To celebrate 40 years of riveting choreographic exploration, Tere O’Connor will present a program comprised of two works:
Construct-A-Guy
A solo originally constructed for O’Connor in 1984, will open the program. It was the first dance he ever made and it premiered at Dance Theater Workshop the previous resident of New York Live Arts as part of Fresh Tracks, formerly known as The Choreographers Showcase. In this revival, it will be performed by Tim Bendernagel.
The Lace (World Premiere)
The second work of the evening will be a new dance entitled The Lace. It will be performed by Bendernagel, Liony Garcia, Gabriel Bruno Eng Gonzalez, Aaron Loux and veteran company members Heather Olson and Natalie Green. Sound design by James Lo.
Although it was created in a state of early artistic naiveté, Construct-a-Guy nonetheless gave birth to the unorthodox craft methods that continue to shape O’Connor’s work. Capricious rhythmic change, constant energy reversals, spatial fragmentation, a collagist sensibility, slippery, multiple meanings and continuous persona shifts are all forged from the complex psychological imprint of a closeted childhood. Throughout his early career O’Connor transposed strategies for survival into tools of choreographic process. His work found its voice in the complex ordering of structural sequence, moving freely between pre-existing dance vocabularies and personal movement dialects. All of these tools and more, plus 40 years of distance, animate his thinking for the creation of The Lace.
O’Connor will open each evening with a brief live appearance to articulate the connections between “then and now”, offering a window into his choreographic philosophy. He hopes to offer a different matrix of viewership for his work–or for any dance–by circumventing concepts like abstraction, formalism, non-sequitur and other default readings of dance, to focus on a different framing; one that draws from the deeply transformational, poetic qualities of dance to generate alternative constellations of human connection.
