ZviDance Presents the World Premiere of LIKE

ZviDance presents the World Premiere of LIKE at New York Live Arts (219 W. 19th Street, NYC) from November 8-11, 2017.

Performances: Wednesday - Friday at 7:30pm and Saturday at 2:00pm & 7:30pm. Tickets are $25 and are available via New York Live Arts' Ticket Services: (212) 924-0077or by visiting https://newyorklivearts.org/event/like/. There will be a gala celebration on November 8, followed by a reception; gala tickets are $100 and are available at http://www.zvidance.com/tickets/index.html.

Artistic Director Zvi Gotheiner, in collaboration with eight dancers, composer Scott Killian, Lighting Designer Mark London and Media Designer, Joshua Higgason, will create LIKE, a new evening-length multi-media dance. LIKE is the third in Gotheiner's trilogy, reflecting on our ever-increasing dependency on technology and how technology is shaping our current models of social interactions. Like both works in the trilogy, ZOOM (2010) and SURVEILLANCE(2014), LIKE will allow audiences to reflect on their own notions of friendships, social belonging, loneliness and social hierarchy, while also interacting with the dancers by utilizing technology. Using their cellphone to "like" (or not), the audience will be invited to participate in a TV reality dance competition, to select a "winner" through a process of elimination. The Audience vote and the total "likes" will be charted and projected on a screen to determine how the dance piece advances.

Multiple video cameras will star as "performers," focusing on various dancers and re-sampling these streams live onto various screens. Both performers and audience members will take turns interacting with cameras and computers, weaving themselves into the narrative. The video design will track the progress of the "liking" competition through charts along with pre-recorded collages of news footage (wars, refugees, natural disasters, sport) and real-time interviews.

The music score will use repetitive patterns to bond the work together and give it a form like a reality show's Round 1, Round 2, et al. Different sounds including club and meditative music will be integrated with electronically manipulated recording of the dancers and interviews with audience members. During the creative process and research period, the choreographer, together with the dancers, will utilize clips from reality TV and MTV shows and video clips posted on Facebook and Twitter to observe the behavioral and cultural attitudes generated by media.

About ZviDance

"One does not just watch a dance by Zvi Gotheiner. One enters a world with its own internal logic, a sensual, organic world of movement, language, and images where one is pulled along by currents unseen and inevitable." - Naomi Abrahami, Dance Magazine

ZviDance brings its audiences a passionate vision of community in a modern age. A collaborative alliance among artists, the company's stirring work celebrates diversity by melding movement genres into the distinct dance vocabulary which is provocative both in form and in subject matter. Led by Israeli-born Artistic Director Zvi Gotheiner, the company is shaped by a synergistic model of creation, involving the ensemble and designers from the initial research phase, pushing the methodology and ethics of a creation process within an interdisciplinary format.

"Zvi Gotheiner's choreography suggests that he is as much sociologist as dance-maker."

- Alastair Macaulay, The New York Times

ZviDance has received critical praise and stable funding for its artistic projects. Recently, one of the company's signature works, DABKE, was recognized by The New York Times as one of Alastair Macaulay's TOP TEN DANCE FAVORITES OF 2013. The company performs frequently at home in such New York venues as BAM's Next Wave Festival, The Joyce Theater, New York Live Arts, and Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors. ZviDance has toured across North America to festivals such as Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival and The American Dance Festival, and abroad to Germany, Poland, Russia, Israel, Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador and Japan.

ZVI GOTHEINER (Artistic Director) Born and raised in a kibbutz in northern Israel, Zvi began his artistic career as a gifted violinist with the Young Kibbutzim Orchestra, where he attained the rank of soloist and Concertmaster at age 15. He began dancing at 17, and soon after, formed his first performance group. Zvi arrived in New York in 1978 on a dance scholarship from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation and danced with the Joyce Trisler Dance Company, Feld Ballets/NY and Bat-Sheva Dance Company. After directing Tamar Ramle and the Jerusalem Tamar Dance Companies in Israel and the Israeli Chamber Dance Company in New York, he founded ZviDance.

For more information, visit www.zvidance.com.

ZviDance's presentation of LIKE at New York Live Arts is made possible through New York Live Arts' Live Arts Plus. The Live Arts Plus Program is a comprehensive subsidized rental program benefiting a diverse group of dance and theater companies and producing organizations.

Support for ZviDance's LIKE has been granted from: NYSCA, The Gilman Foundation, The Harkness Foundation and New Music USA, as well as a generous support by Kaatsbaan International Dance Center for a long-term Creative Residency.