It's been nearly five years since Sandy Hook, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza fatally shot 20 elementary school children in Newtown, Connecticut, in December of 2012. And while little has shifted the country's desperation about gun violence — including not only mass shootings in national places of public conregation; violence by police on unarmed or otherwise law-abiding people of color; and the steady increase of gun sales and campaign donations from the NRA — a circle of friends have spun it into a praxis of healing.

This weekend only, it’s the origins of a captivatinf interdisciplinary piece called The Twenty, devised and performed by artists, educators, students and 15 dancers at the Portland Ballet Studio Theater.