Genna Moroni and Christina Burchard, The Weight of a Dream (homeLA, 2025).

Описание: The Weight of a Dream was a site-responsive dance work choreographed for and inspired by the MHA Site Office in Crestwood Hills, a postwar cooperative housing experiment imagined by artists and creatives in Los Angeles. Created by choreographer Genna Moroni and filmmaker Christina Burchard (and performed by Marlie Couto with music by Joe Berry), the work emerges directly from sustained research and movement development at the site, responding to its architectural form, historical weight, and social vision.

Crestwood Hills—developed by the Mutual Housing Association—was the first successful large-scale cooperative housing development in California. Its original Site Office, where architects worked to realize this ambitious experiment in collective living, became the choreographic ground for The Weight of a Dream. Now a private residence stewarded by architect, author, and historian Cory Bruckner, the Site Office carries layered histories of aspiration, labor, care, and loss.

Through choreography shaped by the building’s spatial rhythms and material traces, The Weight of a Dream examines utopian ideals of community and affordable housing while reckoning with the forces that destabilized them—racially restrictive covenants, the 1961 Bel Air fire, cycles of redevelopment, and historic erasure. Drawing on the writings of Mike Davis, the work frames Crestwood Hills as both a fragile ideal and a lens through which to consider Los Angeles’s ongoing struggles with displacement, rebuilding, wildfire, and resilience.

Moroni’s choreography translates site-specific research into movement scores and pathways that activate the invisible layers of the MHA Site Office, allowing history to move through the body. Developed in parallel with Burchard and Moroni’s research for an upcoming dance film with homeLA, the performance honors Crestwood Hills’ enduring dreams while acknowledging the unraveling of its urban utopia—creating new memories within a place still humming with intention.

The Weight of a Dream was curated by Chloë Flores, produced by homeLA in partnership with Cory Bruckner and Bryony Roberts, and generously supported by homeLA’s community.