Renee Good and Alex Pretti of Minnesota are two of the most significant people in 2026 so far because of how they perished while resisting the operations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (ICE). Hence, a dance collective saw it fit to honor the memory of the two civilians in a symbolic Washington DC re-enactment of how they died, and on President’s Day, nonetheless.
The collective of Broadway and Kennedy Center performers called First Amendment Troop has gone viral for their dramatic dance protest, as they even performed it on February 16 right outside the John F. Kennedy Center (aka Trump and Kennedy Center) for the Performing Arts in Washington DC. The performance portrayed the final moments of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, and a clip of the dance has since gone viral, with millions of views across multiple platforms.
The group calls their performance, “ResistDance,” where 22 dancers symbolized the 22 days between the deaths of Good and Pretti, both died in separate encounters involving federal immigration agents in Minneapolis earlier this year. In the video, you can see the dancers assume the shape of the car that Good was driving, the agents who opened fire, and the chaos surrounding both incidents, while the re-enactment for Pretti’s death was more traditional, though it still involved dancers dressed as ICE agents.
The Dance Has Sparked Off a Debate Online
Regardless of the subject matter they chose, one cannot deny the skill and masterful coordination of the dancers. For that matter, many people online praised the First Amendment Troop for their portrayal, “😢Art is can be so loud and powerful even without words,” according to one commenter, with another echoing the sentiment, “Absolutely brilliant, exhausting, horrifying. Truth in art.”
On the other side of the political spectrum, however, people are criticizing the performance and questioning the goal, as one commenter on X asks, “What are they trying to achieve with this act?” Others, however, were still stuck on trying to justify ICE’s use of force, saying “They forgot the part where the two ton car was used as a weapon,” in the case of Renee Good’s death.
For some reason, one X user even tried to compare the re-enactment to state forces harming civilians, “Serious question: If this was conservatives reenacting a shooting by police to protest defund the police, would the media call it ‘brave art’ or ‘insurrection 2.0’? Asking for a friend in DC.” One might need to clarify the definition of the word “brave” for such a query.
