Programs in Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the UAE, Thailand, the UK, Oman and Serbia headline a full international season alongside concerts and programs in Richmond, VA in May, DC in June, the Kennedy Center in September and all around the DC school system in spring.
THE PEARL DIVER'S DAUGHTER
THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
JULY 2022
Culminating a 20 month creative process, The Pearl Diver's Daughter stage premiere is a concert for the young and the young at heart, telling a timeless tale of dreams, family and aspiration. Sponsored by the Embassy of the United States in the United Arab Emirates, the U.S. Pavillion at the Dubai World Expo and the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation.
Throughout 2021 and 2022 the Company, with artistic partners in the UAE the Company has crafted both a unique Augmented Reality experience and a live stage collabortion with exceptional Emirati, English and Canadian artists.
TO SAIL AROUND THE SUN
CONCERTS FOR YOUNG AUDIENCES | DC
MARCH - APRIL 2022
The existential challenge of climate change is the center of this 2017 Kennedy Center Commissioned work. This 2022 edition for DC Public School audiences takes the message that we all live on one interconnected earth and shares it in a delightful, imaginative trip around the world to all four seasons in a single day. Using the music of Antonio Vivaldi's "Four Seasons," Sail is both a delight and a message for the future.
THE AMERICAN SONGBOOK
A CELEBRATION | MUSCAT, OMAN
SEPTEMBER 2022
Presented by the Embassy of the United States in Oman, and as a part of American Culture Days in Oman, Company | E partners with the Smithsonian Institution and extraordinary American artists to present "The American Songbook."
IN THE SEAM: The Miner's Journey
SUNDERLAND, U.K.
SUMMER 2022
Company | E continues its journey with DC Sister City Sunderland, England with an exploration of the cultural history of the men and women who mined the coal that drove the insdustrial revolution. Created in partnership with the Sunderland City Council and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, "In the Seam" is the fourth program in Company | E's rich partnership with Sunderland.
SHELTER: SERBIA
Nis, Serbia
Summer, 2022
In partnership with the U.S. Embassy, Belgrade Company | E and performing artists from Serbia team up for a dual digital and live collaboration in summer 2022.
PREMIERED APRIL 2020 | ONGOING
The Coronovirus Pandemic caused all our touring and concerts to come to a stop. They stopped, but we didn't. We launched SHELTER and ON CUE and turned to our 18 years of film-making history to create and commission 16 films (and counting). ON CUE, is our platform for premiering those films, interviewing artists, diplomats and leaders in the arts.
AN EVENING OF MOVEMENT ON AIR
ATLAS PERFORMING ARTS CENTER | DC
ONLINE
Company | E brings together an exceptional array of artists for an evening of dance, music and performance art as a part of the Atlas Performing Arts Center's "Atlas Arts On Air."
Featuring Amikaeyla Gaston, Tuyet Pham, Boris Willis, Howard University premiering a new work by Royce Zachary, the Movement Theater of Tbilisi, Georgia and Company | E premiering a work by Robert J. Priore, the concert showcases all new works made in 2021.
NEXT: WARMER
The Company | E choreography commission on the Climate Crisis
Climate change has been a part of Company | E's choreographic mission since the first WARMER concert in 2008.
In 2021 the Company, seeking to spur a return to live performance, commissions five new works in an open call to choreographers around the world. The works chosen came from India, Hungary, Canada and right here at home in DC. Together, the form a snapshot of the concerns and questions confronting us through human induced climate change - sea level rise, the need for sustainable building practices, our obsession with acquisition and the trash which comes from it, and our abuse of our planet.
A/RE YOU THERE
THE AUGMENTED REALITY PROJECT
WASHINGTON, DC | VANCOUVER, BC | SUNDERLAND, UK
This is the project which launched Company | E on its A/R journey.
Dance and technology have long been partners and adversaries. The most human of art forms today most often lives side-by-side with the most sophisticated lighting, stage design and "experiential" tools at theater's disposal. That journey is undergoing fundamental change once again with the advent of Virtual and Augmented Reality. We no longer have to be there to "be there."
"A/Re You There" launches Company | E into the cutting edge of these new ideas for sharing the power of movement. Working with Vancouver-based Volumetric Capture Systems and U.K.-based New World Design Company | E has created a State-of-the-Art encounter with dance that requires only an App and a smart phone or tablet to "see" a body in motion anywhere and at any time in the world.
"A/Re You There" was suppored by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and Sunderland City Council (U.K.).
New York remains the nexus of contemporary dance in the States. Company | E makes its second consecutive appearance at one of New York's most prestigious festivals with "Entangled" by Co-Artstic Director Paul Gordon Emerson, this time held virtually because of the Covid-19 pandemic. It's the Company's third NYC performance third since it was presented at The Joyce Theater in January 2017 with "Falling," one of Mr. Emerson's signature duets. The Company performs at the opening night Gala.
LETTERS TO EARTH
Washington, DC
2020 - 2021
If you could address a letter to the Earth, what would you say? That's the question Company | E, through the support of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, brings to DC Public School students. Climate change, social justice and a suite of in-school workshops (taught virtually now) combined with works by half a dozen choreographers center on the words of DC Middle Schools students.
"A Tamada In Manhattan" brought together deep Georgian traditions with shared questions of freedom of expression and aspiration for a better world in times of conflict. Transporting a traditional Toastmaster - a "Tamada" from Georgia and dropping him into the chaos and aspiration of 1960s New York, "Tamada" used the classic songs of the era to ask "what does freedom really mean, and what are we prepared to do to fight for it."
Sponsored by the Embassy of the United States in Tbilisi, and in partnership with the Movement Theater of Tbilisi, "Tamada" was one of our favorite expressions of the power of Cultural Diplomacy.
We toss the word around so casually, but how do we we, as individuals, as artists, as a culture, as a society and as a country define freedom? Does that universal word have universal meaning, or is it different for every person, every society, every country? For 200 years the United States has been held up as "the land of the free," yet the story of America is bound up in contradiction and conflict of the meaning of that word.
The Republic of Georgia has rarely been free -- in the way freedom is defined as an independent State. Forcibly absorbed into the Soviet Union, occupied and alternately briefly free for centuries, now a fractured country, how do the people and artists of Georgia define freedom?
That's the subject, and raison d'etre of The Freedom Project, a cross-cultural exploration between artists from the U.S. and their counterparts in the Republic of Georgia.
It's a unique opportunity to take art and use it to explore not just culture, but the meaning of a word we often use, but rarely understand.
The Freedom Project is funded by the U.S. Department of State, Embassy Tbilisi.
NATIONAL TOUR - KAZAKHSTAN
November 4 - 21, 2019
Nowhere is Company | E's relationship deeper than in the Central Asian Republic of Kazakhstan.
In November 2019 the Company, through its ongoing partnership with the Embassy of the United States in Kazakhstan, partners with the Country's only Contemporary Dance Troupe, Samruk Dance Company of Almaty, for a seven city National Tour, the first of its kind in the Republic.
VOYAGERS -
A DANCE AMONG THE PLANETS
WASHINGTON, DC
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts commissioned Company | E, for the fourth time in 24 months, to create a journey through the Solar System for its Theater for Young Audiences 2018-2019 season. On the 100th anniversary of the premiere of Gustav Holst's "THE PLANETS" the Center brought in composer arranger Eric Shimelonis to reimagine the classic orchestral work as a jazz quintet to be played live for a ten show run in March, 2019 before an audience of 3,500 young concert-goers.
Partnering with educators from NASA, and using the astonishing imagery from the remarkable journeys of man and machine in the past 50 years, Directors Paul Emerson, Kathryn Pilkington and Mr. Shimelonis created a journey through the Solar System by imagining the Kennedy Center Family Theater as a Planetarium.
SHANGHAI, CHINA
DANCE STAGES INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL
China - its in the news every day. Its the most heavily populated country in the world. Its home to the world's second largest economy. Yet, for all the ink devoted to it, its still very much an unknown to Americans. Culture is a bridge across that people-to-people divide and, in a time where U.S. relations are in an unprecedented upheaval all around the world, a connector at a governmental level.
Company | E spent a week in Shanghai in October 2018 at the invitation of the Dance Stages International Dance Festival dancing, teaching and making a film in the French Concession, one of Shanghai's most --- and only --- undisturbed historical neighborhoods.
The Company chose Lidia Wos's Who Let The Dogs Out, one of our most eccentric works, for the program, pushing the boundaries of contemporary dance -- still very much a nascent art form in China. A day of Master Classes brought us into the studio with 100 exceptional young artists after two days of concerts.
CHECK OUT WRITER'S BLOCK - our adaptation of "WLTDO" in the French Concession.
The 2018 program was the Company's third trip to China. We're looking forward to heading back soon!
INNOVATION
Expanding the possibiltiies for performance across the world. Company | E's deep dive into Augmented and Mixed Reality.
SCHOOL'S OPEN
"The MC builds and supports whole-child learning...instilling the values of self-discipline and team building."
- Roseanna B. MC Parent
The Company | E Movement Center for Dance Education teaches the next generation both the technique and the joy of movement.
WARMER
Since 2007 Company E has been commissioning work from artists around the world speaking to the Climate Crisis.
"...exactly the kind of work we had imagined when creating the Performances for Young Audiences series, elegantly combining multiple art forms including modern dance, classical music, storytelling, visual arts, and theater."
-- David Kilpatrick, Director, Education Programs and Productions. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
@ The Dance Institute of Washington
3400 14th Street NW | Washington, DC 20010
Email: info@companye.org
Phone: 202.930.2207
© Paul Gordon Emerson
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Images © Paul Gordon Emerson
