Season at a glance

Presented by NYU Skirball Developed by Bill T. Jones with Associate Artistic Director Janet Wong, Analogy Trilogy is based on oral histories and inspired by W.G. Sebald’s award-winning novel The Emigrants. Part One, Analogy/Dora: Tramontane, recounts the story of Dora Amelan, a French Jewish nurse, social worker, and World War II survivor....

Derrick Adams: Patrick Kelly, The Journey is based on Brooklyn-based artist Derrick Adams​’s extensive research into the archive of the influential African-American fashion designer Patrick Kelly​ (1954–1990), housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Featuring abstract collage works on paper framed with glazing, the first show in...

World Premiere New York Lives Arts’ 2017-19 Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist (RCA) RoseAnne Spradlin presents the world premiere of her latest work “Y”. Spradlin, an alumnus of Fresh Tracks (1990) who received a Bessie award in 2003, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008, and a US Artist Ford Fellowship in 2014 engages...

Presented as part of For Freedoms’ 50 State Initiative  Bill T. Jones will speak with Hank Willis Thomas, conceptual artist and co-founder of For Freedoms, an artist-run Super PAC founded by Thomas and Eric Gottesman. They will discuss the role of the artist, civic participation,...

NYC Premiere Jennifer Nugent and Paul Matteson, both Bessie Award-winning performers and former Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company dancers (2008-2014), are known for their phenomenal partnering work, creating duets that are intense, forceful, and passionate. Their latest duet, another piece apart, reflects on a history of a fractured togetherness and...

Marking the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Prayers of the People is a secular liturgical performance of Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” This participatory performance, directed by Bill T. Jones, takes the structure of an Episcopal liturgy to bring to life his words, written...

A toolbox of methods for partnering. We explore negative space, interdependent support, responses to touch, and various ways of harnessing momentum. By a quick bridging of improvisation into set work—followed by imaginative reconstruction steps—we develop dances that embolden personal voice within kinetic collaboration.

A Letter to My Nephew, Bill T. Jones’ latest dance theater work, is an intimate, impressionistic collage for nine dancers, setting a portrait of Jones’s beloved nephew Lance T. Briggs—a talented dancer who struggled with illness and addiction—against the political landscape of the present. Composed like a series of postcards...

A Letter to My Nephew, Bill T. Jones’ latest dance theater work, is an intimate, impressionistic collage for nine dancers, setting a portrait of Jones’s beloved nephew Lance T. Briggs—a talented dancer who struggled with illness and addiction—against the political landscape of the present. Composed like a series of postcards...

“Memory, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view...

Presented as part of For Freedoms’ 50 State Initiative What does it mean to be safe?  In America today, when more and more of us are targeted, literally and figuratively, because of our race, gender, gender orientation, ethnicity, or faith, when we are marked as victims-in-waiting because we possess some...

World premiere OUI DANSE: 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...

NYC Premiere Bill Shannon premieres Touch Update, a new work exploring contemporary modes of digital versus interpersonal representation and physicality. Shannon combines movement, wearable projection technology, and video installation to explore the social constructions that surround disabled bodies. His Touch Update features collaborators...

The Condition Arriving is an entertaining yet academic lecture that details through storytelling the evolution of Bill Shannon’s invented movement form that he uses for walking, dance, skateboarding and performance art on crutches. Shannon’s framing of a specific subset of his invented moves led to his naming of The Shannon Technique to codify and then...

In this high energy workshop Bill Shannon will teach rhythm, holding patterns and body positions invented over his life of dance and play on crutches. Workshop participants will be mentally and physically challenged to improvise ways of recreating Bill’s dance on crutches in real time without their own use of crutches. This workshop offers able-bodied dancers...

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....

Live Arts’ legendary Fresh Tracks performance and residency program continues its 54-year commitment to bringing new voices to the forefront. The program provides five emerging artists with a 50-hour studio residency, a professionally produced shared evening bill in the New York Live Arts Theater, commission fee, one-on-one dialogue...

NYC Premiere DANCENOISE’s Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton premiere a new group work created in response to the current political climate. Their legendary stage shows—built on manic choreography, indiscriminate violence, biting up-to-the-minute social commentary, and precise comedic timing—made them “the premier practitioners of synchronized aggression.” (Tom Murrin, downtown performance...

New York Live Arts’ dynamic showcase of new and recent works by Live Arts commissioned artists, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and curated guests is presented during the  Association of Performing Arts Professionals’ annual conference and will feature full theater productions, recently premiered works, and new studio...

Presented in collaboration with American Realness Written and Choreographed by Jack Ferver Performed by Reid Bartelme, Jack Ferver, Lloyd Knight, Garen Scribner, and James Whiteside Everything Is Imaginable, is an evening-length interdisciplinary performance work examining and juxtaposing the lives and technical virtuosity of four queer  performers. In turns manic and poetic, the work...

Open Company Classes with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company is rooted in the style of the Company as developed by Bill T. Jones and Janet Wong. Progressing from somatic floor work to standing exercises, technical and creative challenges culminate in lush, expressive phrase work.

Live Arts continues its Open Spectrum Community Dialogues, curated by culture creator Brian Tate of The Tate Group, providing space for reflection on the most vital issues facing communities today.

Ellen Robbins’ Dances by Very Young Choreographers, a showcase of young talent dancers, has become one of New York Live Arts’ most beloved community programs, inspiring children by exposing them to live performances created and performed by their peers. Alumni Concert An evening concert of work by Alumni who...

Bill T. Jones talks with Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director of New York’s Public Theater, who has nurtured one game-changing hit after another for the Public, including the award-winning musical Hamilton. Oskar Eustis has served as the Artistic Director of The Public Theater since 2005. In the last three...

Developed by Bill T. Jones with Associate Artistic Director Janet Wong, Analogy Trilogy is based on oral histories and inspired by W.G. Sebald’s award-winning novel The Emigrants. Part One, Analogy/Dora: Tramontane, recounts the story of Dora Amelan, a French Jewish nurse, social worker, and World War II survivor. Part Two Analogy/Lance:...

The Live Feed creative residency program is a laboratory for the development of new commissioned work directed toward our theater. This informal workshop showing offers a sneak peek into the artist’s process and ideas before they hit our stage. Taking place within the intimate working space of the Live Arts studio, each...

“Indeed, Blackness provided the occasion for self reflection as well as for an exploration of terror, desire, fear, loathing, and longing.” – Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection Chameleon is a performance project created by Jaamil Olawale Kosoko that examines the shapeshifting, illegible, and fugitive realities of Black diasporan people....

Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith present the New York City premiere of Body Comes Apart, an intimate duet based on a dynamic improvisational score. Lieber and Smith, who were nominated for a 2013 Bessie Award for Emerging...

Live Arts celebrates Women’s History Month with Dinner Party: 1960s-2000s which interprets themes present in second wave feminism including women at work, porn and the erotic, sex positivity, and more. Nostalgic cuisine and custom place settings recombine modern developments in domestic technology and industrial efficiencies. Utilizing...

NYC Premiere Highly acclaimed for her “fierce choreographic imagination” (New York Times), Netta Yerushalmy presents the New York premiere of the complete six-part encyclopedic series, Paramodernities, a multidisciplinary work that involves lectures, performances, and conversations.  The six installments rethink the canon of modern...

Open Company Classes with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company is rooted in the style of the Company as developed by Bill T. Jones and Janet Wong. Progressing from somatic floor work to standing exercises, technical and creative challenges culminate in lush, expressive phrase work.  

Presented as part of Women’s History Month Live Arts continues its Open Spectrum Community Dialogues, curated by culture creator Brian Tate of The Tate Group, providing space for reflection on the most vital issues facing communities today.

Developed by Bill T. Jones with Associate Artistic Director Janet Wong, Analogy Trilogy is based on oral histories and inspired by W.G. Sebald’s award-winning novel The Emigrants. Part One, Analogy/Dora: Tramontane, recounts the story of Dora Amelan, a French Jewish nurse, social worker, and World War II survivor. Part Two Analogy/Lance:...

World Premiere Darkness Odyssey Part 3, the final installment of Yamazaki’s Darkness Odyssey series, is a non-operatic celebration of the act of “becoming otherself.” Inspired by writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and butoh pioneer Tatsumi Hijikata’s notion of “dance of darkness,” the series explores the...

A Letter to My Nephew, Bill T. Jones’ latest dance theater work, is an intimate, impressionistic collage for nine dancers, setting a portrait of Jones’s beloved nephew Lance T. Briggs—a talented dancer who struggled with illness and addiction—against the political landscape of the present. Composed like a series of postcards...

The Cotillion is a multi-channel audio and video installation with live performance that explores ceremonial entrances into society. From re-entry into society after prison, to ‘entering society’ in debutante balls, to rituals of welcoming ancestors back to communities, this new work by Kaneza Schaal is as a companion piece to...

Last Audience is the newest work by the Bessie-award-winning collaborative group, a canary torsi. It is an immersive performance installation where audience members incarnate the work at each performance. The piece utilizes the structure of a traditional requiem mass as the inspiration to develop scores for the audience. Greetings, processions,...

Sassafrazz is a new evening-length dance inspired by the word sassafras: A dried root used for flavoring, early character based dance styles and flavor in Breaking and the privilege of maturing as a dancer in this form. With an original, improvisationally structured composition for 3 Breakers and 3...

Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School, Arts , “home to one of the more progressive collegiate dance departments in New York” (New York Times), offers a unique undergraduate dance curriculum centered on recent developments in the field. These performances highlight new...

Radioactive Practice is the newest work by Juried Bessie award winning Illinois-based choreographer Abby Zbikowski, commissioned by New York Live Arts and set to premiere during their 2019-20 Season. This genre-bending dance for ten performers breaks down the physicality, socio-cultural functions and psychological states...

Bill T. Jones talks with Claudia Rankine, poet, essayist, playwright, and the editor of several anthologies, and Tracy K. Smith, poet and educator, who is currently serving as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States, an office she assumed in 2017. Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections...

Live Arts’ Fresh Tracks performance and residency program continues its commitment to bringing new voices to the forefront. Fresh Tracks artists present excerpts of new work in development. For info on applying to Fresh Tracks click here.

New York Live Arts’ daylong performance party celebrates the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall uprising and World Pride. Queer nightlife and art scene come together under one roof to serve up the city’s most colorful and fierce performance, music, and more for a multi-space, back-to-back party for the...