ABOUT US
ABOUT US
Our Story
Erin Carlisle Norton founded The Moving Architects on New Year’s Day in 2007, marking a clear beginning and an ongoing inquiry into how bodies move through and are shaped by space.
She grew up in a large family, in the nooks and crannies of a Victorian house outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, alongside the strong presence of a Neo-Gothic church where her father was a pastor. The church’s architecture and its role as a gathering place shaped by shared belief and intergenerational connection were a constant part of her early life. Moving between these environments deepened her awareness of how space holds tradition, history, structure, and feeling, as well as how relationships take shape within shared spaces. This awareness continues to inform her choreographic work.
This sensibility, alongside a sustained commitment to exploring and promoting the female voice and form, became the foundation of The Moving Architects. The company is known for creating highly visual, architectural, and physically dynamic work that places the body in direct dialogue with its surroundings, while also attending to the relationships that emerge between the women within it.
Since its founding, The Moving Architects has carried this approach across a wide range of contexts. The company has taught and performed throughout the United States, across Central Asia with the U.S. Department of State, and in Morocco, Guatemala, and Canada.
The work unfolds in spaces as varied as the questions it engages, including seaside settings, tennis courts, churches, historic sites, libraries, classrooms, lofts, and proscenium stages, with each site shaping the choreography in distinct ways.
Collaboration remains central to Norton’s process, as does her ongoing physical research in modern and postmodern dance techniques, Laban Movement Analysis, and improvisational practice. Through this work, The Moving Architects continues to examine how movement can reveal, challenge, and reimagine the structures, both physical and cultural, that shape our experience.
Originally founded in Chicago, The Moving Architects is based in New Jersey and New York City, where the company continues to develop and share its work.
Our Vision and Values
ERIN CARLISLE NORTON, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
I create collaborative, site-responsive dance works that explore women’s experiences, relationships, and the body in space. My work centers on feminist narratives, exploring roles such as mothers, caretakers, partners, and friends, alongside dynamics of power and gender across contemporary and historical contexts.
My movement language draws on physical and emotional intensity. I am interested in how time is shaped through stillness, speed, and overexertion, and how presence emerges through weight, force, contact, and moments of conflict.
Dance artists are essential to the process, and each work is developed through collaboration. Relationships, trust, identities, and lived experiences shape the work as much as the movement itself.
With dance at the core of each project, textiles, interactive materials, objects, music, and rhythm are used to construct architectural environments that hold and frame the work. Many projects are conceived in dialogue with a specific site, drawing from its history, architecture, and spatial character to shape the movement and thematic direction, creating connections between performers, audience, and place.
As choreographer and director, I guide processes grounded in exploration, experience, and trust. The work unfolds as immersive, multi-layered experiences that invite audiences to enter, experience, and reflect.
Photos: Top: Whitney Browne Photography, with collaged fabric quilt by gwen charles, Our Mission L-R: SIFC Photography, Rachel Neville Photography, Whitney Browne Photography, Our Story L-R: gwen charles, Julie Lemberger Photography, video: Where She Once Stood (excerpts), Video Production by Nel Shelby Productions and Edited by Erin Carlisle Norton, Whitney Browne Photography, Our Vision and Values L-R: Rachel Neville Photography, Eric Bandiero, Whitney Browne Photography, collaged fabric quilt by gwen charles
Our Mission
The Moving Architects brings people together through dance across performance, education, and conversation. Grounded in movement, space, and relationship and shaped by women-centered perspectives, dance is used to expand how we relate to one another and to the spaces around us.
