Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance presents its 8th annual season, including the World Premiere of Body Talk, on June 1 - 2, 2011 (Wednesday and Thursday at 7:30pm) at the 5th Floor Theater at NYU Tisch Department of Dance, 111 Second Avenue, between East 6th and 7th Streets, NYC. Tickets are $18 ($12 for students and FREE for current NYU Tisch students), and will be on sale at 800-838-3006, www.brownpapertickets.com beginning April 1, 2011. Appropriate for all ages.
The program features the World Premiere of Body Talk, a collaboration with composer / performer Guillermo Brown, who has created an original score for the piece and whose music is influenced by rock, electronica, free jazz and hip hop. The new fusion ballet echoes the current culture's obsession with video games and the pixilated visual quality that creates broken images. In Will (2009), featuring the World Premiere of a new score, a double duet employs raw energy to display a cool, internally driven performance quality that shows detachment and an impasse in communication. Recently Ms. Lavagnino returned to this material with long-time collaborator, violinist and composer Jane Chung, who created the new score. Ms. Chung will perform onstage on electric violin with amplification. Drawn from Ms. Lavagnino's emotional response to photos of American mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners, Snapshots (2004) deals with shattered notions of humanity and assumptions about the inherent benevolence of women. The percussion score by composer Kyle Olson was commissioned by Ms. Lavagnino in 2010 to heighten the existing choreography's emotional tenor and he will perform live onstage. Inspired by the distortion and beauty of Edward Degas' ballet sculptures, Ménage (2010) stresses the exaggeration of hips and rib cage in contrast to the organized vertical beauty of traditional ballet technique and features an original score by co-composers Scott Killian, Jane Chung and Jacob Lawson.
Funds supporting the performance of live music and composer's commission for this performance were provided by the American Music Center Live Music for Dance Program. This performance is part of the Tisch Dance Residency Festival's performance series.
Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance (CLD) is a New York City-based contemporary ballet company formed in 2000 as a platform for the choreography of Cherylyn Lavagnino. Ms. Lavagnino's choreography encompasses the dynamic extremes of ballet, invoking both rigor and ease to create a passionate expression of the ever-shifting nature of our emotions and interactions. She strives to humanize the ballet idiom by expressing violence, fragility, and tenderness, and the intentioned movement vocabulary creates a dialogue between dance and the human condition. Ms. Lavagnino's work draws a visceral response from her audience, who takes pleasure in the emotion and fluidity of this dynamic contemporary ballet company.
The company has been presented for four NY Seasons by Danspace Project in St. Mark's Church and has performed at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, The Kaatsbaan International Dance Center, Dancenow/NYC Festival, The Joyce Theater's "Evening Stars" series in Battery Park, Symphony Space's "Dance Sampler," The Field's "Uptown/Downtown" workshop and performance series, and three times at Inside/Out at Jacob's Pillow. Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance has been supported by space grants from the Baryshnikov Arts Center, company residencies at The Yard and SILO. The company received funding from the American Music Center's Live Music for Dance grant in 2008 and 2011 and from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in 2007 and 2009.
Cherylyn Lavagnino, Artistic Director of Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance and Chair of the Tisch School of the Arts Dance Department at New York University, has an MFA in Dance from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, as well as a BA in Philosophy from the University of Southern California. Ms. Lavagnino has choreographed over thirty ballets in the past fifteen years; since 2000, most have been created for her contemporary ballet company, Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance. Many of the ballets in the Company's repertoire were created in collaboration with composer Scott Killian, as well as (and in a few cases) Jane Chung, Andy Teirstein, and Kyle Olson.
Independently, Ms. Lavagnino has created original ballets for Tisch School of the Arts, Princeton University, Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, Kutztown University, and the Monadnock Music Festival. She was resident choreographer at The Yard at Martha's Vineyard in 2000 and received Tisch Faculty Artistic Development grant in both 2006 and 2009.
As a performer, Ms. Lavagnino toured nationally as a soloist with the Pennsylvania Ballet with engagements at New York City Center and BAM. She also worked with the San Diego Ballet, Arizona Ballet Theatre, and Ballet Teatro del Espacio in Mexico City. She has performed in a range of classical repertoire and contemporary work by choreographers such as Balanchine, John Butler, Hans Van Manen, and Tere O'Connor. The diversity of her experience as a performer has energized the dialogue she creates between the classical and the contemporary with her choreography for Cheylyn Lavagnino Dance.
Ms. Lavagnino teaches professional ballet internationally as a guest artist and in several NYC studios. She has taught at the Paul Taylor Intensive (NYC), at Bates Dance Festival, at Jacob's Pillow, and taught daily company class for the Lyon Opera Ballet. In her role as Chair of the Tisch Dance Department at NYU, where she has been a full-time member of the faculty since 1987, she also directed Tisch's Second Avenue Dance Company for the past 14 years. In recognition of her superior work, she was awarded New York University's prestigious David Payne Carter Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2003.
For more information, visit www.cherylynlavagnino-dance.com.
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