Year: 2024-2025
DanceForce Member: D. Chase Angier
Partnering DanceForce Member: Margaret Kaiser
Artists: D. Chase Angier, Markéta Fantová
Community Partners: Alfred University + Staff + Students; Buffalo Fillmore Neighborhood; Evelyne Leblanc Roberge; Kayleah Aldrich; Margaret Kaiser + Her Volunteers; Michael Cusack + Houghton Academy; Michael Mandalf; Monica Pellegrino Faix + Buffalo Central Terminal
Audience: 425
County: Erie
Letter to the World VII is a two-plus-year multidisciplinary project exploring connection, place, and collective reflection through dance, visual art, and public engagement. In 2024–2025, the project deepened both artistic creation and community involvement as it moved toward its culminating installation at the iconic Buffalo Central Terminal (BCT). The Terminal’s historic presence served as both the conceptual heart and physical anchor for this iteration.
This cycle focused on the creation of a short film featuring two choreographic “letters to the world” performed by Buffalo artists Elaine Gardner and James Levy. Filmed throughout the Terminal, the dancers’ movement shifted in response to each location’s architecture, acoustics, and atmosphere. Collaborators D. Chase Angier and Marketa Fantova, together with filmmaker/editor Cayla Mae Simpson, crafted a layered cinematic experience that intertwines the performers’ embodied histories with the building’s deep resonance. Composer Matias Homar created and performed an original score shaped by the emotional and sonic qualities of the Terminal’s vast interior.
A close partnership with Monica Pellegrino Faix and the BCT team ensured that all phases of the work aligned with the Terminal’s mission of welcoming, place-based public participation. With the site under active construction and continually evolving, this collaboration allowed the project to remain responsive, accessible, and rooted in the needs of the surrounding community.
Public engagement expanded significantly throughout the year. Two poetic billboards—featuring an image of a table, two empty chairs, and two held hands—were installed in the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood, offering a subtle invitation to curiosity and reflection. These images became quiet points of connection for residents living closest to the Terminal, many of whom later contributed written letters. According to vendor estimates, 206,613 people viewed the billboards.
The project team intentionally engaged a wide demographic range in terms of ethnicity, age, artistic background, and geographic location. They participated in three community events at the Terminal, speaking with residents and inviting them to respond to the central prompt: “If you could write a letter to the world, what would you say?” Partnerships with PS 069, led by Margaret Kaiser and Michael Cusack, generated more than 100 children’s letters—written predominantly by students living within three miles of the Terminal. These letters were displayed on a fifty-foot writing table outside the installation, inspiring visitors of all ages to write their own.
Additional outreach included a gathering at Margaret’s home with an artistically savvy community, connections through Homar to the local Buddhist community, participation of young emerging artists through Kayleah’s networks, and outreach through the BCT’s community organization. Extensive marketing further broadened participation.
Inside the Terminal, visitors could write letters, read children’s letters, record verbal reflections, and experience the danced film in the historic concourse. Packages labeled with excerpts from Letter to the World VI (Prague 2023) linked Buffalo’s voices to a global continuum of shared hopes and concerns. Participants recalled childhood memories of the station, stories from decades past, and emotional responses to the space itself. These cumulative conversations embodied the project’s purpose: to reanimate a public space through care, creativity, and collective inquiry, aligning deeply with the Buffalo Central Terminal’s mission.