With You I’m Born Again, Waiting for the Flight, Finding the Past

You don’t go to the airport expecting to be taught anything. The whole place is designed to move you along — shoes off, laptop out, boarding group called before you’re ready. Which is why the dress catches you off guard.

It stands behind glass at Denver International Airport, a rust-colored skirt falling in a way that suggests it hasn’t quite decided to stop moving. The placard says With You I’m Born Again, first performed in 1980. It doesn’t need to say much more. The fabric already knows.

Cleo Parker Robinson Dance is marking its 55th anniversary this season, though the number feels almost beside the point. Longevity is easy to measure and harder to understand. What matters more is how something survives — and what it refuses to let go of. CPRD has survived by remembering that dance is not spectacle first, but practice: something handed down, body to body, often within families, sometimes within communities that history has been less careful with.

The dress was made by Martha Parker, Cleo Parker Robinson’s mother. Robinson wore it herself when the piece premiered, dancing with Ronnie Whittaker. Decades later, when the work was revived, the same dress returned to the stage. No reinterpretation, no “updated” version. Just fabric, time, and muscle memory agreeing to meet again.

That detail lingers. In a culture that loves the new and distrusts the old, CPRD has quietly insisted that continuity is not stagnation. It is a form of resistance.

The larger exhibition nearby reinforces the point. Costumes from works by Donald McKayle, Milton Myers, and Robinson herself appear less like artifacts than witnesses. They don’t explain themselves. They don’t apologize. They simply stand there, holding the shape of dances that once asked something of the body — and still do.

There’s something fitting about encountering all this at the airport. Everyone is between places, between versions of themselves. The art doesn’t interrupt the rush so much as exist alongside it, unconcerned with whether you stop. But if you do, even briefly, Denver comes into focus differently. Not as a city passing through, but as one that has been keeping time all along.

By the time your flight is called, the dress is still there. You leave. It doesn’t. And somehow that feels like the point.