Revisiting “The Divine Punishment,” the first album in a trilogy addressing AIDS, and at work on new music, the singer and composer is still exploring isolation in her singular, startling way.
PEAK Performances at Montclair State University will welcome back Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Company for the world premiere of Curriculum II, a timely new work conceived and directed by the iconic, Tony-winning, and currently-Tony-nominated Bill T. Jones and choreographed by Jones with Janet Wong and the Company.
(MONTCLAIR, NJ) PEAK Performances at Montclair State University continues to introduce audiences to new work from today’s most exciting dance artists with the world premiere of Movement, in which celebrated choreographer Netta Yerushalmy intricately quilts together quotations from a vast array of sources: folk dances, traditional dances and ceremonies, modern and contemporary concert dance, commercial dance, sports, and contemporary life. The work draws from over 100 existing dances, stretching the idea of pluralism until it almost snaps. Movement features a new score by award-winning composer Paula Matthusen and is performed by dancers hailing from Korea, Senegal, Israel, Taiwan, and across the U.S.
(MONTCLAIR, NJ) PEAK Performances presents Company SBB // Stefanie Batten Bland’s dance-theater work Look Who’s Coming to Dinner, November 4-7 at Montclair State University’s Alexander Kasser Theater. Inspired by and contemporizing the themes of the 1967 Stanley Kramer film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner surrounding an interracial engagement and reactions to it Look Who’s Coming to Dinner pays tribute to those who paved the way toward acceptance in love and life.
A Rift Over Art and Activism Ripples Through the Performance World
A dispute between the director of Peak Performances and an Indigenous choreographer hinged on workplace behavior, power and the boundary between art and social justice.
The choreographer Emily Johnson doing a land acknowledgment at Abrons Art Center in 2018.Credit.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times
March 12, 2021
At a conference of performing arts presenters, in January 2020, Jedediah Wheeler, the executive director of Peak Performances at Montclair State University in New Jersey, introduced the choreographer Emily Johnson. Wheeler called himself “the luckiest person in the room” to be commissioning her to make work.