Museum in Motion: Dance at the Legion of Honor
By Nkechi Njaka, choreography artist and culture writer
October 2, 2025
Megan Lowe Dances in Legion and Legacies, 2025. Photo by Matthew TW Huang
A one-hour, immersive performance by Megan Lowe Dances, Legion and Legacies reimagined how dance and performance can move within, against, in response to, and beyond the museum walls. The site-specific work honored the monumentality of the Legion of Honor’s 100 years while creating openings for unseen histories and embodied truths to come forward, be acknowledged, and be celebrated.
Megan Lowe Dances (MLD) is a multidisciplinary dance company known for transforming unconventional and everyday spaces into vibrant performance environments. Their work combines dynamic physicality, aerial and vertical dance, and collaborative partner work to reimagine how bodies can move through architecture. Centering stories from AAPI, BIPOC, and multiracial communities, MLD creates performances that center dialogue, identity, care, trust, and authentic connection. Each performance at the Legion included artists 艾音 “Ài Yīn” Adelski, Johan Casal, AJ “Dopey Fresh” Gardner, Anna Greenberg Gold, Megan Lowe, and Frances Teves Sedayao, with live music by William Cenoté and Mark Reynolds.
What began as a commission for the 100-year anniversary of the Legion of Honor unfolded into something far more expansive. The Legion is not a traditional performance space, nor is it a neutral stage. Its neoclassical grandeur and ornate galleries hold an extremely complex legacy: Eurocentric narratives, colonial collections, and the haunting silences of what and who have been excluded and unnamed. Over the course of the residency, which consisted of open rehearsals from June through September and two weekends of final performances, an hour-long dance was set at the museum. The rehearsals and performances, a living dialogue between body, site, and history, were all free to the public.
What happens when living bodies are invited into conversation with artifacts arranged as history?
Megan Lowe in Legion and Legacies, 2025. Photo by Gary Sexton
Creating a dance at the Legion of Honor was both powerful and complex. The museum’s historic Eurocentric art reflects a history that doesn’t represent me, the artists I work with, or the communities we serve — and yet, that tension became the heart of the piece. Through dance, we claimed space in this monumental place, honoring the past while reimagining a more expansive, inclusive future.
—Megan Lowe
The performances unfolded across multiple sites within the museum. Solos, duets, and ensembles carved meaningful and moving encounters inside the galleries, placing dancers in direct dialogue with paintings, sculptures, architecture, and one another. This sometimes amplified and sometimes unsettled the gaze and tradition of the institution, while also inviting its complexity. Each body carried their own legacy, memory, lineage, and presence.
As a turf dancer, when you move through these contested or charged spaces, you’re not just dancing in them — you’re dancing with them, against them, and through them. That’s what makes site-specific dance so powerful in helping audiences reckon with legacies: it brings the past into the present and dares us all to imagine a different future.
—AJ “Dopey Fresh” Gardner
AJ “Dopey Fresh” Gardner in Legion and Legacies, 2025. Photo by Matthew TW Huang
To be a moving body in a space that historically asks stillness from its inhabitants, or exist within a museum space as a dancer of color, queer dancer, or dancer with a lineage and identity rarely represented, invites a radical interruption to the past while creating openings for visibility.
The Legion of Honor mainly tells the stories of Europeans depicted by European artists. This caused me to gravitate toward the singular sculpture of a Chinese man. I felt a sense of kinship with him and built my solo in the space next to him. I felt inspired by him, and wanted to be in community and conversation with him, to bring our shared culture into my solo, to add my story to his.
—艾音 “Ài Yīn” Adelski
艾音 “Ài Yīn” Adelski in Legion and Legacies, 2025. Photo by Matthew TW Huang
What gets reflected back to us when we see ourselves or bodies that resemble ours in a space where they may not have always been included?
Museums are spaces where visitors have learned to move softly, speak in hushed tones, and shrink themselves in reverence to the art. Museums are historically places where touch is forbidden, movement is restrained, and sound feels intrusive. To bring dance and live music into the Legion is to disrupt that quiet choreography and make — perhaps even reclaim — space for bodies to be expansive, expressive, and alive.
I wanted to hold space and honor the Ramaytush Ohlone people, whose land we still currently reside on, and hold space for all of those who have been laid to rest in this land prior to the construction of this museum.
I played a lot with interacting with the ground to acknowledge the presence of those who walked this land prior to me. I used the transfer of energy with my movement toward the ceiling to depict the idea of freeing or releasing those forgotten souls into the realm above us.
I’m a brown body dancing in a Eurocentric museum, responding to religious iconography (a religion that also stripped away Indigenous practices of my homeland of the Philippines), and dancing on land that has had so much turmoil and history. My offering of movement in that specific gallery was a space for me to find a sense of freedom and reclamation for those whose stories are forgotten and dismissed.
—Johan Casal
Johan Casal in Legion and Legacies, 2025. Photo by Gary Sexton
If the galleries held weight and stillness, the final outdoor ensemble offered a celebratory moment of larger-than-life expression. Against the museum’s facade, dancers filled the columns, structure, steps, and open air with play and joy. The ensemble reframed the building as a new version of monumental — inviting the possibility of other futures where care, celebration, and a wide range of perspectives are included.
We created a community of care where our safety and artistry was prioritized. We laughed, and sang, and cheered each other on. We shared how the space and its legacies made us feel. We danced those truths. At times flowing with the art and architecture, and at times raging against it.
—Anna Greenberg Gold
As a cast of mainly POC dancers, we brought our experiences, cultures, stories to add to the museum. We created a new kind of community by inviting our loved ones to see the show, many of which have never been to the museum before. This creates a larger and more diverse community for the museum.
—Ai Yin Adelski
Megan Lowe Dances in Legion and Legacies, 2025. Photo by Matthew TW Huang
What happens when bodies move in spaces not designed for them? What truths surface when joy and vulnerability enter places built on exclusion? How do we carry the legacies of the past while making new ones?
Legacies are not only inherited. They are made. Made through movement, through relationships, through the courage to be fully present in places that would rather render us invisible. These performances reimagined what museums can hold and who they can reach.
Watch excerpts from the performance.
Nkechi Deanna Njaka (she/her) is a practice-based creative researcher, choreography artist, public speaker, and culture writer whose work explores the intersection of embodied presence, somatic research, and liberatory and contemplative practice. She is the founder of The Compass, NDN lifestyle studio, and cofounder of the sleep app DreamWell. She is also the cohost of the Dating White Podcast and half of the music and mindfulness project RESONANCE.
