Gotham Arts Exchange presents GOTHAM DANCE FESTIVAL

Returning to The Joyce Theater

with Six Programs featuring Ten Choreographers

including Brian Brooks, Monica Bill Barnes,

Kate Weare and Patrick Corbin

June 1 – 12, 2011

Fresh off the overwhelming success of last summer’s presentation of four female choreographers, Gotham Arts Exchange presents the Gotham Dance Festival, returning to The Joyce Theater with expanded programming and a newly branded festival. Gotham Dance Festival presents six programs featuring ten choreographers from June 1-12, 2011 at The Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, NYC. The festival will also present six talented emerging artists in Summer Sampler Matinees. Tickets start at $10 and are available at 212-242-0800 or www.joyce.org.

In its Joyce debut, the Brian Brooks Moving Company will present a World Premiere piece set to original music by Adam Crystal, who has scored numerous films and commercials, and has performed with such musicians as Fischerspooner and The Citizens Band, among others. The company will also present MOTOR (2010), an exploration of perpetual motion performed by the group’s seven dancers. Featuring a tunnel-like structure that stretches three miles of cables beyond the stage and over the audience, MOTOR is set to a propulsive score by Jonathan Pratt with costumes by Liz Prince. Touring internationally since 2002, the Brian Brooks Moving Company was described in The Village Voice as “smart, utterly unpretentious heroes, they make your eyes water and your spirit soar.”

Wednesday, June 1 at 7:30pm (Opening Night); Friday, June 3 at 8pm; Sunday, June 5 at 7:30pm

Dubbed by The New York Times as “the master of the dance equivalent of a sly guffaw,” Monica Bill Barnes & Company returns to The Joyce after sold out performances this summer. The company will present three works, Suddenly Summer Somewhere (2007), the New York premiere of mostly fanfare (2010) and the world premiere of Everything is getting better all the time (2011). This evening of outrageous and whimsical dance is full of surprise and borrows from the glamour of rock concerts, the good will of a little league game, and the enthusiasm of a high school marching band. Come see this unique company, which “can stir your heart as well as make you laugh” (The Village Voice, Deborah Jowitt).

Thursday, June 2 at 8pm (Opening Night); Saturday, June 4 at 8pm

Kate Weare Company will present two works: the World Premiere of Garden, which grapples with the powerful issues of creative impulse, origination and identity, as well as a revival of the critically acclaimed Lean-To (2009), described by Deborah Jowitt of The Village Voice as: “…eroticism in its primal, devouring purity – challenging, at times ambiguous, and infinitely complex.” Heralded by the New Yorker as “an arresting new talent,” Kate Weare returns to the Joyce with more of the striking physicality and evocative performance style that sold out houses there in 2010.

Tuesday, June 7 at 7:30pm (Opening Night); Thursday, June 9 at 8pm; Saturday, June 11 at 8pm

CorbinDances celebrates its first Joyce Season with the World Premiere of Shady, an evening length work in two acts exploring the potential in a single phrase of movement. The audience gets a glimpse into the dancers’ playful minds as they discover new ways of deconstructing the original phrase and gain knowledge of themselves. Shady culminates in the unity of a single collective conscious as the dancers let loose in an ultimate expression of joy. Shadyfeatures new music composed by DJ/Producer Quinn Raymond, lighting by Joe Novak and costumes by the venerable Liz Prince. Michael Trusnovec (Paul Taylor Dance Company) and Sharon Milanese (Lucinda Childs Dance Company) join the company’s core dancers for its Joyce debut. Once one of Paul Taylor Dance Company’s most beloved dancers and now a proven choreographer in his own right, Patrick Corbin’s work has been described as “fully and uncompromisingly danced… uninhibited, brash, spirited, musical, [and] space engulfing,” said Lisa Traiger, Dance Magazine.

Wednesday, June 8 at 7:30pm (Opening Night); Friday, June 10 at 8pm; Sunday, June 12 at 7:30pm

The Gotham Dance Festival will also present six gifted emerging artists in Summer Sampler Matinee programs. The matinee programs on June 4-5 feature Kyle Abraham’s Abraham.in.Motion performing one of his newest works, The Quiet Dance; Gregory Dolbashian’s The DASH Ensemble presenting In Flux, a sensual piece full of dramatic tension and soft conflict; and the Faye Driscoll Dance Group performing snake dog dragon, an examination of the poignant tension between beauty, power and desire. The matinee programs on June 11-12 include Julian Barnett performing his gorgeous solo Echologue; Sydney Skybetter’s ensemble, Skybetter and Associates, presenting the world premiere of Temporary Mattersas well as a revival of Halcyon; and Ashleigh Leite returning to New York to present The Zoo, an explosive work with music by The Magnetic Fields and an original sound design by Leite herself.

Summer Sampler Matinee 1: Abraham, Driscoll, Dolbashian:

Saturday, June 4 at 2pm (Opening); Sunday, June 5 at 2pm

Summer Sampler Matinee 2: Barnett, Leite, Skybetter:

Saturday, June 11 at 2pm (Opening); Sunday, June 12 at 2pm

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Acclaimed by The Washington Post as “stunning in its simple beauty,” the New York City-based Brian Brooks Moving Company creates highly physical performances that reach international audiences. Artistic Director Brian Brooks amplifies the energy and design of his dances with sculptural installations that encompass both stage and audience, whimsically embracing the architectural aspects of choreography and performance. Within these dynamic and autonomous worlds, Brooks creates virtuosic physical situations that test the body’s limits. Since its first tour in 2002, the company has enjoyed repeat engagements at Dance Theater Workshop (2004, 2006), Wesleyan University (2002, 2007, 2009), SUMMERDANCE Santa Barbara (2004, 2005, 2006) and Alfred University (2004, 2005, 2008, 2010). Presented in New York City by organizations including the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival, Central Park Summerstage, Symphony Space and the 92nd Street Y Harkness Festival, the group’s national tours have included presentations by the American Dance Festival, Vanderbilt University, North Carolina State University, The Egg, Mt. Tremper Arts Festival and the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland. Their work is beginning to emerge in Asia and Europe with recent presentations at prominent international dance festivals. www.brianbrooksmovingcompany.com

Monica Bill Barnes & Company is a contemporary American dance company with the mission to celebrate individuality, humor and the innate theatricality of everyday life.Born and raised in Berkeley, California, Monica Bill Barnes moved to New York in 1995 after receiving her BA in philosophy from the University of California at San Diego. She has created twelve evening-length dance works, numerous site-specific events and several cabaret numbers for her company. Originally built upon a repertoire of solos and duets, MBB & CO. has performed in over twenty venues in New York City and has been presented in 30 cities throughout the United States and abroad. The company has received support from The National Endowment for The Arts, New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, The Greenwall Foundation, Bossak/Heilbron Charitable Foundation, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The Manhattan Community Arts Fund and The Fund for Creative Communities. In addition, major support has come in the form of creative residencies awarded by Jacob’s Pillow (2009 Creative Development Residency), the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University (2006-2007 Choreographic Fellowship), a residency provided by The Joyce Theater Foundation (2004-2005), Dancenow/NYC Silo Residency (2004, 2008, 2009) and The Yard (2002). Danspace Project presented the company’s first New York season, an evening length work titled, “When we were pretty” in 2002. During summer 2010, the company performed at Bates Dance Festival, American Dance Festival, The Joyce Theater and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. www.monicabillbarnes.com

Founded in 2005, Kate Weare Company is committed to creating dances that explore contemporary views of intimacy – both stark and tender – through the power and clarity of the moving body. In 2009 Deborah Jowitt of The Village Voice wrote, “Weare gets under the skin of movement with almost surgical exactness, inflames it, and then makes it glow with a strange, yet familiar light. No one else is making work quite like hers.” Kate Weare Company’s recent engagements include Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Fall for Dance at New York City Center, American Dance Festival, Spring to Dance St. Louis, Symphony Space, Bates Dance Festival, WestWave Dance Festival, SF’s ODC Theater, Joyce SoHo Residency, The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at FSU, Dance New Amsterdam’s A.I.R. Program and Danspace Project, as well as teaching and student commissions at Long Island University, Marymount Manhattan College, Bates Dance Festival, SUNY Brockport, Keene State College, Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Kate Weare is the recipient of a 2009 Princess Grace Award for Choreography, a nominee for the 2008 Alpert Award in the Arts for Choreography, and winner of The A.W.A.R.D. Show in 2007. Born in Oakland, California, Weare earned her BFA in Dance from California Institute of the Arts and was awarded a scholarship to attend London Contemporary Dance School. Weare toured with other companies and presented her own work in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Montreal, Belgrade and London, before moving to New York in 2000 and founding Kate Weare Company in 2005. Weare has since been awarded a Joyce SoHo Residency, a Jacob’s Pillow Creative Development Residency, a Dance New Amsterdam Residency, an ODC Theater Residency, Djerassi Artist’s Residency and a Choreographic Fellowship at The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography and a Joyce Theater Residency. Recent commissions for other companies include Scottish Dance Theatre, Axis Dance Company, Paradigm, CityDance Ensemble, and Buzz Dance Theatre (AU). www.kateweare.com

CorbinDances had its first New York season at Joyce SoHo in June 2006. Since then, highlights include performances at the One World Theatre in Austin, TX, La Mama Moves, NYC (2008 & 2009), Fire Island Dance Festival 13, Jacob’s Pillow’s Inside/Out (2007 & 2008), the Laguna Dance Festival, the Chautauqua Institute, Chautauqua, NY, Dance Place in Washington D.C, Grace St. Theatre in Richmond, VA, American Dance Institute in Rockville, MD, and theMary D’Angelo Performing Arts Center in Erie, PA. In May 2008 CorbinDances returned to Joyce SoHo for an unprecedented, acclaimed and sold-out two week season. The company is grateful to have received funding from the Greenwall Foundation, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Posner-Wallace Foundation and to support our NY seasons, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. CorbinDances was part of the 2009 Gotham Arts Exchange SummerDanz series at Dance Theatre Workshop, in NYC. Patrick Corbin (Artistic Director) was born and raised in Potomac, Maryland where he bagan his dance training at the age of three. In 1989 after being a member of the Joffrey Ballet for four years, Patrick joined the Paul Taylor Dance Company where he became one of its most celebrated members and danced there until 2005. He was featured in five PBS Great Performances between 1988 and 2004 and in the 1998 Academy Award nominated documentary “Dancemaker.” In 2001 Patrick was the recipient of the New York Performance Award (Bessie) for Sustained Achievement with Paul Taylor Dance Company. Since he retired from dancing with the Paul Taylor Company, Patrick has been a featured dancer in Lar Lubovitch’s “Men’s Stories” (2005), David Michaelek’s film installations, “Slow Dancing” (2007) and Martha Clarke’s most recent work “Angel Reapers” (2010). Since 2005 he has choreographed over a dozen works for CorbinDances and nine works for companies and college dance programs in the U.S. In addition to his work with CorbinDances, Patrick stages the work of Paul Taylor on companies throughout the world. www.corbindances.org

Kyle Abraham began his training at the Civic Light Opera Academy and the Creative and Performing Arts High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He continued his dance studies in New York, receiving a BFA from SUNY Purchase and an MFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. As a performer, Abraham has worked with several acclaimed modern dance companies including David Dorfman Dance, Dance Conduction Continuum, Mimi Garrard Dance Theater, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, The Kevin Wynn Collection and Attack Theatre. Over the past few years, Abraham has received tremendous accolades and awards for his dancing and choreography including Dance Magazine’s coveted 25 to Watch in 2009, a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant 2008, and a Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowship in 2002. His choreography has been presented throughout the United States and abroad, most recently at Dance Theater Workshop, Bates Dance Festival, Jacob’s Pillow, The Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum located in Okinawa Japan, Springboard Danse Montreal, City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival and Harlem Stage/Aaron Davis Hall. www.abrahaminmotion.org

Faye Driscoll was hailed as “1 of 25 to watch out for in 2008” by Dance Magazine. Her work, 837 Venice Boulevard, was named “one of the top 5 dance shows of 2008” by the New York Times. Driscoll’s video flip book dance, Loneliness, was a featured work at the New Museum’s first triennial, and over the past year, she has developed There is so much mad in me through a commission from the American Dance Festival and subsequent residencies at Kaatsbaan, University Settlement and Joyce SoHo. In addition to creating her own work, Driscoll collaborates with several theater artists. Last spring, she served as choreographer for the Soho Rep premiere of Cynthia Hopkins’ The Truth: A Tragedy, and the previous year, she directed and choreographed for Taylor Mac’s 5-act epic extravaganza, The Lily’s Revenge, a sold-out hit at HERE Arts Center in October 2009. Other recent stage collaborations include choreography for Jennifer Miller’s Cracked Ice, the National Theater of the United States of America’s Chautauqua! and Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment and Church. Driscoll was a member of Doug Varone and Dancers, performed extensively with Yasmeen Godder and was choreographic assistant to David Neumann in his creation of The Common Foreign Language of the Red-Haired People with Mikhail Baryshnikov. She holds a BFA from NYU/Tisch School for the Arts. www.fayedriscoll.com

Born and raised in New York City, Gregory Dolbashian made his professional stage debut at the age of eight with the Glimmerglass Opera Company. Soon after, he was cast in the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson world tour of Einstein on the Beach. He received his dance training at the Alvin Ailey School on a fellowship scholarship and then graduated cum laude from the dance conservatory at Purchase. Since then he has gone on to dance and choreograph with a variety of artists, including: Patrick Corbin, Nelly van Bommel, Sylvain Emard and Chicago Ballet. He was resident choreographer for both Chicago Ballet’s spring season in 2008 and CorbinDances in 2007, selected as one of four emerging choreographers in the Springboard Montreal intensive run by Juilliard’s Alexandra Wells, and awarded a Bessie Schoenberg Residency at The Yard in 2010. Gregory’s works have been performed at Jacob’s Pillow (Inside/Out), Joyce SoHo, Alvin Ailey Studio Theatre, Dance Place (DC), Athenaeum Theatre (Chicago), and in New York as part of the Reverb Festival, the Dance Sampler at Symphony Space, and at the Gershwin Hotel. He was featured as in Gotham Arts Exchanges’ SummerDANZ at DTW in 2009, then debuted his own company, The DASH Ensemble, in December 2009 at Joyce SoHo. Since then, DASH performances have included appearances in Dance Gotham Festival at the Skirball Center (January 2010), on the Inside/Out stage at Jacob’s Pillow (July 2010), at the DanceNOW festival at DTW (September 2010) and as part of the NuDances series at The Riverside Church Theater (December 2010). www.thedashensemble.org

Born in Tokyo, Japan and transplanted to California, Julian Barnett began his training at the Idyllwild Arts Academy under the tutelage of Jean-Marie Martz of the Stuttgart Ballet. Continuing exploration at the Joffrey Ballet and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Julian proceeded to begin influential friendships with Wally Cardona, Larry Keigwin, and Johannes Wieland. He has also worked with Lar Lubovitch, Doug Elkins, Shapiro and Smith, Kevin Wynn, and the Metropolitan Opera Ballet with Doug Varone. Barnett has created work for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, The Juilliard School, Evolve Dance Ensemble and has received commissions from Danspace Project, Dance New Amsterdam, Duo Multicultural Arts Center, and SUNY Purchase. His work has been presented in China, Germany, Austria, Mexico and Canada as well as throughout the US at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, PS 122, Movement Research and Dance Theater Workshop amongst others. His first evening-length work, Sound Memory, was listed as one of the “Best Dances of 2009” by Time Out New York. In the UK, his solo work The Clean State, was recently a finalist in the Sadler’s Wells Global Dance Contest. In the research and development of his work, Julian has been invited to choreographic residencies at Springboard, Montreal, Mt. Tremper Arts, The Egg, Kaatsbaan, and has been an artist in residence at Joyce SoHo. www.julianbarnett.com

A native of Scottsdale, Arizona, Ashleigh Leite graduated from SUNY Purchase with a BFA in Dance Performance in 1997 and joined the Stephen Petronio Company that same year. Over the next eight years, Leite served as Petronio’s rehearsal director and also assisted him on several creative projects including Petronio’s Underland for Sydney Dance Company and The Human Suite for CandoCo. In 2005, she began creating dances for her own project, Ashleigh Leite Dance, and early on became in artist-in-residence at Joyce Soho, where she developed Crawl Space, an evening-length, multi-media ensemble piece that premiered at Danspace Project in November 2007. In her performance work, Leite seeks a communion with the audience allowing the viewer to take a journey through the prism of their own imagination. Her choreography is rooted in discovering the performers’ physical instincts. Hailed as being “a choreographer to be seen, and seen again,” Ashleigh creates work that explores the dynamic nature and physical realization of the unexpected.

Sydney Skybetter is a choreographer, curator, and consultant for performing arts organizations. After studying at Interlochen, Columbia, and New York University, Sydney performed with Christopher Williams and the Anna Sokolow Foundation. His choreography has been presented in New York at Dance Theater Workshop, La MaMa, and the Danspace Project, among many others. Sydney has consulted for the National Ballet of Canada, David Dorfman Dance, and the Jerome Robbins Foundation, and is a Partner with Design Brooklyn, which provides web and online infrastructure solutions for the arts. He is a Producer with the Dance[NOW] NYC Festival, a teacher at NYU Tisch Dance, a Dance History lecturer for St. Mary’s College / LEAP, and serves on the Board of the Gotham Arts Exchange / Zia Artists, the New York Dance and Performance (“Bessie”) Awards Committee, and is a Trustee of Dance/USA. He received his Masters in Dance Performance and Choreography from NYU. www.skybetter.org

Gotham Arts Exchange: This week of shared programming at The Joyce Theater is presented by Gotham Arts Exchange, and made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and the National Endowment of the Arts.

The Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue (at 19th Street), NYC

June 1 – 12, 2011

Tuesday, Wednesday and Sunday at 7:30pm; Thursday – Saturday at 8pm; Saturday and Sunday at 2pm

Tickets start at $10

JoyceCharge: 212-242-0800

www.joyce.org