Mystical Feet Company to Present SECRET OF THE POSSIBLE at 14th Street Y This Month

Mystical Feet Company, in partnership with the Theater at the 14th Street Y, has announced December 2022 dance/theater performances of a new ensemble-created work from award-winning playwright/choreographer Yehuda Hyman, presented at the Theater at the 14th Street Y, 344 East 14th Street, Thursday, December 15 through Friday, December 23, 2022.

Performances are on December 15, 17, 19, 21, 22 at 7:30 PM, and December 16, 18, 23 at 3 PM. Tickets are $18-36 (Students/Seniors $10) at ovationtix.com.

Running time: 90 minutes. There is an intermission

Masking Policy: Audiences members are requested to wear masks.

Under the artistic direction of Yehuda L. Hyman, Brooklyn-based Mystical Feet Company, an ensemble of dancers, actors, and musicians, follows up its acclaimed production of "The Mar Vista" with "Secret of the Possible," a contemporary theater/dance adaptation of three mystical Jewish tales originating from 18th-century Eastern Europe. The first tale, "Effect," is a Kafkaesque journey of three students who travel to a forbidden encounter with a wizard-like storyteller. "The Merchant of Mezritch," is a soliloquy/dance performed by Yehuda L. Hyman, containing ancient wisdom about what to do when the bottom drops out. The third tale, "This is the Time to Dance!," is a comical vaudeville that begins in tragedy but culminates in a joyous, swirling, wedding celebration with an invitation to all to join the dance!

Conceived and created by Yehuda L. Hyman in collaboration with the company.

Performers: Hallie Chametzky, Aviya Hernstadt, Aria Roach, James Harris, Matthew DeCostanza, Henry Winslow, Madelyn Wansong, Oksana Horban, William Catanzaro, and Yehuda L. Hyman

Music: Performed and composed by William Catanzaro

Lighting Design by Philip Trevino

Sound Engineering by Jesse Timm

Stage Manager - Isaac Goldbaum

ABOUT YEHUDA HYMAN

Yehuda is the Artistic Director of Mystical Feet Company. He was born in Los Angeles to immigrant parents from Poland and Russia. He trained in ballet in Los Angeles with Tatiana Riabouchinska (Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo). At age 16, he received a full scholarship to study at Maurice Bejart's interdisciplinary arts school, MUDRA, in Brussels, Belgium. Returning to the U.S. he danced in three Broadway shows and was a member of the original American Dance Machine company touring the U.S. and Japan. He studied acting with Stella Adler, Paul Sills, Nina Foch, and Paul G. Gleason, and then became a choreographer (theater, opera) working primarily in Los Angeles. He left dance to focus on writing (primarily playwriting) in 1990, studying with the Padua Hills Playwrights Group and writing mentor, James Carroll Picket. He received his MFA in Dance from Sarah Lawrence College (2014). Most of his plays originate in the movement of the body. Original plays include The Mad Dancers, Center of the Star, Swan Lake Bde Maka Ska (formerly Swan Lake Calhoun), David in Shadow and Light (co-written with composer Daniel Hoffman), Max, Rapunzel and the Night, Tequila, Scenes from a Tango (co-written with John Dantona), The Mad 7, and The Mar Vista, which was developed at LABA/14th Street Y and ran at the Pershing Square Signature Center in Manhattan in 2019. His work has been produced at theaters including McCarter Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, San Diego Repertory, Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles, Theater J, Mixed Blood, and Actor's Theatre of Louisville. He choreographed Paula Vogel's Indecent at the Guthrie Theater (directed by Wendy C. Goldberg). He has acted in plays in New York City with Target Margin Theater, The Civilians, and Rady & Bloom, and danced in the 2017 Fire Island Dance Festival (in a piece choreographed by Lorin Latarro). He has choreographed and performed with Dances for a Variable Population, working with a population of senior dancers on the Lower East Side. His honors include the Kennedy Center New American Plays Award, the NEA/TCG Playwright-in Residence Grant, Playwrights' Center of Minneapolis Jerome Fellowship, and LABA Fellow/14th St Y. He currently teaches Devised Theater at Manhattan School of Music. His essay, "Three Hasidic Dances" was first published in Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance (Wayne State University Press. Editor: Judith Brin Ingber) and re-published in Dance in America, A Reader's Anthology (Editor: Mindy Aloff; Foreword by Robert Gottlieb), Library of America. He translates the work of German poet Eva-Maria Berg into English. His article about his dance activism in Germany, "Jew in the Pool," was published in Mahol Akshav/Dance Today in Israel. A revised and expanded version of this article, 'Dancing on Smoke" was published by Oxford University Press in December 2021 in the anthology, "The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance."

Photo Credit: Yehuda L. Hyman