Reasons for Moving

REASONS FOR MOVING is an interdisciplinary performance about the experiences of first, second, and third generation immigrants.

REASONS FOR MOVING brings together dance, theater, and digital media to frame performance as a site to engage community conversation about how cultures of origin inform our identities outside of their homelands.

Performers are: Kalala Kiwanuka-Woernle, whose mother left Uganda for the UK and later came to the US on a student visa; Mai Moua Thao, born in a refugee camp in Thailand; and Skye Reddy, whose family lost their ancestral homelands in the colonial Partition of South Asia. Their families’ biographies anchor an exploration of intergenerational and social negotiations of culture, memory and imagination.

Director Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento explains that REASONS FOR MOVING is not a documentary performance, but rather mixes fact and fiction: “it highlights how transgenerational memory is transmitted: our imagination fills the gaps in the stories told by our elders.”

The performance’s title comes from a line in the poem “Keeping Things Whole,” by Mark Strand.

Combining fictional and non-fictional stories, the ensemble investigates painful pasts as much as the present as a path forward.

REASONS FOR MOVING is especially relevant for local audiences, given Minnesota’s long history with displaced and displacing populations — hosting and uprooting is part of its fabric.

Directed by Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento with media and sound design by Eliot Gray Fisher, lighting design and technical direction by Thomas Barrett, and costume design by Lynn Farrington.