Flatlands Dance Film Festival

• Event Date: Thursday, August 27, 2026
• Time: 7:00 pm–9:00 pm (CDT)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: Tickets available at the door, $5 students/seniors, $10 general admission.

• Film

• Festival Curator: Laura Chiaramonte
• Feature Film: Last Dance at the Sundance Stompede
• A documentary directed by Graham Clayton-Chance

Line dancing carries a lineage far older than the country-western dance hall—its roots trace through Caribbean dance traditions to West and Central African communal movement practices, forms built on unison, rhythm, and collective celebration rather than performance for an audience. That lineage traveled through the American South and into 20th-century social dance, eventually arriving on the country-western dance floor with its own distinct steps, partners, and gendered conventions.

This film tells the story of what happened when queer communities claimed that floor as their own.

In November 2023, more than 800 people traveled from around the world to San Francisco for the final Sundance Stompede—an LGBTQ+ country-western dance weekend that had anchored queer community life for 27 years. What began in the early 1990s as a small grassroots AIDS fundraiser grew into a beloved annual gathering, where queer people of every background found each other through a shared love of country-western dance, and where the form's traditional gender roles were rewritten on the dance floor itself.

Last Dance at the Sundance Stompede documents that final, historic weekend through the reflections of founder Ingu Yun and 15 longtime participants, as they mark the end of an era with one last dance together. More than a farewell to a single event, the film is a portrait of a community that turned to dance—for nearly thirty years—as a means of survival, celebration, and transformation.

After the Screening:

Continue the night with community and dancing Join us at: Gallery Art Bar (external link), 119 W Main St Urbana, IL 61801. (external link)

• 8:30–10:00 pm: line dancing with instructor Marlee Doniff
• 10:00 pm–1:00 am: DJ Ice Dre spinning Afrobeat