fractured relationships collide and ignite. VIEW TRAILER BELOW
About this Event
https://vimeo.com/1209240915
https://vimeo.com/1226990313
“The Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company is continuing to challenge what can be explored in modern dance.” New York Magazine
Continuing to grow and flourish as an acclaimed company, while always challenging itself, Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company maintains innovative programming and has created an exciting fall season at the Ailey Citigroup Theater October 29 and 30 at 7pm, October 31 matinee, 3pm.
FRICTION. A dance exploring AI, humanity, and the sparks where tension, technology, and fractured relationships collide and ignite. FRICTION captures the tension and tenor of our time, arriving days before the midterm election, harnessing the fraught emotions of our uncivil society.
FRICTION is the moment before a fire starts. Before intercourse. Before love. It is the friction that makes this heat possible. Straddling the line separating technology from humanity, a theme DGDC has explored since its first evening-length work, Plasma Field, in 1999, through 2023's e-Motion investigating sentience in AI, ahead of the curve. The dance asks: what's the divide between artificial and real intelligence?
Daniel’s choreographic style was best articulated by dance critic Deborah Jowitt, “blending casualness with precision.” In FRICTION, Gwirtzman is pushing both the casualness and the precision to the max.
In the group section LARGE LANGUAGE MODEL, which previewed June, 2026 at New York City Center’s IN THE STUDIO program, the dancers become bytes, pushing against their will, against their consciousness, executing dense, intricate movements at relentless speeds. The dance contains an archive of excerpts from dances in the Company’s repertory, pieces of dances torn up, recontextualized, fed to the machine and regurgitated. The score has been generated in full in collaboration with AI.
FRICTION, the Company's full first evening-length season in New York City since 2019, presents as an intermission-less evening-length dance featuring Mariah Anton-Arters, Derek Crescenti, Brogan Donston, Daniel Gwirtzman, Maddy Hall, Sarah Hillmon, Vanessa Martínez de Baños, Johnny Mathews and Aria Roach among its charismatic cast.
Overcoming inertia, getting out of bed, combatting aging, striving, hardships, perceptions, expectations, hopes, comparisons, disappointments, struggles, risk. FRICTION.
Event venue & nearby stays
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, 405 West 55th Street, New York, United States
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