Winter is here! Our Winter 2012 season is filled-to-the-brim with new work by more than 40 emerging and established movement artists.

The season begins with reprisals of two evening-length 2010/11 Danspace Project commissions by Robert Steijn & Maria Hassabi and Tere O’Connor Dance. Danspace Project is re-presenting these pieces to coincide with Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) Annual Meeting in New York City. If you missed Tere O’Connor Dance’s sold out run this past week, you’ll have another chance to see Cover Boy!

Danspace Project is honored to present new work by the singular, extraordinary choreographer Keely Garfield, and to continue our DraftWork series of works-in-progress, followed by the much-anticipated next chapter in Danspace Project’s Platform series, PLATFORM 2012: Parallels, curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones (pictured above at Danspace Project in 1982).

PLATFORM 2012: Parallels is the latest chapter of Danspace Project’s acclaimed Platforms series. This Platform marks the 30th anniversary of Houston-Jones’ groundbreaking project Parallels, which originally took place at Danspace Project in 1982 and featured post-modern African-American choreographers Ralph Lemon, Bebe Miller, Blondell Cummings, Fred Holland, Christina Rrata Jones, Gus Solomons, jr., and the late Harry Whittaker Sheppard. In 1987 they performed at the American Center in Paris with additional artist Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, founder of Urban Bush Women. As Houston-Jones wrote in the original program: “while all the choreographers participating are Black and in some ways relate to the rich tradition of Afro-American dance, each has chosen a form outside of that tradition and even outside the tradition of mainstream modern dance.”

Today, Houston-Jones revisits this premise and asks “In a time when the President of the United States is the progeny of a Kenyan and a European American, what real meaning do the terms ‘Black,’ ‘Afro-American,’ or ‘African-American’ hold? Does ‘outside the mainstream’ have the same resonance that it had three decades earlier? How have new generations’ ideas evolved from the time of the first Parallels?

As a part of Parallels, Danspace Project will publish a catalogue with contributions by Houston-Jones, Lemon, Miller, Zollar, as well as Dean Moss, Thomas DeFrantz, Wendy Perron, and Will Rawls. The catalogue will be the first publication to examine the legacy of New York-based black avant-garde dance artists of the 1980s. It will feature historic and contemporary photographs as well as biographical information about all of the nearly fifty artists involved. Judy Hussie-Taylor serves as Artistic Director of Danspace Project’s Platform series and Editor-in-Chief with Lydia Bell, curatorial fellow through the new ICPP program at Wesleyan, as Managing Editor. The catalogue will be on sale to the public starting February 1, 2012.

Over the eight weeks dance scholar Carl Paris will write bi-weekly essays which will be posted on Danspace Project’s blog, and included in a Danspace-published e-book featuring essays and images contextualizing Danspace’s 2012 Parallels Platform.

Visit our calendar and tickets section of our website to read more about this exciting season!