Parsons Dance Company
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| PARSONS DANCE | |
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 Parsons Dancers
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| Background information | |
| Origin |  New York, NY |
| Genre(s) | Dance |
| Years active | 1985 – present |
| Website | Dance Website |
Parsons Dance is a contemporary dance company founded by choreographer David Parsons. The company tours nationally and internationally, and includes an annual season in New York, where they are based.
The company consists of ten full-time dancers. It maintains a repertory of more than 70 works, twenty of which feature commissioned original scores by composers and musicians including Dave Matthews, Michael Gordon and Milton Nascimento. Parsons Dance has collaborated with many other artists, including Julie Taymor, William Ivey Long, Annie Leibovitz, Donna Karan and Alex Katz.
[edit] Performance
Parsons Dance tours an average of 32 weeks per year, having adopted this schedule in 1985. Since then they have made performance appearances in 235 cities, 30 countries and six continents. Their overseas appearances have included ones at Maison de la Danse (Lyon, France), Teatro La Fenice (Venice, Italy) and Teatro Municipal (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). In New York City, Parsons Dance has been featured at The Joyce Theater, City Center, New Victory Theater, Central Park Summerstage, The Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The World Trade Center. Parsons Dance has also performed at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and has appeared at all three Spoleto Festivals (in Italy, Australia, and the United States).
Parsons Dance has also had performances broadcast on television, through the PBS, Bravo, A&E Network and Discovery channels. They also performed in Times Square as part of the televised Millennium New Year's Eve Celebration.
[edit] Outreach
The providing of "education and outreach programs for patrons at all levels of artistic experience"[1] is included in the mission statement of Parsons Dance. To this end, the company offers master classes in modern dance, ballet and jazz techniques, lectures and demonstrations of repertory and/or elements of production, and workshops and seminars on nutrition, fitness and the art of dance. They also hold post-show discussions and offer the Parsons Dance Study Guide, designed in collaboration with the Ferst Center for the Arts, which serves as an educational dance resource for teachers and students.
Parsons Dance also holds an annual summer intensive dance workshop for pre-professional and professional dancers in New York City, designed to have participants work and interact with Parsons Dancers while taking classes in contemporary dance, ballet technique and Parsons repertory.
