Veterans Pete Ramsey and Curtis Waddell join Black Box Dance Theatre’s Stephan Emanuel and Steven James Rodriguez Velez in rehearsal for PATRIOT performance
The Wortham Center for the Performing Arts will premiere We Lift Each Other at 7 p.m. on Monday, November 10. The documentary film, part of the national I Feel Myself to be Part of Something series, spotlights the North Carolina–based Black Box Dance Theatre and its collaboration with Asheville veterans during the summer of 2023. The event will include a post-screening discussion with the filmmakers, dancers and veterans featured in the project.
The film traces the company’s long relationship with the Asheville community, which began in 2001 when the city participated in The Hallelujah Project, a national initiative led by choreographer Liz Lerman. During that project, Michelle Pearson, then a company member with Lerman’s Dance Exchange and now artistic director of Black Box Dance Theatre, spent a year creating a performance with local residents.
“As a lead artist with Liz Lerman’s Dance Exchange, I had the opportunity to meet and dance with all sorts of groups in Asheville,” says Pearson. “Two stand-out groups, dancers from UNCA and the local professional community, brought positive energy, big/bold dancing and insightful artistry to the creation of this new work.” She also recalls a group of women who were lace makers, one of whom described her craft as “weaving air and light,” a phrase Pearson loved. “The thread was just the structure so we could see what was normally invisible,” she says. “I think of dances that way. The bodies moving allow us to see something that may have gone unnoticed.”
Pearson and her company have maintained deep ties to Asheville. “Asheville has always been a place where the arts and community are deeply intertwined,” Pearson says. “Today we have ongoing partnerships with Steve Henderson, Brothers and Sisters Like These, and veterans who hold big passion for the outcomes and hope this work offers.”
Her process for creating choreography rooted in personal experience begins with attentive listening. “Listening not for answers,” Pearson says, “but for what questions may be meaningful to consider. Whether I’m working with veterans, students or community members, I try to hold space for the rawness of their stories without rushing to shape them into art too quickly. My job as a choreographer is not to retell someone else’s life but to translate their truth into a physical language that honors its complexity.”
When filmmaker Lou Pepe reached out to learn more about Black Box Dance Theatre, Pearson says she told him the work was “just something that needed to be witnessed.” After Pepe attended workshops at Fort Bragg, he expressed a desire to tell the company’s story through film. Wortham was the natural choice for the premiere screening of We Lift Each Other. “The Wortham Center holds a very special place in our story—it’s where we first performed the PATRIOT project, and the veterans from Brothers and Sisters Like These committed themselves wholeheartedly to the work,” Pearson says.
Pearson hopes the film will inspire audiences to consider the role of creativity in connection and healing. “I hope audiences recognize how powerfully the arts—and especially dance—can build community,” Pearson says. “My hope is that audiences leave the premiere inspired by the idea that healing and belonging are possible when we create together, and that they feel moved to imagine what might be built in their own communities through the shared experience of art.”
The Wortham Center for the Performing Arts is located at 18 Biltmore Avenue in downtown Asheville. To learn more, visit WorthamArts.org or call 828.257.4530.
