Photo of Eric Sean Fogel and Danica Holoviak by Tom Caravaglia
Ben Munisteri Dance Projects was founded in 1994 in New York City.  The ensemble came up in an often gritty, postmodernist East Village scene.

The company
comprised of six dancershas 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.