Ordinary Pilgrimage

Collaborative Team

  • Amy Oelsner

    Amy Oelsner is a singer/songwriter and musician who plays under the name Amy O and is the Founder/Director of Girls Rock Bloomington. She studied theater and dance at Oberlin College, specializing in contact improvisation and somatic movement. This led her to her time living and studying at Earthdance in Western Mass- where she worked closely with Nancy Stark Smith (one of the original founders of Contact Improvisation) among many other wonderful teachers. She's thrilled to be returning to her love of improvised movement through "Ordinary Pilgrimage."


  • Eric Gordon

    When Eric Gordon is not showing people pictures of his cats, he is authoring blog posts at ocdfree.blog and daisybrain.org, and publishing books, like the upcoming blockbuster sensation, Water Dogs.


  • Mckay House

    McKay House is a Nashville-based dance artist driven by experimentation and collaboration. As co-founder of Garage Collective, McKay crafts innovative performances with musicians, visual artists, and poets. With a deep belief that movement is for everyone, McKay shares their passion for embodiment, creativity, and movement through teaching and community-building.

  • Julian Douglas

    Julian Douglas is a world percussionist, composer, and educator with over 25 years of experience recording and performing adventurous improvisational music. Raised in a musical household by a jazz pianist, Julian's rhythmic foundation is deeply rooted. Julian is a founding member of the progressive world percussion ensemble Rhythm Quest, the world jazz quartet Pangaea Sky, and the experimental improvisation trio Fractured.

  • Selene Carter

    Selene Carter is an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre, Drama and Contemporary Dance at Indiana University Bloomington. Her work integrates improvisation, site specific performance, interdisciplinary collaboration and reconfigurations of historic dances.

  • Nonie Daniels

    Nonie Daniels has enjoyed a life of dance, though not the authentic genre. Nonie taught ballet, tap, jazz, and acrobatics, while pursuing her undergraduate degree and Intro to Dance for non-majors to gain her graduate degree. Working as a choreographer in Indiana and California, Nonie’s expertise usually was utilized on non-dancers. Had she studied authentic dance, she feels her career endeavors may have proved much more fun!

  • Nate Sassoon

    Nate is a classical pianist, organist, fortepianist, improviser, composer and a music producer . He is a graduate of the University of Oxford and Phillips Exeter Academy. Nate has performed in venues including Carnegie Hall, Steinway Hall, Merkin Hall, Russian Synod, Andrei Makarevich Club in Moscow, Art and Music Center of Maykovsky (St. Petersburg), Scriabin Hall (Dzerzhinsk), University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, Jamaica, Italy and Germany.

  • Celina Jaffe

    Celina hails from Bloomington and recently moved back after living for two years in Washington, DC and 5 years abroad. She worked as a freelance dance artist in Europe from 2016 - 2021 and received her MA in Contemporary Dance Performance from the University of Limerick, Ireland in 2017. Over the past decade she has choreographed, performed, and led workshops for groups of all ages and abilities. Her artistic interests involve contact improv and vocal improvisation, site-specific performance, cross-cultural body language, and movement in nature as a catalyst for somatic connection and social change.

  • Kourtney Jones

    Kourtney is a poet, teacher, and interdisciplinary artist from Fort Wayne, Indiana. She can be found typing in public spaces from a typewriter with her performance poetry project known as The Poem Market. Kourtney is the author of the poetry chapbook The Mug Drops. Her current work explores the intersections of languages and dreams, the transmission between the dead and the living, environmental illness, and poetry as a practice for collective liberation. When not writing, Kourtney can be found not using a clock or calendar, hanging near a body of water, and loving language deeply whether found on scraps of trash, overheard from strangers passing by, or by way of burying her nose in a book.

  • Gabriel Jenks

    Gabriel Jenks is a composer, musician, writer, thinker, dancer, and teacher who embraces the dynamic and complex nature of being in his art. He grew up as a homeschooled misfit in rural western New York state, dividing his time amongst the practice room, the dance studio, the woods, and his parents' basement writing stories under various pen names which his sister illustrated, published, and reviewed.

    Choosing which path to pursue proved nearly impossible throughout his early life, and while his formal education centered classical music performance and composition, he now embraces a career that allows him to be active as a dancer, choreographer, author, and singer-songwriter as well as a composer of works associated with the concert stage.

    Gabe's newly released debut album as a singer-songwriter, 'Lonesome,' embraces a raw emotionality in a lyrically driven folk idiom. Throughout its nine tracks, the album charts an interior landscape inspired by the complex, beautiful, and often painful aspects of being human.