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

This week brings Sachiyo Ito to the stage at Joyce SoHo: a Tokyo-born choreographer who brings together the East and the West in her work. She has been performing classical, traditional and contemporary Japanese dance for the last 40 years.

Her work, entitled Poetry in Motion, uses the work of many poets as inspiration: from Rumi to Thich Nhat Hanh. The following poem, “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver, is one of the poems that inspires the work.

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Don’t miss Sachiyo Ito and Company, June 10-12.

Pele Bauch, Joyce SoHo Artist-in-Residence, recently took her rehearsal outside to play with the Method laundry truck. Check it out, and don’t miss her Dance Talks/Open Rehearsal on Thursday, June 3!

Martha Graham Dance Company graces the Joyce stage June 8-13.  To mark the occasion, we compiled some of our favorite quotables from the trail-blazing choreographer:

• People have asked me why I chose to be a dancer. I did not choose. I was chosen to be a dancer, and with that, you live all your life.
• The body says what words cannot.
• Our arms start from the back because they were once wings.
• All that is important is this one moment in movement. Make the moment important, vital, and worth living. Do not let it slip away unnoticed and unused.
• Dance is the hidden language of the soul.
• In 1980, a well-meaning fundraiser came to see me and said, “Miss Graham, the most powerful thing you have going for you to raise money is your respectability.” I wanted to spit. Respectable! Show me any artist who wants to be respectable.
• There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.
• Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery.
• The center of the stage is where I am.
• Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance. Great dancers are great because of their passion.
• Some men have thousands of reasons why they cannot do what they want to, when all they need is one reason why they can.