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Ben Munisteri Dance Projects
Dance Theater Workshop Presents
On June 16-19, the Bessie Schonberg Theater in New York City hosts a special dance performance that will captivate the audience with its unique movements and unique music.
Ben Munisteri Dance Projects performs three new pieces on stage as part of the Dance Theater Workshop’s Guest Artist Series.
Munisteri and his six dancers work together to create a flow from geometrical, symmetrical, and asymmetrical spatial designs that work in time with the music. Munisteri is known for basing new works on existing ones.
“My best works— the ones I find most satisfying—come from editing and re-editing my extant movement phrases and dance sections until multiple incarnations emerge,” Munisteri said on his website (munisteri.com). “Imagine a clothing designer re-sewing and re-fitting an ensemble, creating many different looks and evocations from the same material and then modeling them on different people.”
For the Ben Munisteri Dance Project performances, Munisteri employs his re-editing technique.
Catalog is a performance that contains only five movement phrases but Munisteri alters, rearranges, and repeats these five movements to create a special piece. Catalog is performed with music by Radiohead.
Binary 2.0 is Munisteri’s second performance which is set to music by Debussy. This dance was reworked and recomposed based on movements from Catalog.
Robot vs Mermaid is Munisteri’s third performance that incorporates sharp robotic movements with easy fluid motions. This performance is set to music by Kirk O’Riordan.
Ben Munisteri Dance Projects was founded in 1994 in New York City and is comprised of six dancers: Katie Weir, Todd Allen, Shane Rutkowski, Anica Scott-Garrell, Cameron Burke, and Kelly Garone.
The group has toured internationally and has received numerous grant awards, funding, and critical praise.
Munisteri himself has been choreographing dances for 18 years. He has created dances for the Pennsylvania Dance Theater, Danceworks Performance Company (Milwaukee), Circle of Dance (New York), and other regional dance companies. He has also won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the National Performance Network, and the National Dance Project.
Not only has he created memorable dances, Munisteri also has been a guest artist/teacher at several universities and colleges around the country. With his master’s degree in Teaching Dance in Higher Education from NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education, Munisteri has taught classes such as Modern II and III, Dance History and Criticism, Choreography 2, Performance and Digital Technology, Writing about the Performing Arts, Advanced Repertory, and Seeing Performance.