Making Magic and Taking Chances with Emily Ames by Luisa Lynch

The Yellow Room: Emily Ames

The Yellow Room (@theyellowroomdc)

February 27th, 2026

Emily Ames (@eb.ames)

By Luisa Lynch (@luisalynch)

Cover Photo by Mariah Miranda. (@mariahmirandaphoto)

Kicking off a dance-filled weekend at a salon-style dance show right off of Rock Creek Park is a great way to remember that dance often takes many forms – and lots of those forms don’t take place on proscenium stages with set music to specific choreography. Sometimes, a dance show takes place in a townhouse living room. Sometimes, a dance can actually be a “Choose Your Own Adventure” type of journey for both audience and performer, where music and lighting are decided in the moment, and props are made backstage in a makeshift scene shop. Sometimes, for a dance to be created, audiences and performers have to take chances together, in ways that are unpredictable. And yet, in that uncertainty… that is where the magic lies.

“How can I make it harder for myself?” is a question that local dancer, choreographer and arts administrator Emily Ames would often ask herself when preparing for her chance dance solo show at The Yellow Room, Dance You Me. In the studio, she prepared for about a month. In her subconscious, she prepared for ten years. For the last decade, Emily has been dreaming about creating a work that is unpredictable in nature. Where most dancers would find anxiety when performing, Emily found excitement in the prospect of not knowing what choices would be made for the performance by audience members, rather than sticking to a set script to present. She says that this unpredictability actually takes pressure off of the idea that everything has to go perfectly, and instead helps her accept that if things don’t go as planned, that’s okay. What a great metaphor for life – and between the home setting, audience interaction, and childhood nostalgia that Emily brought forward with her choreographic prompts, Dance You Me challenged the notion that the dance of life – or life of dance – must follow a journey of perfection that worry warts like myself often cling to when navigating uncertainty.

When I walked into the house-turned-dance venue on that Friday evening, signified by a neon yellow LED outline of a spade, I was met by Blythe, the founder of The Yellow Room, and Liz Barton, acting as stage manager for the show. They welcomed me warmly and handed me a yellow playing card (a two of spades) with the date stamped on it, and a bingo card with actions to look out for throughout the evening. Already, I was intrigued, and trying to imagine what to expect from the show with such minimal yet descriptive information given to me. And yet, this informative bingo card could not have prepared me for the enjoyment I was about to experience. 

I spoke with Blythe briefly about how she prepared for The Yellow Room debut. With the venue being her own house, she said that it was a bit stressful as she doesn’t usually throw parties, but the questions she still had were successfully answered throughout the night. Personally, I wouldn’t have known any differently, as they were not only a great host, but an amazing curator and producer as well. To learn more about Blythe’s process in creating The Yellow Room, check out their interview with our very own artistic director, David Dowling, here!

After socializing with friendly familiar faces from the dance community in a way that felt like any fun get-together, and filling up on spinach & cheese mini quiches, I brought my provided Modelo beer to my seat between The Yellow Room itself and the front hallway. The Yellow Room, signified by its tall yellow curtains against two homely sets of bookshelves, is the designated performance space in Blythe’s Park View home, where she started envisioning dance shows exactly like Emily’s: experimental, intimate, site specific and audience interactive. 

“What kind of work do I make in a house?” is another question Emily informed the audience she asked herself when in process for Dance You Me. Her answer to that question brought her back to her childhood, when she would create mermaid or ballerina dance shows in her home, which makes me wonder: why did we ever stop putting on these living room dance shows in the first place? I particularly resonate with Emily’s memories of being a mermaid as a kid, considering I still personally identify as one. And as a self-identifying mermaid, I loved the moments in this show that felt like a callback to the tactility of that specific memory – at one point, Emily entered the space with a giant piece of gold foil on top of her head, which extended to the ground and made sounds resonant of waves crashing on the shore of a beach; the shiny, golden material crinkling even after she finished moving.

But, as it turns out, not all kids believe they will become a mermaid someday. Emily asked three audience members at the beginning of the work: “When you were a kid, what was your dream job?” The answers she received were a teacher, a cat, and a Food Network superstar. A sweet moment of audience-performer interaction led to stage manager Liz Barton conjuring material from what Emily called and continuously emphasized in her post-show thank yous, “The Liz Barton Dream Pharmacy”, for these three audience members to live out their childhood dreams onstage. For the teacher: flashcards. For the cat: a crown with cardboard cat ears. For the Food Network star, a cutting board with cucumber to cut and hummus alongside a recruited phone videographer, also from the audience. Talk about switching up social dynamics – these audience members got to perform alongside Emily unexpectedly! But, at the same time, that fourth wall never existed in the first place. Emily never even broke it, she set the space to have the audience involved in the performance from the beginning. 

“The space helps inform how you create the work,” Emily said, when I asked how she figured out how to use the small yet endlessly possible space of The Yellow Room. Emily didn’t try to create a dance for a proscenium stage to squeeze into a small living space, she made the room a character in her work. I believe that’s a big reason why Dance You Me was so effective: Emily activated the space with compositional magic that made it come alive, using strategic audience seating and finding every nook and cranny of a typical living room to hide away props – truly in a way that I would have as a kid when choreographing dances with my cousins at family gatherings. With Emily as the lead, the space was the supporting actor.

Another childhood memory many of us can relate to is playing “house” or “restaurant”. Cue in Cafe Mueller, where you can order water, still water or tap water – all to be paid for at a whopping price of $0 with a cardboard credit card reader for the guests sitting in the “reserved” seats. Emily’s incorporation of humor made the show that much brighter alongside the audience’s chosen lighting. But my favorite part of the show had to be when she asked us to put on our personal headphones and choose a song to listen to while she danced. I personally didn’t have my headphones with me, but holding my phone up to my ear sufficed to listen to “Cha Cha Cha” from Bruno Mars’s newest album as I watched Emily dance to (assumingly) a completely different song she listened to in her headphones. But that almost didn’t matter – the movement synced up so well with Bruno’s song that I felt convinced she must have been listening to that song too! I love a silent disco, but bring a silent disco into completely unrelated choreography, and I’m set with stimuli for the next four hours. That could have been the entire premise of the dance and I would’ve been happy. 

And yet, so much more happened in Dance You Me, and all I felt was happy – watching an impromptu thumb war between Emily and an audience member, seeing streamers burst throughout the room, hearing multiple “BINGO!” exclamations after said streamers burst, and agreeing to all collectively end the piece with a gasp of delight – I think I had a smile on my face for the entire forty-five minutes. Emily mentioned she pulled a lot from queer joy when finding the ethos of this piece, and had her girlfriend, Jenna, be a test audience for every run they did in their home. As a queer person myself, I think if sharing art and tapping into childhood imagination isn’t queer joy, I don’t know what is. When speaking with her after the show, I told Emily that I was hoping she would ask me what my dream job was as a kid. Despite being a mermaid, I would have instantly replied as my third grade self, “astronaut” (I have never had the mathematical skills to even attempt that career route, but we won’t talk about that). A la Liz Barton Dream Pharmacy, I was presented with a cardboard moon created in the event someone like me answered that question, and I even got to plant a pride flag on it. I mean, what more could I ask for than that?!

“You know, when you’re a kid, so many things seem possible. You’re figuring out the world, and I see this all the time with my friends’ kids where it’s like, sometimes they’ll ask a question and I’m like, oh yeah, you don’t know how it works. I think in that, you can sort of be really expansive and then, as you know, we see how young gender roles and heteronormativity gets put on kids. But I think returning to what you were interested in, regardless of what people were telling you to be interested in, is really lovely.”

Simply put: Emily showed us that when making art, world-building not only starts within the home, it starts with our inner child. In the dance phrase she repeated to an audience-decided piece of music, the silent disco, under the gold foil and alongside the three audience members living out their childhood dreams, Emily would often look at her hands in an introspective way that made me believe she had gold, glittery magic running from her palms all throughout her body. She brought us along in her journey of making magic that night, and left us all remembering to find playfulness that our inner child so often needs to make it through our regular, adult lives. To close out this review, here’s an important anecdote from Emily about her overall hope of audience takeaway for Dance You Me:

“I wanted the show to be fun and funny and warm and safe, and the world is not that way right now, especially for our trans siblings and queer people of color. And so I wanted this to be a space where people could fill their cup, and go out and do the hard things we have to do. You know, go out and protest, and go out and donate and help our neighbors. So I wanted this to be something that could feel sort of restorative – that’s what I was hoping for.”

Written by Luisa Lynch for Dancing in the District

Luisa Lynch (she/they) (@luisalynch) is a queer, mixed-race dance artist and educator based in Washington, D.C. In her work, practice, and life, Luisa reimagines dance through reclamation of the body, and aims to highlight intersectionalities of all identities and selves! You can read more about Luisa on our STAFF page!