has toured internationally and received many
grant awards, funding support, and critical praise. Recent
tours and new dances were subsidized by the National Dance
Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts, the
Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, and the National Performance Network. The company has enjoyed
recent home seasons presented by the Joyce
Theater, Dance Theater Workshop, and Dance New Amsterdam. Supported by grants from the
National
Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, their
2006–07 season features the creation of Terra
Nova, developed in residence at Indiana University and
premiered at the University of California Santa
Cruz’s Arts
& Lectures series.
Ben
Munisteri is a
collagist. That is the shortest sentence to describe his
artistry. For 15 years, Munisteri
has methodically compiled a body of choreographies that challenge
notions of contemporary dancemaking. The hallmarks of his
dances are their articulation and legibility: bold musicality, vivid
theatricality, and rigorous, virtuosic dancing. Yet these
descriptors cannot articulate the contribution he hopes to
make to his
art form.
Use
of
the term collage
does not mean to suggest that his work
is
random or expeditiously pieced together. They are not
simply a spontaneous and clever mixing of ballet and modern idioms.
Rather, they are finely crafted compositions that not only draw from
these
and other disparate movement sources, but also layer musical and aural
soundscapes from an equally broad array.
His
results are
realized as
colorful, abstracted adventures: constructions to be revealed and
visions to
be cherished before they slip away. His dances reveal
Munisteri’s playful wit, but they also demonstrate his astute
sense of and adherence to form. Munisteri likes to surprise
his audiences, but closer examination exposes an unorthodox sense of
logic and design that are the underpinnings of each dance.
That which at first seems unexpected eventually proves to be in tune
with the organized whole. He applies structure against chaos,
distilling his visions until character and narrative evaporate, leaving
a fleet, nuanced yet potent theatrical experience that continues to
reverberate after the performance ends.
