Hope to See You at the 2012 Arts Presenters Showcase

Four of H-Art Artists will perform during the 2012 Arts Presenters Conference in New York which has been titled We are They — Owning the Road Ahead.  To make a reservation, please email us at reservations@h-artmanagement.com or call 212.868.2134.  During the conference, please come by booth# 99 in the EXPO Hall, we look forward to seeing you in New York soon!



Stephen Petronio Company- UNDERLAND. Photo by Sarah Silver

STEPHEN PETRONIO COMPANY
Stephen Petronio Company presents excerpts from UNDERLAND (NY Premiere, 2011) —an evening-length work inspired by the music of Nick Cave and awarded a 2010 American Masterpieces grant—and highlights from a new work, The Architecture of Loss, an international collaboration with music by influential Icelandic composer Valgeir Sigurðsson along with the contributing talent of composer Nico Muhly, costumes by Guðrun & Guðrun (Faroe Islands), and lighting design by Ken Tabachnick to premiere in NYC at The Joyce Theater in March 2012.

Sunday, January 8, 2:30 PM
City Center, Studio 4
130 W 56th Street (between 6th & 7th Avenues)
30 minutes
Subway: N/Q/R to 57th St / 7th Ave, F to 57th St / 6th Ave, D/E to 7th Ave / 53rd St
Bus: M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, M6, M7, M10, M20, M31, M57, M104
reservations@h-artmanagement.com


Shen Wei Dance Arts- Limited States. Photo by Rick McCullough

SHEN WEI DANCE ARTS
Limited States is Shen Wei's newest marriage of film and choreography.  Dancers blend seamlessly with video, shadow, paint and lighting.  The distraction of technology is his new focus and he attacks it, but beautifully.  It's an "alternate world" where attention is dissipated and we surrender impulse control— We question our acceptance of it.  The choreographer of the 2008 Beijing Olympics has taken our breath away again.

Monday, January 9, 4:00 PM
City Center, Studio 4
130 W 56th Street (between 6th & 7th Avenues)
60 minutes
Subway: N/Q/R to 57th St / 7th Ave, F to 57th St / 6th Ave, D/E to 7th Ave / 53rd St
Bus: M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, M6, M7, M10, M20, M31, M57, M104
reservations@h-artmanagement.com


David Dorfman Dance- Prophets of Funk. Photo by Kate Enman

DAVID DORFMAN DANCE
David Dorfman Dance's newest evening length work Come, and Back Again finds its heart and spirit with the music and artistry of Patti Smith.  Charged by Patti Smith's electric poetry and song, Come, and Back Again is a movement meditation on loss, death, and spirituality, excavating the sedimented changes in class and power dynamics in American culture from the 1970s to the present.

Saturday, January 7, 11:30 AM
City Center, Studio 4
130 W 56th Street (between 6th & 7th Avenues)
30 minutes
Subway: N/Q/R to 57th St / 7th Ave, F to 57th St / 6th Ave, D/E to 7th Ave / 53rd St
Bus: M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, M6, M7, M10, M20, M31, M57, M104
reservations@h-artmanagement.com


RUBBERBANDance Group- Gravity of Center.  Photo by Jocelyn Michel

RUBBERBANDANCE GROUP
Born of a collection of images, notes and questions that have been gestating for several months, Gravity of Center brings back all of RUBBERBANDance Group’s (RBDG) enthusiasm and intensity to the stage.  Victor Quijada’s pursuit of movement – acceleration, exaggeration, syncopated rhythms and physical prowess – is the central theme of this ninth production.

Saturday, January 7, 3:15 PM & 9:00 PM
Gerald W. Lynch Theater, John Jay College
899 Tenth Avenue (btwn 58th & 59th Streets)
25 minutes
Subway: 1/A/C/B/D to 59th St / Columbus Circle
Bus: M5, M7, M10, M11, M104
reservations@h-artmanagement.com

As part of the Dance/USA Agents Council, we would love to invite you to FOCUS DANCE, taking place all over the city from January 3-10.  Access to DANCE MEET Studio 5 will be monitored, so it would be great if you could register.  For more information please click here, see you soon in New York!

Lucy Guerin Inc. Presents at ISPA Pitch Session

We are delighted to announce that Lucy Guerin Inc. has been selected to participate in the Pitch New Works Now session for the International Society for the Performing Art’s 64th Annual Congress – Art in Action! Community, Crisis & Change.

The company will present Weather, a new full evening length dance work currently in its first development stage which begins at Place des Artes in Montreal.  The subject of weather which is fundamental to human kind, will be explored through a physical and visual integration of dance and design.  Weather is the perennial conversation opener, but also the outward sign that we are irreversibly changing the planet. 

Choreographer Lucy Guerin will work with designer Robert Cousins (Cloud Street, War of the Roses) to create an atmospheric environment on stage which will affect the dancers and their interactions with each other.

The pitch session will take place on Wednesday, January 11th, 2011 at 10:00 am EDT at the Times Center in New York.  You can also see it live at ISPA's online Arts Exchange.  Execute Producer Michaela Coventry will be in New York from January 5-15, 2012, please feel free to contact us by email or give us a call at 212.868.2134 if you would like to have a meeting with her.

Shen Wei Dance Performs at Park Avenue Armory

To mark the 10th season of his modern dance company, Chinese choreographer Shen Wei is staging an intimate performance in the Wade Thompson Drill Hill at the Park Avenue Armory.  The show celebrates the end of Wei's artist-in-residence at the Park Avenue Armory.  Shen Wei will present a new work Divided Undivided as well as re-stage Rite of Spring, set to Igor Stravinsky and Folding, set to John Tavener and traditional Tibetan Buddist chants.

Divided Undivided brings the audience into the performance, making them experience the choreography, sound, energy and feelings of the dancers.  Experience connecting with the dancers in this intimate space:  Nov. 29 - Dec. 4, 2011

Tickets $35.  To purchase tickets or for more information visit Park Avenue Armory

Welcome Animal Farm Collective to Our Roster!

H-Art Management welcomes to its roster Animal Farm Collective, the striking new German/Australian dance theater troupe led by Gavin Webber and Grayson Millwood.  In their newest creation, Food Chain, bears change places with humans in an exploration of animality, sex, voyeurism, performance and power.

Gavin Webber and Grayson Millwood have worked fifteen years between Australia and Europe, in companies including Australian Dance Theatte and Ultima Vez & Sasha Waltz & Guests.  Their trademarks are a gutsy physicality, arresting choreography, surreal imagely and a wicked sense of humor. 

Set in a forest, Food Chain turns the notion of a "superior species" on its head.  Instead of humans studying animals, the beasts are studying us.  Bears lure humans into ambushes using baits such as food, the sexual smell of a woman's body and a tape recording of a baby crying. They first seem to  want the humans for food; having killed nearly all of them, they turn to studying their sexual behavior. The line between 'animal' and 'human' increasingly blurs. A woman couples with a bear head and becomes half-human half-bear; a man turns into a lion and a pack of people turn into gazelles. Instinct rather than intellect directs actions, and the humans turn on each other, tearing in each other's flesh with their teeth.  The bears seem immune to the pain of their prey and there are obvious parallels between the animal food chain and the social one.

The work premiered at the Sydney Festival (Australia) in January and was presented in Heidelberg, Germany and St. Pölten, Austria in the spring of 2011.  It has been supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council and Arts Queensland; also by the Tanja Liedtke Foundation and the Goethe Institut.  It was originally produced by pvc Tanz Freiburg (Heidelberg) and Performing Lines (Australia).   

Grayson Millwood and Gavin Webber have collaborated since their days at Australian Dance Theatre in the early nineties.  Although they moved to Europe to work for different companies, they managed to find time to pursue projects together. They started with silly short films but later got together with other Australian artists to create Lawn and Roadkill with Splintergroup. The group showcased these two pieces in Germany, Britain, Canada and Singapore. In its Australian tours, Lawn and Roadkill won six Green Room Awards in 2010.

The dancers are Millwood, Webber, Kate Harman, Joshua Thompson and Gabrielle Nankivell.  Lighting design is by Mark Howett; Sound design is by Luke Smiles.

Garth Fagan Dance at The Joyce Theater

Garth Fagan Dance will be performing at The Joyce Theater October 4-9, 2011.  Bessie and Tony Award winning choreographer Garth Fagan, will premiere Madiba, a new work which was inspired by the life of anti-apartheid activist and former South African President Nelson Mandela.  Norwood Pennewell (long time dancer, muse, and rehearsal director) will debut his second choreographed work, Liminal Flux, set to music by Miles Davis, Chancha Via Circuito, and Sly & Robbie.  Liminal Flux plays with perspective and patterning to express the interior journey that people experience.  The season will be further highlighted by the return of Garth Fagan's revivals, Until, By, & If and In Memoriam. 

Fagan’s…episodic structure, ever-surprising musical responsiveness and delicate blend of individuality and impersonality…leaves you intuiting an entire, mysterious new world. - Roslyn Sulcas, New York Times

Program A:  Prelude, Talking Drums (excerpt from Senku), Liminal Flux**, Madiba*, Thanks Forty 
Program B:  Until, By, & If, In Memoriam, Madiba*, Liminal Flux**, Translation Transition 
Program C:  Prelude, In Memoriam, Liminal Flux**, Hylozoic, Madiba*, One Love (excerpt from Translation Transition)

Click here for more information

NDP Support For Shen Wei's Limited States

Limited States, the newest work by Shen Wei, choreographer of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, is a marriage of film and choreography. Dancers blend seamlessly with video, shadow, paint and lighting.  The distraction of technology is Shen Wei's new focus and he attacks it, beautifully.  There is tour support for presenters of Limited States in the 2012-13 season, thanks to the National Dance Project of New England Foundation for the Arts. 

The work premiered at American Dance Festival in July and was labeled a remarkable blending of film, shadow, paint and lighting.  Denise Cerniglia declared in Triangle Arts & Entertainment, Attention to detail and creative genius put this dance in a category of its own and described the dancers as moving like Rodin sculptures that have come to life.  Critics had particular praise for soloist Sara Procopio, who painted herself with paints from hidden receptacles, evoking notions of savage rites.  (Roy C. Dicks, News-Observer).

From September 1-3, Shen Wei Dance Arts performed Re- (I,II,III)/ Triptych in the Edinburgh Festival at Edinburgh Playhouse.  The work is a trilogy that reflects on Tibet, Cambodia and the future of China in three separate "acts" that debuted individually in 2006, 2007 and 2009.  The "Re-" in the title refers to the notion of return, reconsideration and renewal.  The evening was regarded as a stunning depiction of the chaotic change in East Asia, breathtaking in style, with fluid, fascinating choreography.

On June 6 and 13, Shen Wei Dance Arts made history in the Metropolitan Museum of Art when it delivered the first performance ever directly inspired by, and conceived for, a particular gallery there.  The Charles Engelhard Court is a grand, light-filled, windowed pavilion that provides an entrance to the American Wing.  Its marble and bronze figurative works by American sculptures framed an evening named Still Moving, a dance about time, space and energy.  Its first half was a slow, dreamy exploration of the beauty of the human form.  Its second half used electronic music, speculating on our peculiar moment in digital time and how we feel human connections in our bodies.

From November 29 to December 3, the company will perform a three-part concert to close its year-long creative exploration at Manhattan's Park Avenue Armory.  The evening will culminate in a newly commissioned work which will take over the entire Drill Hall and reveal new directions for the troupe.  Shen Wei will also revisit two of his most celebrated works: Rite of Spring (2003), a study of deliberate versus reflexive movement set to intricate music by Stravinsky, and Folding (2000), which combines  stylized movement with ethereal melodies by John Tavener and traditional Tibetan Buddhist chants.

A Gossamer View of Loss, from Ether Sketches

Stephen Petronio has produced an impressive body of work integrating new music, visual art and high fashion, most of it Gotham in its soul.  His newest work, Architecture of Loss, reaches out for inspiration all the way to the Faroe Islands, that Danish territory between Scotland and Iceland where the cultural inspiration is Nordic and lace knitting is a traditional handicraft.  The open and webby designs of fashion designers Guðrun & Guðrun, using locally-made Faroese fabrics, will help create a visual motif for a dance that captures the experience of loss.

The title of this piece has been "in his life" for a long time; in the 90's he began to refer to it as the heartbeat of his work. 

But what's its shape?  It defies conventional expectations. People who know Stephen Petronio Company will attest:  there are few occurrences of stillness or spaces in his dances.  As things appear, they disappear.  That, Petronio maintains, is what's peculiar and special about dance.  He focuses on emotional and architectural elements that develop, form, then slip away.

To physicalize loss is an interesting and challenging task.  Petronio draws on figurative sources, but does not use them literally.  In a recent trip to Mexico, he was struck by Mayan pottery and architectural figures.  His fascination was not purely the shapes themselves, but the fact that they were evocative of a state of mind. 

From that was born (or codified) a process named "Ether Sketches," which is now a central creative technique for Petronio.  An evolving concept , it applies as much to contemporary urban life as it does to remnants of classical civilizations.  The principle is that you can take the consciousness of a source and draw with it in space, reconstituting it in a dancer's body.  The magic is that the source figure is lost. 

Back to the designs of  Guðrun & Guðrun:  Petronio says, There is something Gothic and sad about the web of their fabrics.  The gossamer feeling of their web weavings suggests the fragile feeling he envisions, and will be an important addition to the piece.  So will the music of Valgeir Sigurðsson, one of Iceland's most prolific mixer/composers and founder of the Bedroom Community record label.  His score, with additions by Petronio's long-time collaborator Nico Muhly, will be of an electronic mixed genre, ranging from fabricated electronics to beautiful live acoustic strings.  The image, says Petronio, will be of a thick, industrial surface with beautiful acoustic moments bursting through it.

Six men and five women dancers will perform, with no other set picture than the live musicians onstage as a living piece of decor.

The piece will tour to Oslo, Reykjavik and the Faroe Islands.  But the debut will be at the Joyce Theater March 6-11, 2012.  In that engagement, it will be paired with Petronio's "City of Twist" (2002), a collaboration with artist/composer Laurie Anderson and fashion provocateur Tara Subkoff.

City of Twist addresses loss differently.  It's a series of archetypal urban portraits of resilient New Yorkers and a love letter to them in the aftermath of 9/11.  It's a choreography of aggression and vulnerability, celebrating New York's highly-strung, shifting course of life, with shock in its nerves and expansive humanity in its heart.  The work was begun before the attacks of 9/11 but was, inevitably, influenced by them.

…they fall into embraces, assist one another, make gestures that hint at emotions. But always they dance, as if their lives depended on it, as if even while connections sever and structures spin apart, this world’s fragments carry the DNA of wholeness." - Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice

Petronio's Underland goes to Reno

On July 30, 2011 at Artown, Reno, Stephen Petronio Company will perform Underland, a work that was originally created for the Sydney Dance Company in 2002.  Underland presents a dark and brooding world inspired by the tender, bitter-sweet songs of pop balladeer Nick Cave, with dancers hurling through space with razor sharp precision; fiercely energized one moment, sensually lyrical the next.

In November, the company will bring Underland to the west,  embarking from Alverno College, Milwaukee, WI, to UC Santa Barbara, UC Riverside, CA, and Scottsdale Center for the Arts, AZ.

For more information about the performance in Artown, Reno:
http://www.renoisartown.com/calendar/featured-events/stephen-petronios-underland/