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