Dance Theatre Of Harlem Adds Streaming Performances

Dance Theatre of Harlem (Virginia Johnson, Artistic Director; Anna Glass, Executive Director) announced today new programing on its online streaming service, DTH On Demand. Upcoming performances include Nacho Duato's Coming Together, and an extraordinary 2019 performance in the Guggenheim Museum's majestic rotunda of works by George Balanchine, late DTH Co-founder Arthur Mitchell, and Resident Choreographer Robert Garland. Sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies, DTH On Demand launched on June 3 with the acclaimed 1984 production of Creole Giselle and has since featured Darrell Grand Moultrie's Vessels, Robert Garland's Return, and Annabelle Lopez Ochoa's Balamouk.

While access to DTH On Demand is free, gifts of any size provide crucial support to Dance Theatre of Harlem's current operations and will help to ensure that New York City's dance future continues to be even more inclusive and diverse than ever before. For more information, please visit www.DanceTheatreOfHarlem.org.

Nacho Duato's Coming Together is a complex and exhilarating work set to the music of contemporary American composer Frederic Rzewski. Duato uses the composer's restless repetition and structural intricacy to create a highly physical ballet that is both compelling and richly poetic. The score manipulates and expands musically eight spoken sentences (included below) from a letter written by Sam Melville (a political prisoner killed in the 1971 Attica Prison riots). Coming Together is a work that allows the viewer to contemplate the interrelated elements of music and sound as they are merged to create dance. The title of the piece, created in 1991 for Compania Nacional de Danza in Madrid, is both a reference to a sentence in the letter and to the technique of musical improvisation.

I think the combination of age and a greater coming together is responsible for the speed of the passing time. It's six months now and I can tell you truthfully few periods in my life have passed so quickly. I am in excellent physical and emotional health. There are doubtless subtle surprises ahead, but I feel secure and ready. As lovers will contrast their emotions in times of crisis, so am I dealing with my environment. In the indifferent brutality, incessant noise, the experimental chemistry of food, the ravings of lost hysterical men, I can act with clarity and meaning. I am deliberate-sometimes even calculating--seldom employing histrionics except as a test of the reactions of others. I read much, exercise, talk to guards and inmates, feeling for the inevitable direction of my life." -Sam Melville, Attica Correctional Facility, May 16, 1970

Although founded in 1969​, Dance Theatre of Harlem made its official New York debut in 1971 in the ​Guggenheim rotunda with a performance that included ​Co-founder Arthur Mitchell's Tones. To celebrate the Guggenheim building's 60th and Dance Theatre of Harlem's 50th anniversaries, Works & Process presented a Rotunda Project with DTH called Works & Process Rotunda Project: Dance Theatre of Harlem at 50 on Monday, September 30, 2019. The company paid tribute to its history with Tones II, a restaging of Tones by former DTH Principal Ballerina Lorraine Graves with assistance from former DTH Principal Ballerina Caroline Rocher, set to music by Tania León; the first three themes from choreographer George Balanchine's The Four Temperaments, with music by Paul Hindemith; and Dance Theatre of Harlem Resident Choreographer Robert Garland's Nyman String Quartet No. 2, with music by Michael Nyman.

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