Lar Lubovitch Dance Company Announces 50th Anniversary Season

The Lar Lubovitch Dance Company announces its 50th anniversary season at The Joyce Theater in New York City, April 17-22, 2018. The season will feature the world premiere of Wanderers as well as signature works from the Company's vast repertory, including Men's Stories: A Concerto in Ruin (2000), performed by Lubovitch's acclaimed Company of dancers. The Company will be joined by the Martha Graham Dance Company and dancers from the Joffrey Ballet, each performing seminal Lubovitch dances in honor of this milestone year.

Lar Lubovicth, one of America's foremost choreographers, founded his eponymous Company in New York in 1968. In the years since, he has choreographed more than 110 dances for his Company, which has performed throughout the United States and in more than 40 other countries. Lubovitch's work, noted for its musicality, full-bodied fluid movement, and deeply humanistic voice, has been hailed as "giving pleasure though beauty." His choreography is "a thrilling sight...ravishing the eye...telling stories both complicated and mysterious" (The New Yorker). In addition to his dances for his own Company, Lubovitch's prodigious creative output includes works for ballet, theater, film, and ice dancing.

The 50th anniversary season at the Joyce will feature two programs. The centerpiece is the world premiere of the haunting Wanderers, set to rare choral music by Schubert. The season also includes Lubovitch's acclaimed Men's Stories, performed by an all-male cast and set to an original score by Scott Marshall. When the work premiered, The Village Voice described it as "one of Lubovitch's finest...the dance suggests fragments of personal history gleaming within layers of formal dancing." Dancers from the Joffrey Ballet will perform a quartet from Lubovitch's Othello, a beloved work originally created for American Ballet Theatre, with music by Elliot Goldenthal, and the Martha Graham Dance Company will perform Lubovitch's lush The Legend of Ten, which maps the complex, shifting terrain of a Brahms quintet for piano and strings. Tickets will go on sale in December 2017.

Also in the spring, on April 6, the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company will return to the 92nd Street Y in New York City-the site of its first-ever performance in 1968-for a special commemorative event. Part of the 92nd Street Y's Fridays at Noon series, the program will include a performance of excerpts from Men's Stories and a conversation with Lubovitch about dance and his career.

This fall, Lubovitch, in his role as a curator and as a part of his distinguished professorship at UC/Irvine, is curating Heart of Dance, a series of four lecture-demonstrations featuring guest companies: Ronald K. Brown/Evidence (October 21), Pam Tanowitz Dance (October 28), Martha Graham Dance Company (November 11), and Mark Morris Dance Group (November 18). The events will be held at New York University's Crystal Theater and will be shared, via interactive live telecast, with students at UC/Irvine and other California universities. Very limited seating is available at NYU.

About the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company

The Lar Lubovitch Dance Company was founded in 1968. Over the past 50 years it has gained an international reputation as one of America's top dance companies. Celebrated for both its choreographic excellence and its unsurpassed dancing, the Company has created more than 110 new dances and performed before millions throughout the United States and in more than 40 countries.

Lar Lubovitch is one of America's most versatile, popular, and widely seen choreographers. In addition to being performed by his own Company, his dances have been performed by many other major companies throughout the world, including American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, Royal Danish Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and the Joffrey Ballet. In 2016, he premiered a new dance based on the Pushkin poem "The Bronze Horseman" at the Mikhailovsky Ballet in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Lubovitch has choreographed concert works for Olympic ice skaters, including John Curry, Peggy Fleming, Brian Orser, JoJo Starbuck, and Paul Wylie, and created feature-length ice-dance specials for television: The Planets for A&E (nominated for an International Emmy Award, a Cable Ace Award and a Grammy Award) and The Sleeping Beauty for PBS and Anglia TV, Great Britain. His work for theater and film includes Sondheim/Lapine's Into the Woods (Tony Award nomination), The Red Shoes (Astaire Award), the Tony Award-winning revival of The King and I on Broadway and in London's West End, Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame in Berlin, and Robert Altman's movie The Company (American Choreography Award).

Over the past ten years, Lubovitch has focused a significant part of his attention on curating. In 2007, he created the Chicago Dancing Festival, launched in collaboration with the City of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art, which, for 10 seasons, presented five days of performances taking place in four major theaters in downtown Chicago, and featured a national roster of leading American dance companies. The festival was seen every August by an audience of 15,000 people and was presented entirely free to the public. For this service to the public, in 2007 Lubovitch was named Chicagoan of the Year by the Chicago Tribune, and in 2008 by Chicago Magazine. More recently, Lubovitch conceived and directed the critically acclaimed NY Quadrille at The Joyce Theater featuring four New York-based dance companies.

Lubovitch is the recipient of numerous awards. Among the most recent: In 2011, he was named a Ford Fellow by United States Artists and also received the Dance/USA Honors Award. In 2012, his dance Crisis Variations was awarded the Prix Benois de la Danse for outstanding choreography at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. In 2013, the American Dance Guild honored him for lifetime achievement, and in 2014 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by The Juilliard School in New York City. In 2016, he received the Scripps/American Dance Festival Award for lifetime achievement and the Dance Magazine Award and was named one of America's Irreplaceable Dance Treasures by the Dance Heritage Coalition. He was appointed a Distinguished Professor of Dance at UC/Irvine in 2016. Since then, he has annually conducted 10 weeks of activities there with his Company's dancers.

The Lar Lubovitch Dance Company is supported, in part, by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. The Company also acknowledges the generous support of the Howard Gilman Foundation, Little One Foundation, McMullan Family Fund, Emma Sheafer Charitable Trust, Shubert Foundation, Singers Forum, A. Woodner Fund, Harkness Foundation for Dance, Marta Heflin Foundation, and numerous additional generous individuals, corporations, and foundations.

For more information about the Company, visit www.lubovitch.org.

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