SONYA TAYEH REHEARSAL WITH BILLY BELL, ET AL, AT DEMA DANCE

Today I was invited to attend a rehearsal for a new company, DeMa Dance Company, at their studio in Brooklyn. For their first set of performances, which will be in May at the Alvin Ailey Theater, Sonya Tayeh, from So You Think You Can Dance is choreographing a piece, called When the Love Enters, the Light Shines, set to Bjork’s Unison. They let me sit in and watch her work, which was really thrilling!

Thrilling also because none other than Billy Bell (who, all regular readers of this blog will remember, I was going on and on and on about at the start of this SYTYCD season) just became a principal dancer with this company. So I got to watch him rehearse too 😀

And then, I got to do little mini-interviews with both Tayeh and Bell. (A first for this blog!) Billy is one of the sweetest, most enthusiastic people I think I’ve ever met and I’m just so intrigued by Sonya’s unique work; she’s really endlessly fascinating, as was just watching her work — and this is the first time I’ve ever been invited to a rehearsal when the dance is at its beginning stages; you learn so much more about how a dance is actually created by watching at this stage than when you only see the finished, or almost-finished product. So I’m really thankful to DeMa for inviting me today.

It may be a couple of days though before I’m able to get the interview and rehearsal notes up because I have Alvin Ailey tonight and then tomorrow I’m leaving for Art Basel in Miami for the weekend. But I wanted to at least get some of the photos up now (all taken by DeMa’s photog Kim Max).

Above are Tayeh and Bell with the founders and artistic directors of DeMa, Despina and Matina Simegiatos (Matina is on the far left, Despina on the far right). Below is the whole company. All of the dancers (at least those I saw today) are very good, with strong technique and loads of energy (you need it to work with Tayeh). More on the rehearsal and the interviews to come, but in the meantime, check out their website — I think they’ll be a promising company. And check out the videos — I particularly like the top one — Zaloggos — about the Greek women.