Season at a glance

Barnard/Columbia Dances at New York Live Arts features the U.S. premiere of Again? What now? by the legendary Yvonne Rainer, the 2019 Lida A. Orzeck ’68 Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at Barnard College, plus two other dances by Bessie-winning choreographers: the exquisite Caruggi by the preeminent American director and dance maker Doug...

FIVE is a multimedia performance that abstracts the art of Vogue Femme, a dance form originating from the African-American and Latino LGBTQ community of 1970s Harlem. In the performance five dancers represent the five elements of Vogue Femme—hands, catwalk, floor performance, spin dips, and duck-walking. As each dancer takes the...

Cosmos Within Us is a daring storytelling experiment blurring the boundaries between VR, performance, cinema, and music. Through a combination of state-of-the-art tech, immersive soundscapes, scent, and touch, the groundbreaking piece, directed by Tupac Martir, explores the intricate connection between memory and the senses. This story draws us inside the mind...

In celebration of Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company’s 30th year anniversary, the company will present a retrospective production CrossCurrent showcasing Chen’s distinctive cross cultural style and diverse influences that has informed her work. The program will open with one of Chen’s earliest signature work Calligraphy II which explores the spirituality, the flow...

Bill T. Jones in conversation with Elizabeth Diller (world renowned artist/architect of projects including The High Line and The Shed, partner/founder of Diller Scofidio + Renfro) about their collaboration on the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company’s upcoming work premiering in Spring 2020. Live Arts encourages a culture of respect...

A fully produced evening of the auditioned works by the five incoming 2019-20 Fresh Tracks artists: Anh Vo, Annie Heath, Jordan Lloyd, Kayla Hamilton and Stuart B Meyers. New York Live Arts is wheelchair accessible. There are double doors at the front entrance that can be used. Please alert the staff of...

“One does not just watch a dance by Zvi Gotheiner. One enters a world with its own internal logic, a sensual, organic world of movement, language, and images where one is pulled along by currents unseen and inevitable.” (Dance Magazine) MAIM sets out to raise awareness to issues related to...

Faye Driscoll’s Thank You For Coming: Space is a shared rite of passage—a conjuring of the transformative powers of presence, and of absence. Space unfolds within an intimate installation, wired for sound and upheld by pulleys, ropes and the weight of others, where Driscoll appears alone with the...

New York Live Arts’ dynamic platform of new and recent works by resident commissioned artists and curated guests. Presented during the annual Association of Performing Arts Professionals conference, Live Artery 2020 features excerpts of recently premiered works and work-in-progress presentations.

Body Comes Apart is a declaration of love, commitment, catharsis, and rage. Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith continue their ten year challenge of making work based in abstraction but in response to trauma, the work uses the potentialities of our bodies to challenge perceptions of female identity and...

RADIOACTIVE PRACTICE is the newest evening length work by Bessie award winning, choreographer Abby Zbikowski and her company Abby Z and the New Utility. This group work brings together a mosaic group of movers versed in forms ranging from hip-hop, modern dance, West African, tap, synchronized swimming, and ice skating...

Trailblazing transgender choreographer Sean Dorsey returns to New York Live Arts for the NYC premiere of BOYS IN TROUBLE – at New York Live Arts for 3 performances only as part of a 20-city international tour. Sean Dorsey Dance’s timely and urgent commentary on contemporary masculinity places...

Colleen Thomas will show two small works- Diane. Still. and a collaboration with Adriane Fang tiltled, Wake Up! Also on the program is an excerpt from light and desire where Thomas joins five women artists from Venezuela (Carla Forte), Hungary/Germany (Ildiko Toth), Poland (Joanna Lesnierowska), Albania/ Greece (Ermira...

This showing includes work-in-progress excerpts of CORPS, a new work by Los Angeles-based choreographer Milka Djordjevich examining labor and the feminine body through the lens of regimented movement, and reveals similarities across traditional, militaristic, ritual, athletic, and folk movement forms. The work is a continuation of Djordjevich’s ongoing...

Enacted specifically and uniquely with and by each audience, Last Audience is a live laboratory for the communal work of what it means to conjure. Comprised of a set of unique scores written for each performance, the piece grapples with agency and...

RACE: Talc & Ash is a movement duet piece about gentrification, race and class. The original performance focused on Washington, DC. New iterations will explore Chelsea/Hudson Yards in New York and Detroit, MI. The performance is set up like a sporting event, complete with a pre-show tailgate party...

Sassafrazz is an original composition of structured improvisation for four Breakers and four musicians. It focuses on the three stages of Break Life: birth, life, and death, that are represented by three styles of Breaking: Top, Footwork, and Ground Text.  Ken Swift, a pioneering B-boy from NYC, will...

Engaging with the current socio-cultural climate, Liana Conyers deconstructs her experience as a Black woman in America.  #ImFxckingFunny explores the levels of consciousness, healing, hiding, and coping that technology provides. Through her autobiography, Conyers unmasks the authenticity that might otherwise be concealed by digital representations of oneself.  As...

Pythagorean Peas is an evening-length physical theater piece that aims to highlight how we process our own vulnerabilities and weaknesses through characters inspired by the Grimm brothers’ folk tales including Snow White and Red Riding Hood. Focusing on the way these processes manifest somatically and mentally, the dancers specifically explore...

Bill T. Jones joins Marlon James, award-winning writer and author of A Brief History of Seven Killings and most recently Black Leopard, Red Wolf in conversation. Marlon James was born in Jamaica in 1970. His novel A Brief History of Seven Killings won the 2015 Man Booker Prize. It was also a finalist for the National...

the feath3r theory is remaking the film Dog Day Afternoon as a speculative documentary dance theater queer-fantasia where psychological realism meets pop soap opera at a cabaret club called Wednesdays. In our show, WEDNESDAY, the members of the feather theory take on the role of journalists in search of...

Fragments, Lists & Lacunae is a multi-media production focusing on three college students who are grappling with their own blind spots as well as the (resonant) concepts in a course entitled “Fragments, Lists, & Lacunae.” In each scene, a professor presents material on absence, silence, negation...

Choreographer, performer, educator, and 2019 Guggenheim Fellow ​Kimberly Bartosik​ creates viscerally provocative, ferociously intimate choreographic projects that are built upon the development of a virtuosic movement language and rigorous conceptual explorations. Her new work through the mirror of their eyes is built from the...

The “Feminist Dinner Party” merges feminist theory with design to create an immersive dining experience where participants discuss and explore feminist futures.

CU*T C*NTEMPORARY is a queer tourist attraction, featuring trans-regurgitated contemporary dances, costumed gay characters & queer baiting soundtracks. It’s a destination wedding between queer nationalism and the American assimilation of trans bodies. The Live Feed creative residency program supports and nurtures the development of new work with residencies and...

RADIOACTIVE PRACTICE is the newest evening length work by Bessie award winning, choreographer Abby Zbikowski and her company Abby Z and the New Utility. This group work brings together a mosaic group of movers versed in forms ranging from hip-hop, modern dance, West African, tap, synchronized...

Transition. Change. Going nowhere. Perception. Perception is 2/3rds of the law. This piece is about women artists during fascist times. Oppression. Going backwards. Smile. Stupid. Simple. Whore. Sexy. Prude.

Save the Date | 2020 Live Ideas Gala | Monday, March 30th Event Chairs: Alanna Rutherford, Barbara & Alan Marks, and Ruth & Stephen Hendel The Caldwell Factory 547 W 26th St New York City

Chameleon: A Biomythography is a live art work that explores the fugitive realities and shapeshifting demands of surviving at the intersection of Blackness and queerness in contemporary America. In this new work from Nigerian American artist Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, a melanated stage...

“Pip saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or...

RACE: Talc & Ash (RTA) is a dance duet about gentrification staged as a sporting event. The original iteration was set in Washington, DC, while this newest iteration will explore West Chelsea and specifically Hudson Yards. Community workshops on the city’s changing demographics helped inform the work, and community members’...

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 resident artist Daniel Alexander Jones’s process and ideas before they hit our stage. Taking place within the intimate working space of...

“Pip saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or...

Contemporary Afrofuturism may be defined as an emerging social philosophy of the African diaspora and Africa. Today, partly because of a crisis in globalization, social media and other technological advances, it has grown into a Pan African movement that encompasses artistic, academic, geopolitical and scientific investigation and production....

CORPS is a new work by Los Angeles-based choreographer Milka Djordjevich examining labor and the feminine body through the lens of regimented movement, and reveals similarities across traditional, militaristic, ritual, athletic, and folk movement forms. The work is a continuation of Djordjevich’s ongoing questioning of contemporary dance’s preoccupation with neutrality,...

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. Featuring works from Anh Vo, Annie Heath, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Kayla Hamilton, and Stuart B. Meyers. Live Arts’ legacy Fresh...

Live Arts’ Pride: The House Party epic 6-hour celebration embodies and honors the historical importance and unwavering power of houses, collectives, and chosen family in LGBTQIA culture. Both legendary and young families from NYC’s queer nightlife and art scene come together under one roof...