In 2022, Michelle Dorrance and Ephrat Asherie premiered a short duet called a little room, which was expanded into the first iteration of The Center Will Not Hold at New York City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival. Further developed into an evening-length work in 2025, this dance engages the expressive capabilities of footwork-driven and percussive dance practices to convey emotion and share a narrative in abstract terms. As Pillow Scholar-in-Residence Maura Keefe noted, “It includes an array of vernacular dance practices, all rooted in the African diaspora and grown in the United States.” Although it was very much created collectively by artists with their own Pillow histories, it was primarily led by both Dorrance and Asherie, whose deep Pillow connections include Dorrance Dance’s site-specific Ways to Now and Asherie’s Pillow-commissioned Odeon.
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