The Annual Lang College Fall Dance Production
Lang students perform in a place called Mem, by David Thomson from the 2013 Movement Research Repertory class. Photo by Frank Mullaney.
New York Times has called The Dance program at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts “one of the more progressive collegiate dance departments in New York.” On Friday, December 13 and Saturday, 14, audience members will experience this first-hand at their Annual Fall Dance performances.
Working with New York Live Arts, which is also dedicated to emphasizing research and experimentation within the movement-based arts, the students of Lang dance program mount seasonal performances of original dance works created by guest choreographers and students. This year, that group includes Lang faculty Faye Driscoll and Sally Silvers, and students working in Gutierrez’s “Choreographic Research” course.
This trio – Driscoll, Gutierrez, and Silvers – are formidable figures in the New York dance scene. Driscoll is a New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award-winning choreographer and director who has been called “a startlingly original talent” by the New York Times. Gutierrez is a dance and music artist based in New York whose work is characterized by the attentive state it imposes on its audience, while centering around enduring philosophical questions about desire, longing and the search for meaning. Silvers, also a Bessie winner, has worked with the Jerome Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts (who gave her six separate awards) and twice from Meet the Composer/ Choreographer Project for collaborations with John Zorn and Bruce Andrews.
The Lang Dance Program is run by faculty members Danielle Goldman and Neil Greenberg. It offers a unique undergraduate dance curriculum centered on recent developments in the field, combining intensive practice and performance opportunities with a rigorous liberal arts education. Students at Lang explore dance through varied modes of analysis—verbal, textual and physical—through a curriculum that emphasizes research and experimentation. Conversation is fostered across artistic genres and students are encouraged to think about dance in social, historical and cultural contexts, through a variety of disciplinary lenses. This approach stimulates aspiring dancers and choreographers to think about their roles in society and to consider multiple ways of engaging a public through dance.
The performance is $9; and free to all students and New School faculty, staff, and alumni with ID at the door or by emailing the New York Live Arts Box Office at: boxoffice@newyorklivearts.org.