Dance Rising NYC: Video Tour (Still Dancing): 300 Videos Broadcast Throughout the Five Boroughs at More Than 20 Cultural Venues Through March 21

Dance Rising NYC announces a five borough Video Tour (Still Dancing) through March 21 to mark the one-year anniversary of NYC’s cultural shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Screens across New York City will broadcast videos from Dance Rising’s fall 2020 dance-outs, bringing visibility to the dance industry while live performance remains on pause.

A grassroots collective formed last fall as an urgent response to the pandemic, Dance Rising NYC is a platform for embodied advocacy that affirms the importance of dance in all its forms. In October and December 2020, Dance Rising organized live, hyper-local dance outs: on several specific dates/times, 300+ NYC dancers across the boroughs simultaneously took to the parks, streets, and rooftops to dance, calling attention to an entire sector that has been shut down by the pandemic. Dance Rising collected video recordings from these dance-outs, representing individual artists and established companies like Limon, Ballet Hispánico, Flamenco Vivo, Trisha Brown, Heidi Latsky Dance, The Bang Group, New York Theatre Ballet, Kinesis Project dance theatre, jill sigman/thinkdance, Renegade Performance Group and Movement of the People.

Now these compilation videos are ready to share with the public. Dance Rising is teaming up with the Village Alliance to produce large-scale, multi-screen projections at 21 Astor Place and partnering with 20+ cultural organizations in all five boroughs to share these videos in venue lobbies, windows, and online (March 13-21). A special edit of the complete, eight video series will premiere on March 16 via www.DanceRising.org. New Yorkers can also see short clips on LINKNYC kiosks across the city (March 8-26). Collectively, these videos will saturate the city with what already exists but has been out of the public eye for the past year. 

The dance sector of NYC is in crisis right now, from training the next generation to employing full-time professionals: dancers live in every neighborhood in the city, but the physical distancing requirements of the pandemic have kept them isolated in their homes, and studios and stages remain largely closed. Video Tour (Still Dancing) is a tribute to quarantine and the industry’s tenacity in finding ways to insist that dance is a vital performing art — one that shapes NYC’s identity as a cultural center.

Dance Rising founding member Melissa Riker, director of Kinesis Project dance theatre, says, “As a dance artist living through a mismanaged pandemic, struggling to support my own company, I am acutely aware of the damage to our field. Choreographers and dancers cannot train, teach, create, or perform in person – a year into the pandemic, they are still largely dancing in their living rooms on zoom. Dance Rising is an emergency call to action; a way to create a multi-faceted dialogue that threads advocacy and visibility for dance into the streets of New York City.”