Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company Presents AN EVENING OF LOVE DANCES

This Valentine's Day, the NYC-based Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company offers An Evening of Love Dances, a free live Zoom event celebrating love in the DGDC repertory.

Reserve your ticket for a front-row view to the 25th Anniversary edition, Gems from the Vault, featuring highlights from the archives. Choreographer and dancer Daniel Gwirtzman, joined by influential Company dancer Cary McWilliam (1998-2009), will offer their unique perspectives surrounding these favorite dances.

Valentine's is not all saccharine; the push and pull of relationships, the work they require, are equal ingredients. Grab a seat so you can be up close and personal to the lauded dancers. Be among the first to see this footage! 

 

Register for a free ticket at our Eventbrite site: https://dgdc-valentines.eventbrite.com 

 

The Oracle, the Company's 15th Anniversary season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn. "The phrase, ‘angels in the architecture,' written by Paul Simon, has been ringing in my mind since the New York-based company debuted part of this larger work…a vision that vibrated on a frequency of harmony and brilliance" wrote ArtsATL dance critic Cynthia Bond Perry, reviewing the Company in Atlanta. 

New Territory, the Company's 2002 season, produced many of the Company's most popular and beloved dances: Coupling, Shifting, Obsession, Puzzle, Scenarios, Getting Together. "A troupe I'd follow anywhere" wrote Eva Yaa Asantawaa in The Village Voice reviewing this show at Joyce SoHo in SoHo, Manhattan, “perfect magnifying glasses for the choreographer's quirky ideas. They brought exceptional vitality to each work's compact vignette.” 

Encore, the Company's signature evening-length show set to jazz music, “is both the title of Gwirtzman's new dance suite and the response it's likely to inspire. The name refers to the repetitions of rehearsal, as a fictional troupe of Broadway dancers prepares to go on the road, but there's little tedium in Gwirtzman's choreography, set to classic jazz recordings. Executing his tricky syncopations and intricate patterns at breakneck tempos, the dancers can't help but smile” wrote Brian Seibert in The New Yorker. 

e-Motion, the Company's newest work, a collaboration on a hybrid dance/theater piece with playwright Saviana Stanescu, explores artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and what it means to be human in a digital age.. “Gwirtzman and Stanescu provide a frequently dazzling hour of questions. Embodied thought. Theatre reaching past its own boundaries. Gwirtzman's choreography is spare but rich in details, vigorous within containment ... What e-Motion does well is to articulate the concerns (part ethical, part dystopian) of the bond between human and AI” wrote critic Ross Haarstad in The Ithaca Times. 

 

An Evening of Love Dances features the work of Daniel Gwirtzman (Director, Choreographer), Jeff Story (Composer), and dancers Jonathan Alsberry, Oren Barnoy, Amanda Blauer, Courtney Baron, Dwayne Brown, Derek Crescenti, Daniel Gwirtzman, Lindsey Dietz Marchant, Kenzie Haynes, Kenneth Higginbotham, Madeline Hoak, Jason Garcia Ignacio, Gary Jeter, Justin Keats, Lauren Kravitz, Vanessa Martínez de Baños, Stacy Martorana, Cary McWilliam, Preston Miller, Tess Montoya, Michael Novak, Honza Pelichovský, Maya Petty, Simon Phillips, Ryan Pliss, Brittany Posas, Or Reitman, Aslan Rolston, Frances Samson, Anna Schön, Jamie Scott, Simone Stevens, Christian von Howard, Jessica Vokoun, Jarel Waters and Corey Wright. 

 

In this 25th anniversary year, what better time to go back into the archives and share dances that have not been seen in decades, many which have never been digitized, until now, or shared online. What good is dance doing sitting alone in its room? In excavating these “gems from the vault” there is a chance to come hear the music play. I have enjoyed tracing the dancers and dances from the beginning of the Company's formation. This milestone celebration is an opportunity to expose so many beautiful dancers whose work is never seen enough. The dances selected are mostly duets. What fortune drives the juncture of two people, the coordinates of two intersecting lines? The repertory's long-time fascination with relationships is captured by these dances. The intersections of people is at the work's heart, the Yin and Yang of relationships, the shifting lines of attraction and repulsion, of volatility versus balance.

 

An Evening of Love Dances, two back-to-back sold-out performances of ten dances for a cast of eleven, at Joyce SoHo the evening of February 14, 2000. Reviewing the program in Attitude: The Dancers' Magazine, (published Summer 2000 issue) dance writer Madeleine L. Dale wrote: For love of dance, audience and performers were romanced at Joyce SoHo…it was nice to just sit back and be nuzzled by Mr. Gwirtzman's gift and to enjoy the satisfying feeling of love at first sight, with hope in your heart that you will meet again soon. 

 

The acclaimed New York-based Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company, celebrating its 25th Anniversary, is known for its playful virtuosity, musicality, accessibility and charisma. “A troupe I'd follow anywhere” (The Village Voice), a “troupe of fabulous dancers” (Backstage) that “can't help but smile” (The New Yorker). The nonprofit has been committed to 

education since its inception in 1998, operating with the philosophy that everyone can join the dance through multigenerational interactive programming. Incorporating dance and story into the film medium has been a consistent practice along with creating original programming for the stage. Collaborations that erode boundaries, blend genres and disciplines, take chances, involve community, promote accessibility, and celebrate performers' individuality and humanity are areas of focus. Highlights include performances at Lincoln Center, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, The Kennedy Center, Battery Dance Festival, Fire Island Dance Festival, Bryant Park, La MaMa, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. The Company has been awarded commissions and residencies from institutions including the Joyce Theater Foundation, The Yard, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Raumars (Finland), Sacatar Foundation (Brazil), Sfakiotes Residency (Greece) Maison Dora Maar (France), Centro Negra (Spain), Gdański Festiwal Tanca (Poland), The Studios of Key West, CUNY Kinsgborough Community College, and Ucross (Wyoming), among many others. In the fall of 2023, the Company's film Charged screens at Cuadro por Danza Festival in Caracas, Venezuela; London International Screen Dance Festival 2023 at Laban Theatre; and Exeter Dance International Film Festival in the UK's South West, after having screened at the American Dance Fesitval's 90th summer of programming in Durham, NC in July. 

 

Celebrating his 28th anniversary as a NYC company director and choreographer, Daniel Gwirtzman co-founded Artichoke Dance Company after touring as a member of both Garth Fagan Dance and Mark Morris Dance Group. Reviewing this debut concert in 1995, Elizabeth Zimmer wrote in The Village Voice, “It's hard to believe Mark Morris has already spawned imitators, but Gwirtzman seems headed in Morris' direction, moving dancers to music with acute sensitivity'' under the headline The Next Generation: Young Companies With Strange Names. Since then his work has been presented without pause.