The dance performed by 12 young women and girls in front of the Lincoln Memorial on Thursday afternoon didn’t last long. Just two minutes or so. But the performance, a protest work aimed at President Donald Trump and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, conveyed emotions that for some onlookers continued to resonate after it ended.
Wearing black blindfolds and light-blue leotards with different passages from the Epstein files printed on each, the dancers fluttered, flexed and weaved across the promenade beneath Lincoln’s gaze. Madonna’s “Live to Tell,” performed by a children’s choir, played from a speaker.
A man can tell a thousand lies/I’ve learned my lesson well
Hope I live to tell the secret I have learned/’til then it will burn inside of me
The performance began with lead dancer Devyn Scherff, 15, standing alone, in a skin-tone leotard, seemingly fighting off an attack and then slinking away. She was soon joined by another dancer, and the others eventually encircled her and flipped her over. Devyn emerged, miming a primal howl, before all of the dancers turned to face the memorial, removed their blindfolds and knelt down.
Devyn remained standing and raised a fist to the sky.
“Goose bumps,” said Peter Borsos, 56, as the dance ended. “Very emotional,” his wife, Anna, 55, said. The couple, from Stockholm, is spending a year in the United States and said they were encouraged to see signs of protest, particularly this one.
“It helps people understand how you can use art and performance to make a point, not just the protests that everyone is used to,” he said.
The work, titled “ResistDance vs Redaction,” “draws from recent reporting by NPR that the Justice Department withheld and removed certain Epstein-related files tied to allegations that President Donald Trump sexually abused a minor, known as Jane Doe 4,” its presenters said in a statement. The NPR article was published on Feb. 24. The dance “reinterprets those allegations through choreography and movement.”
On March 6, the Justice Department released files that included details from FBI interviews with a woman who told authorities she had been sexually assaulted by Trump and Epstein. The department said the files had not been previously released because they were incorrectly determined to be duplicates of other records.
The woman, who was interviewed by the FBI in 2019, accused Trump of sexually assaulting her decades earlier when she was a minor. No evidence has emerged publicly to corroborate that accusation. The Washington Post has been unable to reach the woman. The White House has called the allegations against Trump “completely baseless accusations, backed by zero credible evidence.”
“As President Trump has said many times, he has been totally exonerated by the release of the Epstein files,” White House spokeswoman Abigail T. Jackson said when asked for comment about Thursday’s dance protest.
The performance on Thursday is the creation of the First Amendment Troop, formed earlier this year by filmmaker Bryan Buckley, a two-time Academy Award nominee for live-action short films, and choreographer Matthew Steffens. Their first work, “ResistDance,” interpreted through dance the shooting deaths in Minneapolis by federal agents of two U.S. citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, who were protesting tactics employed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
Video clips of “ResistDance,” performed by 22 dancers in front of the Lincoln Memorial and — briefly, before being ordered to leave — in front of the Kennedy Center, quickly went viral. They were viewed more than 70 million times on various social media platforms in the first week, the presenters said.
Buckley said he wanted to move quickly with the new dance. “It’s very visceral. If it sits around too long, unfortunately the news cycle moves on,” he said in an interview. The entire project — from deciding to go forward with it to auditioning dancers, arranging video and production, and getting everyone to Washington for the event — took just under one month, he said. The presenters had a permit from the National Park Service to stage the protest at the Lincoln Memorial site.
Buckley estimated the total cost at between $100,000 and $200,000, and said it was paid for by Hungry Man Productions, the production company he co-founded in 1997 that is best known for television ad campaigns and Super Bowl commercials. Two of the 12 dancers are minors, and Buckley said that in addition to requiring parental approval, his team made certain that all of the dancers understood the purpose and meaning of the work. Parents were also present for all of the rehearsals, he said.
Deciding to put together a dance protest about the Epstein files and the young victims presented numerous challenges that Buckley said he spent a lot of time thinking about how to tackle.
“How do you do that with a degree of taste that doesn’t offend and doesn’t hurt the cause of justice, but rather furthers that cause?” he said.
Steffens, an opera and musicals choreographer, said that with the most recent work, he and assistant choreographer Nicole Lewandowski “wanted to make sure we were honoring these brave women who have come forward with their stories, and we’re trying to exemplify that strength with the choreography.”
Devyn said performing the dance in Washington “felt really great because I know that a lot of kids my age get abused and assaulted, and I don’t even know what would happen if that happened to me. … By doing this dance, it really made me express how I feel frustrated about this subject and I just want to let people know that it’s wrong and they shouldn’t do it.”
Devyn’s mother, Kelly Scherff, watched her daughter perform on Thursday and said they both “feel very strongly about protecting children from something like this.”
Cynthia Lewis, 78, visiting from Rowlett, Texas, said she and other family members were intrigued when they saw the women dancing and noticed their intense expressions. She didn’t immediately know it was about the Epstein files, “but I knew it had to do with struggle,” she said. Lewis said she fully supported the protest and thinks there’s nothing controversial about making the Epstein files public. “I’m hoping it eventually will be released, because the average American believes there’s information being hidden and covered up.”
“They are very brave to do something so peaceful and powerful without using any words,” said Lindsey Wiley, 43, who was taking visitors from out of town on a tour of D.C. when they happened upon the performance. “And that it’s a group of young women is very empowering.”
Taylor Curry, 28, of Jacksonville, Florida, was touring the capital with a friend when they saw the dancers. Curry wasn’t sure what to make of it at first but sensed that it was a protest of some kind.
“The best thing about America is that you can come out and do stuff like this,” she said. “The reason it works is that people actually stop and look. It’s better than just a sign.”
After their performance at the Lincoln Memorial, the First Amendment Troop dancers headed the short distance to the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, one of the Washington institutions renamed last year to honor the current president.
Moments after they finished their first run-through, they were ushered away by security.
They did not have a permit.
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