The Return

What stories have shaped our collective consciousness, our world? What new stories can we tell that will uphold and protect the sanctity of all life?

Invaders of the Heart: The Return is a multimedia dance theater production from renowned choreographer and director Myra Krien, featuring the Mosaic Dance Company, the Starbelly Dancers, Drake Von Trapp, and Kamrah. By exploring sacred symbols of rebirth, renewal, ecstasy, and our inextricable interconnectedness with the natural world, The Return looks to the past as a touchstone for examining our present and building our collective future. With prominent artist Michael Bergt's paintings as a striking backdrop for the dance, this collaboration is both visually stunning and powerfully prescient for these times.

"Eternal return is the promise of the snake."

-Craig S. Barnes

"The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together.” — Robin Wall Kimmerer

Santa Fe, NM - May 24th & 25th, 2024

NDI NM Dance Barns

San Miguel de Allende, MX - January 31st and February 1st, 2025

Teatro Ángela Peralta - Tickets coming soon

Waimea, Big Island of Hawaii, HI - March 8th, 2025

Kahilu Theater - Tickets coming soon

Are you a dancer interested in performing in Invaders of the Heart: The Return? Check pomegranatestudio.org/eventcalendar for current performance opportunities.

About the Director:

Myra Krien is the founder and director of Pomegranate Studios, a dance school and performing arts organization dedicated to education and community outreach which opened in Santa Fe in 1996. The 2019 recipient of the Santa Fe Mayor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, Krien is an award-winning dance artist, professional dance mentor, and international performer, choreographer and instructor of MENAHT (Middle Eastern, North African, Hellenistic and Turkish) dance forms. More info: pomegranatestudio.org

About the Artist:

Michael Bergt (b.1956) is a figurative artist whose work has been in a deep dialogue with art history over the course of his more than forty-year career. Working across drawing, sculpture, and primarily egg tempera painting, Bergt currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has had major exhibitions in New York, San Francisco and Santa Fe. Bergt has works in the permanent collection of: The Arnot Museum, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Crystal Bridges Museum, Currier Museum, Evansville Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco—de Young Museum, Frye Art Museum, Kalamazoo, Museum. His works can be seen at michaebergtart.com.

"Man is as much attached to nature as a tree, and though he walks freely on two legs and is not rooted in the soil, he is by no means a self-sufficient, self-moving, and self-directing entity.For his life he depends absolutely on the same factors as the tree, the worm, and the fly, on the universal powers of nature, life, God, or whatever it may be...."

"From some mysterious source life flows through him unceasingly; it does not just go in at birth and come out at death—he is the channel for an ever moving stream, a stream that carries the blood through his veins, that moves his lungs and brings him air to breathe, that raises his food from the earth and bears the light of the sun to his face..."

"If we look into a single cell of his body we find the universe, for sun, moon, and stars are ceaselessly maintaining it; we find it again if we plumb into the depths of his mind, for there are all the archaic urges of primeval life, both human and animal, and could we look deeper we might find kinship with the plants and rocks." - Alan Watts