UC Irvine festival blends dance, music, film, and mindfulness

At UC Irvine, mindfulness did not sit in a workshop room. It opened a festival with a community meditation, then moved into film, jazz dance, and a campus-wide conversation about how the body holds knowledge.

Restive Moves: A Multimedia Festival of Dance, Music, Film & Mindfulness ran from April 30 through May 3, 2026, in the Experimental Media Performance Lab at the Claire Trevor School of the Arts. Conceived and curated by Professor S. Ama Wray, who also directs MOVE LAB, and developed with UC Irvine senior Nakya Solomon, the four-day program brought together artists, educators, scientific researchers, students, and community members around movement, healing, creativity, and community.

UC Irvine framed the festival as more than a performance series, calling it an interdisciplinary event that highlighted “the moving body as a site of knowledge, connection and restoration.” That wording fit the structure of the weekend. Instead of treating mindfulness as a standalone wellness offer, the university placed it inside dance-making, music, documentary film, and public discussion, a format built to catch people who might never sign up for a conventional meditation session.

The opening night program, Breath, Justice & Jazz, began with a community meditation led by Tina Orduno Calderon, identified as a Culture Bearer of Gabrielino Tongva, Chumash, Yoeme and Chicana descent. The meditation was framed as a way to deepen alignment with life, land and one another, before the evening shifted to Erin Cooney’s documentary Aire Libre, created with CONTRA-TIEMPO, and a performance by the LA Jazz Dance Company. Dr. Dominic J. Bednar moderated the post-performance Q&A, keeping the night’s focus on the overlap between artistic practice, social meaning, and embodied awareness.

The festival also underscored access. UC Irvine listed tickets at $20 for the full price, $15 for groups of 10 or more, seniors and UCI affiliates, and $10 for students and youth. A package for all four paid events cost $40, or $10 per event, signaling an effort to pull the campus and surrounding community into the same room.

Wray’s role gave the project deeper context. UC Irvine describes her as a choreographer, teacher, researcher, writer, director, performer and inventor, with presentations at the United Nations, Princeton, Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study and Dance/USA. Her MOVE LAB explores how movement and music function as practices for healing, health and human flourishing, and her Embodiology practice draws on African performance traditions and neuroscience to restore body-mind awareness. Restive Moves showed where mindfulness is spreading next: into cultural programming that can feel like art, study, and community at once.