Philadelphia Dance Projects’  DANCE UP CLOSE  Thursday-Saturday April 30-May 2, 2026

Putty Dance Project will premiere, Dance Like It’s 1829, a dance and music project led by choreographer Lauren Putty White and Musician/composer Brent White. The new work celebrates the city’s shared history through movement — exploring how dance has always been a language for connection across race, class, and neighborhood, and how Philadelphians have found freedom, belonging, and joy through rhythm.

Inspired by the calls from the sheet music of the Lafayette Ball of Francis Johnson’s music and an early nineteenth-century lithograph that caricatured a Black ball in Philadelphia, Dance Like It’s 1829 begins there — not to reenact the past, but to uncover it. Through choreography, improvisation, live music, and storytelling, it focuses on the early Black assemblies of the 1820s and the music of Francis Johnson and William Appo — two of Philadelphia’s pioneering Black composers and bandleaders.