Directed by Bernard Brown, WinterWorks 2026 is a timely and powerful collection of dance works celebrating the circularity of shared histories, looking at what binds us together, and is a call to remember, guided by radical love to power us toward a beautifully reimagined future. A tap dance work, by Melissa Tannus, inspired by the Portuguese notion of "saudade," the deep emotional state of longing for something or someone loved and lost, but with love that still lingers. Alison D. Smith's contemporary dance honors circle dances from all of our ancestral lineages that create embodied belonging and community weaving with and through collective movement. And lastly, a new work choreographed by Bernard Brown considers the lasting effects of colonialism on global communities of color through the prism of sugar, an important harvest crop to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and today, while the dancers are sliding, spinning and colliding through the visceral topography in search of intimacy and a shared dignity.