Gibney Company Up Close

Gibney Company returns to New York Live Arts with its annual UP CLOSE series presenting a dynamic program of world, east coast and company premieres.

William Forsythe’s Trio premiered in Frankfurt in 1996 and Gibney Company’s production will mark the work’s first North American performances. In Forsythe’s compact dance, the Allegro movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 provides the rapidly shifting, tilting ground for the lively interplay of the three dancers. They examine the weight of the body and set it loose to the music in a virtuosic, flying tangle of limbs.

Beck/Call by choreographer and performer Emilie Leriche grew out of the idea of runaways sparked by the choreographer’s relationship to home, to the U.S.: leaving when very young and then, as most dancers, moving farther and farther away. Interested in the desire of humans to long for something else and to run towards it with reckless, careening energy, this work explores the fantasy of what lies beyond the present, whether it’s a place or ourselves, and then once we have fled, feeling the undeniable pull to return to these places, or people or times in our life, ultimately mining the tension between going back and staying gone.

South African choreographer Mthuthuzeli November’s unique choreographic language is informed by both traditional South African (Xhosa) dance and street dance along with the Western traditions of ballet and contemporary movement styles. Meaning to wake up, Vukani explores communion with the elders, searching for guidance, a provocation to the spirit to take over the body, and showing the way.