92Y Announces New Online Dance Workshop Series

The Harkness Dance Center announces a new Artist Workshop Series of online master classes with current and former Artists in Residence, featured choreographers and presented performers. Workshops take place every other Saturday throughout the fall starting on Saturday, September 26, offering access to some of the most engaging, insightful, and motivational artists currently creating work in the dance world.

All workshops will be held online on Zoom, offering separate two-hour dance experiences geared to students ages 12-18 and 18+.

Artist Workshop Series | JOHNNIE CRUISE MERCER

Sat, Sep 26, 11 am (12-18 years), $20* / 1:30 pm (18 and up), $20*

Johnnie Cruise Mercer is a maker, freelance-performer, educator, and artistic entrepreneur based in New York City. He has performed for, and collaborated with Antonio Brown, Monstah Black, Andre Zachery, Yon Tande, Ishmael Houston-Jones (2018 remount of THEM), Netta Yerushalmy, Maria Bauman/MBDance, Edisa Weeks/Delirious Dances, and Antonio Ramos, and was a part of Ishmael Houston-Jones's and Miguel Gutierrez's Bessie Award-winning reconstruction/reimaging Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other works by John Bernd.

As the Choreographic/Company Director of Johnnie Cruise Mercer/ TheREDprojectNYC, his processes/works have been shared recently at 92Y Harkness Dance Center, Gibney: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, Dixon Place, Danspace Project Inc, the Fusebox Festival, Mana Contemporary, the NADA Conference, and Abrons Arts Center. Mercer is currently in his second year as an Artist in Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange. Follow him (and his company) on Instagram to find out more about his/their current projects and works. @jcruisem, @jcm_redprojectnyc

Artist Workshop Series | FLOCK

Alice Klock and Florian Lochner

Sat, Oct 10, 11 am (12-18 years), $20* / 1:30 pm (18 and up), $20*

Florian and Alice co-create and perform their own work, teach as a team, and produce shows in the US and Germany in which FLOCK expands to include an international group of artists and collaborators. Alongside their self-produced work they have choreographed for numerous institutions including Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Ballet Arkansas, the Alonzo King LINES Ballet BFA, the Goethe Institut, Adaptations Dance Theater on Maui, and the USC Glorya Kaufman/Hubbard Street Summer Intensive. Their philosophy is to create work that is dynamic, vibrant, and based on joy.

Artist Workshop Series | SHAMEL PITTS

Sat, Oct 24, 11 am (12-18 years), $20* / 1:30 pm (18 and up), $20*

2020 Guggenheim Fellow Shamel Pitts is a performance artist, choreographer, conceptual artist, dancer, spoken word artist, and teacher. Born in Brooklyn New York, Shamel began his dance training at LaGuardia High School for Music & Art and the Performing Arts and, simultaneously, at The Ailey School. He is 2003 YoungArts Finalist and a first prize (level 1) winner of the YoungArts competition. Shamel then went on to receive his BFA in Dance from The Juilliard School and was awarded the Martha Hill Award for excellence in dance. He began his dance career in Mikhail Baryshnikov's Hell's Kitchen Dance and BJM_Danse Montreal. Shamel danced with Batsheva Dance Company for 7 years, under the artistic direction of Ohad Naharin and is a certified teacher of Gaga movement language. Shamel has created a triptych of award winning multidisciplinary performance art works known as his "BLACK series" which has been performed and toured extensively to many festivals around the world since 2016. He is an adjunct at The Juilliard School and has been an artist in residence at Harvard University. Shamel is the choreographer of the play "Help" by acclaimed poet and playwright Claudia Rankine, directed by Taibi Magar, and commissioned at The Shed in New York. He is the recipient of a 2018 Princess Grace Award in Choreography and a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship Award winner in Choreography. Shamel is the artistic director/founder of TRIBE, a New York based multidisciplinary arts collective. TRIBE is a 92Y Harkness Dance Center's Artist In Residence for the 2020-2021 season. For more information, visit www.shamelpitts.com or www.itsatribe.org.

Artist Workshop Series | PASSION FRUIT DANCE COMPANY

Tatiana Desardouin; Lauriane Ogay; Mai Lê Hô

Sat, Nov 7, 11 am (12-18 years), $20* / 1:30 pm (18 and up), $20*

Passion Fruit Dance Company is a New York City-based Street Dance Theater & Educational Company founded in 2016 by director and choreographer Tatiana Desardouin. The Company's mission is to share the authentic roots and distinct contributions of the Afro-American Street & Clubbing dance styles and culture. Passion Fruit Dance Company has performed at SpringUP Dance Festival, NYC's Summerstage, Ladies of Hip-Hop 2017 at Ailey Citigroup Theatre, BAAD! Dance Your Future residency, Jacob Pillow's Inside/Out festival, The New Victory Theater and the legendary Apollo Theater for the Breakin' Convention festival. The company's core members are Tatiana Desardouin, Mai Lê Hô and Lauriane Ogay.

Artist Workshop Series | DORRANCE DANCE

Sat, Nov 21, 11 am (12-18 years), $20* / 1:30 pm (18 and up), $20*

Dorrance Dance is an award-winning tap dance company based in New York City, and current 92Y Harkness Dance Center Artists in Residence. The company's work aims to honor tap dance's uniquely beautiful history in a new, dynamic, and compelling context-not by stripping the form of its tradition, but by pushing it rhythmically, technically, and conceptually. The company's inaugural performance garnered a Bessie Award for "blasting open our notions of tap" and the company continues its passionate commitment to expanding the audience for tap dance, America's original art form.

Founded in 2011 by artistic director and 2015 MacArthur Fellow Michelle Dorrance, the company has received countless accolades, rave reviews, and has performed at venues including Danspace Project, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, The Joyce Theater, New York City Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Vail Dance Festival, the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Works and Process at the Guggenheim, Carolina Performing Arts at UNC Chapel Hill, Cal Performances at UC Berkeley, among many others, including international venues in Canada, France, Germany, Spain, England, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Russia. DorranceDance.com

Artist Workshop Series | MAURYA KERR

Sat, Dec 5, 11 am (12-18 years), 20* / 1:30 pm (18 and up), $20*

Maurya Kerr is a Bay Area-based choreographer, educator, performer, and artistic director of tinypistol. She was an ODC artist-in-residence from 2015 to 2018 and holds an MFA from Hollins University; her thesis focused on how systemic racism denies black and brown people access to wonderment, and her choreographic work is an extension of reclaiming birthright to wonder. She was a member of Alonzo King LINES Ballet for twelve years and teaches extensively in their educational programs. She most recently performed in The Foundry's Deep South , and BodyCartography Project's felt room at SFMOMA and the University of Minnesota's Weisman Museum. In 2017 she co-founded the tiny little get down, a quarterly dance party intended to defiantly and subversively fortify otherness through embodied joy and the power of the collective.