STILL/HERE 30th Anniversary Tour and More Set for Live Arts 2025-26 Season
The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company will kick off the New York Live Arts 2025-2026 season with a national tour featuring various programs of new work creation.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz Jun. 28, 2025
New York Live Arts has unveiled its 2025-2026 season. Taking place on site at 219 West 19th Street in NYC and beyond, Live Arts’ 14th season reinforces its commitment to collaborating with artists to fortify a creative future.
“How does one respond to this moment of extreme cruelty, regression, and rapid descent into authoritarianism? Art making seems so futile right now. But art making IS defiance. There is a reason why art and culture are under attack when it is such a minuscule part of the federal budget.” said Jones and Wong. “Art and culture have the ability to affect profound change—through hearts and minds, not policies or executive orders. So, make art we must. We proudly champion and hold space for ideas and values that articulate the plurality of the world we want to live in, with radical empathy, kindness, courage, respect, and always in community. The personal is political.”
The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company will kick off the New York Live Arts 2025-2026 season with a national tour featuring various programs of new work creation, seminal repertoire, and the Company’s restaging of its historic work Still/Here. Marking 43 years since Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane formed the Company, the tour will include Bates Dance Festival (Lewiston, ME), Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival (Becket, MA), Guild Hall (Easthampton, NY), Kaatsbaan Cultural Park (Tivoli, HY), ASU Gammage (Tempe, AZ), Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center (College Park, MD), Meany Center for the Performing Arts (Seattle, WA), CAP UCLA (Los Angeles, CA), Wisconsin Union Theatre (Madison, WI), K-State University McCain Auditorium (Manhattan, KS), Lied Center (Lawrence, KS), Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth (Hanover, NH), and more to be announced.
Opening the season in the renowned Live Arts theater are two poignant dance artists co-presented with L’Alliance New York’s Crossing The Line Festival:
October 2-4, 2025: Built in cycles of desire and fierce compassion, Kimberly Bartosik’s bLUr exists within a landscape of physical and emotional crisis. Five performers of exquisite humanity navigate urgent interventions, tender and brutal rescues, inside a space of howling hunger and deeply erotic tenderness. In bLUr, time warps and haunts, reminding us of our fragility, power, and need to care for and rescue one another.
October 15-17, 2025: Grounded in epigenetic and psychosomatic research, acclaimed Kenyan American dance artist Wanjiru Kamuyu asks herself and the performers to consider their bodies as museums of lived experiences and archives of memories. Offering voice and light to embodied legacies of inherited and personal inaudible wounds, Fragmented Shadows explores through emotional, visceral and sensorial landscapes the body as a vector for liberation.
Running October 22-25, October 29, 30 & November 1, 2025: TIMES FOUR / David Gordon: 1975/2025. Seminal choreographer David Gordon’s little-seen duet with his life/art partner Valda Setterfield, Times Four (1975), is excavated and performed by Wally Cardona and Molly Lieber in the same SoHo loft space where it was first seen 50 years ago. The year before he died, Gordon talked to Cardona about doing Times Four, last performed in the 70’s and not seen in its entirety since. A partial record of the work exists in a rehearsal video, part in Setterfield’s handwritten notes, and part is totally lost. Now, four years later, Cardona is in the studio with Lieber, preserving and building on the 1975 fragments, imagining a Times Four for 2025.
The fall portion of the season will conclude with an extra special bang. December 3-6 & 10-13, 2025, Tere O’Connor returns to 219 West 19th Street to celebrate 40 years of riveting choreographic exploration. This momentous occasion features O’Connor’s first dance Construct-A-Guy (1984) alongside his newest creation The Lace. These works express a range of creative output shaped by the complex psychological imprint of a closeted childhood and its influence on the organizing principles of O’Connor’s choreographic constructions. Originally made for himself and performed by Tim Bendernagel for its revival, Construct-A-Guy premiered as part of the New York Live Arts legacy program Fresh Tracks. Started in 1965 and formerly known as The Choreographers Showcase, Fresh Tracks originated at Dance Theater Workshop 60 years ago to bring new choreographic artistry to the forefront.
The Live Artery Festival, January 7-18, 2026, has grown into one of New York City’s most attended dance-specific happenings during the annual presenter conference period. A main highlight of this season’s Live Artery will be Ogemdi Ude’s North American premiere of MAJOR, January 7-10,2026. MAJOR is a dance theater project exploring the physicality, history, sociopolitics, and interiority of majorette dance, a form that originated in the American South within Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the 1960s. Developed in residency at Live Arts, MAJOR’s six Black femmes embrace majorette form - a fundamental relic of Black girlhood - to pursue the intimate journey of returning to bodies they thought lost. Additional Live Artery Festival evening-length shows onsite and off, in-process showings and more will be announced later this fall, including the return of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company’s Curriculum III: People, Places & Things.
Legacy artist Ellen Robbins’ Dances by Very Young Choreographers returns January 24-25, 2026 with her family-centric program of student choreography, ages 8 – 18. Devised to give a young audience exposure to the variety of theater experiences that modern dance affords, the program promises a range of qualities including humor, narrative, minimalism, lyrical dance, and visual conceptual. An evening concert by the Alumni of Dances by Very Young Choreographers will present works by dancers who studied with Robbins as early as 1982 to 2016.
The spring portion of the season lights up with commissioned premieres created in residency. Live Arts will present the following world premieres:
February 12-14, 2026: kNoname Artist | Roderick George’s The Grave’s Tears is a full-length choreographic work that confronts the legacy of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the ongoing erasure of Black and queer lives. Expanding from Venom (2024), it explores generational trauma, systemic neglect, and the violence of being forgotten. Haunting and skeletal in movement, the piece is a physical elegy shaped by memory and spirit. Snow falls throughout as a metaphor for erased bodies and unmarked graves. Guided by the voices of Black queer cultural ancestors, the work is both a mourning and a refusal to disappear—insisting on presence, resistance, and the power of remembrance.
June 11-13, 2026: Jasmine Hearn’s Memory Fleet: Beloved, Let’s Cross is the New York-specific iteration of a continually expanding, episodic, migrating performance and archive project that builds an alternative archive for the preservation of shared memories and stories that center the work/rest & past/future of the Black people who have mothered and mentored the artistic trajectory of lead artist Jasmine Hearn. Memory Fleet: Beloved, Let’s Cross encompasses a series of performances, a shared embodied practice, an evolving installation of archival materials, an expanding digital archive, and a body of original sound, text, and recipes — all celebrating the stories, dances, and gestures passed on through intergenerational lineages. Co-Presented with Chocolate Factory Theater.
A co-presentation with Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels will feature U.S. premieres from two riveting International Artists:
February 27 & 28, 2026: Leïla Ka’s Maldonne features five female dancers performing in forty different dresses – evening dresses, wedding dresses, night dresses, casual dresses and ball dresses. Sequined, long, puffy, fitted and oversized. Dresses that fly, that shine, that burst, that spin, that trail on the ground or fall. Maldonne is a highly evocative piece that explores the fragilities, rebellion and multiple identities that co-exist within femininity. Making its US Premiere, Maldonne is the first group piece by Leïla Ka and has been performed more than 100 times.
March 11 & 12, 2026 Soa Ratsifandrihana’s g r oo v e is a vibrant solo navigating sonic landscapes between glitch, hip-hop, and electronic jazz, g r oo v e investigates how bodies groove through diasporic memories and digital flows. The piece evokes the tension and pleasure of transformation, rooted in listening and rhythm.
On view September 25, 2025 - March 29, 2025, the Ford Foundation Live Gallery in the Live Arts lobby will present Live Arts Creative Director Bjorn Amelan’s newest intricately mysterious and vibrational sumi ink paintings. The opening reception on September 25th is free and open to the public by RSVP. The NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program Exhibition will follow with an opening reception on April 14, 2026. Co-presented with New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program, the annual group exhibition presents around 20 artists featuring photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and more.
Additional programming to be announced later in the season include timely pop-up conversations between Artistic Director Bill T. Jones and fellow artists, thinkers, and influential figures for our live conversation series Bill Chats. Guests this season will be announced in real time and tandem with Jones’ academic, ideological, and creative interests, inviting audiences into both important dialogues and a glimpse of his present musings.
Creative residencies remain foundational to the support that Live Arts proudly provides artists every season. Earlier this year, Live Arts announced Joanna Kotze as the ‘25-26 Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist (RCA). Known for work that emphasizes deep physicality, collaborative spirit, and multi-disciplinary layers, Kotze will continue developing her latest work this is the beginning, this is the end in preparation for its ‘26-’27 season world premiere. The unique award provides two years of salary, healthcare benefits, professional development, office space, creative funds, a technical residency and fully-produced work in the theater, and touring support.
The annual Fresh Tracks Residency & Performance program for emerging movement-based artists will continue to celebrate its 60th year featuring Juliana May as Artistic Advisor. Applications to this program will be accepted at the Live Arts website starting July 1, 2025. Performances of new works created during the residency will be presented May 14 & 15, 2026.
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