When Green Box Director Scott Levy sat down with co-founding board member and choreographer Larry Keigwin to discuss the dance component of the sixteenth annual festival in Colorado’s Green Mountain Falls, the pair decided it was time to do something new. “We thought how wonderful it would be to offer more of a variety during the festival,” Levy says. “So we started to think about what different styles of dance we might want to incorporate—particularly in areas we’ve never presented, or haven’t presented in a long time.” The result, A World of Dance: A Variety of Rhythms, a genre-scrambling program representing five different companies and styles from tap to modern, flamenco to Kathak, and points in between. “I hope audiences walked away with the idea of dance as a universal language,” Levy says. “There is so much individuality based on culture. It’s one, but it’s many. I think it resulted in a very powerful experience.”
Barkha Patel
The dance practice of Barkha Patel lives on the fine edge of the old ways and the new. Articulating traditional North Indian Kathak performance in a bold contemporary voice, the New York City-based performer, choreographer, and educator says it’s a marriage born of motion across the map. “I’m taking what has been passed down to me and imagining it as a creator and artist based in the diaspora,” she says. “So while the movements are all still very deeply Kathak, there are choices I make that don’t often look like Kathak, but they are often informed by my upbringing in the West.”
Jesús Muñoz Flamenco
For Jesús Muñoz, it’s hard to separate himself from the artform he’s dedicated the last two decades of his life to exploring. The forty-two-year-old flamenco dancer, educator, and artistic director says it has less to do with a distinct set of artistic practices and more with a vision for a better future. “It’s more than a performance—flamenco is a way of life,” Muñoz says. “Good artists practicing their art changes the world, and it changes mindsets. If I didn’t think I could save the world by dancing flamenco, I wouldn’t do it.”
Marrying the folkloric tradition of southern Spain with Latin, jazz, and hip-hop expressions, Muñoz brought his flamenco fusion to the Green Box Arts Festival for a soul-stirring evening of dance.
“If they’ve never seen flamenco or they’ve never seen us perform, I see a lot of people have involuntary emotions: They laugh and cry,” Muñoz says.
Michela Marino Lerman
It was an episode of Sesame Street that set Michela Marino Lerman on the path of tap dancing. Cast on the beloved PBS children’s show at age six for a segment with celebrated tap dancer and actor Gregory Hines, it was a pivotal moment for a kid who was just beginning to discover her love for the percussive dance form. “It really felt like fate had just exploded in my life. I wanted to meet this guy, and I wanted to tap dance—and I just so happened to be in this Sesame Street segment about Gregory and tap dancing,” she recalls. “That really kind of catapulted me.”
Since dubbed a “prodigy” by the New York Times, the Hoofer and FloBert Awards-winning tap dancer took the stage at Green Box Arts Festival as a duo with her partner Russell Hall.
“Tap lives at this nexus between a dance form and a music form. I just really try to break down that wall,” she says. “This doesn’t have to be two separate things. It can be one thing, and it can be beautiful.”
GALLIM
Focusing on its three self-described pillars of art-making, education, and community building, the vision of Brooklyn-based modern dance company GALLIM is to help make way for a world “where creativity, movement, and art is accessible, valued, and serving its ancient role of communicating the experience of our times.”
In addition to its School of Movement, including professional dance training, intensives, and experiences, the organization founded in 2007 by choreographer Andrea Miller also operates a residency program for early-career movement artists from marginalized communities.
The company performed Miller’s Bruce at Green Box Arts Festival. “With six dancers, there’s variety not just in the style of the dance itself [at the festival], but in the presentation of the dance,” says Levy.
Ephrat “Bounce” Asherie
Her training may be in ballet and modern dance, but it was the South Bronx street art of breaking and the house music of the New York club scene that brought the practice of Ephrat “Bounce” Asherie where it is today. “As a kid, hip-hop, jazz, and then house music opened my ears and mind to the profound vastness of music and dance from the African Diaspora,” Asherie says. “I have been beyond fortunate to learn a multitude of culturally reflective dances from elders—both in NYC’s breaking and underground club scenes—for over two decades now.”
A 2016 Bessie Award winner for Innovative Achievement in Dance, Asherie has racked up a number of other high honors including the Dance Magazine Inaugural Harkness Promise Award and the Jacob’s Pillow Fellowship at the Tilles Center for the Performing Arts at Long Island University, along with appearances on MTV, Comedy Central, Carnegie Hall, and Madison Square Garden.