Tom Gold Dance Returns To Untermyer Park And Gardens This Month

Tom Gold Dance will return to Untermyer Park and Gardens in Yonkers, NY, with a program of four pas de deux from Tom Gold Dance Founder and Director Tom Gold, Sunday, July 24, nearly a year to the date the Company fulfilled the instructions of photographer Bill Cunningham to "dance in the magical garden." In the event of rain, this performance will be rescheduled to Friday, July 29.

Dancers Lauren Collett, Gabriella Domini, Claire Von Enck, Malorie Lundgren, Jonatan Lujans, Jules Mabie, and Luciana Paris are currently scheduled to perform.

At Untermyer, the Company will present the New York Premiere of Vision Fugitives, a tribute to artists of Ukraine to music of the same title for solo piano by Sergei Prokofiev; Intimacies to Anna Weesner's Possible Stories for solo cello; a revival of Rapid Oxidation (2018) to music of Donald Knaack (aka The Junkman); and the World Premiere of A Felicidade, a work originally intended for the Company's canceled 2020 spring season. Tom Gold Dance premiered Intimacies during the Company's spring 2022 season this past April, its first self-produced indoor program in New York City in more than two years. The Company also presented Intimacies and premiered Visions Fugitives last month at TurnPark Art Space in West Stockbridge, MA.

As part of the Company's return to in-person programming last summer, Tom Gold Dance first appeared at Untermyer in July 2021, years after the legendary New York Times society photographer urged Tom Gold to find a way to stage a performance in the Amphitheater of the Walled Gardens. The program, in memory of Cunningham (and later that summer the subject of a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece), featured the first in-person presentation of Gold's Plan & Elevation in New York and the New York Premiere of his Borrowed Time.

"We believe our performance at Untermyer Park and Gardens last summer was everything Bill Cunningham envisioned it would be," says Tom Gold. "The only thing missing, of course, was Bill, but we are grateful the success of our first visit has given us the opportunity to return to this special place."

Between April 2020 and November 2021, Tom Gold Dance cancelled four self-produced seasons due to the coronavirus pandemic. During this time, the Company appeared in the 39th Annual Battery Dance Festival in August 2020 with Gold's Plan & Elevation, as well as in livestreams from the Nave of the Church of the Heavenly Rest with the World Premiere of Gold's Portraits in February 2021 and a revival of his All the Lonely People (2015) in October 2020, and conducted a residency in the Berkshires of western, MA in January 2021, following the Company's first in-person performance of Plan & Elevation on the grounds of Shakespeare & Company the previous September in Lenox, MA. After marking its formal return to in-person programming with performances at TurnPark Art Space last summer, Tom Gold Dance conducted another residency in the Berkshires this past March, culminating with its first indoor appearance in more than two years with a work-in-process showcase at Elaine P. Bernstein Theatre, also at Shakespeare & Company. In April 2021, Tom Gold Dance began a collaboration with Riverhead Books (an imprint of Penguin Random House) to create five dance-based promotional videos in connection with the publication of several novels, including Intimacies, on which Gold's work of the same title is based. In April 2022, the Company restored its annual spring season with performances at The Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College. This summer, Tom Gold Dance has appeared at TurnPark Art Space in the Berkshires and, following its performance at Untermyer Park and Gardens, will make its debut at Little Island at Hudson River Park as part of Little Island's Second Summer Season of Pop-Up Performances Monday, August 1 and Saturday, August 13 in The Play Ground.