A Decade of Dance;
Vermont Dance Alliance 2026 Gala
September 26, 2026
6:00 and 8:00 PM
Montpelier Performing Arts Chapel
36 College Street, Montpelier, VT, 05602
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Standard Tickets - 25$
Supporter Tickets - 35$
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Standard Tickets - 25$
Supporter Tickets - 35$
Come join us for our annual gala-this year celebrating a decade of Vermont Dance Alliance! Enjoy a beverage by Spoonful Herbals, share your favorite memories of VDA with friends, and watch excerpts of five dances developed through our Choreographer’s Seed Micro-Grant program!
Proceeds and donations from this event will support our programming and goals for the next ten years of VDA.
Take a look at the projects being presented, get your tickets, and scroll through some of the photos below full of Vermont Dance Alliance history!!
Choreographer's Seed 2026 Cohort
$1,000 Recipient
Hanna Satterlee- ANIMAL Dance
Caitlin Morgan
“Wind and Unwinding” explores humans’ interventionist relationship with our ecosystem: an internal war between the intellectual desire to control our surroundings and a fundamentally animal urge to surrender to the imperfect, sometimes violent, and nonetheless beautiful wildness that surrounds us. Drawing inspiration from mosh pits, sacred geometry, and architectural evolution, this entropic mirror of the human condition invites the audience to see where care accompanies chaos, the blurry edge between nature and Nature, and to feel their full spectrum of emotions—both individually and collectively.
Caitlin Morgan is a Burlington-based creative, interested in flow-state embodiment as a means of eliciting nuanced, collective understanding and alchemical impact. Her choreography; inspired by ecosomatics, communication theories, and postmodernism; has been featured across New York, Vermont, Ohio, and Michigan. Around a perpetual movement research practice, Caitlin edits (and reads) novels, performs with other local makers, and facilitates dance and yoga classes at Lines Vermont, Studio 3, and Sangha Studio.
Kat Coyne
Kat’s piece researches ideas of bodily autonomy and creative property ownership in the context of an AI age. How do we protect our bodies from artificial replication, our ideas from intellectual property theft? It is an exploration into the systems of power and social culture that define how we interact with ourselves and each other.
Kat is a dance artist originally from the Boston area. She is a 2025 graduate of the UVM dance program and currently an Instructor at Lines Vermont in South Burlington. Her creative focus is in fostering radically accepting and accessible dance spaces and exploring power and control, creative freedom, technology ethics, and queer feminism as it relates to the dancer.
As director of ANIMAL Dance, Hanna Satterlee has been commissioned by Middlebury Dance Department Professor and dance artist Kari Wolfe Borni to choreograph a new section for a unique performance she is creating and producing inside her horse barn, in Shoreham VT, set for October 15th and 17th 2026. This commission is a years-long conversation that is finally coming to fruition.
Thanks to the support of VDA, Hanna will use the VDA Micro-Grant to establish a May-September rehearsal schedule with a new company of dancers to create and set the choreography for this commission. Joining them on this creative journey are Vermont dance artists Sarah Vogelsang-Card, Mia Makarski, Maggie Maury and Maura Gahan, each of whom bring a captivating and daring presence to the stage. Music will be a DJ mix by noltron, sourcing tracks Hanna has been dancing to for the last four months as new ideas have been percolating for this specific piece.
The title for this new work is “Future Nostalgia,” nodding to two ideas: that there will be a time when we viscerally miss what is happening now, and there will be a time when we wish we could tell our past selves of the good that will come out of their current hardship. “Future Nostalgia” will touch on the concept of being in a specific and tenuous moment, with five sides of one character in dialogue, each dancer representing one of five voices within the self.
The opportunity to perform the work on the Gala’s indoor stage, prior to the dirt floor stage of the Horse Barn, will give the work a unique chance to be celebrated by an audience at the tails of its completion, leaving the mystery of how the site-specific elements will enhance and change the work.
The section by ANIMAL Dance will not be danced with horses in the space, but will be a dance/theater story mixing story and character with the embodied nonverbal vocabulary that relates how physical language is shared between species.
$500 Recipients
Jennifer Daniels
Through this residency, Jen aims to expand the Talking with Strangers series by developing Conversations 4, 5, and 6, etc., inviting additional dancers into the process and exploring new collaborative dynamics. The work investigates how communication, curiosity, and vulnerability unfold when artists engage with one another as “strangers,” allowing the creative process itself to become a form of dialogue.
Jen is a lifelong dancer whose creative practice is informed by more than four decades of movement, community engagement, and interdisciplinary work. Alongside her artistic pursuits, she is a landscape architect, facilitator of dialogues in conflict transformation, leadership, and social justice, and co-founder of her family’s hemp farming and product manufacturing business. Her work has been shaped by experiences across the southwestern and northeastern United States and throughout Russia, where relationship-centered collaboration and productive landscapes informed her approach to creativity, leadership, and advocacy. As both an artist and practitioner in the healing arts, Jen brings a thoughtful, community-driven perspective to her dance, facilitation, and design practices.
Melisa Clark
Melisa will be presenting new portions of Shimmers, and will bring her three daughters into the dance, inviting them to participate in the creation of movement vocabulary, mask making, audio recording, and overall development. Multiple masks will be worn and changed throughout the dance performance. In the changing of the mask, there is a transition and transformation taking place. Shifting fields, underlying currents, and overlapping realities explore a dreamlike state with a glimpse of deep shadows.
PIMA Group co-founder and Artistic Director Melisa Putz Clark is a dancer, choreographer, educator, and certified yoga instructor based in Southern Vermont. Her work integrates dance, developmental movement research, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Through PIMA Group, founded in 2001, she has created and presented performances nationally and internationally at venues including the Joyce SoHo, 92nd Street Y, and the National Center for Dance Bucharest.
10 Years of Dance with VDA
It’s difficult to imagine the bewildering emptiness of a world without art. Art gives us so much: a healing sense of awe; revelations about ourselves and the world that we couldn’t otherwise articulate; new perspectives. It helps us define our values, and it can be a historical artifact reflecting our civilization.
We get inestimable value from art. Yet, artists are still largely expected to create at their own personal sacrifice. This remains the experience of most dance artists in Vermont.
VDA was created and developed with this in mind-and to create alternate pathways that allow dancers in Vermont viable pathways to create, develop, and share their art. To see some of the ways we have helped fill the gaps and take creating dance from an act of sacrifice to a fulfilling journey for artists, take a look at some of the photos below!
If you feel so called, we invite you share some of how VDA has impacted your dance journey to info@vermontdance.org or by posting on social media and tagging us!
Help Us Take the Next Step
As we celebrate 10 years of VDA, we invite you to help us invest in the next ten.
Whether you are a dancer, artist, educator, audience member, supporter, or simply someone who believes that art and movement make our communities stronger, your gift helps keep dance moving forward in Vermont.
Together, we can continue creating opportunities for artists to be paid for their craft, supporting new work, bringing dance to communities across the state, and ensuring that more Vermonters can experience the power of dance.
Give today and help us take a bold leap into the next decade of dance.
Thank you for believing in Vermont’s dance artists and for being part of the VDA community. We couldn’t do this work without you. General donations undergird our day-to-day work supporting and connecting artists across the state and increasing public awareness about the importance of dance in Vermont.
Thank you to all who donate, and to the following organizations and partners who have made our micro-grants and gala possible!
