Gibney Company
Gibney Company Up Close
OPENING NIGHT: TUE, DEC 10, 7:30 PM
WED, DEC 11 THRU FRI, DEC 13, 7:30 PM
SAT, DEC 14, 2:00 PM & 7:30 PM
Ticketing Information
All Performances: $40-$80
Opening Night Party: + $30 (purchased at checkout)
Pay What You Wish: $5 minimum (limited quantity available each performance excluding Opening Night)
Rush Tickets: $25 tickets available 1 hour prior to curtain (available each performance excluding Opening Night)
Supporter Ticket (What It Really Costs): $250
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.
Trio (of six) is a reconfiguration of the 1996 work which had been a staple of William Forsythe’s repertoire in Frankfurt, Germany. The work has been restaged several times in its original trio form, most recently at the Paris Opera Ballet. Forsythe rearranged the work for Gibney Company, as the small ensemble offered a significant degree of organizational flexibility. This six person staging reflects his practice of evolving works over time and adapting them to the local creative environment.
In the original 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.
All Photos by Nir Arieli: 1 Madi Tanguay, 2 Jie-hung Connie Shiau and Zack Sommer, 3 Lounes Landri
WORLD PREMIERE
Trio (of six)
Choreography: William Forsythe
Stager: Thomas McManus
Staging Assistant: Roderick George
Costume Design: Stephen Galloway
Costume Construction: Victoria Bek
Lighting Design: Brandon Stirling Baker
Music: Ludwig van Beethoven
WORLD PREMIERE
Beck/Call
Choreography: Emilie Leriche
Music: Wolff Bergen
Lighting Design: Burke Brown
Costume Design: Victoria Bek
EAST COAST PREMIERE
Vukani
Choreography: Mthuthuzeli November
Music: Mthuthuzeli November
Lighting Design: Asami Morita
Costume Design: Victoria Bek
William Forsythe
Raised in New York and initially trained in Florida with Nolan Dingman and Christa Long, Forsythe danced with the Joffrey Ballet and later the Stuttgart Ballet, where he was appointed Resident Choreographer in 1976. Over the next seven years, he created new works for the Stuttgart ensemble and other ballet companies worldwide. In 1984, he began a 20-year tenure as director of the Ballet Frankfurt, where he created works such as Artifact(1984), Impressing the Czar (1988), Limb’s Theorem (1990), The Loss of Small Detail (1991), Eidos:Telos (1995), Kammer/Kammer (2000) and Decreation (2003).
After the closure of the Ballet Frankfurt in 2004, Forsythe established a new, more independent ensemble, The Forsythe Company, which he directed from 2005 to 2015. Works produced by this ensemble include Three Atmospheric Studies (2005), Human Writes (2005), Heterotopia (2006), I don’t believe in outer space (2008) and Sider (2011). Forsythe’s works developed during this time were performed exclusively by The Forsythe Company, while his earlier pieces are prominently featured in the repertoire of virtually every major ballet company in the world. More recently Forsythe has created original works for the Paris Opera Ballet, English National Ballet, Boston Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, La Scala Ballet Company, as well as A Quiet Evening of Dance produced by Sadler’s Wells Theatre (London) and The Barre Project (Blake Works II) created for the digital stage.
Forsythe has been commissioned to produce architectural and performance installations. These Choreographic Objects, as he calls these works, have been presented in numerous museums and exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial (New York, 1997), the Louvre Museum (2006), 21_21 Design Sight (Tokyo, 2007), the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, 2009), Tate Modern (London, 2009), MoMA (New York 2010) and the Venice Biennale (2005, 2009, 2012, 2014), ICA Boston (2018), Museum Folkwang (2019), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2020) and Kunsthaus Zürich (2021).
In collaboration with media specialists and educators, Forsythe has developed new approaches to dance documentation, research, and education. Core elements of his CD-ROM Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye, published in 1999 and developed with the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, are now accessible online via the website Improvisation Technologies – The Lectures as of June 30, 2023.
In 2002, Forsythe was chosen as the founding Dance Mentor for The Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Forsythe is an Honorary Fellow at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance in London and holds an Honorary Doctorate from The Juilliard School in New York.
Emilie Leriche
Emilie Leriche is a freelance performer and creator based between Göteborg, Sweden and Paris, France. She has danced with GöteborgsOperans Danskompani and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, where in 2015 she was awarded a Princess Grace Foundation fellowship in dance. She has created work on Scapino Ballet Rotterdam, Nederlands Dans Theater II, Whim W’Him in Seattle, and in the winter of 2023 she was a guest choreographer for Nuova X’s professional dance program in Torino, Italy. In May of 2024 she premiered her latest work ‘Property Identity Report’ -a creation for the tanzensemble of Theater St. Gallen.
In 2021, her project On Mending, a collaboration with Shawn Fitzgerald Ahern, was selected for Orsolina 28’s “Call for Creation” fellowship where the work was originally developed for film. In 2022, with the support of a “Work-in-Progress” grant from the Princess Grace Foundation, On Mending was further developed and performed as a live production at Baryshnikov Arts Center. In 2023, Leriche and Ahern were commissioned by BAC to direct their next film, One & One Other; which premiered on BAC’s digital platform in April of 2023.
Mthuthuzeli November
Mthuthuzeli November is an award-winning choreographer and dancer born in Cape Town, South Africa. He started dancing at the age 15. He has made multiple award winning/nominated works for since 2016, include the Laurence Olivier Award for INGOMA. Mthuthuzeli has made works for British Grime artist, Stormzy at Glastonbury Festival in 2019, Ballet Black,Royal Ballet, Ballet Zurich, The Washington Ballet, Northern Ballet, Charlotte Ballet, Luzerner Theatre, Cape Town City Ballet, Cape Town Opera, Fall For Dance North Nominated for best soloist In a production ( Black British Theatre Award). In 2022 he was nominated for Best Classical Choreography by the Critics Circle National Dance Awards, for his work The Waiting Game. 2023 winning best choreography for his work Nina- By Whatever Means at the Black British Theatre Awards.
