The Big Range Dance Festival features modern and postmodern dance exploring diverse ideas and the theatrical arts. Choreographers are encouraged to experiment with movement invention as they create a personal dance language. This is the eighth year of the festival, which begins June 5 and ends June 19.

The festival opens with four dances choreographed by Catalina Gutierrez Molnari, Jennifer Wood, Jacqueline Nalett and Allison Chavez Duncan. Highlights include Wood's Unite Dynomite and Smite You White Backbiting Mites and Nalett's Liquidbreathlandscape.

In Unite, Wood experiments with tiny and expansive movements. The dance gives a sense of people reaching out to each other but concludes with them in their own space.

Nalett's Liquid was inspired by shapes in nature. The third section features the ocean and incorporates circular body and rotational movement. The dance includes a video in the background and is performed to rain sounds and the music of Maxwell.