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Dancing back together
Philadelphia Dance Project’s Dance Up Close presents new works by Curt Haworth and Tammy Carrasco
Camille Bacon-Smith
Philadelphia Dance Project opens its 29th season with Dance Up Close on March 18 and 19 at Christ Church Neighborhood House with choreographers Curt Haworth and Tammy Carrasco. According to PDP executive director Terry Fox, Haworth’s Imperfect Circles is “trying to meditate, or reflect on the temper of the times, fractured by upheaval.” It’s about connections, and Fox said his dancers will be creating circles and breaking them again, showing the fractures in our own social circles. Choreographer Tammy Carrasco’s duet, a creature of the garden and cellar, expresses inner life as a house that can give shelter but can also become confining, until the dancers escape to the world outside in a garden.
We’ll be seeing some familiar dancers: Chloe Marie, who dances with Tamar Gutherz in Carrasco’s duet, caught my eye in Lily Kind’s I’ve got a tape I wanna play for PDP, and then did an event of her own choreography with Carrasco as one of the dancers. Dancers such as Kaliani Sood in Haworth’s piece have appeared in other PDP performances as well. So I asked about the dance community that PDP seems to be a part of. Fox said that she loves all the artists she brings in, wherever they call home, but added that in some ways the local community came as a surprise to her. “I’ve seen Tammy Carrasco, as an example, in other people’s work, and I saw a trio that she [choreographed] for Philly Dance Share, an open studio.” That trio led to the new duet.
“So yeah, there is a community,” she agreed, thinking about the question a bit. “Paige Phillips put together the Queen event, and it was fun to see everybody come together and dance to this song, and you really felt a solidarity within that community. And I found that when I was in New York at Danspace Project [Fox was director from 1984-1989], the same kind of phenomenon on the Lower East Side.”
That ferment of emerging artists in the Philadelphia dance community is under threat, however. PDP received one of the last Creative Sector Flex Fund grants: that program has been replaced by an initiative called Creative Industries, wiping out whole programs in areas like folk and traditional arts. The new program grants funds only to organizations with a minimum budget of $100,000 two years in a row. And Fox told me that organizations will no longer receive grants for operating expenses, the most underfunded cost of keeping arts organizations afloat. Except for a handful of big companies, she said, most of the dance community will be left out in the cold. “No one emerges with a $100,000 dollar budget for two years, so you just cancelled out a whole generation of emerging artists and art and cultural organizations.”
There just aren’t enough private donors to make up the difference, so she’s asking people to write letters to their state representatives and the Council on the Arts. And it may not be enough, but the arts won’t survive at all unless we vote with our butts, putting them in theater seats in grand halls and on folding chairs in church halls, wherever performances happen.
What, When, Where
Philadelphia Dance Projects presents Imperfect Circles, choreographed by Curt Haworth, and a creature of the garden and cellar, by Tammy Carrasco. $15. March 18-19, 2026 at Christ Church Neighborhood House, 20 N. American Street, Philadelphia. (215) 546-2552 or philadanceprojects.org.
Accessibility
Christ Church Neighborhood House is a wheelchair-accessible venue, but the cobblestones outside the entrance may be difficult to navigate. There is a ramp over the curb at the entrance.
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