Bridge Street Theatre in Catskill is once again throwing its doors wide open to what it does best: making a stage into a crucible. On Saturday, June 21, local movement artist and choreographer Francesca Avani returns for the eighth annual installment of her Bridge Street Dance series, this time with reclaiming, an evening-length exploration of healing, transformation, and sweaty, sinewy storytelling through the body.
This is not dance for dance’s sake. It’s movement as invocation. “Reclaiming” isn’t so much a performance as it is an exorcism—one that trades spectacle for sincerity and choreographic dazzle for embodied truth. “Dance allows us to reconnect with the body as a site of agency, expression, and truth—especially in a world that often teaches us to disconnect from it,” says Avani. “In reclaiming our voice, we give form to what’s been hidden or unheard, transforming pain, memory, and desire into movement.”
Each year, Avani gathers a cohort of dancers and movement artists to collectively burrow into a theme. This year’s is reclamation: of voice, of self, of agency. Think grief and awe doing a slow tango. Think old selves being shrugged off like worn-out coats.
Styles span the spectrum—from fusion belly dance to freestyle waving—but technical virtuosity is only half the point. These dancers are selected less for their lines than for their ability to carve open a story and bleed it honestly. The evening also features returning artist Jesse Sykes, a Vegas-based dynamo with Cirque du Soleil cred and a style so hypnotic it might qualify as legally actionable. Sykes has spent years teaching and performing globally, and this is one of those “catch-him-before-you-Google-him” moments. Other performers include Minh Nguyen; Angela Josephine; The Gerudo Vagrants; Arcadia, Laura Scarlett;
Inez and Rose; Violet Kind, Jessi Turner, and Abby Daleki; Cult of Yes; Arcadia and Francesca; and poet Alysia Quinn.
Throughout, spoken word interludes punctuate the program like deep breaths, offering the audience a linguistic foothold amid the flood of movement. The themes—resistance, grief, tenderness—don’t unfold in neat progressions but spiral in on themselves, much like healing does. And much like the title insists, reclaiming isn’t tidy. It’s raw. It stumbles. It reaches.
“Movement can be both a mirror and a doorway,” Avani says, and the night is set up to be both. Audience members will be asked to do more than clap—they’ll be asked to listen. Not to plot or narrative, but to the subtle truths the body tells when it stops trying to be polite.
“Reclaiming” happens for one night only—Saturday, June 21 at 7pm—at Bridge Street Theatre in Catskill. Tickets are $30.
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This article appears in June 2025.
