Valerie Green/Dance Entropy: Utopia
Community ACCESS provides subsidized off-season rental opportunities for Danspace Project community members.
What does Utopia mean to you? Is it a physical, external place—or, might it reside internally? Valerie Green/Dance Entropy, in collaboration with visual artist Keren Anavy, explores the idea of Utopia through dance and visual art in her newest evening-length work.
Green questions whether Utopia might be an internal place, investigated through personal and intimate moments and alongside the community. The notion of what it means to be safe persists inside an environment that is continually built and deconstructed. Anavy’s artwork displays on 10-foot cylindrical pillars used by the dancers throughout the piece.
Click here to watch a trailer for Utopia
Choreography by Valerie Green
Concept by Keren Anavy and Valerie Green
Visual Art by Keren Anavy
Performed by Emily Elizabeth Aiken, Daan Bootsma, Caitlyn Casson, Hana Ginsburg Tirosh, Erin Giordano, Kristin Licata, and Richard Scandola
Music by Mark Katsaounis
Additional vocals by Katie Mullins
Lighting design by Kathy Kaufmann
Costumes by Deborah Erenberg
Video Projection by Alex Lopez
Founded in 1998, Valerie Green/Dance Entropy believes in humanizing movement, both in Ms. Green’s critically acclaimed choreographic work and the company’s mission to plant creative seeds in communities across the world. Intersecting mortal and transcendent, sensual and sophisticated, visceral and self-aware, VG/DE invites the artist, the audience—the human—into a compelling, physical experience. Based out of its home studio, Green Space in Queens, NY, VG/DE combines performance and specialized outreach programs to inspire communities in cultural institutions throughout the word.
Keren Anavy is a NYC based visual artist who explores the dynamic relationships between nature, culture and site. Challenging the boundaries of painting and drawing as a form of installation, her settings examine broader social contexts through a diversity of imagery, materials and architecture. Anavy’s practice offers a platform for questioning our environments by creating immersive installations, places that often appear to be fantastic. She is interested in how cultivated landscape as well as wild nature can function as cultural agents in Eastern and Western societies. www.kerenanavy.com