Danspace Project at Times Square
For more than four decades, Danspace Project has cultivated a vital community of contemporary dance artists in a unique environment in Manhattan’s East Village. Through a variety of public programs, innovative platform series, residencies, guest artist curators, and more, Danspace Project works to support artists as they develop their work, to encourage experimentation, and to connect artists with audiences.
Inspired by Times Square’s history as the home of Broadway musicals, vaudeville, dance halls, and vernacular dance forms that emerged throughout the 20th century, Danspace Project has partnered with Times Square Arts to commission three new, site-specific dance works by esteemed New York City artists.
luciana achugar, Laurie Berg, and Full Circle Souljahs (Ana "Rokafella" Garcia & Gabriel "Kwikstep" Dionisio) will explore strategies for perception, amplification, and activism within the cacophonous landscape of Times Square. In New Mass Dance, achugar creates a site-specific procession inspired by the New Dance Group, a 1930s modern dance collective that taught classes near Times Square promoting social change through movement. In scape, Berg overlays a landscape of information over live performance via 3-D glasses, exploring Times Square as not just a place of spectacle and traffic but of visual messaging. Full Circle Souljahs' Behind the Groove – Times Square Edition is an homage to street and club dance trends from the 1970s to today, giving visibility to an underground dance community long associated with Times Square. These new works will be presented back-to-back-to-back so that you can experience all three works on one evening or over the course of the weekend.
More information about the individual works can be found below:
Behind the Groove – Times Square Edition
Danspace Project presents new work in dance, supports a diverse range of choreographers in developing their work, encourages experimentation, and connects artists to audiences.
For over 40 years, Danspace Project has supported a vital community of contemporary dance artists in an environment unlike any other in the United States. Located in the historic St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, Danspace shares its facility with the Church, The Poetry Project, and New York Theatre Ballet. Danspace Project’s Commissioning Initiative has commissioned over 540 new works since its inception in 1994.
Photographs courtesy of Ian Douglas for Times Square Arts.