Joyce SoHo intern Elmes Gomez spoke with Kyle Abraham, a 2011-2012 Joyce Theater Residency Artist, about the work he has been creating through our creative residency program (made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation). The work, Boyz N The Hood: Pavement will premiere at Harlem Stage this fall.

Elmes Gomez (EG): Where do you find inspiration for your work? Where do you turn when you are stuck during your choreographic process?

Kyle Abraham (KA): My work, in general, is derived from my life experiences. More to that, I think a lot about my high school years. I think about how formative those years were, in terms of my insecurities and my introduction to traditional dance forms. Other than that, I’m really inspired by art in general—visual arts, music, theater—and seeing dance. I love seeing shows whenever I can!

EG: As a choreographer, what is it about a dancer that catches your attention and makes you want him or her to be in your work?

KA: The thing that interests me most in a dancer is his or her willingness to “go there,” wherever “there” might be. I dig that openness and fearlessness. I love seeing dancers who aren’t afraid to get ugly. Because dance isn’t supposed to always be pretty.

EG: You often perform in the pieces you choreograph. Does that contribute to the personal nature of your choreography? Do you find it challenging to get an outside perspective when you’re performing in the work?

KA: I think of dance as my love and my work. I don’t even know how to separate myself from it, nor do I know why anyone would want to do that and call himself a storyteller. Everything seems rooted from the perspective of the one telling the story. And in my work, I’m usually telling a story that, in some way, is or was a part of my experiences.

EG: For the work that you’re creating as part of your Joyce residency, how does music come into play? Do you prefer to choreograph your movement before or after the music is set?

KA: Every dance and its process is totally different from the next. For Boyz N The Hood: Pavement, I knew from the very beginning, that I wanted to use opera music. So I began to choreograph to that music. Generally, I think I just generate movement that either feels good or hopefully, falls in line with the themes in the work without focusing too much on the reasoning behind “the middle back Merce curve that came after that ballet-like step.”

EG: What creative outlets other than dance do you enjoy?

KA: Music is my first love. Sometimes I actually choreograph a dance as an outlet for more people to know different songs or artists that I’m listening to at that moment. Other than music, I’m kinda in a biography phase. So I’m reading a couple of those… And, I’m always reading random history books — love it! That usually happens while listening to some string quartet or something; I can’t read while hearing people sing because I get distracted by the words in the song!

For more information on the Joyce Residency Artist programs, click here. For more on the premiere of Boyz N The Hood: Pavement, visit Harlem Stage.

The A.W.A.R.D. Show! 2009: New York City winner Makiko Tamura returns to Joyce SoHo with next week with the world premiere of Tank, a poetic dance created in collaboration with Yasushi Nishikawa (Scenery), Tsubasa Kamei (Lighting), and small apple’s distinctive dancers.

With this hauntingly beautiful video, Tamura invites viewers to reframe the way they look at the world. Surprising and beautiful moments emerge. Audiences will share a similar experience when Tank premieres on the Joyce SoHo stage as Nishikawa literally provides a framework through which to view Tamura’s flowing, yet scrupulous movement.

Makiko Tamura/small apple co.’s engagement at Joyce SoHo runs Friday, July 13 through Sunday, July 15.

Director of Programming Martin Wechsler brought to our attention this exciting new app that brings new meaning to “site-specific” work.

Fifth Wall is an app designed for the iPad that considers the digital tablet as a new performance space. It explores the unique spatial, visual, and temporal conditions of the tablet, and its possibilities for choreography. The performance was created to embrace the multi-directional orientation and gravitational pull of the iPad. Viewers can focus on a single dance, or move, sort, and re-frame the performance.

The project’s creators, Patsy Tarr and Abbott Miller of the 2wice Arts Foundation, teamed with award-winning choreographer and media artist Jonah Bokaer, who is no stranger to expanding the boundaries of live performance through digital media.

Take a look, and keep an eye out for 2wice Arts’ next app, which will feature a yet to be chosen choreographer from the ballet world.

The “divinely gifted artist” (The New York Times), Shantala Shivaligappa will make her Joyce debut with Namasya, a work celebrating her diverse choreographic influences that consists of four solos including one created by Ushio Amagatsu, Sankai Juku’s renowned artistic director, and another choreographed during her residency with Pina Bausch.

In this interview with Time Out New York’s Gia Kourlas, Shivaligappa (who Kourlas calls “one of the most transfixing dancers of our time”) talks about the artists and traditions that have influenced and inspired her. An excerpt follows. Read the full interview here.

Time Out New York: Did you conceive of Namasya as an evening of four solos?
Shantala Shivalingappa: Actually, it came into being at different stages. The first solo that I started working on was the one with Pina Bausch. It was intended for one of Pina’s festivals. This was in homage to a dear friend of hers, who had been very influential and present in my life, and who had just passed away. Somehow the time constraint was such that the solo wasn’t ready for the festival, but we continued to work on it for about three years off and on. I thought, I have this one solo: What can I do with this? I have admired [Ushio] Amagatsu’s work for a very long time. The thing is that he only choreographs for his own company, and he only works with Japanese men.

Time Out New York: How did you approach him?
Shantala Shivalingappa: I knew the person touring his work in France, so I asked, “Do you think I could put this request to him?” And he said, “Well, you know, why not? He appreciates your work and he has seen you dance. Ask him and you’ll get your answer.” [Laughs] I went to see one of [Amagatsu’s] shows when he was in Lyon, and I just candidly put this to him, and he said, “Let me think about it.” And very soon after, he gave me a positive answer. I was absolutely thrilled. The work with Pina, of course, was something that had started a few years before, because I had also worked with her company; it was much more familiar for me. Whereas working with Amagatsu was something completely different, even in terms of body language, movement—just everything. We worked for two weeks. He came into the studio with quite a clear idea of what the solo was going to be; the music was composed. But he left a few areas open for what would come up during our rehearsals. It was a wonderful experience. Unforgettable, really.

David Gordon’s unprecedented month-long engagement at Joyce SoHo continues through June 30, and critics and audiences alike are cheering!

On ArtsJournal, Deborah Jowitt calls Beginning of the End of the… a “fascinating, brain-tossing new venture” and applauds the “assemblage of wonderfully nimble-witted movers and talkers.”
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On InfiniteBody, Eva Yaa Asantewa remarks, “Beginning runs only 60 minutes but packs enough verbal wit, choreographic elegance, visual playfulness and emotional vitality to supply 60 other dance makers.”
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In her New York Times review, Claudia La Rocco notes the work’s “marvelously expansive dance interlude” and commends Mr. Gordon, “a smart, romantic trickster who began as a member of the groundbreaking Judson Dance Theater” for “taking all sorts of delicious liberties with canonical playwrights.”
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For tickets to Beginning of the End of the…, visit Joyce.org.

Joyce SoHo intern Elmes Gomez interviewed Andrea Miller just days before the premiere of Gallim Dance’s SIT, KNEEL, STAND at The Joyce Theater, as a part of Gotham Dance Festival.

Elmes Gomez (EG): Tell me about how your company, Gallim Dance came to be, and what’s the inspiration for its name.

Andrea Miller (AM): Choreography has always been a big part of why I fell in love with dancing. My early dance training was in the techniques and performance of works by modern dance pioneers, like Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Martha Graham, and Jose Limon. It wasn’t until I started working with living choreographers at the Juilliard School that I truly stopped to consider that you could be alive and choreograph! I was so inspired by the choreographers I was working with; I knew instantly that I wanted to be and do that.

I’ve always found ways to make dances. I think I have a good 30 studies of Mozart’s Requiems choreographed in my early teens, all set for one dancer and one bed. When I came back to New York after dancing with Ensemble Batsheva in Israel, I kept training as a dancer, thinking about where I could audition and where I might live. Classes were getting expensive, and what I missed more than anything was being in rehearsal and part of the creative process. It was at a Doug Varone workshop at Peridance that I first saw Francesca Romo dancing. It was as if she had walked right out of my imagination. And, I found myself saying, “whenever I have a dance company, I want to have dancers like her.” At the end of the week, I asked if she wanted to play in the studio with me, and we started making dances. It was such an amazing collaboration. I decided to stop looking out in the world for a dance life, and we started making our own. I guess at that moment Gallim Dance was born.

Gallim is Hebrew for wave. When I was living in Tel Aviv, I used to walk along the beach and watch the surfers. I decided that they understand this world. They are able to experience the shifting momentum surrounding them, understand its undeniable force, and at the same time carve their own path; a truly visceral experience. It’s an incredible metaphor for how a creative environment should be. We try to create this feeling at Gallim; to be aware of the tides surrounding our lives and offer a voice, an expression of that ride.

EG: As a choreographer, what is it about a dancer that catches your attention? Are there specific qualities or training that you look for in a dancer?

AM: It is hard for me to define any one thing that I look for in a dancer because most of the time it’s that thing you can’t define that makes the dancer attractive. I love to see dancers who take risks and observe the consequences of those risks.

EG: When you hit a road block during your choreographic process, what is it that gets to back on track?

AM: Definitely the dancers. They have a heightened sensitivity to the way my process unfolds, and I look to them first when I need inspiration. We reengage the choreographic concept by sharing thoughts on where the piece is going, sometimes destroying the order of how things have been or taking breaks and talking nonsense. I draw a lot from literature and visual art and the conversations that I have surrounding those sources. When I’m really stuck, I shut myself into what the dancers call my office; I lay down on the floor, cover my face with my elbows and make no sound or movements.

EG: Tell me about Gallim Dance’s educational programming, for example, the sold out workshop with Dancewave on May 26. What effects do you think educational programming have on the dance field?

AM: Gallim Dance has partnered with Dancewave, a pre-professional arts training program, to fill what we have perceived to be a gap in dance education. Many dancers don’t exactly understand how their passion for dance connects with dancing professionally or dancing in the future. What we have co-designed with Dancewave is a partnership in which the students engage with Gallim to learn more about how passion can turn into a profession and fuel a creative environment.

At the core of this program is our individual and group mentoring initiative, which offers students an opportunity to express what they have experienced both in and out of the studio in their dance life. We want the students to be able to hear how the Gallim dancers deal with some of those issues in the professional world, and to learn some of the steps they can take to help cultivate their passion. A second important feature of this program is open rehearsals that will allow students to observe the creative/rehearsal process, the behavior of teamwork, and challenges that come with each individual’s body and mind in the work environment. Our mission is to teach our students to cultivate and demand passion in their lives.

This summer, we’ll be co-hosting our first pre-professional summer intensive with Dancewave. We’re looking forward to piloting the program and seeing what impact it has on the students’ perceptions of the field.

EG: The company will perform the world premiere of SIT, KNEEL, STAND on June 8th as part of the Gotham Dance Festival. How does this new piece differ from your past works? Does it mark a new direction in your choreography?

AM: SIT, KNEEL, STAND is a really different work for us. As a choreographer, I always try to insert a new challenge into the creative process. This time, I was inspired by the myth of Sisyphus, who was condemned to carry an immense boulder to the top of a hill, only to have it fall back down to the bottom, causing him to repeat the process for all of eternity. I was looking for an object that could help me tell his story, and I chose chairs because I felt that they are objects everyone has experience with.

I think Sisyphus’s story is a very human one. Maybe Sisyphus is stuck in a Greek myth, a victim of the Gods. But if you consider our daily rituals —how we push things around all day only to go to bed and wake up and push things around again — we probably appear no different than Sisyphus. I became creatively committed to this story after reading a quote by French philosopher Albert Camus: “We should imagine Sisyphus happy.” The piece takes on this challenge; the chairs act as a support and a burden (and is the source of some major bruises).

We use the voice in a conversational improvisation, which is a first for me. In making this piece, I have felt like Sisyphus himself occasionally haunted us in the studio. I’m excited about the work. I’m thrilled about the many discoveries we’ve had as a group. It’s been six weeks of getting to know Sisyphus and embodying the effort and releasing the story contained within the piece. I feel so lucky and happy to be making dances with the beautiful artists at Gallim.

EG: Tell us about Gallim Dance’s future plans. When can audiences next see your work?

AM: We’ll be at The Joyce June 8, 9, and 10! The company also looks forward to developing programming for its new home in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. We will be offering Gallim Open Class, open rehearsals, yoga and private Gyrotonic sessions with Fran. We hope you’ll come visit us!

We have some exciting tours coming up in the 2012-2013 season, including stops in Chicago, Atlanta, California, and Madrid. The company will begin creating a new world premiere at Montclair State University this summer as part of the Peak Performances series, and in the fall, I head to Holland to work with Nederlands Dance Theater 2.

And, Gallim Dance was selected as an inaugural recipient of the BAM Professional Development Program for 2012-2013, which comes with a performance in the brand new Fisher Building.
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For tickets to see the world premiere of SIT, KNEEL, STAND – at The Joyce June 8, 9, and 10 – visit Joyce.org

Gallim Dance on the Making of SIT, KNEEL, STAND

David Gordon and his Pick Up Performance Co(s) take over Joyce SoHo for the month of June with a world premiere work based on the writings of Nobel Prize-winner Luigi Pirandello and the music of Giacomo Puccini. In this interview with Time Out New York’s Gia Kourlas, the postmodern Judson dance pioneer talks about how the project developed, his approach to directing, and how he managed to divide Joyce SoHo into four distinct stages.

In recent years, choreographer and director David Gordon has tackled Brecht, Ionesco and Shakespeare in dance-theater productions that shift between illusion and reality. For the postmodern artist—an original member of the experimental Judson Dance Theater—the shift between theater and life is endlessly fascinating (and, in his work, purposefully hazy). Now he takes on the Italian writer Luigi Pirandello, whose work so closely mirrors his own that it’s sometimes difficult to figure out where one leaves off and the other begins. In Beginning of the End of the…, which is at the Joyce Soho for four weeks beginning June 1, Gordon has invented a choreographic world that melds three of Pirandello’s works (the play Six Characters in Search of an Author, the short story “A Character’s Tragedy” and the one-act The Man with the Flower in His Mouth) with his humorous, dictatorial directing style that puts his thoughts in everyone’s mouths—including that of his wife, Valda Setterfield. He spoke about the piece in his Soho loft.

How did this project develop?
The Pirandello has to do with all the stuff I’ve been doing lately—the Pirandello following the Brecht and the Brecht following the Ionesco.

It’s a logical progression?
It’s so logical, and it’s so connected. I realize that Pirandello is talking about illusion and reality. That’s what Ionesco is dealing with and, oh, wait a minute: Everybody I’m choosing to work with along the way seems to have either known about the other person, experienced the other person, is moving on from the other person.… I just seem to be on some historical trail that I didn’t know existed. I went online and looked up Pirandello, and there are a bunch of short videos made in London with an English cast doing parts of Six Characters while somebody talks about the relationship between Pirandello and Ionesco and Brecht. I never heard anybody say that before. I had nothing to compare what I was thinking to, but there it is. The [scene in Six Characters] about how two babies die—I turn them into Raggedy Ann and Andy, thinking how inventive I am—and then I look at this little bit of tape, and they bring in two dummies. I was thinking about all of this, and I realized that a long time ago, I made a piece called Wordsworth and the Motor [1977] and it happened here [at the loft]. I rented bleachers and put them at both ends of the space; Valda and I came in on the two sides, and we began to do the same concert. A wall was built in between, so the audience that first saw each other now could not only not see each other, they couldn’t see the other one of us. They could only hear us.

Read the full article here.

For tickets, click here.

Last Friday, twenty-some eager dancers gathered at DANY Studios to participate in a master class led by Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet’s Artistic Director Benoit-Swan Pouffer and Ballet Mistress Alexandra Damiani. As dancers stretched and warmed-up, Ms. Damiani meandered through the studio greeting some of her former students with hugs and smiles. Dressed in practice clothes, Ms. Damiani and Director Pouffer taught class from within and among – rather than in front of – the dancers present. One could hear their voices instructing the class while, at times, their bodies were lost in the crowd.

Ms. Damiani started the morning with some gentle rolling exercises to awaken the joints. Next, accompanied by lilting French pop music, she guided dancers through core-strengthening by testing their capacity for turn-out. The initial exercises alternated between concise phrases derived from a classical ballet vocabulary and fluid explorations of mobility and balance. Ms. Damiani reminded dancers that, “Cedar Lake relies on the precision of ballet technique as an entry point for risk-taking. The dancers must acknowledge their own bodies’ facility and determine their way to connect to that technique.”

Beads of sweat quickly began forming as the mid-morning sun shone through the windows. Director Pouffer joined in with his own warm-up, before tag-teaming with Ms. Damiani to teach a substantial movement phrase from the Cedar Lake repertoire. Mild-mannered in tone, both Damiani and Pouffer challenged these ambitious dancers with the content of movement – spiraling turns to the floor, suspended balances – and immediate reversals of phrases. It was a delightful offering in the middle of Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet’s Joyce season

All in attendance worked quietly and generously, sharing the space, water, and praise for each others accomplishments throughout the rigorous movement phrases. In the five-minute rest, per Ms. Damiani’s suggestion, dancers stretched and reviewed the morning’s material. The final demonstrations from the recently learned repertory moved so fluidly, Director Pouffer said, “Let’s see it one more time,” a few times! The two hours disappeared so lightly, all seemed startled with the ending of the class. In thanking Pouffer and Damiani (and The Joyce) for the class, those in attendance breathlessly found that this class allowed them to relive and experience what they had just seen (or plan to see) on stage.

The Joyce’s Master Class series continues into the summer with Larry Keigwin (Artistic Director of KEIGWIN + COMPANY) teaching at DANY Studios on June 15^th. Material for Keigwin’s class is shaped by his distinctive vocabulary, which combines physicality and theatricality with a contemporary, pop perspective.

David Gordon’s Beginning of the end of the… premieres at Joyce SoHo in June. Read what dance historian Suzanne Carbonneau says about this intriguing artist in relation to his 2002 work Autobiography of a Liar.

by Suzanne Carbonneau
2002 Suzanne Carbonneau/ Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival

What do you call an artist who would title a work Autobiography of a Liar?
A postmodernist. (Ba dum.)

But seriously, folks… you would. And not a little to the vexation of the artist himself who declares the terms “postmodern choreography” to be “stakes driven into the heart of a work.”

Nevertheless, the artist in question, choreographer/writer/director David Gordon is identified in history books as a founder of what is now generally called postmodernism in dance. And whether or not you accept this description of his achievement, there is no question that Gordon’s presence in the field has irrevocably and permanently expanded what we conceive dance to be. A member of the Judson Dance Theater and Grand Union, the choreographic and improvisatory collectives that revolutionized modern dance by stripping it of the Romanticism and Expressionism of its founders, Gordon has remained in the succeeding forty years one of the most consistently experimental and original artists working with movement. For despite critical acclaim and an assured place in history, Gordon has yet to show any signs of resting on his laurels. Today, he remains as defiantly maverick—and important—as he was when he shared stages in Greenwich Village in the 1960s with Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Steve Paxton.

Gordon created Autobiography of a Liar in 1999, and, in addition to being a collection of personal and creative vignettes, the work is also a compendium of the concerns that he has been examining over the course of his career. The title is a joke, of course, but is, at the same time, immensely serious in its questioning of the idea of perception as unreliable, of memory as fallible, and of truth as ultimately unknowable. It is a theme he has returned to again and again. Yet, even as he is aware of his fool’s errand, Gordon will go ahead and make the attempt at finding truth – or rather, competing truths – all the while openly (eagerly!) exposing the rickety and ultimately illusionary nature of the enterprise. The glue that invariably holds all of these contradictions together is Gordon’s keen wit. Exhibit A: Gordon describes Autobiography of a Liar as “half remembered half truths about dances made another time in another life accommodating the talents of performers I was in love with and remade for the talents of performers I hope to be in love with now.” And many such passages of Gordon’s works have more in common with Abbott and Costello and their “Who’s on first?” routine than they do anything choreographed by Martha Graham.

Such verbal dexterity is matched by a physical language whose virtuosity is also concerned with punning, allusion, about-faces, and multiple meanings, and these twinned and twined disciplines are the hallmarks of his work. For Gordon, all language implies action. Interested in the ways that the interaction of words and movement increase the possibilities for complicating and layering meaning, he ricochets between the scrupulously literal and the fancifully symbolic meanings of both words and actions, and is most happy, it seems, when these things exist simultaneously.

This idea of revealing each work’s philosophical and structural scaffolding is endemic to Gordon. Most of the work he has made since the 1970s has dealt with the idea of performance as an illusion that is created by real people. And like Penn and Teller who purposefully betray the cardinal rule of professional magicians by revealing to their audiences how their tricks are done, Gordon also exposes how his work is constructed by mixing autobiography and fiction, by moving back and forth between performer-as-performer and performer-as-person, by acknowledging the false authority of the creator, by foregrounding the artificiality and manipulation of the theater, by revealing process, by breaking the theatrical “fourth wall,” and by inserting matter-of-factness into the most magical theatrical moments.
Carbonneau Essay-David Gordon
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In fact, his works are backstage musicals taken to their ultimate conclusion. The incorporation of his family (his wife, the luminous dancer and actor Valda Setterfield, and his son, playwright and director Ain Gordon) as performers and co-creators only makes things more devilishly tricky as what is real and what is not in the relationships we see on stage come to seem hopelessly entangled. The Gordons’s madcap and heartrending Obie-winning The Family Business (1994), for example, is about a plumbing concern but it’s also about this family business and this family’s business. (Gordon plays an old mustachioed woman who is really Gordon who is also his aunt, while Ain is a father and his son who aspires to be a playwright who will write the play that is actually being performed now, and Setterfield is the mother and…you get the picture.) Following who’s who and what’s what at any given moment of this work makes that infernally labyrinthine Abbott and Costello routine seem like a Dick and Jane reader.

Because Gordon has used language in performance virtually from the beginning of his career, to call the work “choreography” misses what is essential to its nature. (Hence, Gordon’s annoyance with the term. Up until recently, he preferred to call his work “work,” and to say that he “constructed” it.) In fact, most of the standard categories for differentiating performance cannot begin to suggest what it is that Gordon does. These characterizations exist only for the intellectual convenience of those who need familiar archetypes with which to try to come to terms with artistic achievement—even experimental achievement. But these constructs are inadequate, if not outright dishonest, as descriptions of his work. Gordon is not interested in conforming to ideas about what he should be doing, or to fit in with what other artists have done or are doing; rather, his interests lie in expanding ideas about what performance can be. And, after all these years, his impatience with the whole business is understandable.

During the last decade, Gordon’s work has been most often categorized as theater – although his original work is not any closer to the traditional notion of drama than it was dance. For if these works are “plays,” they would have to be described as profoundly choreographed. In these works, everything moves—sets, props, performers. In fact, they are so thoroughly conceived from the standpoint of movement that, even with their fully fleshed-out texts, every moment is dancerly. You’d be hard-pressed to pick out “dance” sections as they exist as interludes in traditional plays; rather, it’s all dance, even if there’s not a recognizable dance “step” in sight. Even the text, which is conceived from a rhythmic as well as a narrative standpoint, contributes to the sense of propulsive action. This is a singular achievement: no other movement artist has achieved this level of integration in the theater as writer, director, and choreographer.

With this theatrical work, Gordon has finally embraced the use of the term “choreography” to describe his movement contribution to these integrated performances. For the term is no longer a limitation, but a more apt description than “blocking” or “staging” of how it is that Gordon conceives these works, alongside his writing and directing. Gordon has also been in the spotlight recently as the director and writer of “PAST Forward” (2000), White Oak’s hugely successful Judson Dance Theater revival program that was instigated by Mikhail Baryshnikov. And if this canonization of an American avant-garde revolutionary by a Russian ballet dancer conjures visions of the Disneyfication of the Impressionists, rest assured. Somehow, one knows that Gordon’s work is undoubtedly too uncompromising, too witty, too prickly, too analytic, too complex—in other words, too damn smart—to succumb to mass marketing. And that, of course, has always been the mark of genius.

Introdans makes its U.S. premiere at The Joyce this week with Heavenly, a retrospective journey that includes three works showcasing the Dutch-based modern ballet company’s eclectic and exciting repertory.

The New York Times‘ Rebecca Milzoff interviewed Artistic Director Roel Voorintholt and founder Ton Wiggers for this article about the company’s history and journey to The Joyce. And excerpt follows:

“In the last three decades the two, and Introdans itself, have gone through enormous changes, public and private, and Mr. Wiggers and Mr. Voorintholt have been uncommonly open about both.

Now, 40 years after Introdans’s founding and after extensive international touring, it will make its first United States appearance at the Joyce Theater on Tuesday, the start of a six-day run.

As Mr. Wiggers explained recently in a telephone interview from the company’s offices in Arnhem, he created Introdans to address an absence of dance in his part of the country. “We had the Dutch National Ballet, and they came to Arnhem once, maybe twice a year,” he said. “Of course there was an audience for those performances, so I thought, ‘Well, if there’s an audience for it, why aren’t we seeking for more dance here?’ ”

He started Introdans with a handful of friends who met in his living room. Though a small city, Arnhem was already on the cultural map because of the renowned Kröller-Müller Museum, with its sculpture garden and collection of van Gogh and modern masters.”

Read the full article here. Introdans will be at The Joyce May 1-6. Purchase tickets now.