Loading Events

CLS: Great Plains — Dances of the Lakota Sioux and The Massacre of Wounded Knee

Date & Time

June 15, 2026

10:30 am - 12:00 pm

This event is included with your Daily, Weekly or Season Chautauqua Pass.
This lecture will dive into the dances of the Lakota Sioux, specifically the Sun Dance and the Ghost Dance. Dance was an integral part of Native American life and still is today. When the colonizers came to America, they clashed with Native Americans in many ways. The colonizers tried to annihilate Native culture and force them to assimilate into the white man’s world. The U.S. government went so far as to ban some of their dances. The Ghost Dance was born specifically to resist Manifest Destiny. The Ghost Dance has a direct connection to The Massacre of Wounded Knee, which was one of the worst massacres to occur on American soil against Native Americans. 

Annika Sheaff earned her master’s in dance from University of the Arts and Bennington College, studying under Donna Faye Burchfield and Thomas F. DeFrantz. She received a bachelor’s in dance from The Juilliard School, where she trained with Ohad Naharin, Paul Taylor, Ronald K. Brown and others, and earned Juilliard’s InterArts Award for community outreach. 

Sheaff toured with Pilobolus Dance Theater, performing over 550 shows on four continents and collaborating with the founders, Inbal Pinto, Avshalom Pollak, puppeteer Basil Twist, graphic artist Art Spiegelman and the band OKGO. She appeared on America’s Got Talent, Extra!, Sesame Street, and the cover of Dance Magazine. She was in the original cast of "James and the Giant Peach" and toured with Aszure Barton and Artists. 

From 2012–2017, she was a member of GroundWorks Dance Theater, creating over 15 new works with collaborators including David Shimotakahara, Rosie Herrera and Johannes Wieland. Her choreography has been presented nationally and in South Africa. Sheaff received a 2016 Creative Workforce Fellowship to produce seven dance films and taught as Associate Professor of Dance at Baldwin Wallace University before joining the faculty at Texas Christian University.