To be performed in the Museum atrium and throughout the galleries, Brendan Fernandes’s Moving Through is a site-specific work featuring six dancers whose movements will respond to a dynamic dance score composed collaboratively by students. Rather than a stationary performance, dancers will move through the Museum, allowing visitors to watch the fluid performance and come and go as they wish. 

Fernandes intends the work to dissolve the boundaries among visual art, dancers, and audience members. As the dancers search for specific works of art, they will pause, interact, and build relationships with each work of art while using gesture and movement as a form of communication. Though largely silent, the performance will be punctuated by sound. At times, the soundscape will become a cacophony of overlapping tones; at others, a call-and-response dialogue among dancers or a rhythmic interplay of sound will emerge and then disappear as they switch their radios on and off. These auditory moments will animate the space, providing tempo and rhythm for movement.

By integrating movement, stillness, and sonic interplay, Fernandes reimagines the Museum as a living, breathing space where art and dance converge, challenging how we see, experience, and interpret both art forms. 

Brendan Fernandes is the 2025 Artist-in-Residence in the Notre Dame Initiative on Race and Resilience. The site-specific commissioned piece Moving Through is made possible through collaboration among and support from the Initiative on Race and Resilience, the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, and the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art.

Dancers 

Katlin Bourgeois 

Hanna DiLorenzo

Princess Gates 

Kara Hunsinger 

Brian Martinez 

Morgan McDaniel 

Sound 

Claire Staples 

Photo by Kevin Penczak 

This event is free and open to all.

More information here 

Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya) is an internationally recognized Canadian artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity, Fernandes’s projects take hybrid forms to address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest, and other forms of collective movement. He is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2007) and a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship (2014).(deleted extra period) He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University. Fernandes is represented by the Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago and the Susan Inglett Gallery in New York. Recent and upcoming projects include performances and solo presentations at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis), MCA Denver, The Fabric Workshop (Philadelphia), and Prospect 6 (New Orleans). More about Fernandes at https://www.brendanfernandes.ca