What Is Folk Dance Mixtape?

Folk Dance Mixtape (FDMT) is a platform for dancing together online, and for exploring our unique identities through shared movement. We hope to both reinvent and challenge what a "traditional" folk dance might be - not as something set on a stage or fixed in our memory, but as active, evolving, and varied, passed from one dancer to another. On this website, we invite you to create and respond to dances through a series simple prompts, performing and “re-mixing” your own folk dances, using dance as a way to connect to each other, our cultural heritage, our everyday lived experiences.

Rebecca Pappas

Rebecca Pappas makes projects that excavate the body as an archive for personal and social memory. Her choreography has toured nationally and internationally, including to Singapore, Estonia, Mexico, and Canada, and she has received residencies from Yaddo and Djerassi, and funding from the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Indiana Arts Commission, the Mellon Foundation, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, The Clorox Foundation, and Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange (CHIME). In 2021 she is a CT office of the Arts Fellow. Between 2001-2014 she made dance projects in California where her work was presented at ODC, REDCAT, and Highways Performance Space. From 2014-18 she served as an Assistant Professor of Dance at Ball State University where she created community-based dance and social practice projects in Indianapolis, IN. In 2018 she returned to Hartford, CT, her hometown to accept a position at Trinity College where her focus is on dance and community. She continues to serve as a Guest Artist in the Masters program in Social Practice Art at University of Indianapolis.

Eileen Levinson

Eileen Levinson is a London-based designer & artist. She is Founder & Executive Creative Director of Custom & Craft, a nonprofit design lab using technology, art and media to imagine new, inclusive formats for engaging with ancient traditions and community-building rituals. In 2011, she created Haggadot.com, a website inviting Jews of all backgrounds to crowdsource & exchange personalized Passover haggadahs, which hosts half a million users annually. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, NBC News, The Los Angeles Times, KQED, and on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” Eileen has an MFA from the program in Graphic Design at CalArts.