about*
Naganuma Dance is a contemporary dance company based in New York City. Led by Artistic Director Darcy Naganuma, the multi-ethnic, multilingual ensemble is comprised of performers from around the globe. Drawing from a wide range of forms, the company's movement vocabulary fuses elements of release technique, street dance, ballet, martial arts, and Japanese dance. Since its inception in 2006, Naganuma Dance has won praise for the dynamic vision, innovative movement, and evocative visual imagery it brings to the stage.
Dedicated to cross-cultural, interdisciplinary exchange and the synthesis of ideas, contexts, and idioms, the company has collaborated with poets, filmmakers, cartoonists, visual composers, and musicians. It has been selected to appear in the 92Y Tribeca Dance-A-Raoke series, the 2006-2008 Battery Dance Company Downtown Dance Festivals, the Earl Mosley Masters of Dance Performance Series, the 2006 Dumbo Dance Festival, and the 2007 and 2008 White Wave Cool New York Dance Festivals, and its full-length shows at venues in and outside of New York City have consistently yielded sold-out audiences.
Naganuma Dance seeks to explore that place where the lines between the real and the illusory, conscious and unconscious, human and otherworldly blur, intersect, and in fleeting pockets of time, disappear. At times, the company employs motion as a medium for reflection and commentary on social realities. Often, however, movement is approached as part of a greater aesthetic drive, at one with the meaning. Audiences are transported into an alternate environment where imaginative props, lighting, and sound create new spaces for invention and play.
Though performance, teaching, and creative collision, members of Naganuma Dance hope to share the artistic process through lines of class, gender, and geography.
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Darcy Naganuma is the Artistic Director/ Founder of Naganuma Dance. Born and raised in Lihue, Hawaii, Darcy currently runs her company out of New York City. Her choreography, described by critics as "physical and explosive," "powerful," "riveting," "lush and vibrant," and "utterly absorbing," has been presented in Hawaii, Salt Lake City, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York. Her heart resides in the studio; she is constantly invigorated by the magic that emerges as her own ideas meet the unique strengths of her collaborators.
On faculty at both Dance New Amsterdam and Broadway Dance Center in New York City, Darcy also heads the modern program at the school of the Westchester Ballet Company. Her teaching credits include workshops and classes at SUNY Purchase, PMT Dance Studio, the Utah State Dance Conference, Salt Lake Community College, and Repertory Dance Theatre.
She has appeared in works by Ron K. Brown, Doug Elkins, Alwin Nikolais (solo reset by Alberto del Saz), Viola Farber, Linda Diamond, and Donna White. She was featured in the premiere of a new Repertory Dance Theatre LINKS work, and, since her move to New York City, has danced with Opus Dance Theatre and Hydroflo Dance Company. She has appeared in commercials and dance specials on both the MTV and VH1 networks, and was invited to perform at the UN Headquarters in May 2007.
Darcy holds a BFA and Dance Education certification from the University of Utah, where she was a Presidential Scholar and recipient of the Interdisciplinary Arts Scholarship.
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- Inger Foster
- Kate Gyllenhaal
- Edward Leung
- Earl Mosley
- Jennie Quon
- Eddie Stockton
