Moving Arts returns to Cincinnati. Like many small arts organizations, the two-city summer dance company was unable to sustain operations during the height of the pandemic. But with audiences back in theaters, the time seemed right to revive the series.

“Our goal is the same as it always has been,” said co-artistic director Cervilio Amador. “So that artists have work during the summer and that they have the chance to continue to develop their craft.”

Amador is best known to local audiences for his distinguished career as the principal dancer of the Cincinnati Ballet. Since retiring from the stage in 2020, he has been the company’s rehearsal director.

Several years earlier, Amador had reconnected with former Cincinnati Ballet dancers Anthony Krutzkamp and Jill Marlow, who became members of Kansas City Ballet. Along with Kansas City Ballet colleague Logan Pachciarz, the couple founded the Kansas City Dance Festival in 2013. One of the dancers they hired for the short summer concert was Amador.

“From the start, it was such a great idea,” Amador said. “Within a few years we started talking about the possibility of doing something like this in Cincinnati.”

In 2017, the timing seemed right. They changed Kansas City Ballet’s name to Moving Arts and added Cincinnati as a second outpost, with Amador producing the Cincinnati dates.

From the audience’s point of view, the result was exhilarating. Brand new work from choreographers who were in some cases familiar – Heather Britt, founder of DanceFix – and in others completely new to Cincinnati. And there was the thrill of watching a pickup team of dancers from a multitude of companies. The Cincinnati and Kansas City ballets were represented. But there were also artists from Grand Rapids, Dayton and Oklahoma City.

“This year we wanted to push things forward in some way,” Amador said. Apparently it wasn’t complex enough to mount a series of performances in two cities nearly 600 miles apart.

They hired three choreographers. And rather than asking each of them to create unrelated works, they asked them to collaborate on an hour-long work built around a single theme: Joy.

It doesn’t matter that neither of them has ever choreographed with each other. The three — Yusha-Marie Sorzano, Andrea Giselle Schermoly and Cincinnati Ballet principal dancer Melissa Gelfin De-Poli — all knew each other. Sorzano and Schermoly were longtime friends. And De-Poli had danced in a work that Schermoly, Louisville Ballet’s resident choreographer, had created for the Cincinnati Ballet.

But knowing each other and collaborating on a long choreography are very different things. And then there is the theme itself. In a time of endless conflict and tension, what constitutes joy? Or is it even reasonable to expect it?

“It’s really challenging,” said Sorzano, an active freelance choreographer and member of Camille A. Brown & Dancers. “There is no roadmap for this.”

She has already collaborated with choreographers. But in this case, she was creating a work for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and, like her, her collaborators had trained at the Ailey School.

“We came from a similar background,” she said. “In this case, we have three women from very different backgrounds, all eager to learn from each other. That’s what we sailed. So far, she says, it’s been “a wonderful journey. I just wish we had more time.

Their first step was to talk – a lot.

“We really dove into uncharted waters with this one,” De-Poli said. “But that’s kind of what Moving Arts is. It’s about pushing the boundaries, working on the kinds of things you might not be able to do within the confines of a company that works 32-40 weeks a year.

At times, although it was nerve-wracking, the magnitude of what they were trying to accomplish with just three weeks of rehearsals became increasingly apparent.

“It’s a huge undertaking,” De-Poli said. “Fortunately, we have a fantastic team of 11 dancers who share the brunt of it all. It’s too early to start remembering what we do, but I’m pretty sure it’s an experience I’ll never forget.

This year’s ensemble is made up of dancers from the Cincinnati, Kansas City and Louisville ballets, as well as a pair of performers from the Kaufman School of Dance at the University of Southern California, the famed institution founded by Jodie Gates, who becomes artistic director of the Cincinnati Ballet. August 1st.

“We had Zoom sessions that were three or four hours long,” Schermoly said. “I know – it sounds tedious. But they weren’t, not at all. We discovered that we had a lot of things we wanted to talk about.

There was the pandemic, of course. But in the end, there was so much more that connected them to each other.

“It’s ambitious, I know,” Schermoly said. “But I was really impressed by the quality of our collaboration. Shocked, honestly. We were very effective in learning to work together. But we have learned to keep this theme of joy before us at all times.

“The pandemic has crippled many people’s feelings of joy. There was so much going on, locally and globally. It’s hard not to bear the brunt of everything that’s going on. But the more we talked, the more we realized that you can’t feel guilty about everything. We must make room for joy.

Moving Arts will perform July 22 (8 p.m.) and July 23 (2 p.m. and 8 p.m.) at the Jarson-Kaplan Theater in the Aronoff Center. Tickets are $25-$35 on Movingartsco.org or by calling 513-621-5282.