After a successful live adaptation of “The Remember Balloons,” choreographer Dominic Moore-Dunson and composer Theron Brown are setting their sights on another children’s book for their next collaboration.
Moore-Dunson and Brown this year will stage a dance theater production of “Float,” a picture book by Daniel Miyares. The two creatives received funding for the show from TYA Tour Development Collective, a national consortium of 21 performing arts presenting organizations. “Float” is one of six shows, from a pool of 64 applicants, that the collective awarded funding to for 2026.
The show will debut in November at the Cuyahoga Falls Performing Arts Center. After that, it will embark on a national tour in 2027-2028. Moore-Dunson said they are currently in talks with 14 performing arts centers across the country.
As with “The Remember Balloons,” Moore-Dunson’s children inspired his decision to adapt “Float.” The book ended up in Moore-Dunson’s hands after his kids, ages 4 and 5, picked it out at the library with their mom, Ashley Moore-Dunson. (She is also Moore-Dunson’s creative partner and is co-producing “Float.”)
When Moore-Dunson sat down to read it to his kids, he quickly realized it was a picture book.
“You flip through the first page, you flip through the second page, and you start to realize there’s no words,” he said. “And then the kids were like, ‘Daddy, go back to the beginning,’ and then they just started telling me what was happening in the story from front to back.”
‘Float‘ will encourage kids to access their imaginations
The book is about a young boy who makes a paper boat on a rainy day. He takes it outside to play in the puddles. But then, much to his disappointment, the boy loses his boat when it’s washed away in a gutter stream.
“He walks back home, afraid to tell his dad what happened, but his dad embraces him,” Moore-Dunson said. “They make a new thing out of paper. It’s a paper plane. And when he goes back outside, it’s a sunny day.”
For Moore-Dunson and Brown, adapting a picture book gives them more room to play and interpret the story as they see it while they script the theatrical production.
“I think that makes it more wide open. It just gives me more freedom, I guess, and less boundaries,” Brown said. “It’s going to be soulful, as usual, because we’re both some soulful brothers. It’s also going to be fun, but there’s also going to be these parts where we’re going to pull out the despair, or what a child is going through.”
In conversations with Miyares, the book’s author and illustrator, Moore-Dunson said Miyares described the book as “intimate yet cinematic.” As he worked on the script, Moore-Dunson’s interpretation of the story evolved.
“Our version of the story, the adaptation, is much more about this boy or this child who doesn’t know how to access their imagination,” he said.
To help the boy along, Moore-Dunson created three new characters: Thunder, Lightning and Sprinkles. They not only represent the weather elements but help the young boy navigate his flurry of emotions, which range from curiosity and excitement to desperation and disappointment.
Book’s message relevant to people of all ages
Moore-Dunson and Brown are still in the early stages of crafting the project’s theatrical production — Brown said they often work on the most difficult parts of the show first. The music will be soulful and fun, Brown said, but it will also match the moments of despair the young main character feels.
“The harmony dictates the mood, and then the instrumentation represents the characters,” Brown said. “We try to, individually, give them a sound, if you will, that kind of streamlines [their presence] throughout the show.”
“Float” is targeted toward students in kindergarten through third grade, but the message, Moore-Dunson said, is relevant to older audiences too. For him, the paper boat represents a person’s dream and what happens when that dream doesn’t work out.
“Once that thing doesn’t happen, the disappointment of it, and then how you take what you learned and the resilience of taking what you learned in that first dream to create your second one that you end up flying with is very much what it’s about for me,” Moore-Dunson said.
For Moore-Dunson and Brown, “Float” is another step in their growing friendship and collaboration.
“I think what’s most important to me is the friendship and the partnership,” Moore-Dunson said. “If we stay as kind as we are, we’ll be able to do, I believe, literally anything with our work.”
