Monica Bill Barnes & Company with Ira Glass Encores at NYU's Skirball Center Tonight, 10/20

NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, along with Gotham Arts Exchange, presents a special encore performance of Monica Bill Barnes & Company with Ira Glass tonight, October 20, 2012 at 8pm at New York University's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 566 LaGuardia Place (at Washington Square South), NYC. Tickets are $26 and are available by phone at 212-352-3101 or 866-811-4111 or online at nyuskirball.org.

After a highly regarded performance in This American Life Live! in May, Monica Bill Barnes & Company and the Host and Executive Producer of the public radio show, Ira Glass, return to the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts for one encore performance. MBB & CO. will perform a full evening of work including The company's current repertory "Everything is getting better all the time" and "mostly fanfare", the New York Premiere of "Luster" and their signature duet "I feel like." Mr. Glass will introduce the evening of dance and join The company for a post-performance discussion.

Monica Bill Barnes & Company is a contemporary American dance company with the mission to celebrate individuality, humor and the innate theatricality of everyday life. MBB & CO. has performed in over twenty venues in New York City ranging from DanceNow at Joe's Pub to Fall for Dance at New York City Center, and including three seasons at The Joyce Theater. The company has been presented in more than 30 cities throughout the United States and has been commissioned and presented by The American Dance Festival, Bates Dance Festival, Fire Island Dance Festival and Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. MBB & CO. 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. Major support has also come in the form of creative residencies awarded by The Joyce Theater Residency Program (2010-2011), Jacob's Pillow (2009 Creative Development Residency), the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University (2013, 2007), Joyce SoHo Artist Residency (2005-2006) and DanceNow/NYC Silo Residency (2004, 2008, 2009, 2012).

MBB & CO. recently brought dance into the world of radio. In May 2012 The company performed in "This American Life Live!" as a part of the public radio show's cinema event shown in more than 600 movie theatres across the US, Canada and Australia. Other 2012 highlights included performances at Joe's Pub at The Public Theater as a part of DanceNow, The 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival and FOCUS Dance at The Joyce Theater. Upcoming performances include encore performances of "Working Women" at The Joyce Theater in January 2013 and The company's debut performance at The Kennedy Center in May 2013. For more information visit www.monicabillbarnes.com.

Ira Glass began his career in public radio as an intern at National Public Radio's network headquarters in Washington in 1978. He was 19 years old. Since then, he has worked on nearly every NPR network news program and done virtually every production job in NPR's Washington headquarters. He has been a tape cutter, newscast writer, desk assistant, editor and producer. He has filled in as host of "Talk of the Nation" and "Weekend All Things Considered." From 1989 to 1995 Glass was a reporter in NPR's Chicago Bureau. For two years, he covered Chicago school reform for "All Things Considered" with two unusual series of reports. The first followed Taft High School for an entire school year. The second followed Washington Irving Elementary for a year. School restructuring at Taft went poorly; at Irving it went well. In 1988 Glass was named as one of a handful of Young Journalists of the Year by the Livingston Foundation. In 1991, he and John Matisonn, NPR's South Africa correspondent, were honored by the National Association of Black Journalists for their four-part series comparing race relations in South Africa with those in the United States. During the 1992 presidential campaign, he travelled with the Clinton campaign, and in January 1993, he anchored NPR's live broadcast of the Clinton inauguration. From 1990 until 1995, he co-hosted a weekly, local program on Chicago Public Radio called "The Wild Room," a show that defies easy description. For more information on This American Life, visit www.thisamericanlife.org.

GOTHAM ARTS EXCHANGE, INC. is a non-profit arts organization set-up to provide administrative, management, booking, fundraising, insurance, and fiscal sponsorship services to the artists that make up the roster of Zia Artists. The idea behind Gotham Arts Exchange is to "pool" the resources of many companies together to be able to afford the many aspects of running a non-profit corporation that is vital to the infrastructure of a dance company. By doing this, each dance company that is not an incorporated non-profit becomes a sponsored project of the organization. Gotham Arts Exchange began producing at The Joyce Theater in 2006, presenting Battleworks and Paradigm, followed by Keigwin+Company and Battleworks (2008), Nicholas Leichter and Keigwin+Company (2009), Gotham Dance Festival (2010, 2011, 2012), and Camille A. Brown & Dancers (2012). The most recent venture is FOCUS (2012, 2013), a new initiative that promotes American dance duringAPAP.

The Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts is the premier venue for the presentation of cultural and performing arts events for New York University and lower Manhattan. Led by executive producer Jay Oliva (President Emeritus, NYU) and senior director Michael Harrington, the programs of the Skirball Center reflect NYU's mission as an international center of scholarship, defined by excellence and innovation and shaped by an intellectually rich and diverse environment. A vital aspect of the Center's mission is to build young adult audiences for the future of live performance. www.nyuskirball.org