Valerie Green/Dance Entropy To Present RITE At The Center At West Park, February 29- March 2

RITE, an evening-length dance work conceived, choreographed, and directed by Valerie Green, represents a healing ceremony, a meditative ritual, and an exorcism of the ego. Performed by six men of Valerie Green/Dance Entropy (VG/DE), RITE will be given three performances at The Center at West Park in New York City, 7:30 P.M., February 29 through March 2, 2024.

RITE serves as a physical invocation of our internal struggle with self-image and societal pressure, following the vulnerable journey from form to clarity in a trance-based dance. RITE's 

multi-cultural cast showcases the dancers' unique personalities which helped shape the work as it was being created. Themes of brotherhood, masculinity, and care are woven throughout the 50-minute dance which concludes with an audience ritual. See a preview HERE.

“RITE carves a path through human pain, to show us what else can be waiting for us as soon as we can release what weighs us down,” says Green. “Inspired by shamanic journeying and altered states of consciousness, RITE invites us to contemplate our individual struggles and release our attachments to body and thought. It poses the question: ‘Can you get out of your own way?'”

VG/DE performers for RITE include Aidan Feldman, Johnny Matthews III, Tsubasa Nishioka, Lawson Pinder, Richard Scandola, and Ethan Schweitzer-Gaslin. The work is set to recordings by Danheim, Lannka-AIWAA, Cobanny, Ancestral Elephants, Poranqui/Liquid Bloom/Eric Zang, and Mary Isis, Costumes are designed by Irena Romendik and Valerie Green, with lighting design by Kathy Kaufman. 

Tickets, priced at $25 ($30 at door), can be purchased at Center at West Park/tickets.

The Center at West Park is located at 165 West 86th Street in New York City.

For more information, please visit www.danceentropy.org

Valerie Green has been an active dancer, choreographer, and teacher in the New York City dance community since 1995. She created her own company, Dance Entropy in 1998, adding a permanent company home in 2005 called Green Space. Green Space serves the dance community by providing an affordable and welcoming environment for rehearsals, classes, and performances. To date Ms. Green has created 44 dances and 11 evening length works. Her choreography has been seen throughout NYC and has also toured to various venues throughout the US. Internationally she has taught and performed in Albania, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Burkina Faso, Canada, Colombia, Croatia, Cuba, France, Georgia, Greece, Guatemala, India, Italy, Lebanon, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, Sweden, and Togo.  As a teacher, Ms. Green leads movement workshops for all populations rooted in the philosophy that all bodies can benefit from dance, fostering creativity and physicality beyond the stage. Ms. Green's choreographic work and teaching style is influenced by her formative years working with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company, a certification in Body/Mind Fitness, Core Energetics (Somatic Psychology) and her undergraduate work at University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has been a distinguished committee member of the Bessie's New York Dance and Performance Awards and the Queens Chamber of Commerce Performing Arts Committee. Ms. Green was presented with a Citation of Honor as an appointed Delegate in the 2023 session of the Queens General Assembly. 

Founded in 1998, Valerie Green/Dance Entropy (VG/DE) believes in humanizing movement, both in Ms. Green's critically acclaimed choreographic work and the company's mission to plant creative seeds in communities across the world. Intersecting mortal and transcendent, sensual and sophisticated, visceral and self-aware, VG/DE invites the artist, the audience—the human—into a compelling, physical experience. The word “entropy” refers to the tendency towards disorder in a social system and chaos in motion, the company aims to make sense of the world's entropy in the expressive art form of dance. The work is bold, compelling, visceral and at times untraditional. The dancers perform in buckets of water, spit stones, perch on platforms in six-foot costumes, dance with sculptures, and use a variety of text elements and audience interactions. They might perform on a proscenium one day and in a museum foyer or public garden the next. Based out of its home studio, Green Space in Queens, NY, VG/DE combines performance and specialized outreach programs to inspire communities in cultural institutions throughout the world. 

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