Join the Dana Tai Soon Burgess Dance Company, Washington D.C.’s preeminent modern dance company, for a performance of We Choose to Go to the Moon. A reference to a line in President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 speech that launched the Space Race, We Choose to Go to the Moon is an ode to a generation that realized a dream, and that still inspires our ideas about outer space today.

The score features nostalgic music from the 1950s and 1960s and interviews that convey various perspectives of the universe, from scientists and astronauts to cultural beliefs. The score also includes the voices of Bruce McCandless II, a former Apollo Mission astronaut; Dr. Chryssa Kouveliotou, an astrophysicist who researches black holes, neutron stars, and gamma-ray bursts; Dr. Neil Gehrels, an experimental physicist working in astronomy; Dr. Jim Zimbelman, a National Air and Space Museum geologist who researches geo-logic mapping of Mars and Venus; and Mary Motah Weahkee, a Santa Fe-based medicine woman, anthropologist, and archeologist whose father was an electrician for the Apollo missions and whose childhood best friend Tamara Jernigan became an astronaut.

Enjoy a post-performance conversation with Dana Tai Soon Burgess, choreographer and the dance company’s founding artist director, and Asma Naeem, Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…” –President John F. Kennedy