Decadancetheatre comes to Joyce SoHo this spring.  Catch this fun battle between Deca Crew members and Miami Heat Mascot “Burnie” on January 20, 2012 to promote the company’s shows at the Arsht Center in Miami. We look forward to welcoming these ladies back to Joyce SoHo in April. Buy your tickets today!

Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo makes its Joyce Theater debut with two riveting works by Jean-Christophe Maillot: Altro Canto I and Opus 40. Altro Canto I features constant, intense movement punctuated by startling jolts of energy. The piece premiered at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco as part of the 2006 Spring Arts Festival.

In a program note, Maillot offers context for his creation, which is set to the music of Monteverdi:

It has been a while since I last worked with a musical style whose only aim would be visual resonance. The music of Monteverdi, with its kinetic power, offers me a space open to the senses, to oppositions and deviations and allows me to suggest choreography as a science of perception, perception as a place of movement and of passage– an interior journey which produces the vibration of space and sound in resonance with the physical wave of the dancers. With Monteverdi, we are not in the psychology but in the all encompassing emotion, the trembling, the constant movement from one emotion to the other. To grasp that without stopping it or rigidifying it, to enter into the tension, harness the flux, the jolts, the discordances, to remain sensitive to it, is the choreographic challenge here.

The arch of candles, which constitutes a kind of setting is a gentle light which is almost liturgical. It underlines the architecture of the body, marks the postures, the accents, the states, the motifs drawn by the limbs of the dancers and intensely focuses the regard on the details, the curve of the movement. Its flickering and its folds, like the regard, stops in statue like form, on the fold of a gesture, the ribbed aplomb of a dress or the grimace of a gargoyle.

The music of Monteverdi, with its dialectic, changing and mobile in gesture, in technique, and in form and colour, which creates harmony by juxtaposing opposites, also brings to my mind the masculine/feminine duality which makes up each person. Again, I think of cathedral architecture, of these imposing monuments where force and mastery intensify the weightlessness and the impression of a certain fragility. The dancer more than anyone else is able grasp this polyphony which exists within each individual, these different textures which each person experiences intimately but which he often embodies as force fields which are harmful and which exclude.

This music, because it does not itself dance, requires that the dancers go to the extremes of themselves, of their work as artists, that they find their own colour, and beyond formal virtuosity, search the texture, the living fibre of their body, passionate, rich and complex, like the music which passes through them. It is not a question of simply «making» some movements, but of letting these movements become, of listening to what this music calls to within which is fundamental, of making these sonorous moods heard, of sharing an intimate experience, of letting go to the effusion so many secrets about themselves.
They are the ones who write the poem.
I only bring it to life.

Take a look at some clips of Altro Canto I:

The acclaimed Chinese dancer Jin Xing discusses her performances at the Joyce Theater January 31 – February 5. Xing Jing was born a man in China in 1967 and began dancing at age 6, later joining the national ballet company, traveling the world dancing and training with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. Then Xing Jing decided to undergo a sex change. She founded the Jin Xing Dance Theatre Shanghai and is dancing in New York the first time ever as a woman.

Cloud Gate 2 makes its New York debut at The Joyce with the work of remarkable international choreographers, including Huang Yi, one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch, 2011.” In this clip, Yi discusses Ta-Ta for Now, his “office rhapsody” which “shows Yi’s usual flair of the offbeat and his total command of techniques.” (Taipei Times)

This weekend Camille A. Brown & Dancers brings its “focused bursts of energy and frozen positions that explode into motion” (The New York Times) to The Joyce stage. Included on the program is part one of Mr. TOL E. RAncE, Brown’s new work dealing with issues of tolerance and the representation of Blacks in the media.

The Joyce’s education department welcomes the young children and families who attend Saturday afternoon’s Family Matinee to take a look this video and have a conversation about tolerance and the issues Ms. Brown’s work presents.

Deborah Jowitt calls Martha Clarke and Alfred Uhry’s Angel Reapers a “beautifully imagined and constructed theater piece.”

Here’s an excerpt of her review in Arts Journal: “What fascinates people about the Shakers—members of religious communities that settled in New England in the late 18th century, proselytized, expanded, and began to wither a hundred or so years later? We marvel at the austerely beautiful furniture they made, their ingenuity, and the fact that they considered drawing, singing, and dancing gifts from God that were to be practiced freely and diligently—all that and more, but what seems to boggle many contemporary minds is that Shakers were celibate.

Doris Humphrey barely hinted at underlying sexual tensions in her ecstatic 1931 dance The Shakers. The Finnish choreographer Tero Saarinen downplayed them in his glorious Borrowed Light (2004). Watching Angel Reapers, which plays at the Joyce Theater through December 11, you get the impression that for its greatly gifted creators, director-choreographer Martha Clarke and playwright Alfred Uhry, Shaker dancing—whether wild or formally patterned—was a sublimation for the erotic physical exertions that the community members denied themselves.”

Read the full article here.

The New Yorker’s Joan Acocella says the show “refuses to limit itself to either realism or vision.”

“Martha Clarke’s movement-theatre pieces have sometimes been heavy on eroticism, with good-looking people sitting around naked on the stage. And, as is often the case with sexy shows, they have tended toward the deluxe: panties, poetry. Now, in collaboration with the playwright Alfred Uhry, Clarke has made another show about sex, “Angel Reapers”—it débuted at the Joyce this week and runs through December 11th—but this one is abstemious.”

Read more.

Angel Reapers continues at The Joyce through Dec. 11. Purchase tickets here.

Last week, as part of The Joyce’s ongoing Dance Talks series, powerhouse collaborators Martha Clarke and Alfred Uhry sat down to speak with Gideon Lester for a video-illustration discussion about their new dance/theater work about the Shakers, Angel Reapers.

Here’s an excerpt of that discussion. You can find the full length video here.

Angel Reapers continues at The Joyce through Dec 11. Purchase tickets now.

This holiday season, MOMIX returns to The Joyce with Botanica, an audience favorite. MOMIX is celebrated for conjuring up a world of surrealistic images by using props, light, shadow, humor, and the human body in a startling way. With Botanica, the company is in top form, creating “an animated world” that “comes fabulously alive.” (The New York Times). This is thanks, in part, to the magical talents of master puppet designer Michael Curry.

Mr. Curry’s twenty-five year career boasts collaborations with visual directors such as Julie Taymor (The Lion King) and Robert LePage and production designers like Mark Fisher and Eiko Ishioka. He has created works for The Walt Disney Company, Cirque du Soleil, Universal Studios and The Olympics, as well as many international opera and stage companies.

Take a look at just a few of Michael Curry’s captivating creations:

MOMIX

The Lion King

2002 Olympics, Salt Lake City

Bush Gardens

Purchase tickets for MOMIX now.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and MacArthur Award winning choreographer discuss the inspiration behind their collaborative work, Angel Reapers, here on video:

And, through an interview with Boston Globe writer Jeffrey Gantz:

“What interested me so much,’’ the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright explains, “was really trying to deny that sex existed. I mean, it just goes against nature. Men and women had no contact, really, but they did have meetings where they would sit on opposite sides of the room, and they would drink spiritual wine, which is no wine. It’s imaginary. They would get drunk; they would dance. They believed that if you danced naked, you were invisible.’’

Read more here.

Angel Reapers runs Nov 29-Dec 11. Purchase tickets here.

Complexions Contemporary Ballet is back for another season at The Joyce and this time, the company will be dancing in honor and remembrance.  Dwight Rhoden will be premiering his piece What Come, Thereafter.  This piece was created in tribute to Desmond Richardson and will be danced by Richardson himself.  2011-2012 will be Richardson’s final touring season with Complexions, so you don’t want to miss this.

“Hailed by The New York Times as ‘one of the great modern dancers of his time,’ Desmond Richardson is a multi-talented artist who has mastered a wide range of classical, modern and contemporary dance genres. Praised for his powerful dancing and singular performance quality, Richardson has been the hallmark performer who has shaped the essence of the Complexions style for over a decade.” Read more on Richardson on the company’s website.  

Mr. Rhoden is also paying honor and tribute to Denise Jefferson, who left the dance world in July of 2010, in another premiere titled Places Please.

“Appointed as director by Alvin Ailey in 1984, after teaching at the School for ten years, Ms. Jefferson — affectionately referred to as Ms. J — was instrumental in identifying a child’s potential, and mentoring myriad students as they began their journey to becoming some of the greatest dance artists in the world. ‘Powerful,’ ‘technical,’ ‘elegant,’ ‘consistent,’ ‘beautiful,’ ‘fierce,’ ‘a force of nature’— these are some of the adjectives most commonly used to describe Ailey students. They are also the words that best describe Denise Jefferson.” Read more about Jefferson here.

Complexions Contemporary Ballet has three exciting programs from which to choose and will be here for two weeks!  Places Please will be performed in all three programs.  Come and see brilliant movers dance in celebration of those who have made an impact in our dance community.

Purchase tickets here.