Get ready to shake your groove thing because we’re diving into the Pittsburgh Fringe Festival with our pals from the Crossing Paths Movement Collective! On March 27th and 28th, at 7 PM sharp, they’ll be taking over the Attack Theatre Studios, and trust me, you don’t want to miss this. This year’s lineup is all about dance and physical theatre, showcasing some seriously talented local artists and their diverse perspectives. Not only are they bringing together incredible performances, but they’re also premiering new work that’s headed for Japan—how cool is that? So, grab your tickets for just 20 bucks at pittsburghfringe.org, and let’s support those local artists while we soak up an unforgettable night of movement, emotion, and maybe a few tears (or laughs!).

Company: Crossing Paths Movement Collective

Date(s): March 27, 2026 - March 28, 2026

Time(s): 7:00 pm

Genre: Dance & Physical Theatre

Venue: Attack Theatre Studios - Main Studio

https://pittsburghfringe.org/events/pittsburgh-fringe-dana-movement-ensemble-presentscrossing-paths-movement-collective/

Mentioned in this episode:

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Well, that music means it's time for another episode of Just Can't Not.

I'm your host, Chris Lindstrom, and this is part of our preview for the Pittsburgh Fringe Festival.

I know this is outside of the typical Rochester and surrounding area content that you know and love, but the Fringe is universal.

And we're thrilled to partner with the Pittsburgh team for their 13th year running from March 19th to the 28th.

To learn more about all of the shows and get Tickets, go to pittsburghfringe.org Tickets cap out at $20 per event, and an entire event passes only 150.

So make sure to get your tickets today and join the action over on Pen Ave. And I have a guest guest, why don't you introduce yourself?

Hello, my name is Nick Daniels.

I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and my company is the Dana Movement Ensemble.

And we are presenting three other great companies from the DMV and Eastern Pennsylvania.

That's awesome.

And we are called the Crossing.

Oh, I'm so sorry.

Oh, you're all good.

And looks like the events are over on March 27th and.

And March 28th at the Attack Theater Studios.

And tickets are $20 on pittsburghfrench.org Absolutely.

So why don't you tell me about.

About your.

About your group and how you're bringing in other.

Other people to the Pittsburgh area for Fringe.

So this is actually our second time performing at the Pittsburgh Fringe as a group, and we're just a group of friends.

Actually, we're not even just friends.

All love, respect each other's work and just love being around each other.

And that was.

We just kept crossing paths and like I met Malcolm and why we saw each other in Bethlehem.

Sarah Carlson from Bethlehem is connected with Jessica from Stacey Pearl's dance company.

And so all these paths just started crossing and we decided that we would name our performances Crossing Paths Movement Collective.

So that way it's recognizable and everybody's work is different.

We all have different points of view, but guaranteed you're going to come out thinking in a different way.

And it's my work, it's more performance art.

And we have beautiful work by Sarah Carlson, who does interplay and other things like that.

And then we have Human dance, Human Landscapes dance from Baltimore and Washington D.C. and they just do wonderful, wonderful contact improv and balancing their.

Your work is just incredible to me.

Malcolm Xu is wonderful and a master of his craft.

So.

And then we have.

Oops, sorry.

No, you're all good.

Go ahead, please.

And then we also have Stacey Clayton, Stacy, Yvonne Claytor and She's actually performing.

Her group is performing one of my new pieces and they will actually be touring that in Japan later on in the year.

How cool is that?

I'm pretty excited.

I can't hide it.

So I'm intrigued.

So dance is something like when it comes to performing arts.

It's one of the things I probably know least about.

When you, when you first started getting into dance, how old were you and what was about it that grabbed you that you needed to do this?

So I was crazy, meaning I would just jump, flip, do all the crazy stuff as a child and.

But I really fell in love with like figure skating.

I was very, very gay as a child.

Spinning around, twirling around.

I would put socks on and spray pledge on the floor and I would figure skate, figure skate in my room until my mother slipped one day coming in from church.

So that little antics stopped.

However, the movement and all that really started with me from a young age going into high school with musicals and training in different dance styles.

Michael Jackson was a really big thing.

Everybody wanted to be move like Michael Jackson.

My work is really, really different from that.

Now I gravitate more towards buto and blend of hip hop.

So I call it Black Buto.

And so I'm really excited because I'll get to show that in Japan.

So I'm really looking forward to it.

Can you explain here at Pittsburgh Bridge, can you explain what butoh is?

So buto came out of Japan and it's a like a Japanese expressionistic, very just emotional, slow moving art form.

It's just, it's really stunning.

I fell in love with it.

Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and Pittsburgh Dance Council back In the early 90s, late 80s brought a group in Senkai Juku and I became really, really just interested and fascinated with their work.

And this was before Internet.

So if you wanted, if you were interested about something, you had to go research the company and then you have to go find the company and study with them.

And I was just lucky that they did residencies and things like that in New York.

Yeah.

And that was where I got bitten by the buto bug.

And then I was just like, well I don't want to just stop here because I'm not Japanese.

That's not my culture.

However, the movement is beautiful.

In studying how can I take this movement and these expressions and make them my own?

And being a black queer artist, this, this served for my work in my work in social justice and things like that.

So well, yeah.

And I, I find it really interesting.

So I search So I just do.

I just did a quick search for it, and one of the first things that popped up was this description is that the creators sought to express the trauma of war, social change, and the search for identity in a changing Japan.

Buto is therefore not just a dance.

It is an artistic revolt, a silent cry that seeks to transcend conventions and reconnect the individual individual with his true essence.

I mean, that.

That's a powerful.

That's a powerful sentence, right?

That's a powerful idea.

And it also seems that, you know, as not to date you too much, but as somebody who is done dance for probably a hot minute, it seems like it also allows expressionistic dance.

But it doesn't have to be the biggest, most athletic thing.

It can be dance as pure expression of the journey and that whole thing.

How do you reconcile that with, you know, I mean, there's so many different kinds of dance that has to feel kind of special, to have something that has so much meaning and that you can perform longer in your career as Da in, you know, doing dance.

So it's as physical as you make it.

Yeah, for me, because like I said, Buto's just a small part of what I do.

It's kind of the heart of what I do.

But I also incorporate a lot of beautiful movement from Africa, Indian movement, actually, as I sit here, I was just playing with my new bells that I just got today from Amazon.

So I'm really, really excited about that.

But, yeah, so my work is already rooted in social justice and emotion that is the basis of my work.

And that's why I feel like it's befitting with Buto.

And it's just refreshing.

It's interesting because I do a lot of festivals, so usually with the tech aspect of my work, I usually am either at the beginning of the program or so they can get me on and off really quickly, or at the ending of the program, so they can just leave the set there.

But it's just.

It's really interesting to see the juxtaposition of my work against some of the more balletic and more, I'll say, dancier things.

But, yeah, it's a thing.

And that's just my work.

And I set that piece on Stacy's company, and it kind of delves into the.

Definitely the emotion of Buto.

And it's interesting because Malcolm Shute, and he has a little basis of Buto in his contact improv as well.

So it's just a really diverse, beautiful show.

Sarah Carlson, she has a solo that she's doing.

It's called Imaging Her.

It is one of the most.

It's just so compelling.

It's one of my favorite dances of all dances I've seen, and I've seen a lot of dance, and Sarah Coulson is bringing that solo here.

It is really basically the experience of having a mammogram.

And I mean, the sounds, it just.

It's so deliciously uncomfortable.

It's.

I cannot wait for Pittsburgh audiences to see this work.

When curating this show and talking to the dancers about what they wanted to bring, I really was just like, we want to make sure that we are being truly authentic to what we do, because that's why you're here.

I want Pittsburgh to see this movement and enjoy these themes that were in the emotion that we bring out.

So.

Yeah, well.

And I find that really interesting that you brought up discomfort that, you know, sometimes the.

Sometimes performances can bring discomfort and not just not joy.

It can be discomfortable.

It can be.

Can be thought provoking.

It can be disturbing sometimes.

It should be.

Yeah.

So I was going to say, how do you.

How do you.

When you're.

When you're working through that or you're curating a whole show, do you think about balance and ups and downs?

Do you focus on a theme?

How do you curate a show like this?

When you're thinking about the entirety of the experience, do you search out discomfort as the core?

Do you find it a, you know, a journey, like a.

You know, like a tasting menu?

And you're going up and down.

How do you like to do that?

So with crossing paths, the whole thing, like I said, it started back in.

In the days of the pandemic, where we wanted to, you know, bring back live performances and get people satiate that need for live performance and live dance, live performance art.

So when I'm curating these things, it's more than.

It's just.

I want the people who I choose to.

To do what they do because I pick them because they do what they do.

Like, I couldn't see anybody else doing imaging her by Sarah Carlson because it's her.

And that's what makes it what it is, my work.

I do what I do because I do it.

Yeah.

And so we.

That's what.

That's what we're bringing to the table.

And I don't.

I want people, if they've never been to a dance concert before, this may be the one that they want to come to, because there is something.

Everybody's going to.

Everybody's going to get Something from it because it's intergenerational.

It's very, very diverse.

We have women, we have men, women, we have queer, we have gender non conforming, we have Asian, we have, you know, it is a melting pot of movement and soul and emotion.

Yeah.

When you.

And to me, that sounds like, that sounds like fringe to me.

Right.

Where all of these performers get to get to do that true expression.

And I love that audiences, you know, at Fringe tend to want to want to experience that, that truth.

And I think the varying, the varying angles of truth is, is kind of like, is kind of the joy of something like that is really sitting with it and doing that.

And I'm kind of wondering like when, like from when you, from when you started doing dance, do you see it differently?

When you started taking it seriously to now?

Do you, do you see it the same way or do you see it differently as you've, you know, as you've lived a life?

Well, I'm 58 years old, so there's no way in hell my body is even.

I, I can't even think about some of that stuff I was doing back when I was, when I first tried started.

Yeah, the physicality is still there, but it's different.

I'm not so much driven into the, the beauty of tricks and turns and I mean, I still turn that but.

And I can still buck when I have to, but it's more about creating those things, those, those emotions, those feelings.

And with my work being as layered as it is with the video and the music that I compose and write and the soundscapes and the atmospheres that I create, it's just a almost immersive experience.

And that's actually the second piece that I'm going to be presenting.

It's more immersive.

So I find it interesting you brought up composing.

My wife and I were watching a movie last night and we got distracted so many times just talking about movie composers and things like that.

When did you start, when did you start composing music?

Was it always in aid of the performance or is it something you did beforehand?

So I really love.

My art is mine.

It's truly mine.

And when I first.

When I first started creating at a very, very young age, I realized that I had something to say that was uniquely mine.

And I couldn't really find the music that was playing in my head.

So the music that was playing in my head is what I wanted.

And so I had to make that.

And my mother blessed me with the torture of taking piano lessons.

And you know, I Played the violin.

I can actually play a circle of fifth scale on every instrument at this point.

And it was just really, really.

Just from that being a child is.

What's really interesting is here in Pittsburgh, one of the dance critics, Jane Branish, was my orchestra teacher in high school.

Oh, how cool is that?

And so.

And she's very.

She's integral to what I do.

So, you know, it's just.

It's just one component, but it's a very important component.

And I like to think that my work can not survive without each other, but it can survive without each other, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, no, and I. I find that interesting because my background's mostly around, you know, writing about food and beverage and doing podcasts and doing that kind of stuff, where I would always break down each individual component and care about every individual component.

But in the end, the thing that mattered most is did it all work together?

Did it harmonize to make the whole experience better?

And each decision is important to that end goal where your message needs to be clear in the end, not just each piece of it being good, because that doesn't make for a harmonious team.

It's just like, you know, watching.

I mean, to me, as a.

As a sports fan, like watching basketball, you can have five great players, but if they don't play well together, you still.

You still.

It's still not good.

It's not.

It ain't good.

It ain't cute.

Yeah.

So I'm kind of wondering, so as somebody who, you know, has done, you know, many different kinds of dance, do you have something where, you know, you.

You don't perform it, or you're.

This isn't like, your angle for performing, but it's something you love to watch.

Like, is there something like that where, hey, I know I can't do this, or I don't think I could do this justice, but I love watching it.

So.

I love.

Figure skating is my jam.

Yeah.

And I actually tried to coach, and I've actually.

I have a little bit of choreography out there on a few dancers, but to see them do those jumps and stuff, I wish I could do that.

And also, I am a band kid, and I love my color guard and my WGI and my DCI and what they're.

The way they are using and incorporating dance.

I have been working with a couple cores and a couple high school teams, and I just love it all.

I love movement.

Yeah.

That's what I love.

I love to see how people have conversations through movement.

Yeah.

You know, did you end up watching.

Did you end up watching some of the performances this year in the Olympics?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

I thought it was wonderful.

I really like ice dance because that's kind of close to what I do.

And even some of the shapes that they make.

And I just love a good twizzle.

You like the flare.

You like.

If I could twizzle through life, I would.

I would just twizzle through life.

Life.

So what I'm, you know, as we're, as we're going to wrap up when, when people are coming out to.

When people are coming out to, you know, Attack Theater Studios over on March.

March 27 and March 28, 7 o'.

Clock.

Tickets $20 on Pittsburgh fringe.org what's, what's the thing?

If you were to tell them one thing and say you need to come to see it because blank.

What.

What's the thing you're going to tell them?

Okay.

Actually, I can say three things.

It's local and we have to support our local artists.

We have to support our local artists.

We have to support our local artists.

Number two, this is.

In this political climate, voices need to be heard.

In this show here, you're going to see different voices, different walks of life, different people.

So there's that.

Also, although we are local artists, I'm bringing in people from, you know, Washington, D.C. baltimore area, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

And this is rare.

They've been here before.

But we're doing, we're premiering new work.

Most of us are actually premiering work that we're taking to Japan.

That's exciting.

These are.

So we are preparing for a once in a lifetime experience here and we're sharing what we're doing.

And I can guarantee any audience member, you may not like it all, but you're definitely going to like something.

You're going to relate to something you want to feel something.

You may feel something bad.

You may cry.

Yeah.

You may laugh, you may do both at the same time.

That sounds like a performance to me, Nick.

Yeah.

I mean, we owe it to ourselves to just go and enjoy and watch and listen, hear and just allow ourselves to let our minds go and enjoy.

Yeah.

And that's what.

And react honestly and really engage with the work.

Yeah, absolutely.

And we definitely give you the tools to do that with this work.

That's awesome.

And I think, you know what I'm going to start doing with the local artists because I'm an out of towner, I come to visit Pittsburgh at least once or twice a year.

But can you give me one local restaurant that if I'm coming to town and there's a place you care about, what's a place I need to go visit next time I'm in Pittsburgh, hopefully for the second weekend of the Fringe this year.

So in the area that Attack Theater is in, there are wonderful restaurants just right there.

I mean, Piccolo Forno is there.

Walters is there.

There's a ton of restaurants.

And they they're all good in their by their own right.

That's awesome.

Well, Nick, thank you so much for joining me on Just can't not to talk about your shows over at the ATT and CK Theater on March 27 and March 28.

Go to pittsburghfringe.org, to order your tickets today.

Thank you so much for joining.

And we'll be back next time with more Just can't Not on the Lunch at or Podcast Network.

This has been a presentation of the Lunchadore Podcast Network.