Open Arms Dance Project creates greater joy and compassion with dance that opens hearts, minds, and arms.
Open Arms Dance Project is a community of dancers with diverse bodies, ages, and abilities, creating powerful art together in Boise, Idaho since 2008. As a dance company with a range of physical and neuro-diversity, Open Arms Dance Project has a mission to create greater joy and compassion with dance that opens hearts, minds, and arms.
You can find us performing everywhere from city sidewalks to main stages, including the Morrison Center for the Performing Arts. We carry our art and advocacy to school age audiences through our Upstanders with Open Arms anti-bullying program and Spiraling, our new one hour compassion building program for middle and high school students, both in partnership with the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights.
Beautifully Imperfect
May 8th & 9th, 2025
Pioneer Room, 6th Floor | Jack’s Urban Meeting Place
Beautifully Imperfect is an uplifting dance concert celebrating imperfection in ourselves and the natural world. Movement inspired by Fibonacci sequences that form golden spirals is interwoven with the Japanese aesthetic of Wabi-Sabi. Western ideals of beauty, balance, and proportion contrast with rustic roughness, asymmetry and impermanence valued in the East.
What does this look like in a dance concert? It’s like nothing you’ve ever experienced - but wish you had! Our intergenerational and inclusive dance company will perform co-created choreography. You’ll hear eclectic music plus some familiar, toe tappin’ songs. The culminating effect will be surprising, validating, and absolutely uplifting for all who attend!
UPCOMING EVENTS
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March 28, 29, 30, 2025
TREEFORT BOOTH
All Day in Julia Davis Park
FREE!
Stop by our booth to spin the wheel and win fun prizes! We’ll have coloring sheets, stickers, a compassion building quiz, donut holes, and bubble machine dance parties all weekend long!!! Get info. about our final performance, field trip shows, and learn about all the incredible ways we create greater joy and compassion with dance that opens hearts, minds, and arms.
Plus we’ll do a pop up performance at Hackfort 3/28 at 1pm in the Boise Center!
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April 2, 2025
WASSMUTH CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
Wednesday 4/2: Speakers at the Center
12:00 PM & 6:30 PM
As April’s Speakers at the Center, we will present a unique and uplifting look at disabilities. Open Arms Ambassadors will share 5 tips to respectfully interact with those who have disabilities. The whole dance company will present a simple, yet profound live dance that communicates and demonstrates Open Arms’ Values.
Questions will be welcome and a short award winning dance film or two will also be shared! Please join us to gain more understanding and comfort surrounding disabilities and enjoy an impactful mini-performance!
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April 7, 2025
WASSMUTH CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
Monday 4/7: Stories at the Center
6:30 PM
Open Arms Dance Project's Spiraling Upwards program is based on the "The Other" statue at the Idaho Anne Frank Memorial and the Wassmuth Center's Spiral of Injustice. It centers around a Narrative 4 story exchange, retold through words and movement. It culminates in an uplifting group experience - helping everyone see the potential for collective Spiraling Upwards when we all stand together and celebrate our differences.
Welcoming entry points to both the story exchange and moving together will be offered. We’ll explore spirals in our bodies and there will be options to move in simple or more complex ways. All movers and movements are welcome in Open Arms Dance Project!
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April 19, 2025
TINY TOTS DANCE CLASS
Saturday 4/19 at JUMP
10-10:45 AM
Sliding Scale $12-$20
In this dance class celebrating SPRING we’ll dance through the life cycles of a frog & tiptoe through tulips!
Inclusive and intergenerational - just like our dance company. All abilities and ages, birth to 5 yrs+, are welcome & no prior dance experience is needed. Bring grandparents, moms & dads, siblings, cousins, aunts & uncles, friends, neighbors, or come solo!
These classes are tons of fun and full of opportunities to JOYFULLY connect with eachother and your own love of movement. We are so excited to host this class at JUMP again this month!
“This dance is about how I envisioned my life, in a spirit of sharing and hope, during a time of grief. It is based on a poem I wrote in 2004, titled, ‘How Should My Life Go?’”
- Gail C. Hawkins, age 75
Root. Grow. Release. Repeat.
Root, Grow, Release, Repeat features the solo choreography of 12 Open Arms Dance Project dancers woven together by Artistic Director Megan Brandel and Cinematographer April Frame. It was created during online rehearsals in the Fall of 2020 and filmed at the Idaho Botanical Garden in Boise, Idaho. Many dancers made full artistic choices in creating their own solos, while the natural, non-choreographed movement of other dancers was celebrated. The descriptive, poetic script makes this film accessible for viewers who are blind or low vision and adds a layer of artistry for all viewers.
“I made this dance because Open Arms makes me feel very awesome.”
- Keely Burns, age 25
“I created this solo because many of us had to “slow down” this past year. I wanted to show that in slowing down my hope is you find peace. Feel the air…breath.”
- Shirley Hurley, age 64
Flipping the Script
Go behind-the-scenes of the Open Arms Dance Project in Boise as it rehearses for its biggest concert ever, and then performs. You’ll also meet some of the members of this inclusive, multi-generational company, which includes dancers with disabilities and others who identify as able-bodied.
I love dance. I just love the ability you have to express yourself through movement.”
- Heather Marie
Box me inside/ Outside the box
Box Me Inside/Outside the Box: A Movement Memoir, March 2020-March 2021 was conceived in June 2020 and created during a 10-day artist residency at Surel’s Place in Garden City, Idaho, in October 2020. It was completed and filmed in March 2021 in Ms. Brandel's home office/dining room in Boise and the Owyhee mountain range outside of Marsing, Idaho. Essential collaborators in creating this piece were April Frame, Jessie Proksa, and Anne Boyles.
Movement invention came from reoccurring pandemic themes: -touching surfaces with body parts other than hands, -helping kids with schoolwork, -home projects, -fighting to concentrate in a noisy home, -massive changes, -constant adapting, -quarantining/freezing -starting again, -escapes into Nature and creative projects.
“When I’m dancing I feel free to express my emotions without fear of being judged.”
- Heather Marie, OADP Dancer & Ambassador
“It makes me happy that I’m dancing.”
- Hava Fisherman, OADP Dancer & Ambassador
Donations to Open Arms Dance Project help provide scholarships, costumes, and cover operational costs that the sliding scale tuition is not able to cover. Some seasons nearly half our dancers are given scholarships. All donations support us in fulfilling our mission of creating greater joy and compassion in the community with dance that opens hearts, minds, and arms.
Thank you so much!
Learn more about our mission, our vision, and how we work
Learn more about how we came to be
Learn more about our anti-bullying program in partnership with the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights
Enjoy a gallery of our award-winning dance films
