film • Dance/Theatre

Founder and Director | Dorothy O’Shea Overbey

In the face of a chaotic world

the creation of beauty is an act of liberation.

Founded by Dorothy O’Shea Overbey in 2017, Red Nightfall Dance Theatre is dedicated to liberating the human spirit through transformative, immersive performing arts experiences.

the creation of beauty is not the privilege of the pedigreed, but a birth-right to us all.

At Red Nightfall, we celebrate the process of collaborative creation as an act of beauty in itself. We are dedicated to devoting the necessary time, effort, and resources to create a world of inclusion, belonging, learning, and growth for artists and audiences alike.

Red Nightfall Productions is based in Austin, Texas.

Red Nightfall Productions acknowledges that the land on which we work and create is the unceded territory of the Alabama-Coushatta, Caddo, Carrizo/Comecrudo, Coahuiltecan, Comanche, Kickapoo, Lipan Apache, Tonkawa and Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo, and many American Indian and Indigenous Peoples and communities who have been or have become a part of these lands and territories.

“Out of doubt, out of dark to the day’s rising
I came singing in the sun, sword unsheathing.
To hope’s end I rode and to heart’s breaking:
Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!”

— J. R. R. Tolkien. “The Lord of the Rings.”

Dancers: Oluwaseun Olayiwola, Beck Nam, Yuriko Roby, Mackenzie Lawrence, Myrah Porter, Christins Leal, Anna Starr
Photo by Lawrence Peart, Courtesy of the University of Texas at Austin

These verses from The Return of the King are spoken at the nadir - the darkest phase of the wheel of experience, the moment of utter obliteration of the self.

The death of hope becomes surrender, the surrender becomes Silence, and from that void emerges a spark of resolve.

I believe this moment - this defiant declaration that ‘I AM’ - is the most powerful moment of our human experience. It is this moment that we are exploring, cultivating liberation by practicing the courage that comes from non-attachment.

-Dorothy

BTS at our first photo shoot, January 2017