Returning to the NDT stage is Nadav Zelner’s Bedtime story (2021) that the choreographer created for the company in the height of COVID-19. “In this work it was important for me to give my dreams a stage, and to give the dreaming child that I once was a tangible expression. As we get older, we tend to abandon our dreams. We should get reacquainted with the child in us,” says Zelner. At the time of its premiere, the work was met with critical acclaim: “Zelner’s dance language is passionate, lighting fast and absolute, detailed down to the thumb,” wrote NRC.
Micaela Taylor is a choreographer, and the Artistic Director of her company TL Collective. Trained in hip-hop and ballet, she has created her own dance genre called Expand Practice, exuding emotion from the core and creating varied physicality and textures as expressions of one’s authentic self. Taylor’s movement language has been described by the Los Angeles Times as “athletic and graceful, precise and fluid,” and one that “settles in the dichotomies.” This premiere will mark Taylor’s first ever creation for the company.
What does participation look, feel, and sound like? How does our perception of time or ‘progress’ stimulate engagement? With the desire to support new voices, NDT has invited Jermaine Spivey to the Amare stage with an expanded version of Code of Conduct (2022), originally created for Up & Coming Choreographers 2022. “With Code of Conduct I was interested in defining physicality through choreographic and improvised structures that place the dancers in states of happening, nothing, something,” Spivey says. “The structures demand rigour, sensitivity, and responsiveness. In this way, the piece could resemble the effect(s) of this shared and internalized process.”
