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Harlem Stage's critically acclaimed dance series enters its 13th season by exploring the future of dance with today's hottest emerging and evolving choreographers.

Evolving: Sheetal Gandhi performing her acclaimed work Bahu-Beti-Biwi

Emerging: Nikki Hefko, Daisuke Omiya, Simone Sobers and Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

EVOLVING:

Choreographer: Sheetal Gandhi

Mentor: David Rousseve

Style: Contemporary

Title of Work: Bahu-Beti-Biwi 

Description of work: Bahu-Beti-Biwi is a solo tour de force combining dance, stirring vocalization and percussive text. It is an incisive commentary on the traditional role of Indian women and is offset by brilliant touches of humor.

In Bahu-Beti-Biwi (Daughter-in-law, Daughter, Wife), Gandhi merges dance, live singing and percussive text based on the language of the tabla (North Indian classical drum) to transition from one character to the next. A “pop-locking” bird transforms into an endearing auntie who nurtures through (over)feeding. The whining of an Indian-American teenage girl evolves into the slippery melody of a North Indian classical raga.

Throughout Bahu-Beti-Biwi Gandhi mines the text and subtext of centuries old North Indian women’s songs to re-imagine the singers’ lives by confronting them with women from her own life. Her characters have conversations with each other across time and space, revealing the complex tensions around freedom and compromise, desire and longing, duty and love. In both form and content, the work reflects her love for tradition with her equally urgent desire to break from it. An original score for the work is the product of a flourishing collaboration with composer Joe Trapanese whose music for the stage has been described as “precise and evocative” by the New York Times.

Biography: Sheetal Gandhi is a multidisciplinary choreographer and performer. She creates work that is reflective of a life that embraces diversity, observes human experience and yearns to tell a story. Using a hybrid movement vocabulary influence by Kathak, Modern and West African dance, as well as complex rhythmic structures, theatricality and singing, she crafts a virtuosic and evocative physical/vocal vocabulary. In form and content, the work reflects her love for Indian culture, tradition and disciplinary technique, with the equally urgent desire to break way from them.

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EMERGING:

Choreographer: Nikki Hefko

Mentor: Nia Love

Style: Ballet

Title of work: myself when i am real

Description of work:An exploration of an improvisation by Charles Mingus:

"I am proud because to me it has the expression of what I feel, and it shows changes in tempo and changes in mode, yet the variations on the theme still fit into one composition. I would say the composition is on the whole as structured as a written piece of music. For the six or seven minutes it was played (originally on piano), the solo was within the category of one feeling, or rather, several feelings expressed as one."-- Charles Mingus notes on "Myself When I Am Real"

Biography: Dancer and choreographer, Nikki Wilson Hefko has danced with the Dance Theatre of Harlem, Les Grands Ballet Canadiens, and the Metropolitan Opera.  Still engaged at Dance Theatre of Harlem as an instructor and most recently as the school's Summer Intensive Director, Nikki also teaches at Brooklyn Ballet and works as a guest instructor nation-wide.  Her choreography has been performed at the Louisiana Dance Festival, Riverside Church, The Actor's Fund Theater, Harlem School of the Arts and Aaron Davis Hall.  Originally from Mobile, Alabama, Nikki received her primary training from Mobile Ballet and is a graduate of Loyola University New Orleans.

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Choreographer: Daisuke Omiya

Mentor: Patricia Hoffbauer

Style: Contemporary

Title of work: There was nobody in the house

Description of work: When I step outside of my house, I step into a world full of many influences that affect everyone. Sometimes there are so many things happening, I feel like I can't keep up with myself. I try to adapt to my surroundings and avoid trouble from others. One of the ways people adapt is they control how much of their true selves they reveal in public. I take moments when I'm outside to stop myself and try to see what's going on around me. I see the world moving so fast, in so many different directions, changing speeds. I see the weird objects and the common ones and I try to feel a flow in it all. For this piece I have taken the relationships between myself, other people, objects, and environments and have translated them into movements.

Biography: Daisuke Omiya: Daisuke Omiya started dancing 7 years ago as a tap dancer. After graduating from high school, he moved from home town in Japan to New York City to become a professional tap dancer.He studied with such great tap dancers as Derick K Grant, Barbara Duffy, and Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards. He performed in the New York City Tap Dance Festival ''Tap City'' from 2007-2009,Boston Tap Dance Festival Beantown Tap Fest 2007,Japan Arts Matsuri/JAM 2007 and 2008,Los Angeles Tap Dance Festival 2009,He was invited to go to Taipei for the Taiwan Tap Festival and had the privilege of performing and teaching there in 2008. In 2009, he started studying contemporary and modern dance in 2009 and since has trained with Max Stone, Nathan Trice, and Karen Gayle. He worked with Maija Garcia's company, Organic Magnetics, this year and recently performed at The Kitchen with them. This is Daisuke’s second year being apart of the E-Moves series at Harlem Stage The Gatehouse.

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Choreographer: Simone Sobers

Mentor: Kevin Wynn

Style: Contemporary

Title of work: Her

Description of work: Her is a work inspired by the struggle women torn between traditional perspectives and expectations of how a woman should behave and individual desires to unleash her own inherent rebellious, wild, and sensual nature.

Biography:Simone Sobers, born in England, received dance training from Vladimir Issaev’s School of Classical Ballet, Alvin Ailey School,  Netherlands Dans Theater, and most recently New York University Tisch Masters in Dance program. Simone co-founded Sobers & Godley, a duet company, in January 2009 and started her own company, Simone Sobers Dance, in September 2010. She has presented her work at DanSpace, FAB! Festival, DanceNow Festival, Dumbo Dance Festival, Outlet Dance Festival, Jody Sperling Tea Dances, East Flatbush Dance Festival, Green Space Take Root Series, BAX Upstart Festival, Let's Dance to Health Celebrity Dance Showcase in Arkansas, Legros Cultural Arts Women in Dance Series, Queens Museum of Art, Queens Fringe Festival, the Chorlton Arts Festival in England, BAAD! Ass Women Festival, Houston Fringe Festival in Texas, and the Stockholm Fringe festival in Sweden. Sobers has taught master classes and workshops in many cities across the U.S as well as in England.

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Choreographer: Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

Mentor: Tania Isaac

Style: Post-Modern

Title of Work: other.explicit.body.

Description of work: other.explicit.body. is a solo performance investigation that bridges movement, live music, and visual art to create a confrontational dialogue that addresses the complexities of critical race issues, political satire, and stereotypical images of the black male body. Delving into themes of post-blackness, otherness, and the ecstatic body in performance, Kosoko uses himself as a vessel through which a series of physic states confront, cohere, and combat each other.   

Biography: Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a 2012 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival LAB Fellow and a 2011 Arts Management Fellow at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He creates work in the spheres of body-based visual design, poetry, and performance art under the moniker of The Philadiction Movement (formally Kosoko Performance Group), a Philly based performance art company. Kosoko has been published in The American Poetry Review, Poems Against War, The Dunes Review, and Silo, among other publications. He has been a guest artist at various universities and high schools throughout the United States. Most recently, Kosoko published Notes on an Urban Kill-Floor: Poems for Detroit.

Mertz Gilmore Foundation and Capezio/Ballet Makers Dance Foundation.