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| Dance: Sundays @ Three presents Cherniak in Full Circle (12.9.07) |
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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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| SUNDAYS @ THREE . . . DANCE PREVIEWS |
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CHERNIAK DANCE in FULL CIRCLE |
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| Five works by Susan Cherniak, including a world premiere |
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| Live music by the Cassatt String Quartet with violin solo by Curtis Macomber, percussionists Matt Ward and Jared Soldivere, and mezzo-soprano Nicole Cherniak Hyde |
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Presented by 92nd STREET Y HARKNESS DANCE CENTER
Sunday, December 9 at 3:00 PM
Tickets at $10; advanced purchase recommended.
The 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center receives major support from the
Harkness Foundation for Dance and additional major support from the Arnhold Foundation.
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| New York, NY, November, 21, 2007—The 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center's Sundays @ Three program presents Full Circle, an afternoon of works by Susan Cherniak's company, Cherniak Dance. One of several performance programs regularly presented by the Dance Center, Sundays @ Three offers performances of new or reconstructed works followed by a Q&A with the choreographer. |
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The five works on the program date from 1992 to the present. Together they trace Cherniak's evolution as a choreographer, her feelings about dance, and the family connections that wind through much of her work.
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The first work is the world premiere of an as yet untitled solo exploring what it was like for a budding dancer to grow up in a household of singers. Cherniak herself performs to a 1950s recording of her parents singing light operatic songs and a 1968 recording of her mother singing a solo from Brahms's Requiem.
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Cherniak continues to illustrate her feelings about dance in the next piece, the solo Weighted Light. Here she creates a sense of the mystery and wonder of movement by having Mia Howard dance and play with an illuminated Styrofoam ball. While the ball can mean different things to different people, Cherniak sees it as a symbol of the desire to dance. Set to a recording of Gilles Colliard's String Quartet #1, Weighted Light was created in 1992 and reworked in 2005.
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Husband and wife Randy and Mia Howard commissioned the duet Ardor in 2005. The piece conveys the sheer physical pleasure of moving through space and the joy of dancing with one's soul mate. Ardor is set to Arvo Pärt's Fratres, performed live by the Cassatt String Quartet with a violin solo by Curtis Macomber.
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In Temporal Circles (2006), Cherniak suggests dance's capacity to connect human beings. Kristina Horn, Jennifer Smith Lee and Rod Rufo create individual patterns and circles that gradually intersect and change as the dancers react to each other. The music, by New York Philharmonic percussionist Joseph Pereira, is performed by fellow percussionists Matt Ward and Jared Soldivere.
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The program begins with the voices of Cherniak's parents and concludes, in Wunderhorn Tanz (2000), with her daughter's. Mezzo-soprano Nicole Cherniak Hyde accompanies a group of dances set to Mahler's song cycle Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Rather than being a literal illustration of the song lyrics, Cherniak's choreography is a response to the images and thoughts suggested by these tales of love, hunger, death, the ocean and, aptly enough, a vocal competition, The dancers are Kristina Horn, Jennifer Smith Lee, Rod Rufo, Corinne Sarian and Laura Ziv.
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| SUSAN CHERNIAK |
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Susan Cherniak has been choreographing and performing for over 40 years. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, she came to New York in 1967. Since then she has spent the majority of her time training, teaching, and performing in the Erick Hawkins technique, although her own choreography has taken on a style very different from Hawkins'. In addition to performing her own works, she has performed with other choreographers, including the Nancy Meehan Dance Company in the early 1970's and again from 1993 to 1998. Her company, Cherniak Dance, has performed in venues throughout New York and New Jersey, including the 92nd Street Y, Bergen Dancenter, the Evolving Arts Theater, the Mulberry Street Theater, Free Range Arts, the Cunningham Studio, Joyce SoHo, New York City Technical College, Bergen Community College, Ramapo College, Spoke the Hub, and Rider College. Ms. Cherniak teaches at the Nyack Dance Center and the 92nd Street Y. In August 2007, she received an Associate Degree in Massage Therapy from the Swedish Institute of Health Sciences.
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| ABOUT THE 92nd STREET Y HARKNESS DANCE CENTER |
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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, dance professionals and the community at large through classes and performance programs including The 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival, the Y's annual contemporary dance festival.
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| ABOUT THE 92nd STREET Y |
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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 each year — both in person and 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 8,000 public school children through fully-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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