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).
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.
