LIVE YOUR ART!
Heather is a professional dancer and lover of the arts. She dances for two AMAZING companies as well as other project-based artists and companies within New York City. Check out the company websites to find out more info. The websites can also keep you informed on upcoming performances and showings. Enjoy!
www.amalgamatedance.com
Amalgamate Dance Company (ADC) exists to raise awareness around significant topics and events that affect human development and to continue our mission of transforming lives through authentic storytelling. Through ADC, dance is recognized for greater possibilities in society: the company creates contemporary dances that resonate with the soul, encourage self-examination, and incite positive change into the world. ADC embraces dance as a universal language with the power to entertain, educate, and awaken the core being.
Since its conception in December of 2005, Amalgamate Dance Company has ignited audiences across the country with bold choreography revealing a new generation of dance with a purpose. ADC’s repertoire is filled with audacity, rawness, and grit, designed to pulse out the truth of any given person, situation, or event. The company’s dance embodies activism, challenging dancers and audiences to “put it on" – to embrace the topics, events, and global relationships of our times.
As our name indicates, we seek to amalgamate, or merge, dance with specific client-based needs around the globe to produce groundbreaking projects that impact organizations and the world. ADC is known for collaborative outreach efforts inspired by charities, churches, and community centers. ADC is available for performances, choreography commissions, workshops, summer intensives, master classes, and more. The company is active in the community, working in senior centers, dance and art studios, high schools, colleges, churches and community centers.
Amalgamate Dance Company was formed to create more opportunities for dancers to authentically express themselves and ultimately equip them to lead happier and healthier lives. We desire to empower and create an outlet for both the performer and audience. This commitment to expanding lives will allow ADC to influence millions of people who will come into contact with our work.
www.munisteri.com
Ben Munisteri Dance Projects was founded in 1994 in New York City. The ensemble came up in an often gritty, postmodernist East Village scene. The company—comprised of six dancers—has toured internationally and received many grant awards, funding support, and critical praise.
Recent tours and new dances were subsidized by the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, and the National Performance Network. The company has enjoyed recent home seasons presented by the Joyce Theater, Dance Theater Workshop, and Dance New Amsterdam. Supported by funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and a creative residency from Jacob's Pillow, their 2009-10 season features the creation of the Catalog project, whose first incarnation will premiere at Lincoln Center in August 2009.
Ben Munisteri is a collagist. That is the shortest sentence to describe his artistry. For 15 years, Munisteri has methodically compiled a body of choreographies that challenge notions of contemporary dancemaking. But use of the term collage does not mean to suggest that his work is random or expeditiously pieced together. They are not simply a spontaneous and clever mixing of ballet and modern idioms. Rather, they are finely crafted compositions that not only draw from these and other disparate movement sources, but also layer musical and aural soundscapes from an equally broad array. His results are realized as colorful, abstracted adventures: constructions to be revealed and visions to be cherished before they slip away. His dances reveal Munisteri’s wit, but they also demonstrate his astute sense of and adherence to form.
Munisteri likes to surprise his audiences, but closer examination exposes an unorthodox sense of logic and design that are the underpinnings of each dance. That which at first seems unexpected eventually proves to be in tune with the organized whole. He applies structure against chaos, distilling his visions until character and narrative evaporate, leaving a fleet, nuanced yet potent theatrical experience that continues to reverberate after the performance ends.