Brookoff Dance Rep Co. Perform at City Center Studio This Weekend

Choreographer Matthew Brookoff presents his eight-member company in the world premiere of Fracture to a commissioned score by young composer Brad Crane, along with the charming In Love Again to Rodgers and Hart songs, and Lyrical Male Suite #1: Songs Of Love and Solitude. Two performances, today and tomorrow, May 1 & 2, 8 PM, in City Center Studio 5, 130 West 56 Street.

Brookoff looks forward to presenting his company again following an absence to attend graduate school and "regroup." "Each of these ballets is very personal to me," he notes, adding that "this concert marks not only a return to the classical ballet form that initiated my lifelong engagement in dance, but my chance to carve out a personal take, and put my own stamp, on this particular dance language."

The new Fracture is the choreographer's first composer collaboration, and he is pleased to be working with Brad Crane. The physically rigorous neoclassical ballet for six dancers explores identity in formal and dramatic terms; exploiting the tensions between belonging and independence, safety and risk, unity and individuality. Fracture poses the question: is it possible (or even desirable) for bonds of any kind to remain intact, suggesting it is only with the energy of fracture that we can ever be renewed.

Four of Rodgers and Hart's irresistible songs - The Lady is a Tramp, I Could Write a Book, Bewitched, and Thou Swell - accompany In Love Again. Like the songs, the surface of the dance is often witty and light, but the work also questions ideas of romantic love and the rather mercurial nature of attraction.

Lyrical Male Suite #1: Songs of Love and Solitude grew out of an ongoing project which took as its departure point the increasingly unguarded self-presentation, the unmannered masculine lyricism, which has come to characterize male dancing today. Over the past five years, Brookoff has created a repertory of solos for a variety of male dancers, and these lyric solos will be danced by two extraordinary performers: Jehbreal Jackson and Barton Cowperthwaite.

New York-based choreographer, dancer and ballet teacher MATTHEW BROOKOFF founded the Brookoff Dance Repertory Company in 1994, creating a wide and varied repertory for the ensemble. He has received commissions from Performance Mix NYC and the Staten Island Ballet. His work has been seen on Metro Arts 13 TV and reviewed in major publications. Matthew holds a BA in Dance from SUNY/Purchase, an MA in Performance Studies from NYU, and an MFA in Choreography from the U of North Carolina/Greensboro. He co-edited the dance reader, Intersections: Dance, Place and Identity, and helped create the corresponding on-line Dance Appreciation course. Before turning his attention to choreography, Brookoff danced in the companies of Mark DeGarmo, Lynn Shapiro, Eva Dean and Rachel Thorne Germond.

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