Catherine Tharin Dance To Present The World Premiere Of IN THE WAKE OF YES In June

This June, choreographer Catherine Tharin will premiere In the Wake of Yes, a work for four dancers featuring a film by award-winning filmmaker Lora Robertson, and music by renowned composer and jazz pianist Joel Forrester, who will play live. The program also includes Tharin's 2023 work An Armful of Blossoms, with an original score by Jon Kinzel.

Performances are June 5 and 6 at 7:30pm, at Arts On Site, presented by The Bang Group. Tickets are $20 and are available at www.artsonsite.org/tickets. A Q&A with the artists moderated by choreographer David Parker will be held on June 5, following the performance. Arts On Site is located at 12 St. Mark's Place, 3rd floor, in Manhattan.

The evening opens with An Armful of Blossoms featuring a music collage by choreographer, sound designer, and 2023 Guggenheim recipient Jon Kinzel. Performed by dancers Hannah Kearney and Jenny Levy, the dance explores quick rhythms, close partnering, and floor work that imparts a sense of immediacy. Says Fjord Review: “A beautiful sequence had [the dancers] seated on the floor as if rowing a boat, but close enough that one was held in the lap of the other. They tumbled over and over as if the boat overturned, while also switching their positions smooth as synchronized swimmers.” The dance is strikingly costumed by Colleen Howland.

A quartet, In the Wake of Yes moves through connection, memory, and change. Created in response to Joel Forrester's expressive score, the 60-minute work unfolds through solos, duets, a trio, and a quartet—each shaped by the emotional presence of dancers Dylan Baker, Hannah Kearney, Jenny Levy, and Daniel Morimoto. While rooted in personal experience—including Tharin's evolving relationship with her mother, now in her tenth decade, and her daughters, poised at the edge of their own becoming—the work reaches beyond autobiography. What emerges is a quiet reflection on how we move with and alongside each other.

The title In the Wake of Yes suggests both affirmation and aftermath—what follows a moment of acceptance or surrender. The word wake carries a dual resonance: the trail left behind as something moves forward, and the stillness or reckoning that follows a passage. The dance unfolds within this ambiguity, asking what remains in the wake of a goodbye. The word yes itself echoes through the work in many forms, including a passage from James Joyce's Ulysses—Molly Bloom's famous soliloquy, which repeats “yes” more than 80 times. Its inclusion deepens the meditation on assent, longing, and the complexities of love that animate the piece.

A film by Tharin's longtime collaborator Lora Robertson, The Window of This Night Train is Dark Behind the Glass, accompanies the dance. Her visual world follows the dancers from above and afar seen from the Roosevelt Island tram, the Queensboro Bridge, the NYC ferry, trains along the Hudson River, and in the Rockaways, by the ocean, among boulders, and through wide expanses of grass. These shifting cinematic landscapes mirror the dance's emotional arcs, suggesting a sense of passage—through time, through memory, through place. Fjord Review called Robertson's 2023 film, The Stream Wet Earth (conceived by Tharin), “a gorgeous collage of beguiling figurative imagery”—a sensibility that resonates throughout this new collaboration.

About the Artists

Catherine Tharin is a choreographer, curator, educator, and writer whose career bridges performance, academia, and critical discourse in dance. She holds a BA from Connecticut College and an MA in Dance Education from Columbia University's Teachers College. A former member of the Erick Hawkins Dance Company, Tharin performed nationally and internationally with the company from 1988 to 1994. Her choreographic work continues to be shaped by the aesthetic legacy of Erick Hawkins and composer Lucia Dlugoszewski.

For 15 years, Tharin served as Dance and Performance Curator at the 92nd Street Y, where she presented acclaimed choreographers across genres alongside emerging voices, as well as composers, designers, authors, critics, videographers, and photographers. She was also a senior adjunct professor at Iona College for two decades. Her writing on dance has appeared in The Dance Enthusiast, Interlocutor, Side of Culture, and on WAMC, an NPR affiliate in the Hudson Valley. She has also contributed reviews to The Boston Globe.

Tharin currently curates The Dance Series at the Stissing Center in Pine Plains, NY, and dance film at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY. She also serves on the Dance Committee of the Cosmopolitan Club. Throughout her career, she has championed both innovative and legacy choreography, supported the work of artists across the field, and brought critical attention to the art form through curation, education, and writing.

A New York City-based dancer, choreographer, and producer, Dylan Baker is originally from the boondocks of Wisconsin where he acquired a BFA in Dance at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Apart from dancing with Catherine Tharin, you can find Baker in works by Matthew Westerby Company, The Bang Group, and with his own company, BOINK Dance & Film. When not on stage, Baker is a producer for the WestFest Dance Festival every spring in New York City.

Joel Forrester is an American composer and pianist who, after 50 years in New York, resides in Lyon, France. He has written more than 2,500 compositions, all of which are publicly available through his archive at Ohio University.  

Colleen Gibbs Howland holds a BFA in Fashion Design, an AAS in Architectural Technology, and Certificate in Horticulture-Landscape Design. She worked on Seventh Avenue and has had designs featured in Vogue magazine. Her couture commissions include pieces worn at inaugural balls and international galas. Howland is committed to sustainable living, waste reduction, and the power of art in all forms. She is delighted to collaborate with Catherine Tharin Dance and her talented team to bring the highest order of emotion, expression, and shape in every dimension to the stage through dance.

Originally from Philadelphia, PA, Hannah Kearney is a dancer and Pilates teacher based in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated summa cum laude from George Mason University with a BFA in Dance and a minor in Arts Management. She also received her accelerated studies certificate from the Martha Graham School of Dance. Kearney danced with the Philadanco Second Company/Danco II and while doing so also had the opportunity to understudy the Philadelphia Dance Company Philadanco!. She has performed works by Francisco Gella, Robert Battle, Martha Graham, Donald Byrd, Jim Lepore, and Susan Shields. She was a dancer for the new American musical Soul Harmony. Kearney has danced with JKing Dance Company, Daniel Flores, and Ballaro Dance Company. This is her third year with Catherine Tharin Dance. 

Jon Kinzel maintains a deeply interrelated choreographic and visual art practice. He feels fortunate to have performed and collaborated across disciplines with numerous artists. He has served as a sound designer, movement dramaturg, and curator, and taught at several universities, conservatories, festivals, and schools throughout NYC. A series of works—Queens Terminus, The Chocolate Factory, Long Island City, NY (2022); Pacific Terminus, Telematic Media Arts, San Francisco, CA (2019); and Atlantic Terminus, The Invisible Dog Art Center, Brooklyn, NY (2016)—brought together his drawings and paintings, video, sculpture, and dance forms, addressing technology's effects on visual culture, social relationships, performance, haptic interaction, and the presentation of the moving body. He is the recipient of an FCA Grants to Artists (2025), a NYSCA Support for Artists (2025), MacDowell Fellowships (2024, 2020), and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Choreography (2023).

Jenny Levy was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She attended the Conservatory of Dance at SUNY Purchase. Levy has toured nationally and internationally with MOMIX. She has also had the pleasure of dancing with companies such as Douglas Dunn & Dancers, IsadoraNOW, and AlleRetour Dance Company. During the pandemic Levypursued her other life's passion, working with young children. She earned an MA in Early Education with a focus on infant and family Development and Early Intervention. In a return to performing, Levy has “come home.”

Daniel Morimoto grew up in Orlando, FL, immersed within an environment of theme parks, childlike splendor, and a faint sense of magic in the air. He graduated from the University of Florida with a BFA in Dance and a minor in German. As a performer, he has worked with companies and choreographers such as Catherine Tharin, The Bang Group, Matthew Westerby Company, Amber Sloan, NIkki and the Noise, Megan Williams, Jody Oberfelder, Daniel Gwirtzman, Spark Movement Collective, and more. As a choreographer, Morimoto is the Artistic Director of Digital Movement Dance. The dance company embeds elements of fantasy, world-building, and magic into each work, creating immersive worlds with characters and stories to explore.

Lora Robertson (b. 1971, Ann Arbor, MI) is a Leica Master Photographer and a filmmaker known for her large scale works in color. As Executive Director of Satellite Collective in New York, she is an advocate for women to stand in their own power and is committed to the retelling of classic story forms from the perspective of female characters, putting their voices forward as flawed heroes. Bringing the discipline of 15 years of commercial advertising experience into her fine art projects, she uses very little digital manipulation, but instead is devoted to studio lighting, set design and the power of in-camera processes. Robertson also believes in taking technical and creative risks which might break these comfortable habits, always from a place of hard work and forward motion. Recent shows include Agony In The Scrub Pines at Mriya Gallery and Summer Blockbusterz at Canada Gallery, both in 2024. Her work has appeared at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Open Source Gallery, and 92NY in New York, with public commissions in Michigan at The Grand Rapids Art Museum, Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Rosa Parks Circle, the Gerald R. Ford Museum, SiTE:LAB, and Fountain Street Church which was awarded recognition from the ACLU. She will take on a muse but only if bets are lost.