Choreographer Jennifer Archibald's ARCH DANCE Comes to Baruch Performing Arts Center

The CUNY Dance Initiative, Queensborough Community College's Dance Program, and the Queensborough Student Association present Jennifer Archibald's Arch Dance Company. The evening features a preview of Arch Dance Company's newest work Hushed, with QCC dance program students opening the program in Archibald's Line Up. The performance is Saturday, May 25, 2019 at 8:00pm at Baruch Performing Arts Center (25th Street between Lexington and 3rd Avenues, NYC). Tickets are $16.00 general / $11 students and seniors and are available online: www.bit.ly/ArchDance.

Jennifer Archibald is known for her stylistically diverse choreography and has received numerous commissions, including several from the Cincinnati Ballet, where she is the first female Resident Choreographer in the company's 40-year history. Archibald taps classical training, street, funk and lyrical dance styles to create high-energy contemporary dance works based in personal investigations of human behavior.

In this preview of her newest work, Hushed, for her own company, Arch Dance, Archibald dives into the consequences of muting women's souls. Springing from Jane Brox's A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives, Archibald traces the history of silencing women's voices. Performed by an all-female cast, Hushed brings together the hard edges of street dance with the fluidity of classical technique to express the ideals and disillusions that come from speaking uncomfortable truths. Archibald comments, "Souls are essential parts of human beings. When you expose the dark corners of your past, at what point do you reveal, release and soar?"

Hushed is set to music by Eartha Kitt and Julia Kent, and is performed by Caroline Brethenoux, Misuzu Hara, Yvonne Hernandez, Gianna Theodore, Mei Yamanaka, and Kristina Zaidner.

The program opens with Line Up, choreographed by Archibald for Queensborough Community College dance program students. Line Up investigates how racial disparities translate into victimization in firearm violence, and QCC students performed this work at the Northeast Regional American College Dance Association Conference and Gala in March 2019.

JENNIFER ARCHIBALD is the founder and Artistic Director of the Arch Dance Company and Program Director of ArchCore40 Dance Intensives. Archibald has choreographed for the Atlanta Ballet, Ailey II, Cincinnati Ballet, Ballet Memphis, Kansas City Ballet, Tulsa Ballet II, Ballet Nashville; and worked commercially for Tommy Hilfiger, NIKE and MAC Cosmetics as well as chart-listed singers and actors. In 2018, she created new works for Cincinnati Ballet -- where she is the first female Resident Choreographer in the company's 40-year history - along with Tulsa Ballet, Grand Rapids Ballet, Amy Seiwert's Imagery, Ballet Nashville and Stockholm's Balletakademien; in 2020, she will create new works for Ballet West, Ballet Nashville, and Sacramento Ballet. She is currently the acting Movement Director for Michael Kahn's The Oresteia at the Shakespeare Theatre Company. Jennifer is an Acting Lecturer at the Yale School of Drama, and in 2015, she developed the Hip Hop dance curriculum at Columbia/Barnard College. Jennifer is also a guest artist at Fordham University/Ailey, Purchase College, Princeton University, Virginia Commonwealth University, University of South Florida, Goucher College, Columbia College Chicago, and Bates College. In 2018, she premiered new works for Miami New World School of the Arts, South Carolina's Governor's School of the Arts, Ailey at Fordham, Boston Conservatory, and Point Park College. She is a graduate of The Alvin Ailey School and the Maggie Flanigan Acting Conservatory.

This performance is supported in part by The Queensborough Student Association and the Department of Health, Physical Education and Dance. Arch Dance Company's residency and performance are organized by Queensborough Community College and are part of the CUNY Dance Initiative.

ABOUT THE CUNY DANCE INITIATIVE

The CUNY Dance Initiative (CDI) is a groundbreaking model that pairs the resources of the City University of New York (CUNY) - the nation's largest public urban university system - with private funding to act as a creative incubator for the NYC dance field. A residency program that opens the doors of CUNY campuses to professional choreographers and dance companies, CDI supports local artists, enhances the cultural life and education of college students, and builds new dance audiences at CUNY performing arts centers.

Despite New York City's status as the dance capital of the United States, rising real estate prices are challenging the city's ability to serve as a creative incubator, with appropriate rehearsal spaces in waning supply. CDI was developed in response to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's 2010 report, "We Make Do," which cited how destabilizing the shortage of affordable rehearsal space in New York City is to the dance community. A successful pilot project supporting residencies and performances on four CUNY campuses in 2012-2013, underwritten by the New York Community Trust, prompted CDI to expand its scope. Since its official launch in 2014, the program has subsidized and facilitated a total of 120 residencies - from emerging choreographers to established dance companies - at 13 CUNY colleges in all five boroughs. CDI is headed and administered by the Kupferberg Center for the Arts at Queens College. www.cuny.edu/danceinitiative.

CDI receives major support from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the Howard Gilman Foundation, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Jerome Robbins Foundation, the SHS Foundation, the Harkness Foundation for Dance, and Dance/NYC's New York City Dance Rehearsal Space Subsidy Program, made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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