Dance
Current work
I’m interested in ways we make connections through movement.
How can we relate to others? What can we learn about ourselves? How can we find care, joy, and pleasure? How can we undo harm?
I primarily work in Western contemporary, postmodern, and modern dance traditions, with a strong emphasis on improvisation. As a teacher, I especially love moving with people who have never moved in these ways before, or who are revisiting their relationship with embodied practice.
My current work focuses on the relationship between care, movement, and community. Given the structural constraints on care in our capitalist society, how can we use embodied practice to imagine what care could be? What is our dream for a world in which we could care for each other and ourselves in abundance? How can our movement guide us toward that?
In fall 2024, I facilitated Caring through Movement, a no-cost, open creative practice workshop at the Seymour Center for older adults, family care partners, care workers, and UNC students to explore these questions. As part of the workshop, we created a novel movement-based participatory research method and a collection of creative prompts.
Photos above show visual art that participants created during the Caring through Movement workshop.
Dance Bio
Erica Janko is a dance artist and educator based in Carrboro, North Carolina.
Her first evening-length work, the performers, premiered to a sold-out house at the 2016 Philadelphia Fringe Festival.
In DC, Erica was a company member with Contradiction Dance Theatre for their 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 seasons, during which she performed in works by Kelly King and MissJessica Denson and helped facilitate movement workshops across the city. Erica directed a collaborative community performance that spanned three-quarters of a mile on the National Mall as part of Contradiction’s “Dance About DC” series. In DC, Erica also performed in works by Heather Sultz/Keyhole Residencies and May Kessler.
In the Durham area, Erica has danced in Mauri Connors and Matthew Young’s The Living Room When, a dance album, Brooks Emanuel's liminal animals (found animals), Alyssa Noble and Chris Strauss’s RECITAL, and as a community mover in Bill T. Jones’s What Problem. She has taught classes at the Carrboro ArtsCenter and the Seymour Center.
Erica holds a minor in dance from Swarthmore College, where she was a co-recipient of the Hally Jo Stein Award in Dance and earned highest honors for her choreography thesis. She has also trained at ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival, the American Dance Festival Dance Professionals Workshop (with Liz Lerman and Leah Cox), Florida Dance Festival, and the West Coast Civic Ballet, among others.