FOUNDER STATEMENT
Jennifer Ligaya Senecal, Founder & Executive Director
SaltWater Road Performance Institute was born from a desire to create a space where Southern landscapes, embodied knowledge, and contemporary performance could meet with rigor and care. As an artist and performance studies scholar working across movement, sound, and research, I have long been interested in how gathering, ceremony, and creative inquiry shape the ways we remember, imagine, and move together.
SaltWater Road emerged from this inquiry as a living studio and creative humanities institute grounded in the cultural histories of the American South. Here, artists engage in deep research through dance and devised performance, treating site, community, and collaboration as essential partners in the creative process. The work grows from Womanist practice and AfroDiasporic traditions that honor listening, improvisation, and collective presence as forms of knowledge production.
Montgomery and the surrounding Southern landscapes hold layered histories of movement, resistance, and transformation. SaltWater Road Performance Institute seeks to honor these histories while cultivating new artistic futures by aiming to create a world-class home for artists whose work is rooted in place while resonating beyond it. Inspired by the legacy of artist communities that have shaped the field of dance, I envision SaltWater Road as a long-term space for the critical investigation of performance through experimentation and cultural exchange.
This work is sustained by the belief that performance is a wellness praxis grounded in community and gathering that invites us to know with sovereignty through the world and toward new possiblilities.
— Jennifer Ligaya Senecal
Founder & Artistic Director, SaltWater Road Performance Institute
Performance Studies Scholar | Southernist Choreographer | Public Humanities Practitioner
Let’s Work Together
SaltWater Road is an invitation to move differently through the South — to listen, to gather, and to remember what becomes possible when art meets public life. I believe performance is a way of making space for freedom, and I welcome you to walk this road with us.
