2025 Master of Fine Arts in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis (MFAEIP) Graduate
How can whole-bodied listening, intentional touch, intimacy, and care be cultivated through intergenerational artmaking?
It has been a fantastic journey witnessing em liptow cultivate a responsive approach to collective movement and sound facilitation called thresholding—a creative process borne from personal experiences of grief and loss, and a desire to intertwine distinct movement forms: Contact Improvisation, a partnered dance practice exploring movement through sustained physical contact, and Threshold Singing, a group vocal practice offered at the bedside of those on life’s threshold.
An experiment in blended movement and sound that started with semi-structured, improvisational work sessions with an intergenerational group grew into a communal practice that transformed groups of relative strangers through a shared curiosity about how sound, touch, and dance might support the embodied metabolization of grief. These are crucial questions. And em is a gifted facilitator with unwavering faith in the plural and indeterminate meanings that can emerge from moving and active listening. Thresholding culminated in a public gathering at the Ark, where the ensemble invited outside witness-participants into the experience of moving through loss.
At a moment when threats to collective survival feel omnipresent, em offers us an embodied interdisciplinary and intergenerational care practice through dance that feels absolutely right on time. It has been a pleasure serving as em’s primary advisor, and I look forward to seeing this work continue to blossom.
—Sarah Wilbur, Ph.D., M.F.A.
Associate Professor of the Practice in Dance and Theater Studies
Director of Graduate Studies, Dance
Duke University Dance Program
Grief – personal and collective- wants to move us. Into song and towards the earth. Into each other’s arms and towards other ways of being. Where grief takes us is not always clear, but one thing is certain: we do not travel alone.
Thresholding is an immersive performance and community practice featuring an intergenerational ensemble working with movement and song inspired by Threshold Singing. Threshold Singing is a contemporary practice of accompanying those on the threshold of life and death with song. Grounded in the embodied experience of singing and being sung to, performers weave a threshold song between each other and the audience through an improvised movement score.
Thresholding nurtures intimacy with liminal experiences of loss, change, and death. Instead of running away from or trying to smooth over the reality of personal and collective loss, Thresholding invites us to meet in our grief and consider how we can creatively care for one another.
Throughout the performance, you may choose to connect with an ancestor or a loved one who’s passed. You might reflect on a change or transition you are moving through. Thresholding can also simply be an invitation into presence and embodied listening- with ears, heart, and your whole body. There will be prompts to encourage your own personal experience while being in community with others.
Threshold Singing was started 25 years ago by a group of women in California to creatively accompany the sick and dying. Today there are over 200 choirs, one being the Threshold Singers of the Triangle who serve the Durham-Chapel Hill area. Learn more at www.thresholdchoir.org.
emily liptow (she/they) is multi-disciplinary artist, creative producer, facilitator, and community organizer from the watershed of Lake Erie. Working with movement, voice, and textiles, they create experiences – in the form of performances, rituals, workshops, and gatherings – that weave intergenerational relationships and connection with ecosystems. As a student of change, cycles, and grief, they research how collaborative movement and performance practices nurture cultures of care.
Before starting Duke’s MFA program in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis, emily worked as an independent performance artist and organized the Cleveland Contact Improvisation Jam. Now in Durham NC, em teaches contact improvisation through Living Arts Collective and co-organizes monthly Group Shakes. Their movement practice is shaped by training in contemporary dance forms, physical theater, contact improvisation, Tai Chi, and capoeira.
emily’s performance work has been featured at Borderlight Fringe Festival (2022), Maelstrom Collaborative Arts (2019-2023), Cleveland Public Theatre (2018-2020), and most recently Sanctuary Series in Durham NC (2024). They have a B.S. in industrial and systems engineering from the Ohio State University and a decade of experience working across academic, non-profit, small-business, and grassroots organizations. They have 325+ hours of trauma-informed yoga training and are an active node in networks of mutual aid, wealth redistribution, and land justice.
The Master of Fine Arts in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis (MFAEIP) is a two-year, full-time, terminal degree program grounded in Duke’s interdisciplinary approach. This program encourages research that responds to urgent global issues and joins critical conversations both within and beyond the arts.
