LUMBERYARD presents Winter Festival featuring SUGAR By Bessie & Obie Award-Winner Robbie McCauley

Adrienne Willis, Executive and Artistic Director of LUMBERYARD Contemporary Performing Arts, has announced the third edition of the organization's acclaimed LUMBERYARD In The City Winter Festival, which takes place from January 25 - February 10 at New York Live Arts in New York City. The 2018 Winter Festival will feature genre-blurring productions from three daring and highly accomplished artists, including choreographer Kei Takei and her company Moving Earth Orient Sphere who will present the New York premiere of LIGHT, Part 44 (Bamboo Forest) (??) and Solo from LIGHT, Part 8 (January 25-27); playwright and performance artist Robbie McCauley, who presents the New York premiere of Sugar (February 1-3); and choreographer, dancer and visual artist Dana Reitz, who will present Latitude, her new world premiere work (February 8-10).

The LUMBERYARD In The City Festival was created in 2016 as a means of providing artists that span the breadth of the performing arts with crucial opportunities to premiere new works in the New York City area. Since its inception, the Festival has presented over 30 performances from 10 artists to over 5,000 enthralled audience members. Previously hosted during summers at The Kitchen in New York City, this year's LUMBERYARD In The City Festival makes the move to winter as the organization continues preparations to host its inaugural season in Catskill, New York, where its new home is slated to open in summer 2019. Adding to an extraordinary period of momentum for the organization, LUMBERYARD also recently announced a new collaboration with the Brooklyn Academy Of Music (BAM) in which the organization will host residencies for three works that will later go on to premiere in BAM's Next Wave Festival. This partnership marks the first time in BAM's 156-year history that it has collaborated with a presenting organization on the development of multiple new works.

"Over three seasons, we have had the privilege of showcasing performances by some of the world's finest artists across multiple genres, and we are beyond thrilled to continue in that vein this year by presenting the works of three dynamic women who have been engaging and challenging audiences of cutting edge performance for decades," said Adrienne Willis. "This year's lineup explores the universal themes of life and death, sacrifice, cultural rituals, declining health and more, and we are so pleased to share this work with audiences from New York City and beyond."

The 2018 Winter Festival opens with legendary Japanese performer Kei Takei, who returns to the United States with her company Moving Earth Orient Sphere for the first time in 17 years, presenting two works supported by the Consulate General of Japan in New York and the Japan-United States Friendship Commission that showcase the choreographer's sustained synthesis of American and Japanese modern dance styles. First is the U.S. premiere of LIGHT, Part 44 (Bamboo Forest) (??) (2015) - a choreographic meditation on sacrifice that depicts the archetypal cycle of life and death through the image of the blossoming of bamboo flowers (which occurs as infrequently as once a century). As the bloom is immediately followed by the death of that generation of bamboo, Takei's performance draws parallels to the human theme of endless sacrifice of tribe, community, and individual to ensure the continuity of future generations. The company dances to the music of emerging visionary Japanese composer Seiichiro Sou, in a stark surreal set designed by Renta Kochi.

Takei's LIGHT, Part 44 (Bamboo Forest) (??) (2015) is paired with a Solo from LIGHT, Part 8 (1974), another section of her acclaimed, evolving work, LIGHT, which comprises contributions from over three decades in her career-beginning with the first section in 1969, and growing into a work totaling over a days' worth of existentially probing choreography. Recognized by many as one of the most extraordinary works in concert dance history, LIGHT was created in 1969 as a form of "dance diary" stemming from Takei's arrival in the U.S. from Japan to train at Juilliard and exploring her frustrations by how challenging and disparate her studies at Juilliard were from her dance upbringing. In this program, LIGHT, Part 8 (1974) depicts a lone dancer that ritualistically ties herself into knots.

This year's Winter Festival will also feature the New York premiere of Sugar from Bessie- and Obie Award-winning playwright, and veteran New York performer Robbie McCauley. In this 90-minute solo show directed by Maureen Shea, McCauley uses her own struggles with diabetes as a bridge to histories both personal and international. Throughout, she explores themes of colonization, slavery and, now, its causal relationship to an epidemic that disproportionately impacts the African-American community. McCauley tells tales of food-from the comfort food of her southern upbringing to the food from her days living as an artist in New York - and addresses the disparities in health care between black and white communities in the United States. The show will feature music by Chauncey Moore and projections by Mirta Tocci.

Finally, the Festival will conclude with Latitude - the world premiere work from choreographer, dancer, and visual artist Dana Reitz, who is known for her subtle and nuanced performances that accentuate the musicality of the body through silence, and pair the movement of light with that of the human form. Performed in silence by Reitz, Elena Demyanenko and Yanan Yu, Latitude is located in a mutable light field at moments altered by the presence of several wooden sticks. The movement and light score -- created, designed and directed by Reitz -- allows for travel amid ground plans, thresholds, valleys, caves, walkways and furrows, looking for the recognizable, the relatable and the fathomable.

LUMBERYARD Contemporary Performing Arts, based in New York City and led by Executive and Artistic Director Adrienne Willis, is a national non-profit organization that serves the performing arts community and its audiences by providing multi-faceted opportunities for artists to develop new work. Unwavering in its commitment to assisting artists throughout the creative process, LUMBERYARD operates with a collaborative and generous spirit, one driven by this support for artists and appreciation for the audiences who value their work.

In addition to providing critical support to a wide range of artists, LUMBERYARD welcomes audiences of all experience levels into the inner world of the contemporary performing arts, giving them opportunities to witness the creation, as well as the performance, of new work. Among LUMBERYARD's varied and ever-expanding offerings are its acclaimed residency program; its LUMBERYARD In The City Winter Festival; and the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography.

LUMBERYARD's four-building facility on the Hudson River waterfront, set to break ground on November 6, 2017, will make a significant contribution to the revitalization of Catskill, New York. The complex consists of a main Lumberyard building in Catskill and three large adjacent barns along Catskill Creek. There will be a large, column-free, flexible theater, a lobby, administrative offices, housing for up to 20 resident artists, an artist lounge and a public courtyard. This season, LUMBERYARD's end-of-year campaign is focused on raising funds to raise the original lumberyard's roof by 20 feet, which will expand their lighting, rigging, and scenic capabilities in order to accommodate the visions of America's most exciting performing artists and putting LUMBERYARD on par with the most innovative theater spaces in the nation. Phase II will encompass the three adjacent structures, which LUMBERYARD will develop in collaboration with the Village of Catskill and in line with the Village's Downtown and Waterfront Revitalization Strategy.

Each year in Catskill, LUMBERYARD will present a summer season consisting of premiere and work-in-progress performances by celebrated professional artists and companies, serving local residents and attracting tourists from across New York and beyond. From October through April, the facility will be available for collaborative residencies, subsidized and commercial rentals and community programming.

About Kei Takei

Kei Takei (pronounced "Kay Takay") is a native of Tokyo, Japan. In 1967, on the recommendation of Anna Sokolow, Ms. Takei was given a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Juilliard School. In 1969, Ms. Takei began the creation of Light, an epic work that at present consists of 45 distinct "Parts." Ms. Takei's dance company features up to 14 performers. Over many years, the company has presented hundreds of concerts, and has introduced Ms. Takei's choreography to audiences in 60 cities in the U.S.A. and in 17 countries around the world. Ms. Takei has twice been named a fellow in Choreography by The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and has been the recipient of numerous choreographic grants and awards from The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts, CAPS; The New York Foundation for the Arts, The Jerome Foundation, The Japan Department of Cultural Affairs, The Japan Society for Cultural Affairs and others. In 2013 Ms. Takei was awarded the Eguchi Takaya Prize for excellence in choreography and was awarded by the Japanese Department of Cultural Affairs with the Monbu Kagaku Daijinsho, which is among the highest level awards bestowed upon an artist of the non-traditional arts.

Her choreography has been commissioned by the Nederlands Dans Theater, The Kibbutz Dance Company, The Dance Theatre Company INBAL, Tanztheatre Reinhild Hoffman/ Shauspielhaus Bochum, Tanzprojekt München of West Germany, by Improvisations Unlimited of D.C., by Concert Dance Company of Boston, The Modern Dance Company of Hong Kong, and numerous others. Ms. Takei has been guest faculty at universities and regularly teaches workshops on tour and in Japan, her home for the past 26 years. Ms. Takei has been on the faculty of The American Dance Festival, Jacob's Pillow, Naropa Institute, and has been Artist in Residence at many colleges, including Sarah Lawrence College, Manhattanville College, Radcliffe College, Emerson College, The University of California, Santa Cruz, The University of California, Los Angeles, The University of Maryland and The Yamanashi University of Liberal Arts (Japan).

About Robbie McCauley

Robbie McCauley, recent recipient of the IRNE (Independent Reviewers of New England) Award for Solo Performance, and selected as a 2012 United States Artists Ford Foundation Fellow, has been an active presence in the American avant-garde theatre for several decades. Also lately, she directed a critically successful Roxbury Repertory Theater production of "The Glass Menagerie" by Tennessee Williams. She received an OBIE Award and a Bessie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Performance for her play, Sally's Rape.

She is widely anthologized, including Extreme Exposure, Moon Marked and Touched by Sun, and Performance and Cultural Politics, edited respectively by Jo Bonney, Sydne Mahone, and Elin Diamond. One of the early cast members of Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf on Broadway, Robbie went on to write and perform regularly in cities across the country and abroad.

Striving to facilitate dialogues on race between local whites and blacks, she created the Primary Sources series in Mississippi, Boston and Los Angeles produced by The Arts Company. In 1998, her "Buffalo Project" was highlighted as one of "The 51 (or So) Greatest Avant-Garde moments" by The Village Voice, a roster including work by artists such as Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and John Cage.

Robbie McCauley is Professor Emerita of Emerson College's Department of Performing Arts and was the 2014 Monan Professor in Theatre Arts at Boston College.

About Dana Reitz

Dana Reitz is a choreographer, dancer and visual artist, whose performance projects include Necessary Weather, a collaborative work with Tipton and dancer Sara Rudner, Unspoken Territory, a solo she created for Mikhail Baryshnikov, Shoreline, Private Collection, Lichttontanz, Suspect Terrain, Circumstantial Evidence, Severe Clear, and Field Papers. She and Baryshnikov toured together with a program of solos; she later created Cantata for Two, a duet for Baryshnikov and Kabuki master Tamasaburo Bando (Tokyo). In recent years, for The Body Acoustic, she has continued to investigate the shifting sense of place with both built and natural environments.

Ms. Reitz has toured, as a performer and mentor, throughout Europe, Asia, Australia and the US. Since 1973, she has been commissioned/produced by multiple venues internationally including Festival d'Automne (Paris), the Hebbeltheater (Berlin), BAM's Next Wave Festival, and the Lincoln Center White Light Festival (New York). She is the recipient of two Bessies, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and multiple awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, including one as part of American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius, sponsored by the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts.