Who We Are

Here’s T(w)o Collective is the creation of Anna Bjella and Nia Sanders (niaesanders.com), two dance artists with a long list of questions who are constantly seeking space to answer them. Anna and Nia first started dancing together as members of Brown University’s Dance Extension. What started as “improv Friday”, a weekly improvisation jam that was used as a space for idea generation for their own choreographies, has turned into a dynamic, collaborative duo that expresses the two as individuals and as one collective being. Here’s T(w)o was created on accident. The two have documented their shared movement process for over 3 years, but only in the past few months have they discovered their collective artistic voice and sought spaces to share what they have to say. This duo aims to explore individuality within coalition building to question normative notions of progress and healing.

How We Approach Our Work

Our process is designed for us to collectively explore new ways to understand how our bodies and socialized identities occupy space. We, as a collective, engage with a combination of improvisatory practices, critical theory, and deep discussion to expand our understanding of what it means to make dance. We are collaborating to examine societal expectations of queerness, racialized identities within public space, labor and dependence, and physical and emotional realizations of support. Through our dance practice we try again, and again, and again to find, first and foremost, embodied actualizations of our ideas.

Here’s to trying again
Here’s two trying again
Here, too, again and again and again

Our Projects

Holding What Ground?:

Holding what ground?, first performed on October 11, 2019, is a dance performance that considers ideas of repetition, exhaustion, and collective tension as we try over and over to hold ourselves up and to hold up and support each other. In our experience, we’ve found that through the challenge of holding our own weight, we may not be aware of others going through similar trials, so this piece seeks to understand how we can find and hold on to each other in order to progress through.

Upcoming Performances

April 25 + 26, 2020: All Over Westbeth @ Westbeth Dance Fest

Past Performances

March 31, 2020: Movement Research Open Performance*

March 22, 2020: WAXWorks @ Triskelion Arts*

December 5, 2019: The Craft NY @ Threes Brewing Franklin + Kent

October 11, 2019: Spitball Series @ The Bauman

*Cancelled due to Covid-19 outbreak