Raissa Simpson’s Push Dance Company performs at Joyce SoHo this weekend. Read on to learn a bit more about this artist and her work.

What is your dance background?
My dance background has a lot of classical training and influences from dancing in San Francisco and New York.

I graduated from State University of New York, Purchase (SUNY) in 2001. I left New York just 10-days before Sept. 11th. Since then I have returned as a performer and now for the first time I am presenting my own dance company.

My professional dance career started with Robert Moses Kin a modern dance company in San Francisco. Later, I began dancing for choreographer Joanna Haigood who works with arial dance, harness work and on-site public dance performances.

How did you come across a hip-hop opera? And, what interest you about it?
Working with the score for “The Black Swordsman Saga” (based off the music of JooWan Kim’s Great Integration: A Chamber Hip-Hop Opera”) was an opportunity to make a dance adaptation to an opera from the lyrics of MC Kirby Dominant.

I came up with my adaptation by creating characters that were more pronounced in today’s hip hop generation. They go through a lot of inner turmoil because they are demigods who are becoming aware of their own immortality. But, more importantly, I really wanted the audience to connect to different types of personas on stage.

For me, there was a great deal of intrigue leading into choreographing the hour long work. It was the first time that I worked with a voice coach and Ariel Dance. Due to the varying limitations of touring the work, the audience in New York will see a media video portion of the Ariel flying.

Any major sources of inspiration for your work?
I am inspired by art that blurs the boundaries of genres. Because I come from a very multiracial/ multicultural background, blending one thing from the other for me- comes quite easily. Collaborating comes natural to me so, I like to give my Collaborators a lot of room to explore what is interesting to them. In return, we all work in parallel towards the same goal.

Push Dance Company on YouTube

“Paul-Andre Fortier has been traveling the world for the past two years with Solo 30×30, giving free, site-specific performances rain or shine, exposed to the vagaries of the weather and the gaze of passersby – their indifference or their curiosity, their admiration, mockery or desire. At outdoor locations he temporarily marked, with gestures repeated like a ritual, urban territories that are part of the unnoticed banality of everyday life. These places in transit, these thoroughfares and down-at-the-heels city sites, included bridges, public squares, vacant lots and overpasses for which he ascribed new functions. Oddly enough, the strangeness of the proposal bred a familiarity. Every day at the same hour, “a man who dances” would return to resume his odd but regular task, a combination of work and prayer performed by a dancing itinerant of no fixed address.”
– Michèle Fevbre (Associate Professor of the dance department at UQAM)

Now through mid-August, Paul-André will be performing this minimalist work in front of One New York Plaza everyday from 12-12:30pm. Listen in as Paul-André talks with Joyce Theater Program Associate, Laura Diffenderfer about his experiecnes performing this solo in cities throughout the world.

These are free showings. Please join us!

The second week of Pilobolus’s 23rd summer season at The Joyce begins with the premiere of the company’s collaboration with Grammy Award-winning family music man Dan Zanes. Listen in on this great interview with Renee Jaworski and Matt Kent conducted by our friends at American Dance Festival.

Decadancetheatre opens at Joyce SoHo tomorrow evening (Jul 15), and if I wasn’t excited enough by the all-female Brooklyn-based hip-hop troupe with live DJs, it came to my attention that Artistic Director Jennifer Weber has teamed up with multimedia artist Holly Daggers on integrating 3-D video into all of their performances. I sat down with Ms. Daggers yesterday to talk about this exciting collaboration in the Joyce SoHo conference room.

As the audience walks into Joyce SoHo this weekend, they will be handed 3D glasses to wear at their discretion throughout the show. Throughout the performance, video will be projected on the back wall that is enhanced by wearing the glasses, though they’re not necessary. The 3-D technology being utilized in the video for this performance is different from what you see in an IMAX movie theater – while it operates on the same principle that red images jump forward and blue images jump back, you still will see sharp, colorful graphics even when you take your glasses off.

This is the first collaboration between Ms. Weber and Ms. Daggers, who were introduced through a mutual friend. Jennifer Weber used to work with turning classic narrative works into hip-hop works – for example, she has adapted Firebird and different works by Shakespeare. For this concert, she’s stepping away from narrative and moving into the thematic, presenting an evening entitled When the Sky Breaks. Ms. Daggers has enjoyed the challenge of updating the distinct imagery of hip-hop to be utilized in this evening of hip-hop concert dance. The results are sure to be thrilling.

See Decadancetheatre on Vimeo

Renowned for its imaginative and ingeniously intricate and athletic exploration of creative collaboration, Pilobolus will present three programs during its upcoming season at The Joyce. In Program 1, Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic artist Art Spiegelman collaborates with Pilobolus artistic director Michael Tracy and dancers to make Hapless Hooligan in ‘Still Moving’ – a noirish love story told in the style of early comics. Featuring Pilobolus dancers interacting live with Spiegelman’s drawings (animated by Hornet’s animators Dan Abdo and Jason Patterson), Hapless Hooligan tells the tragicomic tale of Hap and Lulu, separated in life and reunited after death. Tony-nominated sound designer Rob Kaplowitz (Fela!) assembles a collage score comprised of obscure cabaret tunes and early jazz hits to create a captivating atmosphere in this remarkable blend of comics and dance.

Take a look at some behind the scenes footage of the work in progress.

And, be sure to see the premiere of Hapless Hooligan in “Still Moving” this July! The program also includes audience favorites Redline, Symbiosis and Rushes.

John Jasperse Company brings Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking, and Flat Out Lies, an evening-length work that explores the often fluid boundaries between fantasy and reality to our stage this week. Last week, Joyce Programming Associate Laura Diffenderfer sat down with Jasperse to talk about the work, his experience presenting it in different cities, his collaborators, and some “wishful thoughts” for audiences experiencing the work for the first time.

John Jasperse Company performs at The Joyce Jun 16–19.
Tickets start at $10!

There are dance history lessons woven into dance classes led by choreographer Robert Battle. During the class he taught last Friday at DANY Studios, he aided a dancer into discovering a contraction in her body. Pointing to this signature of the Graham technique, Battle encouraged the dancers to see Martha Graham Dance Company in performance. (The Company performed at The Joyce June 8-13.) There were plenty of Taylor moments captured in the movement as well. Battle worked a Taylor wrap, a Carolyn Adams’ swing and an Ailey push all into one phrase. Dancers were encouraged to move with fluidity and ease through the movements, making connections from one section of movement to another. Throughout class he spoke about and illustrated two ideas he considers to be important parts of the classical modern dance idiom, the ability to shift weight and the use of breath.

Breath informed the long adagio he choreographed for the dancers who had the opportunity to see his choreographic mind at work. Erika Pujic, longtime assistant to the choreographer, took over the last half of the class. The dancers flew across the studio executing grande battements before learning a section from Battle’s repertoire. The shift from the fluid opening of the class into Battle’s choreography for his dance Juba was dramatic. The dance is an athletic, foot-stomping, fist-pounding explosion of energy, peppered with repetitive driving steps building to an ecstatic climax that leaves performers and viewers breathless. Commissioned in 2003 for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Juba is one of a number of works the choreographer created for the company. (Battle takes the helm as artistic director of the company in 2011.)

Dancers can continue to be inspired when Desmond Richardson – who, along with Dwight Rhoden, is Artistic Director of Complexions Contemporary Ballet – teaches a master class on Friday, June 18th. Richardson’s special gifts as a dance artist were first recognized when he was a student at New York’s High School of the Performing Arts. Richardson is a dancer’s dancer who has mastery over many different styles of dance. He has performed with Ailey, Ballet Frankfort, Michael Jackson, Prince, Aretha Franklin and Madonna; on international stages; in films and on TV. He has choreographed for his own company, and in 2008, he was a featured choreographer on “So you Think You Can Dance.”

RSVP for the Friday, Jun 18 class with Desmond Richardson by emailing Maggie Lockhart at mlockhart@joyce.org

Why SoLE PoWER?
Savion Glover (SG): I wanted to explore the rhythmic percussion of a dance that involves an emotional percussive history similar to the hooferz tradition. What many people do not understand is that tap is percussion. While there are traditional hoofer rhythms, each moment, each brush to the floor is an expressive poetry individual to each dancer’s internal voice. Tap dance is a very passionate and emotional rhythmic dance. It has an ancient rhythmic history relative to its cultural history. I feel very familiar with and connected to his percussive lineage, as I do to the hoofer tradition and lineage.

Do you feel that the percussive element of tap as sound is often misunderstood by the mainstream audience?
SG: Yes. One has to understand the context of the hoofer in history. The dance is about sound as much as drumming, music, any instrument. I try to emphasize that as much as possible.

What do you think about when you are performing?
SG: Everything and anything. Most of the time, it’s prayer. I’m just so grateful that I have been given what I have and to share all that I am to the audience.

Are all of these original songs that you have developed for SoLE PoWER?
SG: Yes.

How do you come up with the names of your songs?
SG: most of our compositions are named or titled with one of the Hooferz in mind. Other than that, I try to figure out how many different ways to say “thank you,” or some type of honorable mention to one who’s been influential towards my approach to tap dance.

You have an insistence with communicating to the audience tap as sound in the past several years - can you expand on that idea?
SG: Tap, the dance, has always been about sound; a percussive instrument; music. I have never learned it to be anything else. I’ve been so blessed with this tradition from my teachers before me, and I’m simply trying to communicate this information clearly, with no room for misinterpretation.

So, if I’m an audience member, and I want to hear you perform these complicated rhythmic patterns or songs that I might identify with, what should I listen for?
SG: I want you to just listen; to whatever you hear. Tap is a way of communicating for me. It’s all that I am. It’s all that I’ve been and will be. It’s a way of life. I’m very blessed. What I wish to communicate is simply joy. Gratitude. Praise. I hope I’m able to achieve this with each composition I create.

What do you think is the biggest misconception in the tap tradition?
SG: That it’s a spectator sport, like basketball. And I love basketball (Mr. Glover laughs). But, I want the audience to listen. Take it in. I take in the audience every night. To hear the hooferz that have come before me.

So, it’s a conversation.
SG: Of sorts, yes. It’s a conversation with everything.

Why do you think some audiences misunderstand the tap tradition?
SG: I think it’s natural to misinterpret a lot of things. It’s the culture. Media can communicate illusion. If one sees a person with sound on their feet, making music, they are going to assume the dance is about something else. However, those who came before me spoke through their feet on so many things: love, suffering, joy. There’s musicality and percussion in the dance I hope the audience can ‘tap’ into.

With SoLE PoWER, what do you want the audience to get?
SG: Whatever they get. I want them to listen. Take in. Talk to me through listening.

See the original Wall Street Journal article here.

Over the years, Torrence Boone has had a varied career in the consulting and digital sector, one that contrasts greatly with his early beginnings as a dancer. Mr. Boone, originally from Baltimore, discovered dance as a 13-year-old at Phillips Academy Andover. Rather than playing a spring sport his freshman year, he took a jazz class.

“I was totally hooked,” said Mr. Boone, who danced all through high school and college and briefly professionally for small pickup companies in San Francisco. (He studied economics at Stanford.)

Torrence Boone is on the board of Manhattan’s Joyce Theater.

Though Mr. Boone took the corporate route working as a strategy consultant at Bain and Company, after Harvard Business School, he took a summer sabbatical dancing at Jacob’s Pillow. “That was a reconnection before fully selling out,” he recalled.

Four more years at Bain led to a stint at the digital marketing agency now known as Razorfish, which led to work at Digitas. It was there, in the fall of 2005, that the Joyce contacted him about joining the board. A friend from Bain had joined a consultancy that the Joyce Theater in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood had hired to expand their board in anticipation of a new 1000-seat theater at the World Trade Center.

“It was serendipity and luck,” Mr. Boone said. “She mentioned my name because she knew I was a dancer and was passionate about the arts. I was incredibly excited. The Joyce has always been a nexus of the dance community in New York.”

Mr. Boone said the process of joining took several months and was “pretty rigorous,” involving interviews with several board members. He came on board, so to speak, at the age of 36 that December.

Beyond financial and operational responsibilities, Mr. Boone sits on the marketing committee. His goals are to make sure “that people are aware of the Joyce, that we fill the house and that we leverage new and emerging media to stay relevant.” He explained that though he has been asked to join other charitable boards in the city, he feels a “deep passion” for the Joyce. “The expectation is that you’re there 120 percent.”

Mr. Boone lives in the Flatiron with his partner, and though he continues to take the occasional modern or hip-hop class at Steps or the Broadway Dance Center, he does more yoga than dance. Now a managing director of agency development at Google, he tries to find time to squeeze in performances at New York City Ballet and, of course, the Joyce. “It’s sort of my favorite, obviously,” he said.
—Marshall Heyman