Lar Lubovitch: Duet from Concerto Six Twenty-Two (1986)

Choreography: Lar Lubovitch (1986)

Music: W.A. Mozart, Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra K.622

Performers: Attila Joey Csiki and Tobin Del Cuore

Concerto Six Twenty-Two received its world premiere at Carnegie Hall on April 9,1986. The duet from Concerto Six Twenty-Two was subsequently performed on October 5, 1987 at the NY State Theatre at "Dancing for Life," the first response to the AIDS crisis by the dance community, conceived and initiated by Lar Lubovitch, uniting 14 different companies to raise money for AIDS care, research and education.

Choreography © Lar Lubovitch 1986

Lar Lubovitch is one of America's most versatile, popular and widely seen choreographers. His dances have been performed by major dance companies throughout the world. His Othello A Dance in Three Acts, originally created for American Ballet Theatre, appeared on PBS's "Great Performances" (and was nominated for an Emmy Award). His dances on film also include Fandango (International Emmy Award). His dances on film also include Fandango (International Emmy Award) and My Funny Valentine for the Robert Altman film The Company (nominated for an American Choreography Award). Lubovitch has also made a notable contribution to choreo graphy in the field of ice-dancing, having created dances for Olympic skaters John Curry, Dorothy Hamill, Peggy Fleming, Brian Orser, JoJo Starbuck and Paul Wylie, as well as two ice-dance specials for television: The Sleeping Beauty (PBS) and The Planets (A&E) (nominated for an International Emmy Award, a Cable Ace Award and a Grammy Award). His work on Broadway includes Into the Woods (Tony Award nomination), The Red Shoes (Astaire Award) and the Tony Award-winning revival of The King and I. In 2007, he founded the Chicago Dancing Festival with co-Artistic Director, Jay Franke. The festival is a series of performances by major American dance companies that takes place the last week of August at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Harris Theater, the Auditorium Theatre, and Chicago's Millennium Park. The Chicago Dancing Festival reaches over 15,000 audience members annually and is completely free to the public. In 2007, Lubovitch was named "Chicagoan of the Year" by the Chicago Tribune, and in 2008, Lubovitch and Franke were named by Chicago Magazine as "Chicagoans of the Year" for having created the Chicago Dancing Festival. In 2011, United States Artists named Lubovitch a Ford Fellow, and he received the Dance/USA Honors, the dance field's highest award. The choreography for Lubovitch's dance, Crisis Variations, was awarded the 2012 Prix Benois de la Danse for Choreography at Bolshoi Theater in Moscow.

Marilyn Wood: All the World’s A Stage- Marilyn Wood and Her Celebrations

All the World’s A Stage- Marilyn Wood and her Celebrations is a presentation in images and text by choreographer and event maker Marilyn Wood.

Credit goes to the young dancers of my early company "MW and the Celebration Group" who committed themselves to my vision of bringing our art form out into the heart of the community.

In the piece, the dancers were joined by other artists inspired to expand their normal work to provide the dramatic staging required for our site-specific events in the scale of public space in so many diverse environments and cultures. This network evolved into the International Center for Celebration" of artists who brought their new forms to each commission to invite collaboration with the local artists as I worked with the variety of local dance companies who also chose to participate in these new performance settings. These local dancers, artists and other support groups also deserve equal appreciation for offering their talents to the success of a resulting "Celebration" experience for their hometown.

Marilyn Wood (1929-2016) Dancer, Choreographer, Honorary AIA. She developed as a professional dancer in two companies, first with Alwin Nikolais (1952-57) and then Merce Cunningham (1958-63). Based on her love of the public processionals, rituals and festivals from growing up in the Latin culture of Puerto Rico, Marilyn was inspired to leave the proscenium to explore her vision of reinventing this ancient art which engages the whole community through collaboration and participation. She created her own dance company, Marilyn Wood and the Celebration Group, of dancers as well as artists, inventing new forms to match the scale and use new technologies to frame her choreography into public spaces in the heart of the community -- free, visible and accessible to all. Their early venues included a five-day series of events on the Lincoln Center Plaza, the entire lobby of Grand Central Station and dancers on a tugboat in New York Harbor. Her breakthrough event was launched in 1972 by Celebrations in City Place: The Seagram Building and its Plaza on Park Avenue where performers used all 38 stories of this iconic Mies van der Rohe building and the expansive "found stage" of its plaza. Commissions for City Celebrations followed from Cincinnati, Columbus, Kansas City, Little Rock, Tulsa, Cambridge and more. In 1976, she was invited to Adelaide, Australia to create three weeks of public performance events around the city leading up to her Opening of its bi-annual International Festival of the Arts. This shift to a global context led to the founding of the International Center for Celebration (ICC), a network of international artists who were inspired by her work to develop innovative art forms expanded for creating a site-specific theater in her large-scale public venues. Her work with local dance companies and her artists' collaborations with local talents and resources in each residency focused each Celebration project to reflect the unique culture, environment, and theme of each community. This process evolved into a legacy of events in such major cities as Hong Kong, Singapore, Teheran, West Berlin, Edmonton and Rio de Janeiro and many more. Marilyn Wood and the International Center for Celebration operated out of Santa Fe, New Mexico until her passing in 2016.

Remy Charlip: Twelve Contra Dances (1980) & Supreme Court (1986)

Twelve Contra Dances (1980)

Choreography: Remy Charlip

Music: Ludwig van Beethoven

Costumes: Courtesy of the Hofstra University Department of Drama and Dance Dance Program

Performers: Stephanie Chun and Ari Someya
Company members of H.T. Chen and Dancers

Supreme Court (1986)

Choreography: Remy Charlip for Lotte Goslar

Music: Dreyer-McDonald

Performers: Patrick Scully and Lance Westergard

Remy Charlip (1929-2012) was a dancer, choreographer, designer, writer, actor, artist, and teacher. He studied art at Straubenmuller Textile High School in New York and fine arts at The Cooper Union, graduating in 1949. He studied dance at the New Dance Group Studio and at the Juilliard School with Tudor and Craske. He was a founding member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, performing as well as designing costumes and posters. He also danced with Charles Weidman, Jean Erdman, and Donald Mckayle. In 1958 he co-founded the Paper Bag Players, a children's theatre in New York. From 1964-70 he worked as choreographer, designer, performer, and director with the Judson Dance Theater. Off-Broadway, he was the Stage Director of a 1962 production of Bertolt Brecht's Man Is Man for Julian Beck's Living Theatre, for which he received his first of two Obie Awards and the second in 1966 for directing A Beautiful Day, at the Judson Poets Theater, NYC. He illustrated and wrote more than two-dozen books, garnering three New York Times Best Illustrated Books awards and a first prize for illustration at the Bologna Book Fair, and was awarded a six-month residency in Kyoto, Japan from the Japan/U.S. Commission on the Arts. Charlip was the model for illustrations of Georges Méliès in the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, written and illustrated by Brian Selznick. He wrote and directed two plays, Biography (1970) and Secrets (1971), as director of the National Theater of the Deaf. He made more than 200 dances, for his own company (founded in 1977) or for others, including London Contemporary Dance Theatre, the Joffrey Ballet and the Oakland Ballet. His choreography showed a rhythmic sophistication and a highly developed sense of fun, and sign language was frequently incorporated into his physical language. In 1972, he initiated his 'air mail dances', a series in which he sent out sketches of positions in the dance and asked contributors to link them together in whatever way they wished. These dances, some of them performed by up to 250 people, have been staged in Europe, S. America, Australia, and U.S. He was asked to participate in Spring Dance Courses, Choreographer Theatre, at the New School for Social Research from 1967-1969. Concurrently, he became Head of the Children's Literature and Theatre Department at Sarah Lawrence College, where he taught a Workshop in Making Things Up. Charlip went on to become a Joseph E. Levine Fellow at Yale University, a Hadley Fellow at Bennington College, a Visiting Artist Resident at Harvard University, and John Adams Distinguished Visiting Professor at Hofstra University. Additional academic opportunities presented themselves as a Regents Lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara and The San Francisco School District Arts Education Project.