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 2011 New Sounds, New Moves program at Joyce SoHo, SummerStage 2010 (NYC), 92Y Fridays-at-Noon, a split-bill evening at Dance New Amsterdam, 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, she has traveled across the U.S. and around the world as a choreographer, performer, and educator. Recent projects have taken her to Morocco, Argentina, Turkey, and Puerto Rico, and her NYC-based ensemble has created a buzz at such venues as Joyce SoHo, Dance New Amsterdam, 92Y, Ailey, 92Y Tribeca, and City Center since 2006. In August 2010, the company shared a split-bill SUMMERSTAGE evening with the Taylor II company. 2011 commissions include works for the Harvard Ballet Company and the Sounds of a New Century Festival (co-presented by Joyce SoHo and the American Composers Orchestra). Dedicated to cross-cultural, interdisciplinary exchange and the synthesis of ideas, contexts, and idioms, Darcy has collaborated with poets, filmmakers, sculptors, painters, cartoonists, visual composers, and musicians.
Darcy has taught at many of the major institutions in New York City, including Dance New Amsterdam, Broadway Dance Center, Peridance, and the school of the Westchester Ballet Company. Past collaborators include the Grammy nominated Brazilian Girls (USA), visual composer Pierre Mansire (Amsterdam, Paris), New Yorker cartoonist Edward Koren (USA), composer Ji-il Jeon (Korea), costume designer Camilla Chuvarsky (USA), Nuyorican Grand Slam Poet Eboni Hogan (USA), filmmaker Linda Brieda (Germany), and street dancer Kambi Gathesha (Kenya, Saudi Arabia). She has appeared in the work of Pavel Zustiak, Yolande Snaith, Doug Elkins, Ron K. Brown, Alwin Nikolais (directed by Alberto del Saz), Donna White, Lara Luzim, and Christopher Huggins (Opus Dance Theatre), among others.
Movement influences include elements of postmodern release technique, street dance, ballet, martial arts, Japanese dance, and the technique of NYC-based choreographer Stephen Petronio. Darcy holds a B.F.A. and Dance Education certification from the University of Utah, where she was a Presidential Scholar and recipient of the Interdisciplinary Arts Scholarship. 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.
Current research interests include Forsythe-based improvisation, service learning in higher education, gaga technique, the history/culture of hip hop, telematic collaboration, and the interplay between structure, content, embodied practice, and meaning-making in contemporary choreography. Through performance, teaching, and creative collision, Darcy hopes to share the artistic process through lines of class, gender, and geography.
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- Kate Gyllenhaal
- Edward Leung
- Earl Mosley
- Jennie Quon
- Eddie Stockton
