This paper discusses a graduate thesis project aimed to serve underprivileged teenage girls residing in a foster care facility through engagement in a collaborative dance-making process with students from a university dance department. While the project focused upon the choreography of trained and untrained bodies as a vehicle for service, it also considers the choreography of the foster care system (involving a continual negotiation of personal, relational, and environmental tensions) and the choreography of community engagement (including communication, planning, relationship-building, inclusion, reflection, and termination).

Additionally, the presentation examines links between embodiment and empowerment, analyzing how the trained and untrained dancers experienced a process of realization of self and others through the development of a corporeal work. The trained and untrained dancers in this project identified sources of personal disempowerment and objectification while also recognizing commonalities. Within the context of this project, participants formed connections between their unique histories and their bodies, asserting subjective agency and ownership as they revisited and shaped memories through embodied expression. The challenging transition from the choreographic to performative phase of this project is also discussed, in conjunction with a consideration of ways to ensure that the choreography of performance leads to empowerment rather than exploitation.