10 Years of NCCAkron: Connecting Artists Across the Country

Photo by Dale Dong; Choreographers Dominic Moore-Dunson (Akron, OH) and Antuan Byers (New York, NY) strategize with Executive/Artistic Director Christy Bolingbroke as part of NCCAkron’s Creative Admin Research program.

The National Center for Choreography-Akron (NCCAkron) is celebrating their 10th anniversary.

As one of only two choreography centers in the U.S., NCCAkron is an incubator and hub for dance research and development. NCCAkron serves as a connector, a catalyst, and a cultural matchmaker for dance artists across the country.

Akron choreographer Dominic Moore-Dunson recently interviewed NCCAkron Founding Executive/Artistic Director Christy Bolingbroke about NCCAkron’s work and reflections on the 10th anniversary.

You can celebrate and support dance in Akron Saturday, June 20 with Dominic’s The Remember Balloons Live! and the NCCAkron Dance Party Through the Decades.

The Remember Balloons, June 20 in Akron; photo by Shane Wynn

Dominic: One major impact on my life and career, through the many different NCCAkron programs I’ve been part of, has been the connections to NCCAkron’s national network of choreographers and dance artists. At first, I felt nervous, like, “I am just a choreographer from Akron,” but I soon recognized that I am the same as these other artists from across the country. We all have similar struggles and similar successes. NCCAkron upends the hierarchy of geography — whether we are choreographers from Northeast Ohio, a huge city, or a rural area, we have so much in common.

Artists who intersect with NCCAkron find that their perceptions of the national dance field change because they can actually start to see the field. As an artist, you’re always in the industry, but it’s actually really hard to see the whole field when you have to write grants, throw a fundraiser, rehearse, and manage a huge to-do list. NCCAkron helps open your eyes.

Christy: As a process-oriented organization, we can focus on those in-between spots. We work within the cracks so that we’re not trying to build a new entity, but a stronger interconnected foundation for everyone in dance.

I grew up in Texas and in our state history Lyndon B. Johnson is remembered for tapping into federal funds to build out the highway system in Texas. Every city did not become Dallas or Austin, but it connected those smaller rural cities to the larger, greater world. I think about NCCAkron in this way.

That’s what excited me about the invitation to build the National Center for Choreography here in Akron – the resources and the fertile infrastructure here between the Knight Foundation and DANCECleveland and the University of Akron made me realize we could build out a stronger highway system for dance.

It’s those connections you mentioned– those highways –give access to information, to opportunity, to reciprocity.

Dominic: It’s like visiting Cleveland from Akron, or Akron from Cleveland. When all of those people meet, it changes perspectives. You challenge assumptions about how to move forward, create your own path, whether you should ‘get bigger’ or grow in a different way.

Christy: Yes. We are all about challenging the norms and so-called “best practices” of the dance world.

Dominic: Now NCCAkron is 10 years old. What has stayed true from the very beginning?

Christy: The spirit of play has remained. From the beginning, NCCAkron’s mission statement is that we cultivate research and opportunities in dance. We strengthen the national arts ecosystem. And I added that we would advocate for dance and the creative process as essential parts of culture in this country. What I’ve always loved about that mission, and it stayed consistent, is the word “residency” does not appear anywhere.

Dominic: It’s broader, bigger than just residencies.

Christy: Right, and NCCAkron is not just for artists. We exist for audiences too, for them to engage and experiment with dance as well. I often say that we want to get all of Akron dancing. That could include actually moving, or it can also include attending a showing, listening to a podcast about creating dance, watching dance films or videos. What if more of us embraced dance as a hobby? A dance club, where you experience and talk about dance, similar to a book club?

Dominic: For a national center – why Akron?

Christy: When artists come to town we give them a tour. And one of the things that we talk about: why is the second National Center for Choreography based in Akron?

I tell them about the history of rubber. I like to highlight what I learned in David Giffel’s The Hard Way on Purpose, where he talked about Akron as a place for functional ingenuity. That’s art making!

We talk about Heinz Poll and the families that helped make it possible for him and Tom Skelton to come here for the early days of Ohio Ballet, and then eventually encouraging the university to start a dance program, and building out this building [Guzzetta Hall]. These elements left this rich footprint for a professional dance entity like NCCAkron. There’s an appetite here.

I remember when I went to the Whitney Museum (NYC) for the first time a couple of years ago. When I visited the permanent exhibition everything seemed so familiar to me. These pastoral paintings, photographs, etc. I read the didactics, and nearly every single one of the artists from their permanent exhibition, which was really established in the early 20th century, were from Ohio.

Dominic: There it is.

Christy: That’s the longevity of this region. We may be making work right now, but we are also in dialogue with our own history while simultaneously shaping the future.

Bios:

Christy Bolingbroke; photo by Shane Wynn 

Christy Bolingbroke is the Founding Executive/Artistic Director for NCCAkron. Previously, she served as the Deputy Director for Advancement at ODC in San Francisco, overseeing curation and performance programming as well as marketing and development organization-wide. She was the Director of Marketing at the Mark Morris Dance Group in Brooklyn, NY. She earned a B.A. in Dance from the University of California, Los Angeles; an M.A. in Performance Curation from Wesleyan University; and is a graduate of the Arts Management Fellowship program at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. She has served on the Akron Civic Commons Core Team; as a consulting advisor for the Bloomberg Philanthropies Arts Innovation Management initiative; and on the New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project Advisory Panel. In 2017, Dance Magazine named Bolingbroke among the most influential people in dance.

Dominic Moore-Dunson; photo by Michael Cannon

Dominic Moore-Dunson is the 2025 Lloyd Richards New Futures Fellow with The Wilma Theater and an award-winning choreographer from Akron, Ohio. His work blends dance, storytelling, and social inquiry to explore the emotional and spiritual weight of growing up Black in post-industrial America. Named one of Dance Magazine’s 2023 “25 to Watch,” Dominic’s choreography has been presented nationally and featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Akron Beacon Journal. A 2024 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award recipient and former resident artist at Headlands Center for the Arts and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, he continues to craft performances that invite audiences to feel, question, and remember—transforming personal stories into shared moments of truth and connection.