DYFIT: 15 Years of Love and Movement!

Dear friends, brave dancers, trusted collaborators, and curious community members:

We are thrilled and humbled to enter our 15th year of practice, and to celebrate it with you!

What began as a four-day experiment in alternative protest has become an ongoing creative contribution to the Twin Cities arts, activist, spiritual, and higher education communities. This coming year, we will feast on the experiences and build on the abundance of 15 years of Don’t You Feel It Too? Will you help support this milestone of public dance and liberation?

Since 2008, Don’t You Feel It Too? has done so much thanks to you. You’ve made possible bringing the liberating practice to:

• Plaza Centenario and Ayeeyo Childcare Center on Lake Street
• the Rondo Community Library
• Twin Cities Pride
• Planned Parenthood
• George Floyd Square
• colleges and universities across the country
• our frozen lakes
• to each other’s front yards
• and many more.

► We’ve partnered with organizations large and small, and with facilitators both local and national – remember when DYFIT and Million Artist Movement teamed up to bring adrienne maree brown in 2019?! 

► We’ve re-committed to racial justice and healing, offering BIPOC Embodied Mindfulness retreats, ongoing BIPOC and White Bodies Practices, and collaborating to invite amazing teachers like Thea Lee and Rev. angel Kyodo williams. 

► We’ve nurtured a cohort of artists who create and move together to understand how DYFIT is a tool for change.

There are many more stories to share. Please enjoy these photos as a small taste of what’s to come. The words were inspired by Marcus Young's poem, Techniques (for dancing as protest) and Gabrielle Civil's essay, Public Mysteries: Don’t You Feel It Too? at the edge of imagining, used by permission of Coffee House Press from the déjà vu, 2022. Enjoy with us a year of reflection, meaning making, and charting the next 15 years with a donation of any amount! 

We are immensely grateful for all of the ways you support DYFIT. Thank you!!

How dare we dance for a thousand more years? What does it mean to feel it too?

- Gabrielle Civil

Peavey Plaza, 2019.

Can you align wildness with your peace and anguish,

lend them to the wide horizon,

and so learn to be natural?

- Marcus Young

Maple Grove, 2021. Photo by Prakshi Malik.

I am insisting on my presence. I am forging belonging. This is activism.
- Gabrielle Civil
Lake Street, 2022. Photo by Prakshi Malik.

--

About Don't You Feel It Too?

Anyone can do it. Don’t You Feel It Too? is a radical and accessible public dance practice of healing, art, and activism. Our work transforms peoples’ relationships to their bodies, the land, and our histories through whole-self, participatory art experiences. We practice embodied bravery to engage in social change.