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 dancers—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,  Dance New Amsterdam, and Lincoln Center Out of Doors. Supported by funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and a creative residency from Alverno Presents (Milwaukee), their 2010-11 season features the creation of two new dances that will premiere at the Williams Center for the Arts (Easton, PA) and Dance Theater Workshop (NYC).

For 18 years, Munisteri has methodically compiled a body of choreographies that challenge notions of contemporary dancemaking.  He aims to create finely crafted compositions that not only draw from 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 may reveal Munisteri’s 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 viewing experience that continues to reverberate after the performance ends.

Artist’s statement
My best works— the ones I find most satisfying—come from editing and re-editing my extant movement phrases and dance sections until multiple incarnations emerge.  Imagine a clothing designer re-sewing and re-fitting an  ensemble, creating many different looks and evocations from the same material and then modeling them on different people. Imagine a digital music composer using a limited pool of samples and effects to create many remixes, each with a different sound and feeling but descended from the same sound library.  This is what I try to do with my dance compositions.  Accordingly, several editions of a single dance often result.  Sometimes I have presented new versions of existing repertory, calling the results “remixes” or “recompositions,” which are set to different musical accompaniment than the original.  More often, I have simply folded these editions into one piece (see, for example, Catalog, on the video page).

But these editions yield more than just the realization of familiar sequences placed in new contexts.  Instead, my recompositions can effect utterly different evocations and resonances: A dark, sensual, slow, personal solo sequence may be re-fashioned as speedy, bright, cold, and layered group piece without generating any new movement.  (Changing the lighting, costume, and sound designs helps too.)  Though these compositional ideas are nothing new in the history of American dance, I am regularly surprised at how the art of choreography—for me, anyway—comes down to altering order, dynamics, tempos, music, casting, and staging. I see my dances as living design creations that are meaningful to their viewers through legible rhythms, movement qualities, speeds, groupings, partnering, and sequences of few—but greatly varied—movements.

I do not see my dances as a function of theater; a system of gestures, mime, or symbols to be deciphered into concrete meaning or metaphor; a way to evince a humanist theme or idea that could be better articulated through language; storytelling; character studies; a means to effect a sociopolitical statement; a result of chance operations; an autobiographical statement; or an expression of dancers’ emotional states (although I hope that viewing the dance stirs the audience's emotions). I am more interested in the way a dance looks to its viewers than in how it feels to the dancers performing it. 

(I think of the scene from the 1970 film Five Easy Pieces, where Bobby plays Chopin's E minor prelude for his sister.  Afterward, she is moved by the emotion in his playing, but Bobby reveals that he was simply executing the kinds of phrasing and dynamics that would elicit an emotional response from a listener: He himself felt nothing. Bobby thinks that because his playing was not borne of the same emotion it induced in his listener, he is lacking or fraudulent.  I don't think that's true. There is enormous artistic value in paying attention to phrasing and dynamics. Also, as a boy I performed that prelude at many piano recitals. How are you supposed to feel great gravitas emotion when you're nervous and nine years old? Because I played thoughtfully and with intent, I think I aquitted myself well.)

I am not a movement innovator, a dramatist, a philosopher, or a semiotician. Instead, I see myself as an excellent editor, tailor, and craftsman who manages to make something artful, meaningful, and beautiful with these skills (and with smart, generous, talented dancers).