on display by Benjamin Franklin: “Without Freedom of Thought, There Can Be No Such Thing As Wisdom; And No Such Thing As Public Liberty, Without Freedom of Speech.” Moving in a canon, in unison, in front of the quote and below it, the movers then layered and harmonized vocalizations of key words: freedom, wisdom, liberty, speech. Assembling into a circle, they rhythmically patted their hands against their legs, humming, singing and clap-clap-clapping their song of freedom. Participants continued their journey of listening and learning with City Hall guest speakers Hon. Patricia Lock Dawson, Mayor of the City of Riverside, and Nathan Mustafa, Deputy Director of the City of Riverside Public Works. They joined public community members to see the full performance outside at the Riverside Main Library breezeway. Following the dance, they enjoyed a reception at the Civil Rights Institute of Inland Southern California and viewed the multimedia exhibition “Homegrown Heroes,” featuring 25 oral histories, 27 heroes, and five areas of focus exploring how to advance civil rights in the Inland Southern California region.

GROUND SERIES site-specific performances endeavor to forge relationships between the people making the work, the people experiencing the work, and the places where the work is made. Grounding exemplifies these relationships between dancers and planners. Connecting dance with planning expands the toolkit for creative participation in place-keeping and community-building. Dancers and planners can co-create spaces and solutions to meet urgent and complex community needs. In welcoming more people to imagine and move in relationship to our bodies, lands, and histories, we can reorient ourselves to creativity, connection, and home.

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To learn more, visit www.GroundSeries.org.

Brittany Delany is an artist based in Southern California. Dance helps her make sense of the world. To learn more, visit brittanydelany.weebly.com.