STAGED?

Maria Hassabi, the choreographer of Cypriot origin, has been pursuing her highly personal and entirely unique career on the New York scene for years now. Her style draws on elements from her dance education but also from her artist’s eye, which places her work on the cusp between dance and performance. That’s why she is performed in museums as well as in theatres. Her artistic idiom and her commitment to it have earned her numerous recent appearances at important festivals, venues and museums in Europe and America, including a show at the MoMA in New York. There’s something alluring about her work—something revelatory of the secret links between the human body, space and time.

In “STAGED?”, she puts three of New York’s finest dancers and herself on stage in a work which readdresses the thematic axes that have long underpinned her work: the body as an art-work in space; the interweaving of parallel solos into a unitary composition resembling a large, moving sculpture; the temporal expansion that asks the audience to adapt to the work’s slow, catalytic pace and allow themselves to sink into contemplation; the "intermediate" movements and the qualities they bestow on the space they occupy, which become the heart of the choreography; and the expressive warmth generated by bodies in motion.

“STAGED?” was created during residencies at Bard College (New York) and the Camargo Foundation with funding from the Jerome Foundation (Cassis, France) and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (Florida, US)

“STAGED?” was supported, in part, with contributions from Randi and Jeff Levine, and Leo Koenig and Maggie Clinton