Megan Williams Dance Projects
For the health and safety of our community, all public performances through March 28 have been cancelled. We will offer full refunds to audiences and seek to reschedule suspended performances and events when reasonably possible. We will be in touch with all ticket buyers directly regarding refunds. MORE INFO
Thursday, March 26, 8pm
Friday, March 27, 8pm
Saturday, March 28, 8pm
Danspace Project’s Community ACCESS series provides subsidized off-season rental opportunities for Danspace Project community members.
can I have it without begging is a live music and dance event created and performed in collaboration with acclaimed composer Eve Beglarian, the dancers of Megan Williams Dance Projects, five new music luminaries, and the Young People’s Chorus of NYC. The evening will be comprised of four connected repertory dance works that live in and around existing compositions from Beglarian’s expansive catalogue, as well as inside of two newly commissioned world premiere works.
Works include:
My Great Desire, a large ensemble “ballet” to five sections of Eve Beglarian’s MACHAUT IN THE MACHINE AGE series, that interrogates and agitates the classical lexicon while forging a narrative around attention, longing, and the finely drawn and oft-severed line between desire and love. Beglarian has been writing responses to 14th century Guillaume de Machaut’s secular songs since the 1980s and has added a new world premiere piece for these performances.
Play Like A Girl, a raucous and contemplative suite of short dances to Beglarian’s keyboard variations of the same name based on the Bulgarian tune “Kaval Sviri”(sung by the Young People’s Chorus of NYC in these performances) that reveal embodied memories of the physical struggles and joys of girlhood that fuel our collective adult sense of self.
Five Things is a reboot of a duet that originally premiered in the DANCE NOW Festival in 2018, and is now reimagined for Megan and Esmé Boyce. It jumps head first into the musical dialogue and zen text in Beglarian’s work that was written in October 2001 and was the first piece Beglarian’s wrote after the events of early September of that year to the text of Thomas Cleary’s translation of a Song Dynasty (10th to 13th century) letter to a Zen Master Xiang.
Swift Bird, a newly commissioned world premiere companion piece to Five Things, is a rigorous solo for Megan Williams that explores and exposes the vulnerability and solitude of aging.
Dancers: Esmé Boyce, Robert Mark Burke, Derek Crescenti, Réka Echerer, Mary Lyn Graves, Chelsea Hecht, Courtney Lopes, Amelia Pagliaro, Joshua Tuason, and Michael Wang
Musicians: Margaret Lancaster (flute), Tristan Kasten-Krause (bass), Amy Garapic (percussion), Thomas Feng (piano), Huizi Zhang (toy piano/synth)
Lighting design: Kathy Kaufmann
Sound design: Sam Crawford
Costume designer: Barbara Erin Delo
Accessibility Danspace Project’s main entrance is fully wheelchair accessible via ramp. A same-level restroom is available near Danspace Project’s main performance space in the church sanctuary.
Megan Williams is an independent dance artist, choreographer, in demand teacher and repetiteur. Her choreography has been produced throughout the United States. In addition to performing her own work, she can be seen dancing with choreographer Rebecca Stenn and in Netta Yurashalmy’s Paramodernities project. In 1988, she joined the Mark Morris Dance Group, dancing for 10 years, touring worldwide, teaching, and appearing in several films, including Falling Down Stairs (with Yo Yo Ma), The Hidden Soul of Harmony, The Hard Nut and Dido and Aeneas. Her dancing with MMDG was named “ an unusual blend of delicate precision and sensuous fluency…..with considerable strength and profound musicality.” (Tobi Tobias for New York Magazine).Williams continues her affiliation with Morris, as guest ballet master , guest rehearsal director, and as a stager of his works.
Megan Williams Dance Projects was founded in 2016 with the mission of interrogating and elevating the human experience through the research, creation, production and performance of contemporary dance works. The company was a DANCE NOW Commissioned Artist in 2018 , premiering Williams’ first full evening work, One Woman Show to great acclaim at Joe’s Pub in NYC which was hailed as “whip-smart and vastly entertaining” (Deborah Jowitt for Artsjournal), and was recently in the Fridays at Noon series at the 92nd Street Y, and part of the Dance Off the Grid series at the Emelin Theater in Mamaroneck, N.Y.
Megan Williams Dance Projects Composer and performer Eve Beglarian “is a humane, idealistic rebel and a musical sensualist” (Los Angeles Times). A 2017 winner of the Alpert Award in the Arts for her “prolific, engaging and surprising body of work,” she has also been awarded the 2015 Robert Rauschenberg Prize from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Beglarian’s recent projects include a collaboration with writer/performer Karen Kandel and director Mallory Catlett about women in Vicksburg from the Civil War to the present, a piece about the controversial Balthus painting Thérèse Dreaming for vocalist Lucy Dhegrae, and a duo for uilleann pipes and organ that premiered at Disney Hall as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 100th anniversary celebrations. Beglarian’s chamber, choral, and orchestral music has been commissioned and widely performed by major orchestras across the country, and by individual performers including Maya Beiser, Sarah Cahill, Lauren Flanigan, Marya Martin, and Mary Rowell. Highlights of Beglarian’s work in music theater includes music for Mabou Mines’ Obie winning Dollhouse, Animal Magnetism, Ecco Porco, Choephorai, and Shalom Shanghai, all directed by Lee Breuer; Forgiveness, a collaboration with Chen Shi-Zheng and Noh master Akira Matsui; and the China National Beijing Opera Theater’s production of The Bacchae, also directed by Chen Shi-Zheng. Performance projects include Brim, Songs from a Book of Days, The Story of B, Open Secrets, Hildegurls’ Ordo Virtutum, twisted tutu, and typOpera. https://evbvd.com