Dancers Responding to AIDS, founded in 1991 by former Paul Taylor Dance Company members Denise Roberts Hurlin and Hernando Cortez. It is a program of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, one of the nation’s leading industry-based, nonprofit AIDS fundraising and grant-making organizations.
Last year’s Fire Island Dance Festival raised a record-breaking $585,045, bring the event’s total to more than $5.5 million raised since it began in 1995. Through their generous support, Fire Island Dance Festival attendees have helped ensure that those in need throughout the New York area and in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. receive lifesaving medications, nutritious meals, counseling and emergency financial assistance.
Stage and screen favorite Nathan Lee Graham hosts this year’s festival. Graham appeared on Broadway in Priscilla Queen of the Desert and The Wild Party and, most recently, in the acclaimed Off-Broadway hit The View UpStairs. He’s well-known as Todd from both Zoolander movies with Will Ferrell and Ben Stiller. And he earned a Best Classical Album Grammy Award for Songs of Innocence and of Experience as a soloist.
This year’s lineup includes works by choreographers Gemma Bond, James Kinney, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Jamar Roberts and Christopher Wheeldon, and performances by Caleb Teicher & Company, Camille A. Brown & Dancers, Cirio Collective and Paul Taylor Dance Company.
