Offering “a light-hearted performance that required zero effort to enjoy and “a very different type of dance performance,“ (City Newspaper), Commotion Dance Theater specializes in wide-ranging works, inspired by poetry, music, stories, film, and more. Ornelas, Commotion has appeared numerous times at MuCCC Theater, in the Rochester Fringe Festival, at Writers and Books, and at the Karpeles Manuscript Museum in Buffalo. In 2024, Commotion performed at the Grand Re-opening of the Avon Opera House and hosted its first Day of the Dead Celebration at MuCCC. Laurie MacFarlane has presented her choreography and improvisations in a variety of settings, from the proscenium stage to art galleries, sidewalks, and storefronts, throughout the US, in Toronto, Canada and Puebla, Mexico. She is an Artist in Residence at MuCCC and in 2022 was awarded a NYS Choreographers Initiative Grant from the NYS DanceForce, a NYSCA Partner. Ornelas has presented his work in North America, Central America, and East Africa. He has been a Fulbright Specialist to Mexico and Guatemala and an Artist in Residence at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in New Mexico. In 2022- 2024, he was a recipient of a Creatives Rebuild NY grant, working in the GLOW Creatives collaborative with nine other artists and three regional arts councils to bring arts programming to primarily rural areas of Western NY. Together, they founded Dances at MuCCC, an annual contemporary dance festival in Rochester, NY, and coordinated the festival from 2014-2022.
