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| Dance: Sundays @ Three presents Rebecca Lazier and Terrain (10.14.07) |
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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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AN INFORMAL AFTERNOON WITH REBECCA LAZIER AND TERRAIN |
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| Serenade and Terminal, a work-in-progress |
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Presented by 92nd STREET Y HARKNESS DANCE CENTER
Sunday, October 14 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, September, 21, 2007—The 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center kicks off its 2007-2008 Sundays @ Three season with an afternoon of work by Rebecca Lazier and her company Terrain. The company will perform Serenade, set to Tchaikovsky's Serenade in C, and Terminal, a work-in-progress. Both works were created by Lazier in collaboration with the dancers. Following the performance, there will be a Q&A session with the artists. |
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| THE PROGRAM |
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Rebecca Lazier's Serenade is a riff on one of the most famous ballets of the 20th century, George Balanchine's Serenade. Lazier upends the expectations created by that dance, altering the relationship between audience and performer. Five dancers twist, leap and fall, exploring group dynamics and individual connections as they prepare for a "Performance." In the first section, the dancers are in rehearsal clothes; in the second they are backstage; in the third they meet in a park; and in the fourth they go "On Stage." While Tchaikovsky's music is familiar, sound designer Gregory Spears uses unusual sources to play it, including an old record player and two tape decks playing out of sync with each other.
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Terminal reflects both the idea of a physical place where one waits to move ahead or change, and the end of something — whether a train line or a life. The contrast between waiting and moving informs the choreography as four dancers in everyday clothes alternate between moments of stillness and explosive, quirky movement. Lazier explains, "We generated the material by attempting to do four different things with our body simultaneously. Sometimes we assigned a movement to each limb and then learned to perform the actions together. Sometimes we worked on phrases where one half of the body was in consonance with the other half, juxtaposed against phrases where one body part was set in dissonance against the other part." The score by Gregory Spears uses small tape decks placed around the performing space; as the piece develops, sound increasingly envelops the dancers and audience.
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| REBECCA LAZIER and TERRAIN |
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Choreography and teaching are the main strands of Rebecca Lazier's career. A Nova Scotia native, she studied at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and Juilliard. She performed for eight years with Laura Glenn and for three with Pedro Alejandro. While teaching dance in Connecticut, she began choreographing, and was awarded commissions by Trinity College, the Hartford Conservatory and the Westport Arts Center. She has taught at UCLA, Muhlenberg College, and Wesleyan University and was the first foreign artist-in-residence at Turkey's Mimar Sinan Conservatory. She is now the Associate Director of the Dance Program at Princeton University. Lazier's work has been seen at the World Special Olympics, in Los Angeles and San Diego, at the White Mountain Summer Dance Festival (where Lazier is the Festival Director) and at the Diaghilev Museum in Perm, Russia. She has collaborated with composers Shane Shanahan, Becet Mehmet Ates, Jody Elff, Fred Ho, Michael Wall, Daniel Trueman and Paul Lansky and with theater directors Bartlett Sher and Ron Bashford. She recently completed artistic residencies with both the Joyce Theater Foundation and Movement Research.
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In 1999, Lazier formed Terrain, a dance company dedicated to creating theatrical and site-specific dance while cultivating audiences through collaborations and educational programs. The company has performed in Canada, Boston, Chicago, Virginia, New Orleans, Princeton, Provincetown and The Yard in Martha's Vineyard, as well as at numerous venues in New York, including Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church, the Guggenheim Museum, Joyce SoHo, Movement Research at the Judson Church and Brooklyn Arts Exchange.
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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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