Entryway of Crane House & Historic YWCA

#001: The Beginnings

January 4, 2025

“It takes a thousand voices to tell a single story. Whose voices do you hear in this house?”
– printed in large letters on the wall inside Crane House & Historic YWCA.

We have begun! Yesterday The Moving Architects had a tour of Montclair History Center’s Crane House & Historic YWCA – the official start to our site-specific dance project set for September 2025.  After a fall of initial planning, grant writing, bringing together project dancers, and early studio solo work, it felt good to be in the space together.

Crane Family Tree Close-up

Our tour was led by the knowledgeable and enthusiastic Angelica Dibbs, Executive Director of Montclair History Center.  She guided us in learning and understanding more about the people who lived and breathed in the rooms from 1796 to the present and with this, the fascinating, layered, and surprising history of the structure itself.  She was a wealth of information, and we look forward to digging through the archives and watching documentaries to learn more.

Cece, Emily, Kelly, and Karma at the back entrance after tour

I find sacredness in embodying and spending time in historical sites and spaces, taking in and imagining the lived histories within the architecture or landscape. I felt this recently when filming a dance project at Broadway Presbyterian Church in NYC and creating on the shores of Lummi Island in Washington State, and I felt it again yesterday.  We had time to settle in. We turned on the record player in the Club Room (1940-1965) and heard a scratchy 1950s Elvis Presley – leading us to imagine the social gatherings when the building was a YWCA.  We looked closely at the family tree hand drawing in the Dining Room (1840-1900), which led us to visualize the lives and deaths of a wealthy family lineage.  We walked the creaky, sturdy wood stairs, imagining the immigrants and enslaved people who worked in the house over the decades. We read and examined artifacts in each room that represented a different period, inspected details up close,studied room compositions from afar, and simply sat and took in the spaces.

The beginning is an exciting place to be.

-Erin Carlisle Norton