Lar Lubovitch Dance Company in its 50th Year

Men’s Stories: A Concerto in RuinThe Lar Lubovitch Dance Company is edging closer to its exciting 50th anniversary season at The Joyce Theater in New York City on April 17–22, 2018. The season will feature the world premiere of Wanderers as well as signature works from the company’s vast repertory, including Men’s Stories: A Concerto in Ruin (2000), performed by Lubovitch’s acclaimed company of dancers. The company will be joined by the Martha Graham Dance Company and dancers from The Joffrey Ballet, each performing seminal Lubovitch dances in honor of this milestone year.

 

Lar Lubovitch, one of America’s foremost choreographers, founded his eponymous company in New York in 1968. In the years since, he has choreographed more than 110 dances for his troupe, which has performed throughout the U.S. and in more than 40 other countries. Lubovitch’s work, noted for its musicality, full-bodied fluid movement, and deeply humanistic voice, has been hailed as “giving pleasure though beauty.” In addition to his dances for his own company, Lubovitch’s prodigious creative output includes works for ballet, theater, film and ice dancing.

 

The 50th anniversary season at the Joyce will feature two programs. The centerpiece is the world premiere of the haunting Wanderers, set to rare choral music by Schubert. The season also includes Lubovitch’s acclaimed Men’s Stories, performed by an all-male cast and set to an original score by Scott Marshall. When the work premiered, The Village Voice described it as “one of Lubovitch’s finest…the dance suggests fragments of personal history gleaming within layers of formal dancing.”

 

Dancers from The Joffrey Ballet will perform a quartet from Lubovitch’s Othello, a beloved work originally created for American Ballet Theatre, with music by Elliot Goldenthal. Then the Martha Graham Dance Company will perform Lubovitch’s lush The Legend of Ten, which maps the complex, shifting terrain of a Brahms quintet for piano and strings.

 

Also this spring, on April 6, the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company will return to the 92nd Street Y in New York City—the site of its first-ever performance in 1968—for a special commemorative event. Part of the 92nd Street Y’s Fridays at Noon series, the program will include a performance of excerpts from Men’s Stories and a conversation with Lubovitch about dance and his career. 

 

This fall, Lubovitch, in his role as a curator and as a part of his distinguished professorship at UC/Irvine, curated Heart of Dance, a series of four lecture-demonstrations featuring guest companies: Ronald K. Brown/Evidence (October 21), Pam Tanowitz Dance (October 28), Martha Graham Dance Company (November 11), and Mark Morris Dance Group (November 18). The events were held at New York University’s Crystal Theater and were shared via interactive live telecast.

 

For more information about the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, visit www.lubovitch.org. Book tickets to The Joyce performances at www.joyce.org.

 

 

Photo: Lar Lubovitch Dance Company in Men’s Stories: A Concerto in Ruin. Photo by Steven Schreiber.