Rhonda Moore in a deep wide squat, hands clasped, peering over her fingers.

Helpful Hints for Strength and Health for Busy People

  • Philly Flamboyance AwardPhilia
  • Fringie Audience ChoiceBest Dance

An intergenerational dance project · Philadelphia · through spring 2027

It started with a book.

Helpful Hints for Strength and Health for Busy People is inspired by the whimsical 1901 book Illustrated Hints for Strength and Health for Busy People.

This project reimagines turn-of-the-century fitness advice through an intergenerational, embodied lens, exploring the evolving definitions of strength, health, and readiness across time and lived experience.

A sequence of Rhonda and Ben in acrobatic poses, like diagrams in an old exercise manual.

What do these practical workout tips have to do with surviving a gilded age and the rise of authoritarianism? Here are a few hints!

Hi, we're Rhonda and Ben.

Rhonda Moore

Rhonda Moore is a dancer, performance artist, educator, and a founding member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Moore has danced with Jamie Cunningham’s ACME Dance Company and began her dance career with intensive training in Dunham technique, performing with the Akosua Afro-Haitian Dance & Drum Troupe.

Currently a teaching artist for the award-winning Pierre Dulaine’s Dancing Classrooms Program, Moore previously served as Choral Director for the Singing City-in-the-Schools Program. Moore’s extensive international and domestic portfolios include conducting professional sound and movement workshops; creating site-specific interdisciplinary installations that integrate sound, movement and visual art through shared experience collaborative elaboration; teacher-specific professional development laboratories geared to generate curriculum development with a focused, integral inclusion of visual art, design, movement; and music and vocal concerts as jazz soloist in small combos as well as with chamber and full orchestral formations.

She holds a BFA from SUNY Purchase, a diploma in classical piano performance from Hoff-Barthelson Music School in Scarsdale, NY, and full, permanent certification in Italian as a second language, conferred by the University for Foreigners of Siena, Italy. Ms. Moore serves as adjunct professor, dance faculty at Boyer College of Music and Dance, teaching a variety of courses spanning from dance composition to the study of the development of jazz music and dance in the United States.

Ben Grinberg

Ben Grinberg (he/they) is a Philadelphia-based performing artist, director, educator, and festival producer. For over ten years, they have created community-based platforms for artistic presentation and exchange both in Philadelphia and abroad. He is a company member, co-founder, and director of Almanac Projects (formerly Almanac Dance Circus Theatre), an award-winning and internationally touring physical performance ensemble, and from 2017-2021 was a founding core faculty member and head of Performance and Artistic Craft at Circadium, the nation’s first certificate granting program in contemporary circus performance, where he developed and curated the Test Flights series.

He co-founded and led (2021-2025) Cannonball Festival, a hub for new performance in Philadelphia, and is on faculty at the (formerly UArts) Pig Iron MFA program in devised performance. Through Almanac, they initiated and co-produce the biannual Fit Fest in Penn Treaty Park. He is the 2025 recipient of the APAP/CIPA Award for Outstanding Achievement in Creative Producing, is a 2024 Festival Academy graduate, and was a 2024 and 2022 invited choreographer at the Breaking Walls Festival in Cairo, Egypt, a 2022 Subcircle resident artist, and a 2021 APLI fellow. With Almanac, he won a 2020 Rocky Award, a 2017 Suraya Award, and a 2019 Barrymore Award for Outstanding Movement/Choreography.

Recent directing and producing credits include I Think It Could Work, Dead Muse, Fix Me, $7 Girl, I Hear You and I’d Like to Respond, The Fleecing, and xoxo moongirl. Grinberg’s work has been presented by Queer Zagreb, Jacob's Pillow, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Morris Museum Presents, Touchstone Theatre, FringeArts, New York Live Arts, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Co, the Mexico City International Festival of Contemporary Dance, Assembly Festival, Zoo Edinburgh, Circus Now, and more. Regional performance includes Pig Iron Theatre Company (Franklin’s Key, Swamp is On, 99 Breakups, Pay Up!), Theatre Horizon (Peter and the Starcatcher, Hero School), Lantern Theatre Company (The Tempest), and more. As a video collaborator he has worked closely with artists such as Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Eiko Otake, and Zina Saro-Wiwa.

The duet will feature live original music from Philadelphia-based musician Honeychile, who explores identity and aging through the Black music canon. Meet Honeychile →

Rhonda and Ben sit close together on a mustard-yellow bench.
On a dark stage, Rhonda and Ben lean away from each other, holding hands.
Rhonda stands on Ben's shoulders under a single spotlight.

Partners since 2020.

Grinberg and Moore have been collaborating since 2020, when they created Fun With Dick and Jane as part of the digital Fringe, supported by a micro residency at FringeArts. Since then, they have continued to work together off and on, including for I Hear You and I’d Like to Respond, an ensemble production which featured Moore and was created and directed by Grinberg.

Moore’s entire journey of learning acrobatics has been with Grinberg and can be tracked through those two pieces, and as it will continue through the creation of Helpful Hints. The tenor of their collaboration is light and fun, yet both bring a sense of rigor to their artmaking.

Free · 50 minutes · comes to you

Free workshops for seniors.

We're touring to senior community centers, homes, and anywhere where seniors congregate with a FREE, 50 minute performance and workshop!

Moore and Grinberg will perform short, 25-minute excerpts of the duet at partner locations. These free, intimate, site-specific performances will be paired with a 25-minute accessible creative movement workshop facilitated by Moore and Grinberg, followed by a brief Q&A session. These workshops will introduce senior communities to dance and circus in an accessible way, while also laying the foundation for ongoing engagement and participation through an introduction to this project, its goals, and ways to get involved.

A woman flexes on an exercise ball beside a flexing partner.
A group of workshop participants pose with a tennis racket, a frisbee and a resistance band.

Our FREE program:

  • Engages seniors in opportunities for physical activity and exercise.
  • Sparks cross-generational conversations about strength and health.
  • Offers opportunities for further creative practice.
Sign up for a workshop

Host a workshop

If you or a community member, organization, or space can help support this project, we’d love to hear from you!

We’re in search of:

Space to hold our community workshops and performances! Suitable spaces:

  • are at least 15’x15’ to perform in, preferably with at least 12’ ceilings.
  • have access to power for a speaker.
  • are ADA accessible, or have as few steps as possible.
  • Partner organizations to help us spread the word about the project.
  • BIPOC elders and community spaces interested in creating dance that revolves around their personal expressions of health and strength.

Here’s what we can provide:

  • A FREE award winning performance and a participatory workshop for folks of many ability levels, where participants can share what strength and health mean to them!
  • Promotional materials to help spread the word about the performance/workshop!
  • More info about how to get involved in our ongoing community art project through March 2027!
Email colby@thealmanac.us

Upcoming workshops: Mon, Oct 19 · Sun, Oct 25 · Sat, Nov 7

Helpful hints for Helpful Hints

How do you define strength and health?

“Health” and “Strength” mean and look like many different things. To be clear, we’re not interested in furthering antiquated ideas of what health, strength, and fitness looks like. Instead, we’re defining Health and Strength as:

On a pink sunburst, a woman lying on her back balances a dancer on her feet.
  1. Ability to take risks, learn from, and even celebrate mistakes.
  2. Willingness to support others, and to be supported.
  3. Emotional and physical resilience through challenge or struggle.
  4. Creative thinking and problem solving.
  5. Openness to new ideas and new ways of being in relationship with others.
  6. Employing practice and experimentation to move past initial ideas about limitation, both internally and externally.
  7. Noticing the daily opportunities life offers us for connection, gratitude, and transformation.

Busy People

10 elders. 10 duets.

Rhonda and Ben are collaborating with 10 BIPOC elders to co-create intergenerational duets with younger artists, based on their personal concepts of strength and health. Memories of cultural practices, traditions, and experiences will collide and meld, inviting us all to come together across differences.

Busy People will be a full-length dance work co-created by 10 BIPOC elders, each of whom will work, through a facilitated development process guided by Moore and Grinberg, with a member of the Philadelphia independent performance community to create their own duet about the concepts of strength and health and coming together across differences. Moore and Grinberg will lightly shape and choreograph these 10 duets into an hour-long performance work.

Two dancers dance cheek to cheek in front of lilac and yellow blocks.
A pair of dancers strike a series of playful poses.

Co-creation of duets begins in the Fall of 2026 for a premiere in Spring 2027. We’re looking for BIPOC elders (55+) and non-elder emerging and professional dance artists of any skill level, body type, and age.

Selected participants will be compensated!

Be in the performance

Co-creation of duets begins in the Fall of 2026 for a premiere in Spring 2027. We’re looking for BIPOC elders (55+) and non-elder emerging and professional dance artists of any skill level, body type, and age.

Selected participants will be compensated!

Busy People will be a full-length dance work co-created by 10 BIPOC elders, each of whom will work, through a facilitated development process guided by Moore and Grinberg, with a member of the Philadelphia independent performance community to create their own duet about the concepts of strength and health and coming together across differences. Moore and Grinberg will lightly shape and choreograph these 10 duets into an hour-long performance work.

Ideal duet partners are:

  • Interested in making new connections in their community.
  • Curious about ways to stay “strong” and “healthy” outside of physical fitness.
  • Open to try new ways of exercising their brain AND their body.
  • Seeking ways to empower themselves and those around them.
Apply to take partAsk us a question

From the first workshop to the stage.

  1. Now – March 2027

    We're touring to senior community centers, homes, and anywhere where seniors congregate with a FREE, 50 minute performance and workshop!

  2. Fall 2026

    Co-creation of duets begins in the Fall of 2026 for a premiere in Spring 2027.

  3. Spring 2027

    Almanac Projects will create, produce, and present two new full-length companion dance works titled Helpful Hints for Strength and Health for Busy People and Busy People.

Two dancers perch on a yellow stool against a blue and white sunburst.
Rhonda and Ben lean back from each other, hands joined, on stage.
Ben lifts Rhonda overhead against a deep blue stage.

What’s the point really?

We like to think we’re planting the seeds for:

Stronger Communities

street blocks, neighborhoods, and cities that can work in partnership to solve the problems they face, share what they have with one another, and resist together against forces that would tear them apart. We are stronger together than we are alone.

Healthy Minds and Bodies

people who feel empowered to speak their truth, who can exercise their agency to inspire and make change, who know when to rest and when to push themselves and others to do more. Health is holistic.

Helpful People

folks who see a need and can figure out how to meet that need, friends who can give to (and receive from) their communities, and communities bonded by the shared experiences of seeing, needing, and learning about one another.

Ben and Rhonda lie head to head, grinning up at the camera.

We want to hear from you!

Come to a free workshop

We're touring to senior community centers, homes, and anywhere where seniors congregate with a FREE, 50 minute performance and workshop!

Sign up

Upcoming workshops: Mon, Oct 19 · Sun, Oct 25 · Sat, Nov 7

Host or partner with us

Partner organizations to help us spread the word about the project.

Host a workshop

If you or a community member, organization, or space can help support this project, we’d love to hear from you!

We’re in search of:

Space to hold our community workshops and performances! Suitable spaces:

  • are at least 15’x15’ to perform in, preferably with at least 12’ ceilings.
  • have access to power for a speaker.
  • are ADA accessible, or have as few steps as possible.
  • Partner organizations to help us spread the word about the project.
  • BIPOC elders and community spaces interested in creating dance that revolves around their personal expressions of health and strength.

Here’s what we can provide:

  • A FREE award winning performance and a participatory workshop for folks of many ability levels, where participants can share what strength and health mean to them!
  • Promotional materials to help spread the word about the performance/workshop!
  • More info about how to get involved in our ongoing community art project through March 2027!
Email colby@thealmanac.us

Dance in Busy People

Selected participants will be compensated!

Be in the performance

Co-creation of duets begins in the Fall of 2026 for a premiere in Spring 2027. We’re looking for BIPOC elders (55+) and non-elder emerging and professional dance artists of any skill level, body type, and age.

Selected participants will be compensated!

Busy People will be a full-length dance work co-created by 10 BIPOC elders, each of whom will work, through a facilitated development process guided by Moore and Grinberg, with a member of the Philadelphia independent performance community to create their own duet about the concepts of strength and health and coming together across differences. Moore and Grinberg will lightly shape and choreograph these 10 duets into an hour-long performance work.

Ideal duet partners are:

  • Interested in making new connections in their community.
  • Curious about ways to stay “strong” and “healthy” outside of physical fitness.
  • Open to try new ways of exercising their brain AND their body.
  • Seeking ways to empower themselves and those around them.
Apply to take partAsk us a question

If you’d like to get involved please reach out to colby@thealmanac.us.

Thank you to our funders.

With lead support from

With additional support from

  • Philadelphia Cultural Fund
  • Henrietta Tower Wurts Memorial Fund

Produced by Almanac Projects.

photographs by

  • Maya Jackson
  • Johanna Austin
  • Shosh Isaacs

Follow the project

Join the Almanac newsletter for Helpful Hints news, workshop dates and the premiere.