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| Dance: Sundays @ Three Veterans Day Dances (11.11.07) |
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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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| VETERANS DAY DANCES |
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| Dances by NAOMI GOLDBERG HAAS, RICARDO GOMEZ, HEIDI LATSKY and DEGANIT SHEMY |
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Presented by 92nd STREET Y HARKNESS DANCE CENTER
Sunday, November 11 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, 1, 2007—The 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center marks Veterans Day on Sunday, November 11 at 3:00 p.m. with a group of dance works that consider the varied meanings of "veteran": soldier, seasoned performer, experienced older person. Participating are four contemporary choreographers, NAOMI GOLDBERG HAAS, RICARDO GOMEZ, HEIDI LATSKY and DEGANIT SHEMY. |
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The choreographers were selected by Renata Celichowska, Director of the Harkness Dance Center, who invited a range of contemporary choreographers to present work in honor of Veterans Day. From more than fifteen responses, Celichowska selected these four artists, based on the quality of their work and the way their dances illustrate different notions of "veteran" — veteran performers, older people, veterans (or survivors) of traumatic disease, military veterans. "The result," says Celichowska, "is a wonderful tribute to the concept of veterans from all walks of life."
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| THE PROGRAM |
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Naomi Goldberg Haas frequently works with senior adults, whom she sees as "veterans of life," and three of them — Sandy Broyard, Kathy Joyce Costanza and Sally Cohn — join Goldberg Haas to perform excerpts from her work From the Blue Notebooks (set to Max Richter's music of the same name). The work was first presented this past summer in Martha's Vineyard. In one dance, two women sit in two red chairs, but then try to switch seats without ever losing contact with their original chairs. Forced to bridge the gap between them and connect to the chairs and each other in unexpected ways, the two dancers "trace the trajectory from solitude to solidarity," Goldberg-Haas explains. In the second section, an older woman and a younger one walk and dance together, strolling alone and together through memories, space and time.
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Ricardo Gomez reflects on the veterans of South America's political struggles in the second half of the 20th century in his work Voces ("voices"). The piece is about Latin America's "desaparecidos" or "disappeared"—those who were kidnapped, tortured or killed during military dictatorships and civil war, and uses dramatic, fluid movement to convey the pain of the victims and their families. Voces is set to original music by David Sher and incorporates a video by Luna Hirai.
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Heidi Latsky has long worked with disabled dancers — veterans of dealing with disability and altered movement patterns. She presents a work-in-progress, Two Men Walking, a duet inspired by one of its performers, guest artist Lawrence Carter-Long, who has cerebral palsy. His labored walk is the root of the dance's movement, which also includes fluid gestures and partnering between Carter-Long and Jeffrey Freeze, a principal dancer for Heidi Latsky Dance. Latsky describes the duet, set to music by Sxip Shirey, as "an exploration of being watched," giving the audience, who usually stare or look away when confronted with a disabled person, a chance to really see him. Latsky continues, "The dance is also about the relationship of these two men to their bodies and to each other's, and how they feel being watched." This is Carter-Long's first dance work; in his day job, he is the Director of Advocacy, Disabilities Network of New York City. A veteran of raising awareness about the experience of disabled people, he was the United Way's poster child when he was five years old.
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Deganit Shemy, a veteran of the Israeli army, drew on her own experiences as a soldier to create Iodine, a dance for five women. Shemy spent four months in an intensive army medical course, training only with women, and before that lived with a small women's group on a kibbutz. "The kibbutz was like a training camp," Shemy explains, "with uniforms, defined roles, tension and fights." In Iodine, with original music by Alon Nechustan, five women are fighting their inner selves and their fear as they stand together in a line above a pit, holding themselves while looking into it. "I'm looking at female vulnerability and the push-and-pull of alienation and connection within a group," Shemy says.
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| THE CHOREOGRAPHERS |
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Naomi Goldberg Haas has worked in concert dance, theater, opera and film. She has collaborated on works presented by the American Dance Asylum; The Yard in Chilmark, MA; the Ying Quartet at Symphony Space, NY; Tony Kushner's adaptation of A Dybbuk, and Mel Shapiro's Taming of the Shrew, NYSF/The Public, among others. From 1989 to 2004, Ms. Goldberg Haas was the founding artistic director of Los Angeles Modern Dance & Ballet, for whom she created the nationally-touring KlezMania with The Klezmatics; she has also danced with Pacific Northwest Ballet. Based in lower Manhattan, Naomi Goldberg Haas/Dances For A Variable Population emerged from a series of investigations of movement with older adult communities and professional dancers. The company has been critically and popularly received performing in venues including The Public, the Joyce SoHo, the Jewish Museum, Movement Research at Dance Theater Workshop, Judson Church, the Flea Theatre, and in Washington DC at the Kennedy Center. She currently teaches at New York University, University Settlement, 440 Studios and the Harkness Dance Center at the 92nd Street Y.
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Originally from Colombia, Ricardo Gomez came to New York on a scholarship to study in the professional training program at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance. He performed with the Graham company from 1993-1996, and worked with Pearl Lang, Marijeanne Liederbach, Mary Street Dance Theater and Deuxalamori Ballet Company. He founded Gomez Dance Theater in 1996, and his company and choreography have appeared at New Generation for Dance in Purchase, New York; New Choreographers on Pointe; Joyce SoHo, Riverside Church Theater and in South America and Europe.
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Heidi Latsky started her first dance company, Footlite Dance Theater, in Montreal in 1982. She came to New York in 1983 and danced with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance. She formed Heidi Latsky Dance in 2001, and the company has performed her work at DTW, Movement Research at Judson Church, BAM and Symphony Space, as well as in Boston, Pittsburgh, Switzerland, France and Canada. She has been commissioned to create new work by the American Dance Festival, the Joyce Theater, Alvin Ailey Dance Center and by Gus Solomons Jr., Maxine Sherman, Janet Lilly and others. She has also developed her own teaching method, which she has shared in teaching residencies at Skidmore College, the University of Wisconsin, Connecticut College, Bryn Mawr, Rutgers and Purdue.
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Deganit Shemy studied art, movement and dance in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and started choreographing in 2002. She won the Choreographer Award from the American-Israeli Cultural Foundation in 2003 and the Young Choreographer Award from the Israeli Ministry of Education in 2004. She came to New York in 2005 and was an artist-in-residence at Dance New Amsterdam and Movement Research. Shemy has presented her work at Dixon Place, Dance New Amsterdam, DTW, Joyce SoHo, and the Tribeca Performing Arts Center.
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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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