ABOUT DANCE NOW

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Created as a pilot program for the Downtown Multi-Arts Festival in 1995, DANCE NOW (DN) launched independently in 1997 with our signature Festival series, and a mission to offer unconventional, all-inclusive destination events to make dance more accessible to the public by bringing it into the places where people, live, work and play. In 2003, we created our Dance-mopolitan Series for the intimacy of Joe’s Pub at The Public. The closeness of the artists to their audience at the pub provided a vital stimulus to spark creativity. This, along with our challenge initiative, encouraging work marked by brevity and clarity, inspired the commissioning of more than 35 full and shared evening works for the pub. With this huge success of our pub programming, we merged all our programs to Joe's Pub in 2011, where our audiences come to expect risk-taking, surprise, extraordinary dancing and magical experiences.

 

In 2020, the pandemic forced the cancellation of all our live programming in NYC, as well as our residency, teaching and performance programs in Lehigh Valley, PA and Boston. Following a year and a half of digital online presentations designed to keep the DN community of artists connected, creating and paid during the pandemic, we were forced to make the difficult decision in 2021 to shutter our programming due to a financial loss of more than forty percent of our earned income from lost box office sales, cancelled contracted services and residency fees, and the overwhelming and high cost to keep our staff in place to support the creation of online programming, which coincided with my grave personal loss as DN’s Executive Artistic Director and Producer.

 

In the summer of 2022, Joe’s Pub invited us to curate programming for their new out-door September Astor Alive series so that they could highlight and honor the great partnership that we have shared for 19 years. This free outside event, showcased TruDee (Deborah Lohse) as host, and presented excerpts from two of DN’s favorite commissions, Megan William’s Dance Project’s One Woman Show (2018) and TAKE Dance’s Somewhere Familiar Melodies (2013), on September 17th, 2022. The event was a huge success. It clearly signaled the need for DN to consider continuing to provide our artists with rich and meaningful opportunities through our unique partnership with Joe’s Pub, and to continue to bring a broad range of dance to our long-time DN fans, as well as the new audiences that the pub has always generated.

 

We are thrilled to be returning with our live programming  at Joe’s Pub in the fall of 2023, during our traditional spot right after Labor Day to once again kick off the NYC dance season as DANCENOW / NOW.