Right Now

A message from founder Patricia Reedy on Luna’s adaptability

Dear Luna community,

I write this message as West Coast Moving Company is packing up Luna’s beautiful dance floor, our library, and 29 years of financial and program files to take to storage. This is the ninth time I have supervised such a move and I cannot minimize the physical and emotional toll it takes. I comfort myself with memories of 40 families dancing together in the Hula Hoop challenge at our 2017 Open House, or babies having their first experiences rolling, crawling, and swaying on a dance floor.

COVID-19 has affected all of our lives and I know that my feelings are small compared to the challenges our partner teachers, our families, and our young students have experienced this year. I also know that this situation is temporary and one day in the not-so-distant future, we will be dancing again together in real space and time. This time, our families will be dancing in a building that Luna owns, so I am comforted, too, by the knowledge that this move out will be my last.

Thanks to our agility and the support of so many, Luna remains alive. As we continue to work remotely, our focus will be on manifesting our 2020 strategic plan with its dual focus on stability and adaptability. Dancers know that stability and adaptability go hand-in-hand to create the optimal conditions for movement and improvisation. As Luna moves toward its 30th anniversary, we are excited about these critical paths:

Realizing a permanent home.The silent phase of our capital campaign will merge into a public campaign with the intention of raising funds to buy a building in Berkeley to house Luna’s future.

Creating a bridge between our current programs and an expanded Creativity Center. Luna seeks to share all that we’ve learned from building cultures of dance through an equity lens–in various forms of partnership–for three decades. Situating a Creativity & Research Center in our new home will help expand our reach as we support others to respond to their community’s needs through dance. Finding a name for it is the first order of business.

Establishing a new infrastructure that will support the new home, the new center, and the next generation of Luna leadership.

Despite operating remotely with a scaled-down faculty, we continue to work with teachers and students and are excited about sharing stories of these experiences in upcoming communications. Stay tuned!

Some updates: To keep our community safe, we have paused our in-person programming, but we still offer the following:

Professional Learning

In order to support dance educators as they navigate the shifting realities of their teaching, we are designing a new calendar of Professional Learning opportunities that are responsive to the questions they’re asking now. Visit here for more information.

Our two new resource pages provide further support:

Online Resources for Dance Educators & Teachers During COVID-19

Racial Justice Dance Resources

Studio Lab

suspended until 2022

MPACT | School & Community Alliances

We will collaborate with our partner organizations and schools when they are ready to restart live dance classes (online began in small ways in 2020-21). More information to come!

While these programs are on hold, keep dance learning alive with these videos by Luna faculty members. We hope that you discover new ways to dance and create at home and outside.