Live Arts Plus
New York Live Arts’ Plus program is designed to allow mission-aligned performing arts organizations access to state-of-the-art facilities and support toward the growth of their work.
*Denotes Live Arts Plus Partners. The Live Arts Plus Partners programs come from our community of artists and nonprofits, and receive access to discounted space, marketing, and production opportunities.
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The Block: An Afro-Musical
The block is much more than a strip of pavement in an urban neighborhood. It’s a stage for both good and bad to flourish in a community and for its residents to express their hardships and triumphs. Lakaï dissects topics like toxic masculinity, racial profiling, mental health and violence as a way to self-check and self-improve our respective communities worldwide. Their 2 hour-long piece draws from Jazz, Hip Hop, and Afro-Diasporic styles while incorporating powerful spoken word and live music aspects to paint complex stories that reflect the realities of inner-city existence.
WORK!
World premiere OUI DANSE with special guest artist Christine Dakin:
A challenge to the body, a dare to the imagination, a reconnection with humanity. OUI DANSE in French, means “yes dance”. “YES” for positivity, OUI / “WE” for universality.
Artistic director/choreographer Brice Mousset explores the OUI DANSE award- winning first work Travailler in an hour long re-envisioning: WORK!
Mousset draws on his education in human/biological sciences and the testimonies of burned out players in the business world to portray work conditions driven by ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality. As success infiltrates and pollutes, WORK! shows the loss of humanity with grotesque elegance, bold movement and a theatrical sensibility. WORK! follows its characters journey through the circus of the business world’s competitions, compulsions, masquerades and the desperation to escape. Combining irony, exaggeration and raw emotion, the choreography creates a world of reckless movement, technical bravura and the deceptive simplicity of pedestrian movement.
LIVE DANCE AND VIDEO: MIMI GARRARD AND MARCUS JARELL WILLIS
LIVE DANCE AND VIDEO: Mimi Garrard and Marcus Jarell Willis
2 premieres by Mimi Garrard will be presented and a solo by Marcus Jarell Willis. “Mimi Garrard and Dancers at the New York Live Arts displayed her creativity and a mind that is ever open to experimentation” Joel Benjamin United States Premiere “Travelling Man” for live dance and video was first performed in Cardiff, Wales to an enthusiastic audience. It is directed, and has video and sound by Mimi Garrard. The choreography is by Mimi Garrard with Marcus Jarell Willis. Marcus is a former dancer with Alvin Ailey and is an excellent choreographer who has created works on companies world- wide. World Premier, “I Celebrate Myself” was inspired by the poem “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman and features the dancer Marcus Jarell Willis. Direction, sound, and video are by Mimi Garrard.
“The program presented at New York Live Arts on November 12, 2017 was truly a presentation of Mimi’s mastery of the art of video dance making and her excellent skill at forming motion.” -Ruth Grauert
“With unusual movement and background projections we are catapulted into states of consciousness that are unfamiliar, even foreign.” -Barney Yates about program at Live Arts
Fall 2018
Barnard/Columbia Dances at New York Live Arts features choreography by modern dance legend Merce Cunningham in a MinEvent arranged and staged by Jamie Scott and Dylan Crossman expressly for Barnard and Columbia dancers. New works to premier are by David Dorfman, Amy Hall Garner, and Adrienne Truscott. Produced by the Barnard College Department of Dance and performed by Barnard and Columbia University students, this concert celebrates its fourteenth season of dance at New York Live Arts. The Cunningham MinEvent is as part of the official Merce Cunningham Centennial.
Barnard/Columbia Dances at NYLA 2018 from Barnard ScreenDance on Vimeo.
*Live Arts Plus Partner – read more about our Plus Partner program.
Lang Dance Spring Concert
This year’s Eugene Lang Dance Production features works created in the Susan Rethorst Guest Artist Residency led by Jodi Melnick and Vicky Shick; guest choreographer luciana achugar; and Rebecca Stenn, Lang faculty; along with student-created works. All choreography will be performed by students of the Eugene Lang College Dance Program.
“Home to one of the more progressive collegiate dance departments in New York.” –The New York Times
Susan Rethorst
Susan Rethorst is a choreographer, writer, and teacher who has been making works of modern dance since 1975. She has been active as a choreographer and teacher of choreography throughout Europe and Scandinavia since 1995. Rethorst’s work has been presented by The Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, and the Whitney Museum Of American Art, as well as at various dance theaters, universities, and festivals throughout the United States. Her work has been produced internationally by The Holland Festival, Spazio Zero Rome, The Kunsthalle Basel, Aix-en-Provence Festival, Jerusalem’s Room Festival, among others. (Foundation for Contemporary Arts)
Jodi Melnick
Jodi Melnick is a NYC based choreographer, collaborator, dancer, and teacher. Melnick designs intricate movement to explore the exquisite nature and dynamic relationships between human beings. Her dance language is quietly nuanced and pedestrian, at times wild and reckless, flooded with imagery, accumulating into dramatic content unmistakably constructed through choreographic means. The profound expression of the dancing body and her lucid performing instincts drives the creative process. The body is the aesthetic material. Her work has been presented both nationally and internationally, at BAM’s Fisher theater (Next Wave Festival) City Center, The Joyce Theater, New York Live Arts (NYLA), The Kitchen, La Mama, Jacob’s Pillow, American Dance Festival, Martha’s Vineyard, commissioned new works by OtherShore Dance Company, Barnard College, Sarah Lawrence College, George Washington University, Taryn Griggs (2014 Mcknight awardee), DanceBox in Kansai, Japan, opening the Dublin Dance Festival, Belfast, Ireland, St. Petersburg and Moscow, Russia, and Tallinn, Estonia. Her most recent work, MOAT was commissioned for LMCC’s River to River festival, New Bodies, presented by the Guggenheim Museum Works in Process for NYCBallet principal dancers Sara Mearns, Gretchen Smith and Jared Angle, and collaborating with Playwright Sibyl Kempson for the ongoing solstice performances at the Whitney Museum of Art. Current project include a two week long residency (september 12th-24th) in Madison Square Park, Prismatic Park, with artist Josiah McElheny,
Vicki Shick
Vicky Shick has been involved with the NYC dance community for more than 3 decades. She was a second time Movement Research Artist-in-Residence in 2015. During her years with the Trisha Brown Company she received a “Bessie” Award for performance. Shick has been making dances since the eighties and was honored with a second “Bessie” for her collaborations with artists Barbara Kilpatrick and Elise Kermani. She has also worked with many other choreographers and performers. Shick has taught, shown work, created student dances and restaged Trisha Brown’s dances at festivals and universities, including in her hometown, Budapest. She is a 2006 grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2008-2009 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and received a 2018 Gibney DiP grant.
Luciana Achuga
Luciana Achugar is a Brooklyn-based choreographer from Uruguay who grew as an artist in close dialogue with the NY and Uruguayan contemporary dance communities. She has been making work in NYC and Uruguay independently and collaboratively since 1999. Her work is concerned with the post-colonial world, searching for an undoing of current power structures from the inside out. She is a two-time “Bessie” Award recipient, a Guggenheim Fellow, Creative Capital Grantee and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grantee, amongst other accolades. She was one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2012 and her Bessie Award winning work PURO DESEO was named one of 2010 TimeOUT NY’s “Best of Dance”. The Pleasure Project, an ongoing space intervention project, has been seen since 2014 in NYC as guerrilla performance and through LMCC’s Paths to Pier 42 Program, at Le Mouvement-Performing the City Festival in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland, the American Realness Festival in NYC and most recently as part of the Seattle Art Fair. She received the 2015 Austin Critic’s Award for Best Touring work for OTRO TEATRO, after being presented at the Fusebox Festival, and having premiered in 2014 at the Walker Art Center and NYLA. Her latest work, An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love, premiered at Gibney Dance in December 2015, was remounted with an all Uruguayan cast at the Festival Internacional de Danza en Uruguay this May, was presented outside as a performance/block party/urban ritual at the River to River Festival in Lower Manhattan in June 2016. She received a 2016 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Choreography and a nomination for a BESSIE Award for Outstanding Production for her last full-evening length work An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love, and most recently she received the 2017 Alpert Award for Dance and became a 2017-18 Brooklyn Arts Exchange Artist in Residence.
Rebecca Stenn
Acclaimed as a “rising choreographer” by the New Yorker and “vibrant, potent and darkly imaginative” by the New York Times, Rebecca Stenn, dancer, choreographer, educator, author, founded Rebecca Stenn Company in 1996. The company has since performed to critical acclaim and sold out houses in over 50 cities including such venues as The Copenhagen Festival, The Edinburgh Festival, The Joyce Theater, BAM Fisher, The Kitchen, Danspace Project and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival among many others. The company has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Council for the Arts, The Joyce Theater Foundation, and the American Music Center and has been hailed in The New York Times as “a collective force…keenly pleasurable”. Recent performances include a return to the Edinburgh Festival, The Joyce Theater Family Matinee series, and solo performances at the Rubin Museum.
Stenn has been has been a contributing editor at Dancemagazine, has published work in the International Journal of Dance and the Brooklyn Rail and most recently co-authored the newly released book, A Life in Dance: A Practical Guide. Stenn is currently on faculty at The New School and Princeton University and is Choreographer-in-Residence at Dartmouth College. She has enjoyed Artist in Residencies at numerous university and college programs including Barnard College, Montclair State University (New Works Award) and University of Wisconsin (Alumni Award) among many others. Stenn most recently performed a new duet at BAM Fisher, and recently created and premiered the final evening length work in a trilogy for Rebecca Stenn Company, which was premiered June 2018 at the Gowanus Loft. She is currently working on a commission from Women In Motion, to be premiered spring 2020. Stenn is the proud mother of Jonah and Elie Weissman.
*Live Arts Plus Partner – read more about our Plus Partner program.
When Change Comes
Featuring cast members from Hamilton, Bandstand, Finding Neverland, and Cats:
“When Change Comes: A Movement Forward” is a powerful dance musical that asks one question: Can the act of “seeing” each other without judgment or fear break the cycle of intolerance?
When Change Comes transports audiences through a century of music, movement, and human connection in the shadow of our nation’s most defining moments. Using Mark Stuart Dance Theatre’s explosive brand of storytelling, When Change Comes follows three love stories set against the backdrops of the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement, and the LGBTQ Rights Movement. Danced to hit standards from the 1930’s, 1960’s, and the 2000’s, the show features 7 dancers, 3 vocalists and a 5-piece band.
When Change Comes aims to inspire and empower audiences to create positive change in their communities. This theatrical experience includes a 90 minute performance of When Change Comes followed by discussions with Mark Stuart and the cast. We will ask: how might we commit to small everyday acts of kindness, learn to truly see each other, and build empathetic dialogue about equality and tolerance.
A Movement Forward, exists as a challenge: Can we all turn seemingly small acts of kindness into a tidal wave of tolerance? Experience the magic and join the Movement…
September 13-14 at 7 PM, September 15 at 2 & 8 PM, 10th anniversary Mark Stuart Dance Theatre gala on September 16 at 5 PM, featuring guest appearances by Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine), Jerome Bell (American Idol), Matt Cusson, and Daniel Watts.
All Student Tickets $10, use code bethechange
For more info, visit whenchangecomes.org