CHAW Teaching Artist Rachel Coad recently completed a one week residency at the Kennedy Center with Printz Dance Project, a San Francisco-based contemporary dance company directed by Stacey Printz. We asked Rachel to fill us in on her experience!

“Stacey brought two of her company dancers from San Francisco with her and we were all in the new REACH space at the Kennedy Center all week to create a brand new piece to bring back to their company in San Francisco that will be performed in May. Stacey hopes to bring the piece back to DC at some point soon and integrate the DC dancers back into the work, but there’s no exact plan for that yet. It was a lovely collaborative experience and so cool to see the merging of two cities and communities or artists. The piece is an exploration of pain and how it lives in our bodies and affects our lives and was very deep, personal work for Stacey.”

More about Rachel:
“I am involved at CHAW through teaching the Saturday four, five and six-year-old classes. I also currently teach dance for The Washington Ballet and Joy of motion dance center. I grew up dancing in Northern Virginia, went to receive my BFA in Ballet and modern dance from Texas Christian University in Fort Worth Texas, lived in the DFW area teaching dance and dancing professionally for about eight years and then relocated to DC in September of 2018. I’ve been married to my wonderful husband Josh for almost 10 years and we have an almost four year old daughter (who dances at CHAW with Ms Laura) and a 15th month old daughter as well.”