The Company, led by Founder and Artistic Director Tina Finkelman Berkett and President & Board Chair Gillian Wynn, will present Love Lost Fly by Micaela Taylor – loosely based on tales of unrequited love, like Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, this work tells a story about people from different worlds coming together. The work explores how our identities are shaped and changed by our relationships with others and by the culture that surrounds us.
The program will also include Recurrence by Ethan Colangelo. Intimate and vulnerable, Recurrence indulges in the complexities of relationships to consider who we are as individuals versus who we are in love. Lastly the company will perform Blue Until June by Trey McIntyre. Los Angeles native and soul-singing icon Etta James sets the stage for Blue Until June. Her revolutionary music exemplifies the power of love, while the interweaving partnerships encourage us to immerse ourselves in all that encompasses love: the pain, the lightness, the joy.
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ABOUT BODYTRAFFIC
BODYTRAFFIC was founded in Los Angeles in 2007 by co-directors and dancers Tina Finkelman Berkett and Lillian Barbieto. Both professional dancers in New York, Berkett and Barbieto wanted to create a dance home in Los Angeles that matched the incredible opportunities they had been afforded dancing at Juilliard and Barnard College in New York City and across the world with Mikhail Baryshinkov and Azsure Barton.
BODYTRAFFIC today, led by Artistic Director Tina Finkelman Berkett and President & Board Chair Gillian Wynn, is one of the top repertory companies for contemporary dance in the world. The Company’s mission is to elevate the voices of both established and new choreographic voices and to provide them opportunities to present their work with an unmatched group of professional dancers. The Company is also dedicated to providing educational programs to young professional dancers and supporting the Los Angeles community through education and outreach programs. In recent years, BODYTRAFFIC has commissioned work from renowned choreographers including Kyle Abraham, Ohad Naharin, Hofesh Shechter, Victor Quijada, Arthur Pita, and Fernando Magadan; and its ‘New Voices’ program commissioned work from rising star choreographers Micaela Taylor, Joan Rodriquez, Baye & Asa among others. Its biannual education programs that reach more than 500 students from diverse backgrounds each year offer dance students the chance to learn pieces of the Company repertory directly from BODYTRAFFIC Company dancers.
While the Company’s home base is in Los Angeles, BODYTRAFFIC has also been a top touring company for the past 15 years, each season presenting work across the United States, Europe and Asia. International touring highlights include serving as United States cultural ambassadors to Israel and Jordan in 2015, to South Korea in 2016, in Algeria in 2017-2018, and in Indonesia in 2018. Additionally during the 2017-2018 season, BODYTRAFFIC toured Moscow and St. Petersburg for the CONTEXT Diana Vishneva Festival and The Hague for The Holland Dance Festival.
2023-2024 season Company premieres include works by longtime collaborating choreographers Trey McIntyre, Fernando Magadan and Matthew Neenan. Additionally, in Summer 2024, BODYTRAFFIC will return to Sun Valley, Idaho for its second annual Summer Residency at the Argyros Performing Arts Center.
