New York Theatre Ballet To Play At Edgecombe Community College Performing Arts Series, 3/30

New York Theatre Ballet, the foremost chamber ballet company in the United States, will return to Tarboro, North Carolina on March 30, 2017 at 7:30pm to perform in the Edgecombe Community College Performing Arts Series, bringing a program of mixed repertoire. NYTB has performed in the series annually for the past four years.

Pam Tanowitz's Double Andante, a 13-minute ballet for ten dancers set to the Andante movement of Beethoven's Sonata in DMajor #15, which will be played live on piano two times at different tempos. The dance is based on the "pas de deux" and will be used as a metaphor for the age-old notion of unrequited love. A duet set to music by Franz List, Run Loose is the first ballet choreographed by Gemma Bond especially for NYTB, as an up and coming choreographer from the corps of American Ballet Theatre. In Antony Tudor's Judgment of Paris, the Greek legend is transferred to a French Café, late at night, where a drunken boulevardier makes his choice from three sad and aging ladies of pleasure. Set in a magical fairy kingdom beneath the roots of a great tree and filled with magic and poetry, Sleeping Beauty, choreographed by James Sutton, tells the fantastic tale of Princess Aurora from her fateful birth to her triumphant wedding. Tchaikovsky's captivating score sets the mood for New York Theatre Ballet's unique one-hour version of this beloved classic.

These performances have been underwritten by the Furman Mathewson Memorial Trust of Edgecombe County Memorial Library and have played to sold-out houses three years in a row. The performances have included an evening mixed program of balletic works for the general public and a Friday morning matinee of children's programming for all second and third graders in the county free of charge. Over 1100 students each year have been in attendance and the concert has been a great success. Over 3000 students have been exposed to the art of dance through these programs. In March of 2017, New York Theatre Ballet will return for the fifth year.

The Furman-Mathewson Trust

The Furman-Mathewson Trust of Edgecombe County Memorial Library is authorized "to provide a perpetual and continuing memorial to the Mathewsons" in the form of a continuing program of superior cultural, literary, educational or scientific presentations for the patrons of the Edgecombe County Memorial Library. The trust has previously helped to bring Maya Angelou, Nicholas Sparks, and B.B. King to Edgecombe County, and have sponsored free performances of Jasmine Guy and the Avery Sharpe Trio and the Regina Carter Quintet and for the past three years, the New York Theatre Ballet.

Gemma Bond was born in Bedfordshire, England, and trained with Sylvia Bebbs and at The Royal Ballet School. In 2000, she danced Zulme in Giselle in the School's annual performance. Bond joined The Royal Ballet in 2000 and was promoted to first artist in 2003. Her repertory there included Olga in Onegin, Princess Stephanie in Mayerling, Clara in The Nutcracker, the Fairy of the Song Bird in The Sleeping Beauty, a Cygnet in Swan Lake, Marie in Anastasia and a Sylphide in La Sylphide. She also created a role in Poppy Ben David's Siren Song (2000), which was part of The Royal Ballet's The New Works. Ms. Bond joined American Ballet Theatre as a member of the Corps de Ballet in January 2008. Her repertory with the Company includes Galya in The Bright Stream, Her Other Stepsister in Cinderella, Mazurka Lady in Coppélia, Amour in Don Quixote, the Chinese Dance, Columbine, and one of the Nutcracker's Sisters in Alexei Ratmansky's The Nutcracker, the Fairy of Charity in The Sleeping Beauty, a Little Swan and the Italian Princess in Swan Lake, Effie in La Sylphide, and roles in Black Tuesday, Company B and Dumbarton. She created roles in Alexei Ratmansky's The Nutcracker, Firebird, Dumbarton, and Everything Doesn't Happen at Once. Her performances at American Ballet Theatre are sponsored by Avery and Andy Barth, in recognition of former ABT dancer Carmen Barth. She has created three ballets for ABT's Choreographic Innovation Initiative, and two ballets for New York Theatre Ballet.She has made ballets for Intermezzo Ballet Company,The Hartt School, and for the 2014 YAGP Gala Performance. Ms. Bond was awarded a fellowship grant from The New Choreographic Institute in 2014 which enabled her to create a new ballet, The Giving.

Pam Tanowitz Dance was founded in 2000 as a platform for Tanowitz to explore her vision with a consistent group of dancers. Since then the company has received commissions and residencies at prestigious performance venues such as The Joyce Theater, Bard Summerscape Festival, New York Live Arts, The Guggenheim Museum's Works & Process series, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Chicago Dancing Festival, Baryshnikov Arts Center and Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival. The company has been selected by The New York Times Best of Dance 3 years in a row (2013, 2014 and 2015). Pam was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011 and as the Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University in 2013-14. In 2009 she received a Bessie Award for her dance, Be in the Gray With Me, at Dance Theater Workshop. Tanowitz has been invited to create new work for The Vail International Dance Festival and City Center's Fall for Dance Festival; has set work on The Juilliard School, Ballet Austin, New York Theater Ballet and Saint Louis Ballet; and has been a guest choreographer in the dance departments at Barnard College, Princeton University, Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, Marymount Manhattan College And Purchase College. Additional awards include three Joyce Theater ResidenCy Grants, Jerome Robbins Foundation, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists Award. She holds dance degrees from The Ohio State University and Sarah Lawrence College. She is Resident Fellow at New York University's Center for Ballet and the Arts, New York City Center and currently teaches at Rutgers University. Pam Tanowitz is the 2016 Juried Bessie Award Winner.

James Sutton, teacher, and choreographer, and writer, was for fourteen years an Associate Arts Professor in Dance at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and is currently company teacher for New York Theatre Ballet. He was the co-recipient of the Balasaraswati/Joy Ann Dewey Beinecke Endowed Chair for Distinguished Teaching from the American Dance Festival in 2015. As a performer, he appeared as principal dancer with Houston Ballet, Chicago Ballet, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, Milwaukee Ballet, and DANCERS. Formerly Associate Director of the Kathryn Posin Modern Dance Company, he formed his own company in New York in 1983. His choreographic commissions span all aspects of theatre and dance, from opera and musical productions to ballet and contemporary dance. A frequent guest instructor around the US, he taught on the faculties of Marymount Manhattan College, Connecticut College, Southern Methodist University, and the University of Michigan, as well as frequent summers at the American Dance Festival beginning in 1985. He was formerly ballet master for Ballet Hispanico of New York, and, for five years, company teacher for the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. Internationally, he has been a guest teacher at the Mikhailovsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia; Cloud-Gate Dance Theatre in Taipei, Taiwan; Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, Australia; and the Cullberg Ballet and Balett Akademien in Stockholm, Sweden, among other venues across Europe and Asia. Previously an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and teacher at the Juilliard School in New York, he also currently works in Communications for Brooklyn Academy Of Music and is a contributing writer for Ballet Review.

Antony Tudor is generally accepted as one of the great originators of modern dance forms - a principal transformer of ballet into a modern art. His work is usually considered as modern "psychological" expression, but of austerity, elegance, and nobility - remarkably using primarily classical forms. Mikhail Baryshnikov said, "We do Tudor's ballets because we must. Tudor's work is our conscience." Tudor began dancing professionally with Marie Rambert in 1928, becoming general assistant for her Ballet Club the next year. A precocious choreographer, at age twenty-three he created for her dancers Cross Garter'd, then Lysistrata, The Planets and other works at the little Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill Gate, and his two most revolutionary, Jardin Aux Lilas (Lilac Garden) and Dark Elegies, before the age of thirty, dancing the main roles himself. In 1938, he founded the London Ballet with Rambert members, including his future life partner, Hugh Laing, Andrée Howard, Agnes De Mille, Peggy Van Praagh, Maude Lloyd and Walter Gore. With the onset of World War II, in 1940 he was invited with them to New York, joining Richard Pleasant's and Lucia Chase's reorganized Ballet Theater. Chase's company was later to become the American Ballet Theatre, with which Tudor was closely associated for the rest of his life. He was a resident choreographer with Ballet Theater for ten years, re-staging some of his earlier works but also creating new works, his great Pillar of Fire(1942), Romeo and Juliet, Dim Lustre and Undertow, on that company by the end of the war. Retiring from dancing in 1950, he headed the faculty of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, taught at the Juilliard School recurrently from 1950 onwards, and was artistic director for the Royal Swedish Ballet from 1963-64. He choreographed three works for the New York City Ballet. Tudor continued his teaching career as Professor of Ballet Technique at the Department of Dance, University of California, Irvine from 1973 (work curtailed by a serious heart condition), while rejoining American Ballet Theatre in 1974 as associate artistic director, creating The Leaves Are Fading and Tiller In the Fields, his last major work, in 1978. With Laing, he continued seasonal residence in Laguna Beach, California. Tudor was awarded a creative arts medal by Brandeis University, the Dance Magazine and Capezio awards, New York City's Handel Medallion, and both Kennedy Center and Dance/USA National Honors.[2] Tudor was inducted into the Mr. & Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney Hall of Fame at the National Museum of Dance in 1988.

ABOUT NEW YORK THEATRE BALLET

New York Theatre Ballet (NYTB), founded in 1978 by artistic director Diana Byer, has been hailed by The New York Times as "an invaluable company." NYTB is dedicated to inspiring a love of dance in diverse audiences through performances of chamber ballet masterpieces and bold new works, as well as innovative one-hour ballets for children, all at affordable prices.

By pairing the ballets of legendary creators with those of contemporary visionaries, NYTB brings a new understanding and appreciation of dance. The approach to live performance for children is groundbreaking and unique. New York Theatre Ballet offers an annual series of hour-long ballets tailored to the attention span of young audience members, while offering high production values and clever choreography sophisticated enough for discerning parents.

NYTB is committed to reaching underserved audiences by performing in small cities throughout the U.S. Its professional school provides ballet training based on the Cecchetti syllabus. Classes are offered at affordable prices. Scholarships are awarded to talented homeless and underserved children along with support for well-rounded learning.

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