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| Harkness Dance Festival: Brian Brooks Moving Company (3.12-16.08) |
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| Tickets/Registration: 212.415.5500 |
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| Media Contact: Sarah Morton, 212.415.5435, email |
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| 92nd STREET Y HARKNESS DANCE FESTIVAL: BRIAN BROOKS MOVING COMPANY |
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| Celebrating its 10th Anniversary with Repertory Highlights |
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| And the World Premiere of HAPPY LUCKY SUN |
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Choreography: Brian Brooks
Music: John Stone and Tom Lopez
Costume Design: Roxana Ramseur
Set Design: Brian Brooks; inflatables by Anakin Koenig
Lighting: Burke Wilmore
Wednesday, March 12; Thursday, March 13, and Saturday, March 15, 8pm
Sunday, March 16, 2pm
PERFORMANCE LOCATION: Ailey® Citigroup Theater at the Joan Weill Center for Dance
(405 West 55th Street at 9th Avenue)
"Brian Brooks' choreography is a kind of external exploration of human limits."—Dance Magazine
"Faster, Pussycat! Thrill! Thrill!"—Dance Insider
The 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival and Center receives major funding from the Harkness Foundation for Dance; Jody and John Arnhold; the Mertz Gilmore Foundation; the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development; the New York City Council; the Philip and Janice Levin Foundation; public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; and Capezio/Ballet Makers Dance Foundation, Inc., among others.
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| New York, NY, February, 15, 2008—The last week of the 92ND STREET Y HARKNESS DANCE FESTIVAL features Brian Brooks Moving Company, celebrating its 10th anniversary with a selection of repertory works and a world premiere. Brian Brooks is known for his precise, demanding, athletic choreography and his exploration of color, expressed through dances that are devoted to different hues. For his performances at the Festival, Brooks has reconfigured the theater so that the colors of the dances to be performed—orange, pink, green, blue, white and black—surround the audience. The dancers use the entire space as a stage, performing highlights from Brooks's repertory in the differently colored areas of the theater. The performance culminates with the world premiere of Happy Lucky Sun, a new, yellow dance by Brooks.
Happy Lucky Sun addresses force, gravity and collision and the attempt to escape gravity's pull. Brooks says it is the most extreme piece he has created. Although it incorporates the repeated but slowly-changing movements that have become the company's trademark (the approach has been compared to Steve Reich's compositions), the dance has a different momentum, which Brooks describes as "a lot of little tornados." The dance almost looks like a choreographed football game, with dancers diving backwards as others dive down to catch them, and plucking each other out of midair. The partnering is aggressive, verging on combative, and the choreography is punctuated with forceful, angry gestures. As in other works, Brooks examines the concept of endurance, asking dancers to throw themselves heedlessly into the air, but also to repeat arduous gestures for an extended period of time with subtle changes. The dance's cheery title and sunny yellow decor are ironic amid the rigorous choreography; Brooks says the piece could have been called "Angry Sad Moon."
Brooks's use of color has become an integral part of his work. He does not set out to create a "green" or "pink" work, but instead finds that a color emerges as he creates the choreography. Brooks says that his monochromatic dances give him a chance to see the world differently. "What if everything were all red?" he asks. "You'd see shapes and shadows in different ways." Through his use of color, he invites his dancers—and his audiences—to be more alert to the power of color and aware of how it can offer fresh perspectives on their surroundings. The Festival performances feature dances of several different colors, and offer audiences a chance to consider how color has shaped each work. Among the highlights are the following repertory selections: |
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From Dance-o-Matic, the saucy, popular pink dance he premiered in 2002: a quartet for dancers clad in feather-boa and ruffled panties, as well as a solo on a mood-shattering blue square placed on the pink floor. |
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From faster! (2001), a work bathed in orange, with an orange circle on the floor recalling a circus ring: a Brooks solo in which his body leans, turns and shifts at odd angles. |
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From 2004's Acre, with its green horizontal panels: a duet built around two people running, later joined by two more to form a quartet in which the partners use suspended lifts to extend the running motions. |
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From Piñata (2005), a black-and-white dance: the opening white piece, in which dancers lying on the floor pop up abruptly in response to the music, and the "Ten Hands" section, in black, in which spot-lit hands do all the dancing. |
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And from 2006's again again, which has no dominant color and which Brooks came to see as a dance about the absence of color ("I thought I wasn't doing color anymore, but I couldn't escape it."): the gravity-defying section in which dancers run up the wall and jump off it, occasionally supporting each other as they move sideways across the wall; and the powerful section in which one dancer moves across the stage by stepping onto Brook's outstretched body, without ever touching the floor. |
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| ABOUT THE COMPANY |
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| The Brian Brooks Moving Company had its first season in 1997-1998 at the Merce Cunningham Studio. That first performance featured a film of Brooks dancing at various public locations around New York City during the course of one day. The Lower Manhattan Council funded the company's next "Performance Marathon," in which the company danced across the Brooklyn Bridge, at Grand Central Station and through the aisles of a deli. Since then, the company has performed internationally in Canada and South Korea and across the U.S, including Jacob's Pillow. In New York, the company has had two commissions from DTW and has performed at Symphony Space, The Egg, and Central Park Summerstage. For more information about the company, visit www.brianbrooksmovingcompany.com.
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| ABOUT BRIAN BROOKS |
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| Brian Brooks formed his first dance company, without any dance training, in his hometown of Hingham, Massachusetts when he was 14. At 17, he won a scholarship to study in Boston, and at 20 he auditioned on a whim for Nicholas Rodriguez's dance company in New York. He was accepted on a Friday and moved to the city three days later. In New York, he danced with Sean Curran, Eun-Me Ahn, Carolyn Dorfman and, for three years, with Elizabeth Streb, known for her extreme, acrobatic choreography. He was already running his own company, when he also became co-founder and (for a time) managing director of the Williamsburg Art neXus (WAX), an arts facility in Brooklyn. He has been a guest artist at the University of Maryland and Illinois State University and is a Teaching Artist of Dance at the Lincoln Center Institute. |
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| ABOUT THE 92nd STREET Y HARKNESS DANCE CENTER |
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Renata Celichowska, Director
In 1935, what is now the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center provided a
home to the fledgling modern dance movement and its leader, Martha Graham.
Among the great artists who have created, performed and taught at the Y are
Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham, Jerome Robbins, Agnes de Mille, Erick
Hawkins, Robert Joffrey, Pearl Lang, and Donald McKayle, building the
foundation for contemporary dance as we know it. In recent years, they have
been joined by today's dance stars, like David Parsons, Zvi Gotheiner,
Keely Garfield, Neil Greenberg, Bill T. Young, Maia Claire Garrison, David
Dorfman and Sean Curran. With the generous support of the Harkness
Foundation for Dance, the Center continues to nurture the teaching,
creation and performance of modern dance, serving adults, children and
dance professionals through classes, professional development programs like
the 92nd Street Y Dance Education Laboratory and performance programs like
the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival, the Y's annual showcase for
contemporary dance. The 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center is part of the
Y's arts-education division, the 92nd Street Y School of the Arts. For more
information, please visit www.92Y.org/dance. |
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| ABOUT THE 92nd STREET Y SCHOOL OF THE ARTS |
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Robert Gilson, Director
The 92nd Street Y's arts-education division, the 92nd Street Y School of the Arts, comprises the Harkness Dance Center (estab. 1935), the School of Music (estab. 1917) and the Art Center (estab. 1930). Together they offer instruction to adults, teenagers and children of all ages and interests, as well as master classes and, in the case of dance, performance opportunities and professional performances. The School of the Arts's Educational Outreach initiative provides in-school dance, music and art education to 7,000 economically disadvantaged New York City elementary-school children. The Y's Scholarship Program enables all New Yorkers to enjoy the School of the Arts's programs regardless of income level. For more information, please visit www.92Y.org/arts. |
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| ABOUT THE 92nd STREET Y |
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Sol Adler, Executive Director
Founded in 1874 by a group of visionary Jewish leaders, the 92nd Street Y has grown into a wide-ranging cultural, educational and community center serving people of all ages, races, faiths and backgrounds. The 92nd Street Y's mission is to enrich the lives of the over 300,000 people who visit in person each year as well as those who visit virtually, through the Y's satellite, television, radio and Internet broadcasts. The organization offers comprehensive performing arts, film and spoken word events; courses in the humanities, the arts, personal development and Jewish culture; activities and workshops for children, teenagers and parents; and health and fitness programs for people of every age. Committed to making its programs available to everyone, the 92nd Street Y awards nearly $1 million in scholarships annually and reaches out to 7,000 public school children through subsidized arts education programs. For more information, please visit www.92Y.org. |
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© 2008 92nd Street Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association
All Rights Reserved. |
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