CIRCULATION DESK: On Migration | Jessie Young

CIRCULATION DESK was born out of the need to reimagine dance criticism. Many iconic artists have circulated through Salt Lake City. They leave to live in other places across the nation, but sometimes they also return. The goal is to have conversations across the nation that connect different geographical hubs for experimental dance. This programming is designed to get at the heart of the complex realities that have inspired and questioned artists across the nation.

On Migration

This season we are thinking about migration in its multiplicity of meaning in hopes to honor the complex way artists migrate today. 

• geographically, the mobility of an artist today and the need to travel to work in various places to make a living in dance. 

• thematically over time, how artists’ ideas migrate over a longer span of time.

• even in how artists migrate through different mediums and career paths and how that impacts the field and cultural landscapes.

Each event date will be an hour long, live, virtual conversation with Halie Bahr (editor of loveDANCEmore) and guest artist/s. We look forward to these personal conversations between artists made public. Please tune in to this pilot program of arts journalism.

Jessie Young (Port Angeles, Washington)

Aug. 13, 2026 @ 7:00pm MST

Tickets, suggested $15 with sliding scale/pay what you can options!

Online event is held via Zoom Webinars. Access link will be delivered via email the day before the event.

Jessie Young is a dance artist, choreographer, teacher, and writer whose work is shaped by the dance scenes she has lived within, including Salt Lake City, Chicago, Seattle, and New York, and by her ongoing relationship to the Olympic Peninsula. Moving between Brooklyn and Port Angeles, Washington, on the unceded lands of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, she approaches practice as a way of paying attention, tuning sensation, breath, rhythm, and timing.

Her dancing and teaching grow out of sustained study, collaboration, and exchange with Cynthia Oliver, Abby Zbikowski, Tere O’Connor, Beth Gill, and others. She works with dancers through duration, clarity of effort, and shared attention, inviting practice as a place to build capacity, curiosity, and trust over time. She is currently developing Working Beings, a solo project with Jeanine Durning.

Her work has been presented by The Chocolate Factory, Danspace Project, New York Live Arts, and Links Hall. She is on faculty at the American Dance Festival and is Director of Education & Artistic Engagement at Field Arts & Events Hall in Port Angeles.

Substack: https://substack.com/@jessieyoung
Website: https://jessie-young.com/

Photo by Whitney Browne