At 6:30pm and 8:30pm on Wednesday, July 1st, Isabella Thorpe-Woods presents Envelop/e, her second program as ISSUE’s 2026 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow. Over the course of her fellowship, the artist will share a series of events that explore letters as a curatorial prompt, and the ways they both fail and succeed in transmitting meaning or reaching their desired destination.
Envelop/e brings together choreographers Jade Manns and Ella Dawn W-S for site-specific duets that navigate presence and absence, repetition and rupture, and the tension between inherited geometries and shifting landscapes. Here, dance unfolds at the site of de/construction.
“Dance is often being evicted,” says Thorpe-Woods, pointing to a lineage of postmodern dancers of the 60s and 70s who left traditional theaters for lofts, basements, halls, and yards — whether by necessity, experimentation, or refusal of the stage. Today, she notes, many emerging choreographers continue this trajectory, working in found and transitional environments that can shape the work as much as the body itself. Dance, in this sense, does not simply occupy space, but reconstitutes it. Just as space, in turn, does not simply contain dance, but actively composes it.
For Envelop/e, ISSUE’s 22 Boerum Pl. theater — which has remained in a state of flux due to city-managed renovations — becomes an active collaborator. It mirrors dance as a condition of becoming. Manns and Dawn W-S work within and against these conditions, producing gestures that feel addressed, tracing the fragile routes between memory, bodies, and their imagined destinations.
There will be no waitlist for this event. Please reserve your ticket in advance.
Jade Manns is a Canadian choreographer and dancer based in New York and a co-founder of Pageant, an artist-run performance space in Brooklyn. Named one of Dance Magazine’s 2026 “25 to Watch”, her work has been presented by Danspace Project, New York Live Arts, Movement Research at the Judson Church and PAGEANT among others. Jade has received support from The New York State Council for the Arts, The Queens Art Fund, The Foundation for Contemporary Art (FCA Emergency Grant), The Alberta Foundation for the Arts, NYU Artist Development Program for Dance and Kino Saito Arts Center. She was a 2024/2025 New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks Artist and is currently the inaugural Choreographic Fellow for the Martha Hill Dance Fund Mesh Fellowship. Jade is an alumna of the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and holds a BFA in dance from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
Ella Dawn W-S is a dancer and choreographer living in Brooklyn. She graduated from The New School, Eugene Lang College in 2017. Her research centers around the relationship of the body and built structures, imaginative and material. Her highly physical work investigates precarity, safety, effort, and stability to reveal the desires underlying how we build and unbuild our bodies and our world. Her work has been presented at various sites throughout New York City, including Sundays on Broadway, Governors Island, Pageant, Arts on Site, University Settlement, Triskelion Arts, and galleries (Putty’s Coronation, Pulse Project, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Foreign and Domestic). As a performer, she’s had the honor of dancing with Phoebe Berglund, Lavinia Eloise Bruce, Sect, inc., Vita Taurke, Kiera Bono, Gwendolyn Knapp, Lu Yim, Malcom-x Betts, and director Marianna Ellenberg. Her most recent work, Machine Room Door, was written about in AWOL Magazine and Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art.
