In collaboration with fourth-year business economics student Nakya Solomon, UCI professor of dance S. Ama Wray created Restive Moves: A Multimedia Festival — Dance, Music, Film & Mindfulness, to engage the UCI community through creative expression and healing in a four-day event from April 30 to May 3.
Hosted at the Experimental Media Performance Lab in UCI’s Claire Trevor School of the Arts, the festival showcased work that combined dance into stories of advocacy and mindfulness — promoting the idea of being in a restive state.
“We are in an uncomfortable, friction-filled version of what life is, and it’s uncomfortable, and that discomfort needs movement to dissipate the discomfort and address it and take action. So the restiveness is about taking action,” Wray told New University.
Opening night kicked off with a three-part itinerary, starting with a land acknowledgment and community meditation led by culture bearer Tina Orduno Calderon, a showing of “Aire Libre” by visual artist Erin Cooney, and a dance showcase from the Los Angeles Jazz Company.
Calderon’s land acknowledgment and the “Aire Libre” showing set the tone for the first day — an atmosphere where the community can find a marriage between physical movement and environmental justice.
With a focus on environmental and physical wellness, audience members like PhD student Prerna Srigyan found the event enjoyable and meaningful.
“Overall, I really hope that people who see these kinds of performances take home this feeling that you know, they can do something about [environmental justice],” Srigyan told New University. “Even if it is just to come and sit and enter in an auditorium at UCI, you know, at 7:30 p.m. in the night after a long day.”
May 1 featured “The Virtuosity of Play,” where audience members were invited to dance along to a performance by Wray and UCI professor of pharmacy & pharmaceutical sciences Amal Alachkar, as well as other dancers and musicians.
Reflecting on her curation of the experience, Wray felt the restiveness of educators living through the current climate. To build on that feeling, she dedicated the beginning of the third day to teachers and left the evening to more film showings.
“There’s a lot of people leaving the teaching profession, there’s a lot of unrest. So I thought, well, what can I do for them? And so having this two hour workshop on the Saturday is just an effort to gift educators who are in this region with the opportunity to come and restore the all, as I called it, which is to recalibrate,” Wray said.
Paying homage to her long-term project MOVE Lab at UCI, artist Nani Agbeli led an open community dance experience welcoming all participants on the last day — the second to last event of the festival. The closing event of Restive Moves was a showing of female-directed screendance films, featuring works like “Mama Dancers” by Jingqiu Guan.
The execution of Wray’s idea, from paper to performance, took approximately two months, from working with no knowledge of the inner workings of a film festival to seeing it come to fruition.
“It was manifesting the moment I committed it to paper and shared it,” Wray said. “Because then energetically, people were responding to it, and those affirmations then gathered more energy toward the effort that it took to build and create it so the moment it was committed and shared, it was happening. And so yesterday was like the jewel. I got to see it shine.”
As for what Restive Moves might look like in the future, Wray holds out hope that the festival may come back with adequate funding so that UC Irvine may have its very own dance film festival.
“There’s every possibility that this could attract a sponsor, a community-based sponsor,” Wray said. “We don’t have a dance film festival on our campus, and it could also become that something that gets to be allied with the film department.”
Briana Chen is a Features Intern for the spring 2026 quarter. She can be reached at brianac6@uci.edu.
Edited by Avery Rosas and Elizabeth Gregg.
