What do we owe to others? How do movements build strength? When language fails, what knowledge remains inside the body?
On Friday and Saturday, March 20 and 21, Christopher J. Salango and Lorraine “Rain” Stippec will explore these themes and more as part of WashU’s 2026 MFA Dance Concert.
The free evening-length performance, which takes place in Edison Theatre, is presented by the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences. It highlights new and original works by second-year candidates in the Master of Fine Arts in Dance program.
The concert will open with with Salango’s “Kapwa: Jukebox Rebolusyon!” A former member of Tony Nguyen’s TwoPoint4 Dance Theater, Bernard Brown’s BBmoves and Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence, Salango was inspired by the histories of Filipino farmworkers in the United States. This seven-part work for nine dancers honors the 1965 Delano grape strike, which played a key role in launching the farm workers movement in California.
The piece also explores the concept of kapwa. With deep roots in Filipino culture and psychology, kapwa refers to a shared sense of self, to physical and emotional community, and to the moral obligations we owe fellow human beings.
“Through a series of episodic scenes, the work reflects on the discipline required to build collective power and the enduring ties that connect diaspora to home,” Salango writes in his program note. “Images of labor, ritual and memory — tsinellas, balikbayan boxes and moments of communal gathering — trace the emotional and cultural landscapes carried across generations.”
The concert will continue with Stippec’s “Trauma’s Tapestry.” As a professional dancer, Stippec toured China with hip-hop group The Famous Crew and performed with The Muny, the Fabulous Fox Theatre Tellerettes and many others. But after a random shooting in 2017 left her severely wounded, she also emerged as a nationally recognized advocate for survivors of gun violence.
“Trauma’s Tapestry” is a five-part work for 11 dancers, including members of the acclaimed Mostly Tap with STL Rhythm Collaborative, where Stippec serves as a guest performer and former director of pre-professional student programs. The piece explores how traumatic events, even and perhaps especially those that the mind cannot fully articulate, impact breath, muscle, pulse and other physiological systems.
“The work understands all bodily rhythms as survival — organizing chaos, summoning memory and insisting on presence,” Stippec writes in her program note. “Resilience takes visible form as movement, imagery and sound converge in an embodied practice of returning — again and again — to aliveness.”
Performances
The MFA Dance Concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, March 20 and 21, in WashU’s Edison Theatre. Performances are free and open to the public. Edison Theatre is located in the Mallinckrodt Student Center, 6465 Forsyth Blvd. For more information, call 314-935-6543 or visit pad.wustl.edu.
