Art Space is a recurring element in the UpFront section of our print publication that spotlights a local artist or project making an impact in the city at large. Here’s what’s going on this month:

On average, humans spend two hours every night (and at least six years throughout their lifetime) immersed in dreams. This month, in its 23rd season, Baltimore’s preeminent modern dance ensemble, the Full Circle Dance Company, presents And Still We Dream, a production featuring music, poetry, and movement inspired by dreams. On Nov. 18 at 7:30 p.m. and Nov. 19 at 2:30 p.m., performances at the Baltimore Theatre Project will touch on themes ranging from daydreaming to insomnia, with one centerpiece work paying homage to dream-like references in the oeuvre of our state’s late poet laureate, Lucille Clifton.

On a summer Thursday around 9 p.m. at Morton Street Dance Center in Woodberry, the Full Circle Dance Company is halfway through one of their biweekly classes. Dressed in leggings and a T-shirt like her students, Donna L. Jacobs scans the room and counts them off.

“And three, four, five, six, seven, eight—step right, left, back, and release,” says Jacobs, pictured, standing on the sideline as the dancers work their way through combinations. “Parallel, put it down. Questions?”

There are spurts of laughter here and there as Jacobs continues her instruction. But when the lesson is over—and the real rehearsal begins—the mood tones down as each dancer takes their position on the floor. Kicking, pushing, twisting, and embracing to the sounds of wistful music from a laptop in the corner, the group is in the final stretch of polishing a piece for their next performance.

“This is a freedom for us,” says Jacobs, founder and artistic director of Full Circle. “Our dancers come from all walks of life…but we shed all of those things when we walk into the studio at night. We share this common thing that many of us have done for all of our lives. It’s an amazing journey.”

In 1991, during a meeting of the Greater Baltimore Committee’s leadership program, members, including Jacobs, were given a vision exercise to explore whether they would still be satisfied with their life in the next five and 10 years. At the time, she was a lawyer, but she spent her free time practicing dance—a passion she’d started as a toddler and fostered at the Bernice Johnson Dance Studio in her hometown of Queens, New York. She opened Morton Street a year later.

“I knew that there were so many children—particularly children of color—who could benefit from the experiences that dance had to offer,” says Jacobs, whose students range from age three to adults. “I wanted to create the kind of opportunities that I had in my youth here in Baltimore.”

In the years that followed, she also found herself craving more opportunities for Morton Street’s instructors to share their art outside of teaching, which led to the creation of Full Circle in 2000. Now the city’s preeminent modern dance company, the group has become known for its thematic choreography, featuring a diverse array of members—mostly female, of different races, skill sets, and career backgrounds—with performance used as a vehicle for storytelling that shines a light on the human condition.

“That’s what we can do with dance—we tell stories,” says Jacobs, noting that some stories are more difficult to tell than others, with performances drawing on themes such as domestic violence , race, motherhood, and religion.

On November 19 and 20, Full Circle will team up with the Baltimore Theater Project to present HOME: Longing and Belonging a new exploration of the idea of home as a place, feeling, and state of being. Performances will delve into a variety of subjects, from marriage, aging, and caretaking to immigration, historically Black colleges, and homelessness.

Jacobs’ central piece, titled Home/Less, aims to capture how quickly an individual can become unhoused, and, in turn, unseen, which she witnessed firsthand through her last two decades of work with the University of Maryland Medical System, where she was previously senior vice president for government, regulatory affairs, and community health. (She has since retired.)

Looking back on 22 years with Full Circle—and 30 with Morton Street—Jacobs takes great pride in the community that her dancers have helped nurture.

“Knowing that many of our dancers have been here for a long time is important to me,” she says. “We have those who are still here, and those who have moved away, yet they all feel like Full Circle is their home. I’m proud of our longevity. I’m proud that people keep coming home.”

Full Circle Dance Company is celebrating its 15th anniversary. Tell us about its origins.
We started in 2000 as an outgrowth of the Morton Street Dance Center, which is a school here in Baltimore that I co-founded and run. Full Circle was founded initially because we had such talented teachers who were not performing but wanted to. And we’ve attracted other folks who have moved to town and looked for that professional dance outlet.

The anniversary show on October 3 will feature a piece themed around breast cancer called 328-HOPE.
That is the phone number for the Baltimore City Cancer Program that screens uninsured and underinsured women. We will provide the proceeds to the program.

Full Circle performances are often built around a theme, but why breast cancer?
We thought about a number of things—domestic violence was one that I was beginning to settle on when one of the dancers said, ‘I have something even more personal.’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ And she said, ‘Breast cancer.’ I took a deep breath and I said, ‘I’ll do it.’ I had breast cancer two years ago, and I’ve got to tell you, I thought all of these concerts were personal—we’ve talked about religion, we’ve talked about race, we’ve talked about the unconscious mind—but this one is different. Many of the dancers and myself spent some time with women who are in the breast cancer support program of the BCCP. I put out the question and simply said, ‘Tell me what your experience has been?’ and I will tell you a little bit of mine, and we just let them go from there.

I was very blessed with a cancer that was discovered very, very early. So my journey is not the journey of some, but I know what mine was, and it’s something I still think about every day. So I can only hear, listen, and imagine what that experience is like for someone who went through the entire panoply of care needed to survive. And it does make you think about your mortality in ways that you probably never did. It makes you very sensitive to each and every ache and pain. I feel such a responsibility to honor these women.

How do you translate personal experiences into movement?
I was thinking about the volume of information and how fast that comes and the decisions you have to make and I began to think, ‘How do I translate that into movement?’ And then there are certain procedures that one goes through. I did radiation therapy, and every day I laid on a table in a certain way, so that became movement to me. And then, when we talked to the women about their stories, one of them said, ‘I just wanted to run away but whatever I did, it followed me.’ So that’s movement in my mind. Or they talked about their strength. Or they talked about support from somebody else. So I used my own experience, but probably even more so, the words, the phrases, the concepts of the other women.

What do you hope people take from the performance?
I hope that, certainly, there’s power in our message about breast cancer and that they’ve been touched by the stories that we’re looking to tell. But I hope they walk away from an evening filled with dance that they’ve enjoyed aesthetically, and they’ve enjoyed the meaning of each piece. So I hope they’re able to follow all that and understand the place that dance has in people’s lives and how beautifully it can communicate meaning and can cross boundaries about things people may need to address or consider about others.