Body as a Home: Belly Dancing and Embodiment Discoveries

media release: Arts + Literature Laboratory and the LAB^4 community curation team welcome dancer and scholar Reenah Dixon for Body as a Home: Belly Dancing and Embodiment Discoveries, a series of three events where the mind, body, and soul are not seen as separate entities, on Wednesday, July 16; Wednesday, July 23, and Wednesday, August 13, 2025, 7:00pm to 9:00pm each session. Free admission.

Reenah’s trilogy of events offers an invitation into embodied connection, where the mind, body, and soul are not seen as separate entities, but as interwoven expressions of the self. Rooted in her personal and professional journey—from academic rigor to artistic expression—Reenah brings a rare blend of psychological insight and performative practice. Each event is designed to explore different access points to integration: scientific understanding, cultural tradition, and social vulnerability. Together, they form a progression from inner awareness to wordless connection to radical presence in community. Through these offerings, Reenah invites participants to tune in, reach out, and make themselves at home—within their bodies and with one another.

In the first event, Models, Mindfulness and Movement (July 16), participants explore how thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations operate within a unified human experience. Reenah introduces a framework that reflects her psychological training: the brain’s biological architecture gives rise to the apparent separation between mind, body, and emotion. Yet through mindful attention and intentional movement, participants experience a re-integration—both from the top down (through thought and awareness) and the bottom up (through sensation and movement). This seminar offers a grounding in theory and practice, bridging ancient wisdom and modern science to help participants better understand their own lived experience.

The second event, Wordless Discovery through Dance (July 23) shifts the focus from theory to shared experience. Drawing from the global traditions of bellydance, this workshop is conducted entirely without spoken language. Participants of all levels are invited to explore nonverbal connection through music, movement, and subtle cues from one another. Without the crutch or barrier of words, communication becomes intuitive and embodied. This silent space honors bellydance’s intercultural legacy, while highlighting how dance can be a deeply human way of knowing and being with others—one that transcends borders, identities, and even words themselves.

The third event, Radical Hospitality (August 13) brings the body into the social realm. Reenah reimagines performance not as a spectacle but as a shared ritual of welcomed vulnerability. Participants become both dancers and witnesses in a space designed to dissolve the usual boundaries between artist and audience. Feelings of pride, fear, and generosity are welcomed as part of the offering. In this final gathering, Reenah distills the essence of her practice: connection arises not from perfection, but from presence. When we accept ourselves as we are, we make room for others to do the same—and that is where true home begins.

more on the exhibitions:

New LAB^4 exhibitions on display from Tuesday, July 8 through Friday, August 29, 2025. A reception for all current exhibitions will be held on Thursday, July 17, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm.

"The Whimsyland Series" by Poornima Moorthy is a drawing series that conveys a place where one feels unconditional love, acceptance, and protection. There is an invisible thread that binds us: love, empathy, curiosity. These are the magical forces we can’t see. Moorthy captures that magic in the world around us. By listening and observing, she reveals how magic lives in ordinary moments—hidden marvels we don’t always notice, feel, or think about. Her drawings are intended to spark hope, faith, and a sense of endless magical possibility.

"Willow Sanctuary" by the artist, master naturalist, land steward, and environmental educator, mars. "I am deeply encouraged by the possibility of highlighting women builders and connecting people and plants through place and curiosity," explains mars, "As an Artist, Ecological Restorationist, and representation of my Ancestors wildest dreams, I am joyful to be a part of watering seeds of interest around honoring Art as common soil to cultivate germination of ideas, curiosity, and connection."

"The Persistence of the Unsorted" by Sara Black, Jessie Mott, and Claire Pentecost: A motley collection of makeshift beings wanders through a museum in search of a home. Lost, excluded, imperfect and unfinished, these creatures of indeterminate constitution persevere. They persist in a world almost beyond repair, a realm where all they have is what they can scavenge from a failed paradigm. Survival depends on solidarity across differences of kind, persuasion and species. Haunted by boundaries, conceptual and material, the unsorted carry on in the exuberance of impure existence.

"Stitching the Story: Capturing Heart and Resillience through the Story Cloth" is a powerful exhibition celebrating the artistry, resilience, and lived experience of local Hmong artists. Rooted in the traditional textile art of paj ntaub, the featured works reflect stories of survival, displacement, healing, and cultural pride. Many of the pieces were created during times of great personal and collective hardship, spanning from refugee camps to resettlement in Wisconsin. Others were stitched in moments of reflection, drawing from memory, landscape, and the rhythms of daily life.

The exhibition highlights the work of eight Madison-based artists – Chang Lee, Lou Vang, Mai Vang, See Vang, Kia Yang, See Yang, Thao Yang, and Kong Xiong – whose embroidery bridges generations and geographies. Through detailed motifs, cross-stitching, appliqué, these works preserve a cultural legacy while embracing adaptation and change. In sharing their work, the artists offer a vibrant testament to creativity as a form of storytelling, healing, and connection. Visitors are invited to learn from their techniques, honor their histories, and celebrate the enduring beauty and strength of the Hmong community. 

Ronaldo V. Wilson’s Family Beings, Before the Sea in the Sky’s Eye features three videos, and three related books offering distinct and related configurations of family beings and animated personas enacted through video, drawings, dance, song, and writing, crossing domestic, natural, and urban locations.  The videos Who Gets To? (2024); Harbor (2024); and Carmelina’s Farm (2023), reveal art documentation, including family interviews, improvised songs and performances in site-specific landscapes (beaches, mountains, studios, galleries, and urban streets.) Wilson dances, sings, holds conversations, sometimes donning aviary and old white man masks, and playing with a baby doll, all as poetic meditations. Though poetry, prose, 2D collage, video and performance documentation, Wilson’s books Virgil Kills: Stories (2022); Carmelina: Figures (2021); and Lucy 72, Poems (2018) engage the insides and outsides of perceived race and identity, excavating memory, nation, and embodiment, while manifesting grounded, fluid, and soaring poetic imaginaries.

"Home Is Where You Find It: Reimagined Little Free Libraries"  invites viewers to explore the intimate, expansive, and layered concept of “home” through a unique collaboration between six Madison-area artists and the city’s iconic Little Free Libraries. Madison becomes both canvas and collaborator in this citywide installation, reimagining these beloved neighborhood structures as portals into artistic expressions of the many things that “home” can mean.

Inside the gallery at Arts + Literature Laboratory, visitors will find a work by each participating artist that offers a window into their practice. Accompanying the exhibition is an illustrated zine created by local artist TL Luke, charting the locations of each artist-designed Little Free Library across Madison.

Visitors are encouraged to take home a printed copy of the map and experience this expansive art show in person and beyond the gallery walls.