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2019 New York Season

2019 New York Season – February 28th, 2019

The Schimmel Center at Pace University

School Matinee Performance: 2:00 pm

Tickets are $5 for NYC Public Schools and Private School Groups

Email: Natalia Mesa for tickets

Evening Performance: 7:30pm

Tickets start at $19

Purchase Tickets

PRESENTING A WORLD PREMIERE, ON FOOT, AND SECRETS OF THE PAVING STONES

The Red Line (World Premiere)

Tadej Brdnik, former principal dancer of the Martha Graham Dance Company, collaborates with Battery Dance on a new production currently in rehearsals.

For Media Inquiries Contact:

Michelle Tabnick Communications

Tel:646-765-4773

Email

On Foot (2017)

Reflecting his company’s engagement with refugees and youth in conflict zones over the past decade, Jonathan Hollander has assembled artistic forces that pair the Company’s brilliant ensemble of dancers with Kevork Mourad and Kinan Azmeh, Syria-born visual artist and musician respectively; Tunisian composer Anouar Brahem; and Iraqi dancer Hussein Smko, first recipient of the Company’s Adel Euro Campaign for Dancers Seeking Refuge. This powerful collaboration yields choreography, visual imagery and music that pulsates with the life-force of refugees who overcome staggering odds to reach safety and promise in new lands, while mourning lost family and community members, perished dreams and destroyed homelands. Kevork Mourad will participate in the performances by making art that is projected onto the stage as the dance transpires, creating an immersive environment that is enhanced by the lighting design of Barry Steele.

Secrets of the Paving Stones (2003)

The ancient spiritual history of the City of Kraków, home of one of the world’s first universities; the transmogrifying events of mid-Century in Kraków in which the City’s Jewish population was annihilated; the seeking for a now lost culture by Poland’s young people; and the very architecture of a city which has preserved much of its Jewish quarter as well as its medieval Wawel Castle, churches and guild halls, are subjected to an imagistic palette, richly perfumed at times, dank and spare at others.

World Premiere

Choreography: Tadej Brdnik

Music: Kinan Azmeh

Lighting: Barry Steele

Costumes: Tyler Holland

Run Time: 20 minutes

On Foot

Artistic Direction: Jonathan Hollander, Kevork Mourad, Barry Steele

Music: Kinan Azmeh, Anouar Brahem

Lighting: Barry Steele

Costumes: Tyler Holland

Run Time: 25 minutes

Secrets of the Paving Stones

Choreography: Jonathan Hollander

Lighting: Barry Steele

Music: The Cracow Klezmer Band

Run Time: 24 minutes

About the Guest Artists

Guest Choreographer

Tadej Brdnik is a former principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company. He began his career in Slovenian and moved to the United States after receiving a full scholarship to the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance in 1993, sponsored by actor Gregory Peck. After three years with the school, he joined the Martha Graham Dance Company in 1996. Tadej has danced and taught with Battery Dance since 1998 and has performed with Robert Wilson, David Gordon, and Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project, among many others. He served as Program Director for Accelerate and Extension Programs at the Martha Graham Dance Company and is currently the Director of Teens@Graham. Tadej is also a regisseur for the Martha Graham Dance Company and has re-staged numerous Graham works in the United States, Europe, Brazil and China.

Tadej is a recipient of the 1993 Benetton Dance Award and the 2003 Eugene Loring Award and is a 2015-16 BAM/DeVos Institute Performer in Transition Arts Management Fellow.

Guest Composer

Kinan Azhem has been hailed as a “Virtuoso” and “Intensely Soulful” by the New York Times and “Spellbinding” by the New Yorker. His distinctive sound across different musical genres has gained him international recognition. Kinan was recently named composer-in-residence with Classical Movements for the 2017-18 season. Notable appearances include: Opera Bastille, Paris; Tchaikovsky Grand Hall, Moscow; Carnegie Hall, New York; the Royal Albert hall, London; der Philharmonie; Berlin; the Library of Congress & the Kennedy Center, Washington DC; the Mozarteum, Salzburg, and Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, among many others. His compositions include several works for orchestra, and chamber music; film, live illustration, and electronics, and includes three albums with his ensemble Hewar, several soundtracks for film and dance, and an album with his New York Arabic/Jazz quartet the Kinan Azmeh CityBand. He serves as artistic director of the Damascus Festival Chamber Players. Kinan is a graduate of the Juilliard school and earned his doctorate degree in music from the City University of New York in 2013.

Kinan is member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble with whom he was awarded a Grammy in 2017. For more information on Kinan please visit his website.

Guest Visual Artist

Kevork Mourad was born in Qamishli, a town in northeastern Syria. Of Armenian heritage, he received his Master of Fine Arts from the Yerevan Institute of Fine Arts in Armenia, and now lives and works in New York. With his technique of spontaneous painting, where he shares the stage with musicians—a collaboration in which art and music develop in counterpoint to each other—he has worked with many world-renowned musicians, including Kinan Azmeh, Brooklyn Rider, Ken Ueno, Liubo Borissov, and Issam Rafea.

Mourad is a member, as a visual artist, of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble. He has performed, among others, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Bronx Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Harvard University, the Morgenland Festival, Le Festival du Monde Arabe in Montreal, the Nara Museum in Japan, Lincoln Center Atrium, the Art Institute of Chicago, the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Central Park’s Summerstage, the Agha Khan Museum in Toronto, the ElbPhilharmonie in Hamburg, and Carnegie Hall.

The 2016 recipient of the Robert Bosch Stiftung Prize, Mourad is currently at work on an animated short film about Syria. For more information on Kevork Mourad, please visit his website.

The 2019 Season is supported by