Gibney Company UP CLOSE
Dec 10-14

New York Live Arts

Tickets: $5-$80
NYLIVEARTS.ORG

Gibney Company returns to New York Live Arts with UP CLOSE, our annual series offering audiences an intimate look at the extraordinary artistry and technical prowess of Gibney Company’s amazing dancers as they perform new works by choreographers Emilie Leriche and Mthuthuzeli November, and the North American premiere of Trio by internationally recognized choreographer William Forsythe.

In William Forsythe’s compact dance Trio, a work first performed by the Frankfurt Ballett in 1996, the Allegro movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 provides the rapidly shifting, tilting ground for the lively interplay of the three dancers. They examine the weight of the body and set it loose to the music in a virtuosic, flying tangle of limbs.

Mthuthuzeli November’s Vukani, a Gibney Company commission, was enthusiastically received by audiences at Festival des Arts de Saint Sauveur and Chautauqua Institution last summer. In Vukani, the South African choreographer explores communion with the elders, a search for guidance, provoking the spirit to take over the body, and showing the way.

Beck/Call, a new Company commission developed this fall by choreographer and performer Emilie Leriche, grew out of the idea of runaways sparked by the choreographer’s relationship to home: leaving when very young and then moving farther and farther away. This work explores the fantasy of what lies beyond the present, ultimately mining the tension between going back and staying gone.

Photo: Artistic Associate Andrew McShea by Nir Arieli