february 6 2015: Andy de Groat works at 92nd St Y

Andy De Groat — Creative Simplicity within Visual Splendor

Pieces by Andy de Groat Reconstructed by Catherine Galasso
Fridays at Noon at the 92nd Street Y
Friday February 6 2015 at 12 Noon
tickets: $10 

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Featuring live renditions of: 
* Rope Dance Translations (1974)
* Fan Dance (1978)
* swan lac (1982)
* stabat (1990) 
* Hiroshima (2004)

Performed by: Rachel I. Berman, Christine Bonansea, Ritty Burchfield, Patrick Gallagher, John Gutierrez, Makram Hamdan, John Hoobyar, Anne Lewis, Kathy Ray, Sarah Sandoval, Austin Selden, Emily Smith, Satya Stainton, Julia Vickers, Connor Voss, Buck Wanner, and Emily Wassyng. 



We need your help to sustain this project!


I've known about Andy all my life; he and my parents met when they were all on tour with Robert Wilson's company, the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds in the 1970s. Afterwards, Andy and my father, composer Michael Galasso ("In The Mood For Love"), continued to collaborate, my father composing original scores for multiple pieces of Andy's, both in New York and in France.



I initiated this project because I wanted to see these dances that my father and Andy collaborated on together, most of them created before I was born. There is video documentation of the more recent works, but not of the older ones. Remaking them is about me being able to see them live, but also about giving them new life and allowing others to see them as well. This is archiving through re-performance. It’s my way of passing it on to a younger generation, in an effort to keep this dance history alive. 


Andy de Groat was born in 1947 in the United States into a family of Dutch, Italian, French, German and English origins. Whilst studying at the New York School of Fine Art in 1967, he met the director Robert Wilson. He joined his troupe as a dancer, then as a choreographer for all the productions from Deafman Glance in 1971, A Letter for Queen Victoria in 1974 to Einstein on the Beach in 1976, created for the Avignon Festival. In 1981, he received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation in New York for his choreographic research. He created new works in succession for red notes/cie andy de groat, including several for Jean Guizerix, Wilfride Piollet, Jean-Christophe Paré, the Choreographic Research Group of the Opera of Paris (GRCOP), the Scala in Milan, Ris et Danceries, the Ballet du Nord (Roubaix) and Wah Loo Tin Tin Co, a Montauban-based company of young performers. Today, his work totals over sixty creations that have been presented in around twenty countries and periodically goes back to questioning the repertoire and the heritage of dance. His company has worked regularly on lyrical productions since 1988, in particular on The Magic Flute (Mozart), with Robert Wilson at the Opera Bastille, Paris, The Rake’s Progress (Stravinsky), with Alfredo Arias for the Aix-en-Provence Festival of Lyric Art and at the Operas of Lyon, Gênes and Montpellier, Aida (Verdi) and Klaus Michael Grüber at the Amsterdam Opera.

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