Saturday, July 29, 7.30 pm
Show @OpenAirStage
Free admission
Parking B
The Open Air Stage bar opens 2 hours before the show
Show @OpenAirStage
Free admission
Parking B
The Open Air Stage bar opens 2 hours before the show
A a | a B : O 2 8
Choreography In Process
“At the start of my career, I founded my own project AB&A -Aszure Barton & Artists in order to create an autonomous, collaborative platform for process-centered creation. While I also enjoy creating commissioned work for other institutions, it is through building my own projects with my most trusted colleagues that I’ve achieved the most unfiltered expansion in my work, as that is where I feel most free”. (Aszure Barton)
While at Orsolina28, Azure Barton will collaborate with some of the most talented, generous, and thoughtful artists she has had the pleasure of working with. As an international multidisciplinary collective uniting for the first time ever in this constellation, they will bridge and collide their worlds in service of discovering a new language together. Particularly interested in the way bringing intimacy and autonomy together creates a conversational tension necessary for forming deep relationships, Aszure finds that real closeness to another person coincides/makes space for deeper intimacy with oneself, and acknowledges this as the foundation she needs in order to maintain independence within collaborative relationships and commitments. Staying connected to both a sense of self and someone else without losing one or the other is a true challenge. This collaboration is an invitation for all the artists involved in the project to explore this tension; a dance between giving space and filling space with ambitious undertakings. It is through this tension that a deep collective sensibility will be born.
Dancers: Aszure Barton & Artists, including Dunia Acosta, Nora Brown, Daileidys Carrazana, Tobin Del Cuore, Jeff Docimo, Nolan Fahey, Jennifer Florentino, James Gregg, Nouhoum Koita, Taylor LaBruzzo, Daniela Miralles
Choreographer: Aszure Barton
Music: Ambrose Akinmusire
Aszure Barton
Aszure Barton, whose choreography has been equated to “watching the physical unfurling of the human psyche” by the US National Endowment for the Arts, started tap dancing at the age of three. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Aszure moved to Toronto at 14 to attend Canada’s National Ballet School. To date, she has collaborated with celebrated dance artists and companies including Mikhail Baryshnikov, Teatro alla Scala, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, English National Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Nederlands Dans Theater, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, National Ballet of Canada, Martha Graham Dance Company, Bayerisches Staatsballett, Malpaso Dance Company and many others. Her works have been performed on various international stages, including the Palais Garnier, Mariinsky Theater, The Kennedy Center, The Alicia Alonso Grand Theater, Studio 54, and Lincoln Center. She has also choreographed for film and theater (including the 2006 Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera, starring Cyndi Lauper and Alan Cumming, adapted by Wallace Shawn and directed by Scott Elliott), and her work has been featured on Sundance’s Iconoclasts TV Series alongside Alice Waters and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
After experiences in institutions in various places around the world, she settled in New York and founded her own dance company. Aszure Barton & Artists made its official premiere at the Montréal Fringe Festival, followed by an inaugural season at New York’s Joyce SoHo. Soon after, Barton became the first Artist-in-Residence at the Baryshnikov Arts Center under the Martha Duffy Fellowship, and so began her longtime collaboration with Mikhail Baryshnikov, who believes her to be “one of the most innovative choreographers of her generation.”
Azure Barton is recipient of the prestigious Arts & Letters Award, joining the likes of Margaret Atwood, Oscar Peterson, and Karen Kain, and an official Ambassador of Contemporary Dance in Canada. In 2014, she won the Gross Family Prize for her work Awáa, and this year she received the Ken McCarter Award for Distinguished NBS Alumni. Her work was voted Best Choreography on the 2022 Europe Critic Survey, and she was just awarded with Most Interesting Choreography in Berlin’s Jahrbuch Tanz for two of her works, BAAL and human undoing. She is also a Bessie Award Honoree. As an educator, Aszure is regularly invited to collaborate with and give workshops at private, public and independent art institutions and forums around the globe. She has developed a close working-relationship with The Juilliard School, and she recently served as Artist in Residence at The University of Southern California under the direction of WIlliam Forsythe.