On the evening of October 17, 2026, the Eleanor Roosevelt Room inside Tacoma's historic Armory will fill with something unusual for a dance concert: the audience's own ideas. Barefoot Collective, a community-based dance organization, presents an evening that mixes set choreography with improvisation, and at least some of the dances will take shape from themes suggested by the people in the seats that night. The event is open to audiences of all ages.
The participatory format is the heart of the draw. Improvised dance is nothing new, but building a public performance around prompts gathered from the room is a rarer proposition, one that turns a conventional recital into something closer to a conversation. Dancers arrive with skill and vocabulary; the audience supplies the spark. What gets made exists only for that evening and those people.
Barefoot Collective describes itself as "a community-based organization dedicated to creating opportunities for dance and related arts in the Greater Tacoma Area," working toward that goal through educational opportunities, community-based performances, audience experiences, and artist collaborations. Its stated aim is to foster a creative community through service projects, creative connections, and a collaborative spirit. The organization emerged out of the Barefoot Studios in 2008 and is run by co-directors who, in the group's words, are "proud to call Barefoot their creative home." It is fiscally sponsored by Shunpike, the Washington State nonprofit that provides independent arts groups with the services and resources they need to build sustainable footing. It is also among the organizations funded by Tacoma Creates, the city's voter-approved cultural access program, which for the 2026-27 cycle approved roughly $6.4 million across 80 arts, culture, heritage, and science organizations.
The collective's history runs deep in Tacoma's dance scene. In 2011 it received a three-month creative residency through Spaceworks Tacoma, the program that places artists in vacant storefronts and underused spaces downtown. That residency, at 915 Pacific Avenue, supported the completion of a major piece titled The Ides of May, performed the weekend of May 14-15, 2011, and the studio used the space to hold community auditions and offer dance instruction to students of all levels. Spaceworks described the company then as one that had "earned praise for their original, contemporary works of power and passion." Alongside its mainstage productions, the group has built a steady rhythm of community programming, including a Sunday Dance Day series of open classes taught by a rotating cast of local instructors and a Dancing in the Park series.
The venue itself carries its own weight. The Tacoma Armory was built in 1908 and opened in 1909, and for most of a century it served as a Washington National Guard facility, used for military training but also for social gatherings: graduations, dances, concerts, and sporting events. The Guard closed the Armory in 2011. Two years later, Fred Roberson bought it and set about renovating the then-110-year-old structure, a project that would transform it into a performance venue. Tacoma Arts Live later made the Armory its home, and the Eleanor Roosevelt Room became its intimate theater space, hosting performances as well as educational programs and an arts business incubator.
That chapter has since shifted. In early 2026, Tacoma Arts Live announced it would wind down the majority of its programming at the end of the performance season and put the Armory up for sale, citing millions of dollars in debt and the cost of operating the building. Board of trustees president Lisa Kremer told The News Tribune that the organization's move into the Armory had proven unsustainable, and that after June it would focus on educational programming. The news landed hard on Tacoma's performing arts scene, coming five years after the organization lost its long-held role managing three city-owned theaters.
Against that backdrop, an evening like Live at the Eleanor reads differently. The Armory's future is unsettled, and the rooms that once hosted a steady slate of programming now host a thinner, more precarious calendar. A local collective filling the Eleanor Roosevelt Room with improvised dance, inviting the audience to help decide what happens, is both a continuation of the building's long history as a gathering place and a reminder of what is at stake when a city's arts infrastructure wobbles.
For the dancers, the format is a test of a particular kind of fluency. Choreographed work can be rehearsed into polish; improvisation cannot. It asks performers to listen, respond, and commit in real time, in front of people who are watching closely. When the prompts come from the audience, the stakes rise further, because the material is genuinely unknown until the moment it begins. The result can be funny, strange, tender, or all three, and it will never be repeated in quite the same way.
Barefoot Collective's event is scheduled for October 17, 2026, at the Tacoma Armory, 1001 S. Yakima Ave. The Eleanor Roosevelt Room is an intimate space, and the all-ages invitation is deliberate, consistent with an organization whose mission centers on access. For anyone curious about contemporary dance in Tacoma, or simply looking for an evening that will not unfold the way a typical performance does, the proposition is straightforward: come with a theme in mind, and watch what the dancers do with it.