Dance Premieres From Boris Charmatz, Bill T Jones, and More At NYU Skirball

Nyu Skirball has announced its 2018-19 Dance Season! See full details below!

Bill T. Jones/ARNIE ZANE COMPANY: THE ANALOGY TRILOGY

Saturday, September 22 & Sunday, September 23 from 3 pm - 9:30 pm

This is a rare opportunity to see the three parts of Bill. T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company's acclaimed Analogy Trilogy performed as a whole. The marathon performances feature the NYC premiere of Ambros: The Emigrant, the work's final piece. The complete trilogy will run 6½ hours (including a 90-minute dinner break) and is made up of Dora: Tramontane, Lance: Pretty aka the Escape Artist and Ambros: The Emigrant (NYC premiere).

Analogy Trilogy, inspired by W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants, was created by Bill T. Jones, Associate Artistic Director Janet Wong, and the company, over the course of four years. It combines dance, theater and oral history in an investigation of memory, storytelling and form. Performed to live music composed by Nick Hallett, the complete trilogy searches for the connection between three varying stories, focusing on memory and the effect of events on the actions of individuals. Jones continues his exploration of how text, storytelling and movement pull and push against each other and how another experience can be had through the combination and recombination of these elements.

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, founded in 1982, was born out of an 11-year collaboration between Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane (1948-1988). During this time, they redefined the duet form and foreshadowed issues of identity, form and social commentary that would change the face of American dance. The company has performed worldwide in over 200 cities in 40 countries on every major continent and is recognized as one of the most innovative and powerful forces in the dance-theater world. NYLA/Bill T. Jones

BORIS CHARMATZ: 10,000 GESTURES

Thursday, September 27 & Friday, September 28 at 7:30 pm

Co-presented with the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF)'s Crossing the Line Festival

In this North American premiere, his most ambitious stage work to date, Boris Charmatz amasses a choreographic storm of movements assembled by more than 20 dancers each executing thousands of actions over an hour. Each gesture is unique, not to be repeated, and evaporates as soon as it is completed. Alluding to the ephemeral nature of dance, Charmatz's work-which is set to Mozart's Requiem, a glorious meditation on death-is a statement on the transient nature of being. The inspiration for 10,000 Gestures came to Charmatz while he was staging his piece, Levée des Conflits Extended, at the Museum of Modern Art in 2013, which was a study in permanence and immobility. Charmatz set out to create the opposite effect in 10,000 Gestures, he told The New York Times: "I envision a choreographic forest in which no dancer ever repeats any of the gestures, each of which will be shown only once and will vanish as soon as it has been executed, like an ode to the impermanence of the art of dance."

French choreographer Boris Charmatz is widely celebrated for his radical approach to contemporary dance. From 2009 to 2017, Charmatz was the director of the Rennes & Brittany National Choreographic Centre, transforming it into the notion of a Museum of Dance (Musée de la danse). He has recently presented work to great acclaim at Sadler's Wells, Tate Modern, and New York's Museum of Modern Art. borischarmatz.org Video: https://youtu.be/30khL580zrA

TERE O'CONNOR: LONG RUN

Friday, October 12 & Saturday, October 13 at 7:30 pm

The NYC premiere of Tere O'Connor's Long Run (2017) pushes the emotional content of O'Connor's movement to new physical extremes, allowing time-based elements like polyrhythms, velocity and duration to become external forces in the work, overtaking the eight performers as they repeatedly struggle to bring their bodies into a state of calm. O'Connor's score enhances the referential potential of the work and drives its rhythmic trajectory. The work features dancers: Simon Courchel, Marc Crousillat, Eleanor Hullihan, Emma Judkins, Joey Loto, Silas Riener, Lee Serle and Jin Ju Song-Begin. Costume design is by Strauss Bourque-LaFrance; lighting design by Michael O'Connor and a musical score created by O'Connor himself. LONG RUN Video Excerpt

Tere O'Connor is Artistic Director of Tere O'Connor Dance. His works bring formal and conceptual concerns into direct dialogue. Engaging the tension between the geometries of the rectangular stage, the organic forms of nature, and the vast terrain of human behavior, he reconsiders abstraction. O'Connor has created over 40 works for his company and toured these throughout the US, Europe, South America and Canada. He has created numerous commissions including works for Mikhail Baryshnikov, Jean Butler, and the Lyon Opera Ballet, to name a few. He has received three Bessie Awards and is a Center for Advanced Studies Professor in Dance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. tereoconnordance.org

Co-commissioned by NYU Skirball and Live Arts Bard, with additional commissioning support from the American Dance Festival.

LUCIANA ACHUGAR: BRUJX

Friday, October 19 & Saturday, October 20 at 7:30 pm

Brujx, a world premiere, ritualizes the labor of the dancers, exposing and transcending it to unearth the powerful and primal magic brujx within them. As in all of achugar's work it proposes DANCE as the necessary transformational healing for our time. Brujx resists western assumptions of beauty and hierarchical order, freeing the dancers both of their role as worker in the power structure within the creative project and of the universal shame of being animal-sexual-powerful-instinctive creatures.

luciana achugar, a Brooklyn-based choreographer from Uruguay, has been making work in NYC and Uruguay independently and collaboratively since 1999. She is a two-time Bessie Award recipient and was nominated for a 2016 Bessie for Outstanding Production for her latest An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love. She was a 2017 Alpert Award recipient, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grantee, amongst other accolades. She was one of Dance Magazine's 2012 "25 to Watch" and her Bessie Award-winning work PURO DESEO was named one of 2010 Time Out/NY's "Best of Dance." Her works also include The Pleasure Project and OTRO TEATRO. lachugar.org

LET US EAT CAKE: A FREE MARXIST DJ DANCE PARTY & MARATHON READING OF MARXIST TEXTS

Friday, October 19 at 9 pm

This free birthday party, following the performance of luciana achugar's Brujx, will feature DJ Andrew Andrew spinning the finest Marxist tracks, plus readings from the masterworks Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto, performed by a revolving cast of thinkers, artists, Marxists and celebrities.

NOTE: Brujx and Let Us Eat Cake are part of Karl Marx Festival: On Your Marx running October 17 - 28. Admission is free to all Festival events; however, in keeping with Marx's writings on capitalism, audiences will receive an invoice detailing the cost of every element of the production (supply). They are then free to determine the worth of the production and donate accordingly (demand), thus enabling the artists

to "earn money in order to live and write." Reservations are necessary.

JAN FABRE: MOUNT OLYMPUS, TO GLORIFY THE CULT OF TRAGEDY (a 24-hour performance)

Saturday, November 10 at 5 pm - Sunday, November 11 at 5 pm

Mount Olympus: to glorify the cult of tragedy (a 24-hour performance) is a graphic, 24-hour Dionysian orgy of madness, murder, and music - a hallucinatory vision of Homeric themes and characters, played by 27 performers, that come to life in one day and one night. Acclaimed Belgium director Jan Fabre's North American premiere outlines stories and characters from Greek tragedy, wrenching open their flaws until they are left in tatters, smashed by violence, Homeric laughter and ecstasy. Mount Olympus is not a modernization of Greek tragedy. It is an investigation of the impossibility of representing that which mutilates us and makes us pure again.www.mountolympus.be

Belgian director, multidisciplinary artist and choreographer Jan Fabre is one of the most versatile and provocative artists on the international stage, known for pushing the boundaries of art and performance. Chaos and discipline, repetition and madness, metamorphosis and the anonymous are all indispensable ingredients in Fabre's works. He makes a clean break with the conventions of contemporary theater by introducing the concept of 'real-time performance' - sometimes called 'living installations' - and explores radical choreographic possibilities as a means of resurrecting classical dance. troubleyn.be/eng/about-jan-fabre

DANCE HEGINBOTHAM: Fantasque

Saturday, November 17 at 3 pm and 7:30 pm; Sunday, November 18 at 7: 30 pm

Fantasque, a NYC premiere, is an ebullient and magical pageant created by choreographer John Heginbotham and puppeteer Amy Trompetter. Giant puppets and human dancers join forces to create a fable of a battle of light and darkness, with a fantastical cast of characters featuring giant babies, blue angels, devils, rats, and a restaurant where the customers are tuxedo-wearing fish. Performed to live music composed by Ottorino Respighi, and adapted from piano pieces by Giaochino Rossini, Fantasque ruminates on morality and immorality as seen through a child's eyes in a series of connected vignettes bound by an unconventional and tender merging of puppetry and dance.

John Heginbotham, a former member of Mark Morris Dance Group, founded Dance Heginbotham in 2011. The company has been presented and commissioned by prestigious venues including Bard College, Brooklyn Academy Of Music, Jacob's Pillow, The Kennedy Center and The Joyce Theater, and has toured extensively in the U.S. and abroad. Heginbotham is the recipient of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2014 Jacob's Pillow Dance Award. danceheginbotham.org

Amy Trompetter creates giant puppet operas, outdoor pageants and hand puppet shows. Her critically-acclaimed production of The Barber of Seville exposed and transgressed scripted content and operatic form. Her Punch & Judy just persuaded Brazilians to host an all-women's hand puppet festival next year. She collaborates in prisons, brings puppetry to street actions and neighborhood centers upstate, and is the founder of Redwing Blackbird Theater, a puppet workshop and performing space in Rosendale, NY. redwingblackbirdtheater.com

Fantasque was commissioned by and developed in residence at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, where it received its world premiere at Bard SummerScape in July 2016.

A.I.M./Kyle Abraham: LIVE! THE REALEST MC

Thursday, April 4 - Saturday, April 6 at 7:30 pm

Kyle Abraham, Artistic Director of A.I.M., is a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, a 2015 City Center choreographer in residence and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. A.I.M. (formerly Abraham In Motion) was born into hip- hop culture in the late 1970s and grounded in Abraham's artistic upbringing in classical cello, piano, and the visual arts. Abraham's work entwines a sensual and provocative vocabulary with a strong emphasis on sound, human behavior and all things visual. abrahaminmotion.org

Stephen Petronio COMPANY: BLOODLINES

Thursday, April 11- Saturday, April 13 at 7:30 pm

Stephen Petronio Company presents its most ambitious season of Bloodlines, a five-year autobiographical project that not only honors the lineage of American postmodern dance, but also traces the influences and impulses that have shaped choreographer Stephen Petronio, an artist uniquely positioned to preserve this postmodern tradition. The program includes a world premiere by Petronio alongside works by postmodern masters. To date, the company has restaged works by Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton.

Acclaimed by audiences and critics alike, Stephen Petronio is widely regarded as one of the leading dance-makers of his generation. New music, visual art and fashion collide in his dances, producing powerfully modern landscapes for the senses. Founded in 1984, Stephen Petronio Company has performed in 26 countries throughout the world, including over 35 New York City engagements. www.Petron.io

CUNNINGHAM CENTENARY: IN CONVERSATION WITH MERCE

Friday, May 3 & Saturday, May 4 at 3:30 pm

Merce Cunningham is widely considered one of the most important choreographers of all time. Throughout his 70- year career, he continued to innovate, helping to drive the evolution of the American avant-garde and expanding the frontiers of contemporary visual and performance arts. His collaborations with artists from every creative discipline yielded an unparalleled body of American dance, music and visual art.

As a part of the Merce Cunningham Centenary festivities throughout 2019, Skirball will present In Conversation with Merce, a celebration of Cunningham's legacy through world premiere commissions of contemporary artists. In Conversation with Merce aims to engage the public in theoretical, practical and experiential approaches to examining Merce's cultural and artistic contribution. Rashaun Mitchell, a former Merce Cunningham Dance Company dancer and a Trustee of the Merce Cunningham Trust, is curating this program. Netta Yerushalmy, Moriah Evans, and Mina Nishimura will each present responsive works that draw connections of lineage to the celebrated choreographer. mercecunningham.org

TICKETS

Tickets can be purchased online at www.nyuskirball.org, by phone at 212.998.4941, or in person at the Box Office, 566 LaGuardia Place at Washington Square: Tuesday-Saturday, 12:00-6:00 P.M. For ticket prices and complete scheduling, visit www.nyuskirball.org. NYU Skirball is located at 566 LaGuardia Place at Washington Square, New York, New York 10012.

ABOUT NYU SKIRBALL

NYU Skirball, located in the heart of Greenwich Village, is one of New York City's major presenters of international work, and has been the premier venue for cultural and performing arts events in lower Manhattan since 2003. The 800-seat theater, led by Director Jay Wegman, provides a home for internationally renowned artists, innovators and thinkers. NYU Skirball hosts over 300 events annually, from re-inventions of the classics to cutting-edge premieres, in genres ranging from dance, theater and performance arts to comedy, music and film.

NYU Skirball's unique partnership with New York University enables it to draw on the University's intellectual riches and resources to enhance its programming with dialogues, public forums and conversations with artists, philosophers, scientists, Nobel Laureates and journalists. www.nyuskirball.org.

Subways: A, B, C, D, E, F, M to West 4th St.; R & W to 8th Street; 6 to Astor Place.

Programs, artists and ticket prices are subject to change.