Ayodele Casel will present a new work in April as part of the Joyce Theater’s online spring season. The piece follows Ms. Casel’s celebrated collaboration with jazz pianist and composer Arturo O’Farrill at Joyce in 2019.
The spring list also includes new appearances by Brooklyn-based troupe Ballez; Ephrat Asherie Dance; and Dormeshia, Jason Samuels Smith, and Derick K. Grant. Ballez’s performance of “Giselle of Loneliness”, which was originally planned for the Joyce 2020 Pride Festival, will be broadcast live and then made available upon request. The others are filmed on stage and edited slightly before being released.
In October, Dance returned to Joyce with multiple cast members including Sara Mearns and Shamel Pitts and performed Molissa Fenley’s 1988 solo “State of Darkness” on the stage of the theater for a video compilation. Since then, Pam Tanowitz Dance and Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence company have streamed live from the Chelsea theater.
“The livestreams feel like a really big step,” Joyce’s program director Aaron Mattocks said in an interview. “It was important for the field to get some of these companies up and running again and to show that it can be done.”
The staging of works exclusively for the virtual audience is expensive and “the return is very, very low”.
“I don’t think it’s a sustainable model for the future,” he said.
In addition to the performances taped in the theater, the Joyce will stream digital programs throughout the spring from the Paris Opera Ballet, Batsheva Dance Company, Step Afrika !, Trisha Brown Dance Company, and others.
For more information, including the full schedule, please visit joyce.org.
