Baruch Performing Arts Center
Baruch College, NYC
22 January 2012

Valerie Green, founder of Long Island City’s Green Space, has been active in the NYC dance community since the late 1990s. After starting her career with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company, Ms. Green formed Dance Entropy shortly after Hawkins’s death. While maintaining a visceral bond with the Graham-Hawkins tradition of multi-sourced American dance, Green is distinctively of her own time and place.

One measure of a choreographer must be the ability to attract good dancers and then to build exciting work on them.

Inexplicable Space
Choreography: Valerie Green
Dancers: Kristin Licata, Jen Painter, Julia Sabangan, Yayoi Suzuki, Raleigh Veach, Daniel Zapata
Costumes: Deborah Erenberg
Music: Camille Sain-Saëns, Mychael Danna, Marlon Cherry, Palms Down, Dick Dale, DecOdex, Dafos

Erick Hawkins famously said, “The body is a clear space.” Green mixes that space up, with dancers who thread in and out of each other and props that are goofy but somehow not.

Rise & Fall
Choreography: Valerie Green
Dancers: Amy Adams, Valerie Green, Kristin Licata, Jen Painter, Julia Sabangan
Costumes: Daniel Herskowitz
Music: BP Service, Eno/Wobble, Trent Reznor, DecOdex

A Rite of Spring for the Occupy generation. Green joins four of her dancers to enact an expressionist allegory of Western civilization. Daniel Herskowitz’s costumes aid the differentiation of the characters, who are as clearly delineated as Chaucer’s pilgrims. Midway through this severe work, it is startling to see Julia Sabangan take flight, execute a midair turn and form a deceptively pretty, masterful arc from finger to toe. And we realize, this is our way out, into beauty and clarity of being.