Baryshnikov Arts Center Presents The World Premiere Of Dance Heginbotham's HERZ SCHMERZ

Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC) presents the World Premiere of HERZ SCHMERZ, a work co-conceived by award-winning choreographer John Heginbotham and acclaimed author, painter, and illustrator Maira Kalman. Following the duo's debut collaboration The Principles of Uncertainty in 2017, this new dance-play is based on the written work of early 20th-century Swiss author Robert Walser. Performances are Thursday-Saturday, October 10-12, at 7:30pm, at BAC's Jerome Robbins Theater, 450 West 37th Street in Manhattan.

John Heginbotham-who premiered works at BAC in 2012 and 2014-returns to BAC with a new dance theater collaboration co-created by Maira Kalman, and inspired by the heartfelt observations and witty writings of author Robert Walser. The script, comprising excerpts from Walser's novella The Walk, as well as his letters and short stories, conjures a hyper-detailed, eccentric human landscape of peculiar encounters and gossamer vulnerability. Through a series of impressionistic vignettes, HERZ SCHMERZ weaves together movement and text, melodic chamber music by Swiss composer Hans Huber, and Kalman's singular, whimsical designs to reveal life's most important themes as well as its beautiful minutiae.

HERZ SCHMERZ is conceived by John Heginbotham and Maira Kalman, with choreography by Heginbotham and design by Kalman. Lighting is by Nicole Pearce. The work is performed by David Barlow, Maile Okamura, Daniel Pettrow, Kalman, and Heginbotham. Huber's score for piano, cello, and violin will be performed live.

Tickets are $25 and can be purchased online at bacnyc.org or by phone at 866-811-4111. Running time is 50 minutes.

HERZ SCHMERZ is also the featured program of BAC's annual Fall Fête on Monday, October 7, 2019.

The creation of HERZ SCHMERZ was made possible with support from the Ford Foundation 2017-2018 Art of Change Fellows program and Baryshnikov Productions.

Lead support of dance programming at BAC is provided by the Rudolf Nureyev Endowment.

Major support for dance programming and activities provided by the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, Harkness Foundation for Dance, the New York State Council on the Arts, and Dance/NYC's New York City Dance Rehearsal Space Subsidy Program, made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

About the Artists

Originally from Anchorage, Alaska, John Heginbotham graduated from the Juilliard School in 1993, and was a member of Mark Morris Dance Group from 1998 to 2012. In 2011, he founded Dance Heginbotham, which has been presented and commissioned by Baryshnikov Arts Center, BAM, Duke Performances, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, The Joyce Theater, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Vail International Dance Festival, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. In the spring of 2016, the company toured to Indonesia, Laos, and the Philippines as cultural ambassadors of the United States with the DanceMotion USAa?? program, a project of the US Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), produced by BAM. Heginbotham received a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship and in June 2014 he was awarded the prestigious Jacob's Pillow Dance Award in recognition of his unique choreographic vision and promise. He is currently a Research Fellow at the National Center for Choreography at the University of Akron, was awarded a 2017-18 New York City Center Choreography Fellowship, was a 2016 Fellow at NYU's Center for Ballet and the Arts, and is a two-time recipient of the Jerome Robbins Foundation New Essential Works Fellowship (2010 and 2012). Sought after as a freelance choreographer, Heginbotham's current projects include the Tony Award-winning Oklahoma!, directed by Daniel Fish (premiere at Bard Summerscape, 2015; St. Ann's Warehouse, 2018; Broadway, 2019); John Adams's Girls of the Golden West, directed by Peter Sellars (premiere at San Francisco Opera in 2017, touring internationally in 2019); and Candide (premiere with Orlando Philharmonic in 2016, touring with The Knights chamber orchestra in 2018-19).

Maira Kalman is an author and illustrator of books for adults and children. She has created numerous covers for The New Yorker and columns for the New York Times. She has collaborated with John Heginbotham on the dance/theater piece The Principles of Uncertainty and danced the role of the duck in Isaac Mizrahi's production of Peter and the Wolf, choreographed by Heginbotham. Her paintings are represented by Julie Saul Projects in Manhattan.

For more information, please visit www.bacnyc.org.