Austin Choreographers Bring DANCE CAROUSEL to Ground Floor Theatre

The quintessentially Austin Dance Carousel – 40 dances in 40 minutes – continues its yearly dance celebration with a thrilling roster of choreographers for the 2025 performances at the Ground Floor Theatre.

In 2023, the fun show format reopened to sold-out and raucous audiences at the Ground Floor Theatre and repeated its success in 2024. This uniquely formatted production of new contemporary dance and dance-based performance art was founded in 2004 by Ellen Bartel. Productions of the past integrated hundreds of choreographers, dancers, and dancegoers in a weirdly wonderful and artful event. The return of Dance Carousel has given a new life to an old tradition, cross-pollinating and enlivening the local community with a fresh mix of strong choreographic voices.

Two different programs, Carousel A on Wednesday, September 10th  and Friday, September 12th  and Carousel B on Thursday, September 11th and Saturday, September 13th  will each showcase the work of ten different choreographers. Each choreographer will create 4 one-minute dances that will be shown in a round, amounting to 40 minutes of dance — humorous, poignant, virtuosic, pensive, and sometimes deliciously subversive.

The 2025 iteration is helmed by Austin dance producers Emily Rushing, Lisa Kobdish, Rosalyn Nasky, Alexa Capareda (who have collectively garnered multiple Best Dancer/Choreographer awards, nominations, and accolades), following the guidance of founder Ellen Bartel, named “Best Dance Mobilizer” in 2008 for her tireless work of bringing people together.

Named Best Original Dance Event by the Austin Chronicle and beloved by the Austin dance community for more than a decade, Dance Carousel blends established and emerging Austin creators in a production where creativity flourishes and nearly anything can happen. The fast-paced fun is perfect for our attention spans. Barry Pineo of the Austin Chronicle proclaimed in 2006 that Dance Carousel is “one of the most pleasurable, thought-provoking, eclectic hours you will ever spend in a theatre” and that “Ellen Bartel’s idea of having 10 choreographers create four dances each and then present them in a kind of round is not just a neat, quirky idea, but a brilliantly entertaining one.”

The Dance Carousel producers left the lineup partly to chance – pulling choreographers’ names out of a hat, hearkening back to the original random method to select artists for the program. The reason for this was to promote healthy and non-competitive creative growth within the Austin dance community, to shake up artistic stagnation, and to provide an opportunity for new or marginalized artists to have a platform to create.