Nkechi Njaka
Just a Shadow, an evening-length work from Megan Lowe Dance that premiered last year at Joe Goode Annex, was restaged at ODC Theater as an intimate, immersive exploration of grief, remembering, and connection. Structured as a series of six original duets that each included Lowe, and a final piece that included the entire cast, the performances unfolded like a living altar. Duets often favor the interpersonal while grief privileges the impermanent. There was a sincerity felt and longing demonstrated in some of the dances, a playfulness and nostalgia in others. Each dance offered honoring to those who have passed, while celebrating the vitality, resilience, and complexity of those surviving loss.
I am just a shadow
Walking in the moonlight
Just a shadow, wishing for a lost life
Just a shadow, wanting to make things right
Just a shadow, waiting for mornings light
One of the main immersive elements of the evening was the use of live music, offering the audience a sense of continuity. The show opened with Lowe singing the poem above that her mother wrote before her passing. She was later joined by Frances Teves Sedayao and the two began their duet. They were dressed similarly, in white sleeveless shirts and wide flowy pants, which created a sense of fluidity, relatedness and relationship between them. Lowe’s voice was a continual thread throughout the entire performance and was later joined by Marica Petrey of Girl Swallows Nightingale in the final two pieces.
At the heart of Just a Shadow was a meaningful dialogue between form and feeling. Lowe’s duets with her cast members felt personal, studied, and deeply relational — choreographies that emerged from time spent in the grief process together. These weren’t merely dance pieces, but offerings of vulnerability and resilience, choreographed through mutual trust.
The work brought together seven compelling artists — AJ Gardner, Sonsherée Giles, Megan Lowe, Marica Petrey, Frances Teves Sedayao, Roel Seeber, and Shira Yaziv — each bringing their unique style of movement and embodied language. From contemporary to turfing, contact improvisation to vertical dance, site-responding to integrating live musical performance, Just a Shadow revealed a widely expansive, genre-defying vocabulary.
In creating Just a Shadow, Lowe made more than a performance. She shaped a space for collective observation. When centering grief and loss in a choreographic context, artists are inevitably met with the challenge of flattening grief’s complexity — especially if the representation becomes too literal. The experience of loss is invisible, nonlinear, and deeply internal. This doesn’t always map easily onto movement. Grief is also often chaotic, cyclical, moving in waves, silences, and visceral shifts. Lowe’s work with her collaborating artists captured the feeling of grief without being literal or superficial. The audience was invited to witness, to feel, and to remember alongside each duet — a choice that was very intentional on Lowe’s part.
Grief is weighted material for anyone to work with, and Lowe approached this delicately with each artist she collaborated with, in the choreographic process. It was important to her to start the works as duets, due to the diversity of dancers, their respective backgrounds and perspectives — as well as their relationship to grief. The duets became places for getting to know one another and more specifically within the context of their grief process. By anchoring each piece in collaboration, Lowe underscored the inherently relational nature of healing. We are not meant to navigate our pain alone. We do not heal nor move through grief in isolation.
In this way, Just a Shadow easily became a vessel for honoring the dead as a collective project — and not with finality, rather a dynamic, embodied remembrance. Through movement, sound, and presence, Megan Lowe Dance has created a meaningful tribute to the human spirit and Just a Shadow offered an embodied language for what so often eludes words.
Nkechi Deanna Njaka (she/her) is a practice-based creative researcher, choreography artist, public speaker and culture writer whose work explores the intersection of embodied presence, somatic research, well-being, science, art, and social practice. She is the founder of The Compass, NDN lifestyle studio, and co-founder of the sleep app DreamWell, emphasizing mindfulness and creativity as essential for individual and global well-being.
Megan Lowe Dance’s “Just A Shadow” Brings Grief Into The Light was originally published in ODC.dance.stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.