ATMA Moves · Upcoming Project
What Makes Wings
You were born already able to fly.
The Project
A community moving through listening, forgetting, and flight.
What Makes Wings is a featurette-length screendance work and theatrical dance offering. There is no single story, only what the bodies carry: the wings we are born with, the doubt that shuts them down, and the long way back. On open land, the dancers weave a living nest and rise.
What it asks
What does it cost to forget the wings we were born with?
The work grows from the ATMA Moves methodology, where movement begins as perception before it becomes shape. Wings are not only metaphor here. They are the living inner structure that carries growth, becoming, aspiration, and return.
The film lives inside a paradox: the wings were always ours, and still we have to build them, feather by feather.
The feeling
Nothing is explained. Everything is felt: the weight of forgetting, the ecstasy of return, the moment the body trusts the air.
The Journey
A ritual of birth, doubt, guidance, and return.
The work moves from nest to sorrow, from forgetting to guidance, from collective memory to the vast wings no one body could hold alone.
The Nest
Born already winged.
Movement Arc
From nest to vast wings.
The dancers begin as a living nest: a community forming the vessel through which a soul arrives. Joy opens the body. Doubt enters. The wings fold. At the edges, guides appear — feather-crowned, beaded, watching. They do not rescue; they keep steady the memory of flight.
The return is collective. Bodies give and receive weight, hands paint a living field of life force, and the group gathers into a single vast pair of wings too large for any one body.
October
20
2026
Work-in-Progress Showing
Makers Program · hosted by Shakti Moves
A public work-in-progress showing of What Makes Wings is planned for October 20, 2026 as part of the Makers Program hosted by Shakti Moves, a local Austin contemporary dance company.
This showing will support the next phase of development as ATMA Moves continues building the live work, preparing for production, and seeking funding for the full theatrical offering and dance film.
Visual World
The bird that learned a new sky.
The project’s color story is drawn from the red-crowned parrot: emerald, leaf green, turquoise, soft blue, gold, and crimson.
The Key
Red-Crowned Parrot
The Powers
Spirits of Movement
Costume World
Feather, bead, robe, wing
Palette
Emerald, leaf green, turquoise, soft blue, gold, and crimson.
The visual world is ancestral, avian, ceremonial, and otherworldly. The colors carry the bird, the land, the dusk, the robe, the feather, the bead, and the heat of awakening.
The Guides
Figures of lineage.
Lineage
They do not rescue. They witness.
At the edges of the work stand guides: feather-crowned, beaded, kin by spirit. Their presence keeps steady the memory of flight the dancers cannot yet reach.
These figures grow from Navaji’s painting The Powers and from the larger spiritual and symbolic world behind ATMA Moves: a lineage standing behind the living circle.
Lookbook & Artifacts
A growing visual archive for the world of the work.
Lookbook pages, costume plates, paintings, references, rehearsal images, and future artifacts will continue to gather here as the project takes form.
Scope & Goals
A theatrical offering and a dance film.
The project is being built in phases.
What Makes Wings is currently in development as both a live theatrical dance work and a featurette-length screendance film. The stage process allows the ensemble to build the movement world, while the film expands the piece into land, image, atmosphere, and cinematic ritual.
Stage
A public-facing theatrical dance offering developed through rehearsal, ensemble process, costume, sound, and ritual movement design.
Film
A featurette-length dance film shaped through location, cinematography, editing, sound, color, and festival distribution.
Community
A work that supports artists, audiences, and the larger field through performance, public showing, dialogue, and embodied cultural memory.
Project Support
Help build the wings.
What support makes possible
ATMA Moves is currently seeking grants, sponsors, individual donations, in-kind resources, and community partnerships to bring What Makes Wings into its next stage of development.
- Paid rehearsal time and dancer compensation
- Costume fabrication, beadwork, textile development, and production design
- Filming preparation, location needs, cinematography, and lighting
- Editing, color correction, sound finishing, and festival preparation
- Community showing, documentation, and public engagement
A work of public offering
This is not simply a commercial project. What Makes Wings is being created as a public-facing artistic offering: a live dance work, a film, and a vessel for community, healing, beauty, cultural memory, and embodied transformation.
Support helps sustain the artists, spaces, resources, and production care required to bring the work to life with integrity.
Development Timeline
From rehearsal room to stage, from stage to screen.
Now
Development
Movement language, ensemble structure, visual world, and funding are being built through the 2026 rehearsal process.Summer / Fall 2026
Creation
Choreography, costumes, staging, film structure, and production partnerships continue to take shape.October 20, 2026
Public Showing
A work-in-progress showing through the Makers Program hosted by Shakti Moves in Austin, Texas.2027
Film Production
Pre-production, filming, post-production, screenings, and festival submissions for the dance film.What Makes Wings?
No one rises alone.
This work is being built through community, lineage, discipline, support, and the long remembering of what has always lived inside us. Your support helps ATMA Moves bring What Makes Wings from vision into form.