For dancer and choreographer Nia-Amina Minor — a cofounder of Black Collectivity with David Rue, marco farroni leonardo, and Akoiya Harris — collaboration is at the core of her practice. A longtime dancer (Minor moved to Seattle to join Spectrum Dance Theater), it wasn’t until attending grad school at UC Irvine that she seriously dove into dancemaking, which unlocked a whole new avenue for expression and cooperative creation.

“I’m still trying to figure out my voice,” Minor said last year. “My experience as a choreographer has been much shorter than my experience as a performer, so I approach it from my own physical practice. What the body is carrying is important to me, and I’m using my own experiences as a person, as well as archival research, to explore that.”

One such piece, 2023’s A Practice of Return, was the culmination of two years of deep-dive research about legendary Seattle dancer and choreographer Syvilla Fort, whose 1940 solo concert included a piece, Bacchanale, accompanied by John Cage’s first work for prepared piano. The two-week program included workshops, a film screening and discussion, and performances. This year, Black Collectivity worked with students at Cornish College of the Arts (Fort and Cage’s alma mater) and Western Washington University around the piece. “We were returning to a rich but unknown, or invisibilized, history,” says Minor, who is deeply interested in junctures between Black realities, physical movement, and memory.

“How we return to memory and history in the body, and how we activate that knowledge through choreography, is a large part of what interests me,” she says, “but there is also this question around how one responds to the past in order to imagine new futures.”

It’s a topic she’s continually exploring. Minor, who is currently an instructor in the dance department at Cornish, has several projects coming up this spring. One is a work with choreographer dani tirrell on Leviticus or Love and to walk amongst HUMANS Book II (a follow-up to last spring’s Book I) which will premiere at Kubota Gardens in May; and Once Upon a Time in a Place Called NOWhere with performing artist Keyes Wiley, debuting this spring through Made In Seattle, Velocity Dance Center’s Nationally Emerging Creative Incubator program.

Through her nuanced choreography and mesmerizing stage presence, Minor continues to pave new avenues in dance exploration, bringing thought-provoking work — and the celebration of Black culture — to the forefront of her practice.