Photo of Lisa Nelson and Steve Paxton by Gil Grossi

Steve Paxton – a video amble

Friday, February 14 | 6:30PM

Organized and hosted by Lisa Nelson and Cathy Weis

This special evening marks the opening of Danspace 50th festival celebration and includes video and remembrances of the groundbreaking artist Steve Paxton (Jan 21, 1939 – Feb 20, 2024). Paxton was a singular, iconic dance artist who graced the sanctuary over many decades and whose influence spans five generations.

Choreographer, performer, and videographer Lisa Nelson, Paxton’s oft-collaborator and life companion, joins with choreographer and video artist Cathy Weis to share a selection of excerpts of rarely seen performance documents and video snapshots from his life at the Farm in Vermont. Interspersed with conversation, this viewing will give but a glimpse of the breadth of how, in Steve’s words, “dance is the art of taking place.”

Lisa writes “Prolific to a fare-thee-well, Steve’s thinking with the body’ left us a multiplex of paths to ponder. It would be hard to say which traces of his lifetime of giving dance will be most enduring—his writing, correspondence, talking, performing on and off stages, improvising, collaborating, composting, gardening, teaching, learning, playing, and hanging out. We are deeply grateful that video technology came of age close to the beginning of Steve’s adventure and we’ve had 50+ years to learn how to see through it.”

Paxton’s enormous influence on the dance field and on interdisciplinary artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Ralph Lemon, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Jennifer Monson and other luminaries in movement and art, is impossible to quantify. Ralph Lemon has written: “I didn’t know Steve until late in his life…but I had been in his audiences most of my art life, from his utterly wild, collectively exploratory Grand Union group days (Walker Art Center, 1975), the year I took my first dance class in Minneapolis and had no idea what I was looking at (I’m not even sure I was there, maybe I just heard about it); to his magnificent Goldberg Variations (Jacob’s Pillow, 1988), dancing that completely changed my dance thinking as the music in his body rivaled Gould and Bach; to Ash (Danspace Project, 1999)…to his longtime work with his longtime partner, Lisa Nelson, and their extraordinary intimacy.” –October Journal, 2024

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Before you visit:

Accessibility at Danspace Project
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Lisa Nelson (US): choreographer, improvisational performer, collaborator, learner, editor-publisher of Contact Quarterly. Her practice of Tuning Scores is an approach to composition, real-time editing, and communication that touches the (extra)ordinary self-knowledge that animates our choices as beings and artists facing challenges together—a danceway to collectively reimagine the illusions of our wobbly world. She lives on a farm in Vermont she shared with longtime creative partner, Steve Paxton. Reflections through interviews can be accessed through sarma.be’s oralsite and Conversations in Vermont.

Cathy Weis arrived in New York in 1984 and immersed herself in New York’s avant-garde dance community by videotaping the concerts of most downtown choreographers working in that decade. In 1993, Weis premiered her first New York season with String of Lies, a meld of dance and video. Since then she has done twelve productions in New York and Europe integrating technology and dance in performance, redefining the boundaries of “live” performance. In 2014, Weis opened a performance space at 537 Broadway. Eleven years later Sundays on Broadway has grown into a valued performance venue for downtown artists.

Photo of Fred Holland and Ishmael Houston-Jones by Pamela Moore | Photo of Blondell Cummings by Kei Orihara | Photo of Steve Paxton and Lisa Nelson by Gil Grossi | Photo of Bebe Miller Company by Lila Hurwitz | Photo of Levi Gonzalez, Rebecca Cyr, and Hristoula Harakas by John Cyr

Danspace @ 50: The Work Is Never Done. Sanctuary Always Needed.

Danspace Project @ 50:
The Work Is Never Done. Sanctuary Always Needed.

a spring season festival weaving past, present, and future through the work of iconic, historic, and contemporary artists who all find sanctuary at Danspace Project.

Steve Paxton – a video amble with Lisa Nelson and Cathy Weis

Reimagined performances of landmark work from artists Donna Uchizono, Bebe Miller Company, Ishmael Houston Jones + the late Fred Holland

Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets Reunion
with Claudia La Rocco, Rashaun Mitchell, Sara Mearns, Jodi Melnick, Silas Riener, Kaitlyn Gilliland, Troy Schumacher, Jillian Pena, Yve Laris Cohen, Emily Coates, Pam Tanowitz, and Howard Silver

Reggie Wilson: Some Reflections on Prayerful Platforms Film Screening and Conversation

Marjani Forté-Saunders performing Chicken Soup by the late Blondell Cummings

15 Years of Danspace Project’s Platform Series at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
with Judy Hussie-Taylor, Seta Morton, Okwui Okpokwasili, Eiko Otake, and Reggie Wilson

February 14 – June 9, 2025

Danspace Project continues its 50th birthday into spring 2025, celebrating this significant anniversary with programs that weave Danspace’s past, present, and future through the work of iconic, historic, and contemporary artists who find artistic sanctuary at Danspace Project. This year, artists, writers, and curators will explore Danspace’s archives and its history over the decades, alongside presentations of both historic and new work in dance.

It is almost impossible to fully capture the depth and breadth of choreographers and artists who’ve launched their careers at Danspace Project since 1974. From Meredith Monk to Ishmael Houston-Jones, from John Jasperse to DD Dorvillier, from Miguel Guttierez to Michelle Dorrance, from Okwui Okpokwasili to Kyle Abraham. It’s a long list of luminaries. This spring’s offerings reflect only a tiny fraction of the influential artists who call Danspace home (see 50th video commissions here). With this spring season, Danspace attempts to offer a glimpse of artistic transmission and exchange between and throughout the generations.

“Since 2010, exchange between generations of artists has been a focus of our signature Platform series and was carried forward as an area of interest and research for our Artist Research Fellows (2021–2023),” writes Executive Director and Chief Curator Judy Hussie-Taylor. “The 50th is an opportunity to continue forging connections between artists from different eras who share a passionate curiosity about artistic experimentation and exploration.”

The winter and spring 2025 seasons will focus on the archive and the celebrated icons of dance who found home at Danspace Project.

VISIT THE CALENDAR

for more information and to purchase tickets for performances and RSVP for special events

Photo of Jelani Taylor by Emily Farthing | Photo of Nile Harris by Matthew Leifheit

DraftWork: Jelani Taylor + Nile Harris

Saturday, February 22 | 3PM

Curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones, Danspace Project’s DraftWork series hosts free, informal showings of new works in varying stages of development. This afternoon features performances by Jelani Taylor and Nile Harris.

Showings are followed by a reception, conversation, and Q&A between the artists.

RSVP HERE

Before you visit:

Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project

Jelani Taylor is a dancer, choreographer, and arts administrator from Virginia Beach, Virginia, currently working out of New York City. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of Era Dance Company and is the Artists of Color Council Coordinator for Movement Research. Jelani’s choreography has been presented nationally at Inside/Out at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the International Association of Blacks in Dance Conference (IABD), National Dance Society Conference (NDS), and various festivals in Virginia and New York City. He has performed in work by Nathan Trice, Sinclair O’Gaga, and Mariah Lopez. Jelani and Era Dance Company were artist/company in residence at Norfolk State University and a part of the Digging in Group, Artist Residency program at Green Space Studio. He is currently a 2024/25 Performance Project Fellow at University Settlement. Jelani graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) with a B.F.A in Dance and Choreography in 2019. While at VCU, Jelani was the recipient of the African American Studies Department’s “Black History in the Making” Award.

Nile Harris is a performer and director of live art. He has done a few things and hopes to do a few more, God willing.

Photo of Ishmael Houston-Jones and Fred Holland by Pamela Moore

OO-GA-LA Reimagined (The Fred Holland and Ishmael Houston-Jones 1983 Duet Danced into the 21st Century)

Thursday, February 27 | 7:30PM
Friday, February 28 | 7:30PM
Saturday, March 1 | 7:30PM

Open Dress Rehearsal*
Tuesday, February 25 | 7:30PM

To RSVP for Open Dress Rehearsal, Click Here

As part of recognizing Danspace Project’s 50th anniversary, Ishmael Houston-Jones will present OO-GA-LA Reimagined (The Fred Holland and Ishmael Houston-Jones 1983 Duet Danced into the 21st Century), performed by AJ Wilmore, Stephanie Hewett, and Kris Lee.

Houston-Jones writes: “In 1983 at the Danspace Project festival Contact at 10th and 2nd which celebrated the 11th year that Steve Paxton named the form Contact Improvisation, Fred Holland and I were invited to perform a duet on the Partners Program along with Steve and Nancy Stark Smith and others. Fred and I, who considered ourselves to be the Black Punks of Contact, decided to do our C.I. duet by doing everything wrong. We rehearsed in East Village bars like the Pyramid Club on Avenue A after midnight and were given a cassette tape of sound loops from Kung Fu movies compiled by composer Mark Larson. But it was Fred who named the first ‘wrong’ item in our unpublished score when he said, ‘We are Black.’ We were one of very few people of color included in the festival or inhabiting the C.I. milieu at all. The videos of the two performances of OO-GA-LA by Cathy Weis and Lisa Nelson were largely unseen after the festival until found by Karen Nelson in the early 2000s. I’ve chosen to give the Wrong Contact Score to three AFAB dancers of color who are extraordinary performers, highly skilled improvisors, and innovative DJs to Queer this duet from 40 years and bring it to a new generation.”

*About Open Dress Rehearsal: Tuesday evening’s dress rehearsal will be free with RSVP and open to the public at limited-capacity. Open dress rehearsals are a mask-required, community-minded program prioritizing our immunocompromised and low-income audiences. Staff and audiences will be required to wear masks (N95 or KN95) and performing artists (if unmasked) will be required to test for COVID-19 (rapid tests provided by Danspace Project).

Tickets
support Danspace’s 50th anniversary!

$10 Members
$20 Regular Price
$30 A little extra
$40 A little more!
$50 Celebrating 50 years!
$100 Here’s to the next 50!

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Before you visit:

Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project

Ishmael Houston-Jones is an award winning choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and curator. His improvised dance and text work has been performed in New York, across the US, and in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Latin America. Drawn to collaborations as a way to move beyond boundaries and the known, Houston-Jones celebrates the political aspect of cooperation. Houston-Jones and Fred Holland shared a 1984 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders, which reintroduced the erased narrative of the Black cowboy back into the mythology of the American west. He was awarded his second “Bessie” Award for the 2010 revival of THEM, his 1985/86 collaboration with writer Dennis Cooper and composer Chris Cochrane. In 2017 he received a third “Bessie” for Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other Works by John Bernd presented by Danspace Project. In 2020 he received a fourth “Bessie” for Service to the Field of Dance. Houston-Jones is the DraftWork curator for works-in progress at Danspace Project in New York. He has curated Platform 2012: Parallels which focused on choreographers from the African diaspora and postmodernism and co-curated with Will Rawls Platform 2016: Lost & Found, Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now both at Danspace Project. As an author Houston-Jones’ essays, fiction, interviews, and performance texts have been published in several anthologies and in numerous journals and magazines. His FAT and Other Stories: Some Writing About Sex was published in June 2018 by Yonkers International Press.

Photo by John Cyr of Levi Gonzalez, Rebecca Cyr, and Hristoula Harakas

Donna Uchizono: Dedications / State of Heads (1999)

Thursday, March 13 | 7:30PM
Friday, March 14 | 7:30PM
Saturday, March 15 | 7:30PM

Open Dress Rehearsal*
Tuesday, March 11 | 7:30PM

To RSVP for Open Dress Rehearsal, Click Here

Donna Uchizono performed her first choreographic works as part of Danspace Project’s Access program in 1988. Uchizono has often recounted how Bebe Miller approached her after that first Danspace performance and said “You are a choreographer. I’m going to tell my friend Ralph Lemon to come and see your work.” This spurred an invitation from then Danspace director Terry Fox and launched Uchizono’s 30-year award-winning career. Uchizono is reimagining her Bessie Award-winning State of Heads for a new generation of dancers to celebrate Danspace’s 50th.

This evening will begin with three dance Dedications and continue into an intergenerational restaging of Uchizono’s State of Heads (1999).

Dedications: Donna Uchizono, alongside artists David Thomson and Jodi Melnick, will offer a series of dance dedications exploring the body’s expansive capacity to listen. Grounded in the question “if you were to dedicate a dance to a person, who would that be?”, the dancers invite three audience volunteers to privately talk about someone they would like to dedicate a dance to in a mutually vulnerable exchange, anchored by the weight of trust and intimacy. Each dancer will then create a dedication informed by our ongoing research and development of the body as a reservoir of felt histories. In “Dedications,” we share the power by sharing the weight of vulnerability with dance’s profound ability for direct human sharing, redefining audience engagement to one of audience-shared authorship.

State of Heads: State of Heads (1999), with its “breathtaking” opening, explores the feeling of waiting. The title originated with the idea that the “heads” of states seem to be disconnected from the “body” of the country. The company used this image as a springboard from which to dive into the exploration of disjointed-ness and the passage of time in a state of hiatus, surprisingly creating a strange world of endearingly odd characters that are propelled by unseen undercurrents. For Danspace Project’s 50th anniversary—performed to the “Bessie” Award-winning sound score by James Lo—the original cast, Levi Gonzalez, Rebecca Serrell Cyr, including Donna Uchizono, who has not performed this work in 25 years, will hand the baton over to a younger generation, Tim Bendernagel, Chelsea Hecht, and Paulina Meneses. Originally commissioned by the Bessie Schoenberg/First Light commissioning program of New York’s Dance Theater Workshop with funds from the Jerome Foundation, State of Heads premiered at Dance Theater Workshop. The work was subsequently performed across the U.S. and internationally.

*About Open Dress Rehearsal: Tuesday evening’s dress rehearsal will be free with RSVP and open to the public at limited-capacity. Open dress rehearsals are a mask-required, community-minded program prioritizing our immunocompromised and low-income audiences. Staff and audiences will be required to wear masks (N95 or KN95) and performing artists (if unmasked) will be required to test for COVID-19 (rapid tests provided by Danspace Project).

BUY TICKETS

Before you visit:

Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project

Hailed by Ms. Magazine’s end of the century issue as a “choreographer making great leaps forward into the 21st century,” Donna Uchizono is the Artistic Director of her eponymous New York-based company. Since her choreographic debut in 1990, Uchizono rapidly emerged from the “downtown scene” as a choreographer known for her spicy movement, wit and rich invention. Donna Uchizono Company has toured nationally and internationally and she has created work for notables Mikhail Baryshnikov, Paula Vogel, Oskar Eustis, David Hammons and for Oliver Sack’s 80th birthday celebration. In 2011, after decades of critically acclaimed dance works, Donna Uchizono was identified by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (NYPL) and Dance Heritage Coalition as a master choreographer whose works require preservation. Since 2022, Uchizono has been humbled by the distinction of being the first and only American-born choreographer of Asian ancestry in the history of Modern Dance to have received the recognition of both cumulative esteemed *national awards and significant national and international touring of an eponymous dance company. Donna Uchizono has been using this odd status as an advocate to shed light on the issues of the invisibility of American-born choreographers of Asian Ancestry and the disparity of funding.

*This designation recognizes receipt of a Guggenheim Fellowship, United States Artist Award, National Endowment for the Arts Company Project Awards and Fellowships, MAP Fund, Alpert Award, “Bessie” New York Dance and Performance Award, Jerome Foundation, National Performance Network Commission and Touring support, Creative Capital, National Dance Project Commission and Touring support, Dance Magazine, MetLife, among many other awards including extensive New York State and New York City sustained funding and five New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships.

“Vespers, Reimagined rehearsal, Danspace Project, November 2024. Bebe Miller and Angie Hauser watch Jasmine Hearn, Stacy Matthew Spence and Chloe London watching Bebe performing Vespers (1982).” Photo: Lila Hurwitz

Bebe Miller Company: Vespers, Reimagined (2025)

Thursday, March 27 | 7:30PM
Friday, March 28 | 7:30PM
Saturday, March 29 | 7:30PM

Open Dress Rehearsal*
Tuesday, March 25 | 7:30PM

To RSVP for Open Dress Rehearsal, Click Here

Bebe Miller launched her choreographic career at Danspace Project with the premiere of her breathtaking solo Vespers in 1982 as part of the seminal Parallels, a series curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones and featuring an extraordinary group of young Black choreographers who were working “in the parallel worlds of Black America and new dance.” After Parallels, Miller went on to a brilliant 40-year career and toured extensively with her company throughout the United States. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, four Bessie Awards, and a Doris Duke Award.

As a part of Danspace’s 50th anniversary, Miller has been invited by Associate Curator Seta Morton to reimagine her 1982 solo on a group of five young dance artists.

Performers include: Chloe London, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, Bria Bacon, Stacy Matthew Spence, and Jasmine Hearn.

“Returning to Vespers now, reimagined with these artists, has been a kind of archeological dig into how we’ve all arrived at our various understandings of the art, the currencies, as well as the physics of dancing.” —Bebe Miller

*About Open Dress Rehearsal: Tuesday evening’s dress rehearsal will be free with RSVP and open to the public at limited-capacity. Open dress rehearsals are a mask-required, community-minded program prioritizing our immunocompromised and low-income audiences. Staff and audiences will be required to wear masks (N95 or KN95) and performing artists (if unmasked) will be required to test for COVID-19 (rapid tests provided by Danspace Project).

BUY TICKETS

Before you visit:

Accessibility at Danspace Project
Covid Safety at Danspace Project

Bebe Miller’s vision of dance and performance resides in her faith in the moving body as a record of thought, experience and sheer beauty. She has collaborated with artists, composers, writers, and designers, along with the dancers who share her studio practice and from whom she’s learned what dancing can reveal. A native New Yorker, she formed Bebe Miller Company in 1985. Since then, the Company has been commissioned by Brooklyn Academy of Music’s NEXT WAVE Festival, The Joyce Theater, Wexner Center for the Arts, On The Boards, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Theater Artaud, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Bates Dance Festival, Dance Theater Workshop, New York Live Arts and Danspace Project, and has performed worldwide. The Company’s work encompasses choreography, writing and film, along with digital archive products that share their creative practice. Bebe is a Professor Emerita at Ohio State University, and though her home is in Columbus, OH, she is spending a year in a forest on Vashon Island, WA.

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