BeMoved®

BeMoved® is a dance experience designed to inspire anyone from first-time dancers to professionals to embrace dance as a lifelong means to health, joy, and fulfillment.  See BeMovedDance.com to learn more.

Artist Bio

Jennifer Edgcomb is a Certified Artistry Level BeMoved® Instructor and has been sharing the BeMoved experience since 2014. Jennifer holds a BFA with high honors in Dance from the University of Illinois and has worked as a dancer, actress, teacher and choreographer. She’s taught jazz, modern, tap, ballet, creative movement and the joy of dance for over 20 years. Jennifer is an avid supporter and advocate of concert dance and served on the board of Luna Negra Dance Theater for 5 years. She is now a proud board member of Lucky Plush Productions, a Chicago based dance-theater company, and Co-Chair of the Auditorium Theatre’s Dance Partners. While dance has always been a passion for Jennifer, she has a 'day job' at a Chicago-based real estate investment firm.

Pilates, Stretch, and Strengthening

Build strength and stability through the core and increase flexibility.  Through exercises that focus on the 6 principles of Pilates (control, centering, concentration, precision, breath, and flow) to maintain a healthy body.

Artist Bio

Nicole Betts was first introduced to Pilates in 1996 and was certified through Romana’s Pilates in 2004.  She earned a BFA in Dance from Barat College in 1999 and went on to perform with Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre, Toured Europe with LaTour productions, and worked with numerous independent choreographers and projects in Chicago.  Nicole currently enjoys teaching Pilates classes and private clients in studio at Common Conservatory and Ruth Page Center as well as online.

Intermediate Yoga

This class is great for those with an established movement practice and accurate self assessment. We will work into more dynamic movements and postures that challenge balance and endurance. We will build the breath to move gracefully with the challenges as we work on functional movement and meditation practices for enhanced strength and flexibility for the body and mind! 

Artist Bio

Creatrix, God/dess, Divine Embodiment, Mama A. Raheim White is an experience. Their passion for dance led them to earn their MFA from New York University Tisch School of the Arts and BFA from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, both in dance performance and choreography. As a healer, Raheim is a Reiki Master-Teacher, Akashic Record Reader, 200-hr Certified Yoga Instructor, and Social-Emotional Learning Facilitator. As the Founder and Creative Designer of RahCrystals, Mama Raheim handmakes crystal healing adornments designed with the individual in mind. Raheim’s intention is to help facilitate healing through movement, meditation, and mindfulness with love and joy.

Fitness Dance Jam

Jacinda Ratcliffe Emily Soong

Join us in our 30-min Fitness Dance Jam. You will be guided through a 30 min improvisation, encouraged to say YES to your own impulses and explore familiar & uncharted territory through your own movement practice. This time is what you need it to be- a dance party, a workout routine, time to just be with other people. Open to people of all levels & abilities.

Artist Bio

Jacinda Ratcliffe is a dancer, actor, and choreographer who has been working in Chicago since graduating from Northwestern University. She is a company dancer with Winifred Haun & Dancers as well as an ensemble member with Lucky Plush Productions, where she has originated roles in Curb Candy and Rink Life.

She has also worked as a performer, choreographer, and devising collaborator on immersive theater productions including in roles such as Lucifer in Striding Lion Performance Group’s production of The Great and Terrible Doctor Faustus and the title role in Frankenstein AI: A Monster Made By Many, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2018. Her recent choreographic credits include The Ode at Pint's End with Birch House Immersive Theater as well as the Jeff Award nominated production of Mlima's Tale with Griffin Theatre. She is on faculty at the Actor's Gymnasium and sits on the Board of Directors of Chicago Movement Collective. She is represented by Lily's Talent.

Emily Soong - Bio coming soon!

Following Nature: Dance IT with Tensegrity

We often notice that our minds and bodies sway like tree branches, or like the wind. In our bodies, there are many common elements, forms, and functions which humans draw from nature– because we are nature. Find elements of nature moving through your grounded and centered body. Integrate your tangible and visible aligned body to internally and externally weave the intangible and invisible flow of air and energy as a conduit between heaven and earth. Through somatic exercises based on PNF and myofascial release as well as improvisational and compositional creative exercises, Ayako will guide you to perceive dance as the art of being, gaining further freedom by letting go.

Artist Bio

Called “moving everyday sculptures, artfully cast in naturalness” (Luzerner Zeitung, Switzerland), Ayako Kato established her dance company Ayako Kato/Art Union Humanscape in 1998 and has been active as a choreographer, dancer, educator, and curator. She has created work through interdisciplinary collaborations with more than sixty musician-composers, and has toured throughout the US, Japan, and Europe. Most recently, she received the Best of Dance 2020 in SeeChicagoDance and the High Concept Labs Fellowship. She is also a recipient of: Links Hall Co-MISSION Fellowship; residencies at Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California (2021) and Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France (2018) through the 3Arts Residency Fellowships; a 3Arts Award (2016); the Meier Achievement Award; and a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist Award. She has received recognition for her work as "Best of Dance" by the Chicago Tribune and as one of “Fifty People Who Really Perform For Chicago” by NewCity (2014, 2018, 2020). The company has received funding from the Reva & David Logan Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, The Japan Foundation, The Puffin Foundation, Illinois Arts Council Agency, Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE), the Chicago Dancemakers Forum, Experimental Sound Studio, and Links Hall.

Kato's current project is “Inception: ETHOS Episode II" from the trilogy. Recent projects include "To the Shore: ETHOS Episode I,” a promenade performance from the Colvin House to Thorndale Beach as part of the Pivot Arts Festival 2019; "Just being," a solo performance at Steelworkers Park in South Chicago, premiered as a film as part of Bridge Dance Festival 2020 curated by Rika Lin and Links Hall; a site-responsive performance with pianist Mabel Kwan for Edra Soto’s “Screenhouse” at Boeing Gallery North, a public art commission of the Millennium Park Foundation and produced with the Arts Administration and Policy program of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and the 30th Anniversary Winter Solstice concert by Michael Zerang and Hamid Drake, two of the world’s leading percussionists, presented at Constellation in 2020. Her essay on improvisation, "'Art of Being' through Emptiness," will be published as part of Worlding Bodies by the Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College, directed by Susan Sgorbati.

Since 2010, Kato has been an artist in residence at the Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Theater under Chicago Moving Company's Dance Shelter Program. She has been studying dance anatomy under Irene Dowd since 2007. In addition to classical ballet and modern dance, she also studied Tai Chi, Noh Theater, and Butoh with master Kazuo Ohno, one of the founders. She holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Michigan and a certificate from the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance of Wesleyan University.