Judy Dworin Performance Project

Moving for Change Since 1989.

JDPP is...resilience

The pandemic has challenged us all to the very core. JDPP was no different—we could no longer rehearse in person or meet our program participants in schools and prisons. How could we delve into and share the lifesaving terrain of the arts and performance in these circumstances? How could we dance together on Zoom? How could we keep a performance residency alive in a prison through correspondence? How could we keep kids in schools engaging in movement and the arts as well as the moms and dads and their families that we work with who are separated by incarceration?

In each case we found a way and learned what it could provide—how it could grow our resources, our reach, and our ways of doing things. And so JDPP expanded—including virtual programming in schools as well as sharing rehearsals, open rehearsals, and performances on Zoom; establishing a new virtual platform for JDPP artists of color, presenting dances on film; designing performances for outdoors; and creating booklets for families and their loved ones in prison keeping them connected through artistic expression.

Since 1989 JDPP has lived out the radically simple idea that the arts enhance our lives in vitally important ways, holding communities together in times of challenge and upheaval and circumventing barriers, silence, and oppression. We continue to carry this critical mission forward into the future.