2025 Village Award Winner: Danspace Project

Village Preservation is proud to honor Danspace Project as a 2025 Village Awardee! Join us in recognizing Danspace and the five other remarkable awardees at Village Preservation’s Annual Meeting and Village Awards on Wednesday, June 11th, at the historic Great Hall at Cooper Union. Registration is free and open to all. Click here to register.

In the historic sanctuary of St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, spiritual gathering doesn’t always take the form of a church service. While the institution is home to a thriving congregation, it also boasts another group of worshippers — those who worship the practice of experimental dance. 

From the hallowed halls of St. Mark’s, Danspace Project has stood as a pillar in the world of experimental performance for 50 years. Acting as an incubator and innovator for dance, its influence is felt deeply in the East Village, across New York City, and around the globe. 

Danspace presents new dance works, supports a diverse range of artists, encourages collaboration and experimentation, and connects dance with a wide range of audiences. Nurturing both early career artists and seasoned practitioners, the organization’s intergenerational focus provides rich opportunities for artistic dialogue and collaboration. Always on the cutting edge, the work that Danspace curates indicates “what’s next” for the field.

All of this culminates in high-quality works accessible to audiences of all kinds. Danspace works hard to keep ticket prices low, with dress rehearsals free to attend, and tickets for performances starting at just $10.

Danspace’s home, St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, is the oldest site of continuous worship in NYC and one of the city’s earliest landmarks, designated in 1966. The church also has a long history of supporting innovation in the arts. In the 1930s, modern dance icons Ruth St. Denis and Martha Graham performed in the space.

In addition to Danspace, the church is also currently home to two other arts non-profits, the Poetry Project and New York Theater Ballet. Through the Poetry Project, which has had a home at St. Mark’s since 1966, legendary poets and authors have performed works in the sanctuary. Many plays have been staged in the church as well.

Danspace has commissioned over 600 new works throughout its tenure. This programming exists within Danspace’s various projects, including the Commissioning and Presenting program, “DraftWork” series, and “Platform Series.”

The Commissioning and Presenting leg of Danspace’s work commissions a range of emerging and established artists each year. While most of these artists are NYC-based, many national and international artists have been included in this programming. There is no formal application process, but rather Danspace’s curation team reviews up-and-coming works and welcomes artists to submit materials or invite curators to rehearsals and performances in lieu of an application. Some of the artists who have been presented by Danspace include Meredith Monk, Bill T. Jones, Lucinda Childs, Eiko Otake, Miguel Gutierrez, Steve Paxton, Michelle Dorrance, Okwui Okpokwasili, and Kyle Abraham.

Danspace’s “DraftWork” series is specifically designed to prioritize process over product, giving artists a chance to informally present their work at various stages in the artistic process. Curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones, DraftWork performances are followed by discussions and informal receptions, which allow for conversation and exchange between artists and audiences. This series is at the heart of Danspace’s work to engage with early-career and under-represented artists at all stages of their artistic lives. Recent DraftWork participants include Jade Manns and Glenn Potter-Takata, whose double-bill performance well represents what the younger generation of artists is creating.

Danspace’s “Platform Series” is a key part of the organization’s programming. Each year, the series invites a guest curator to assist in creating a multi-week series of performances and events, centering on one particular theme. The series enacts curation as a process based on collaboration and is intended to delve into certain artistic, choreographic, and curatorial concerns. Each Platform has been accompanied by a print catalog, and more recent Platforms have also included an Online Journal issue. Both of these sources of written exploration complement the performance aspects of the Platform Series and help the curators dive more deeply into the subject matter.

The “Platform Series” was conceived by Danspace Project Executive Director and Chief Curator Judy Hussie-Taylor when she began with the organization in 2008. This series is one of the many incredible initiatives that Hussie-Taylor has made since joining Danspace. Her approach to curation and direction is artist-driven and aims to provide artistic context rather than to achieve a certain aesthetic or style.

Prior to joining Danspace, Hussie-Taylor resided in Colorado, where she worked in the dance and visual art worlds. For many years, she spearheaded the Colorado Dance Festival before leaving to develop an interdisciplinary performance program at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. She was later the deputy director of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver.

Hussie-Taylor successfully led Danspace through the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, Danspace adapted by offering yearlong paid residencies that gave artists time to just create, with no end goal in mind. And since the pandemic, Danspace has successfully returned to robust year-round programming.

In honor of its 50 years, Danspace has curated a dance series highlighting some of the impactful artists who have found a home at the dance organization over the years. 

“It’s a daunting anniversary,” Hussie-Taylor told Siobhan Burke of the New York Times, “How do you address so many artists, dancers, and choreographers who call Danspace home? Because it’s not just ours. We don’t own this history and this legacy. It belongs to a dance community in New York and nationally and abroad.”

In creating this 50th anniversary festival, Hussie-Taylor and Seta Morton, Danspace’s associate curator and program director, focused on the theme of artistic transmission, or of taking older works and re-envisioning them. What came about is “not a comprehensive season,” Hussie-Taylor said, “just a season of gems, of things that felt relevant and that could be in conversation with a younger generation of makers.”

As part of this series, legendary choreographer Bebe Miller recently showed “Vespers, Reimagined”, a testament to the intergenerational nature of Danspace’s programming. In 1982, a then-early-career Miller launched herself into the dance scene with “Vespers,” presented as a part of “Parallels,” a series organized by DraftWork Curator Ishmael Houston-Jones.

Now, as a part of Danspace’s 50th anniversary celebration, Miller returned to “Vespers,” creating a new version with five intergenerational dancers and technological components. In “Vespers Reimagined,” Bria Bacon, Jasmine Hearn, Shayla-Vie Jenkins, Chloe London, and Stacy Matthew Spence were led by Miller through a blend of improvisation and set choreography. Throughout the piece, Miller wove among the others carrying a laptop playing video of Miller dancing (most likely in her 1982 version of “Vespers”) that they then tried to imitate.

As the performing arts enter a time of economic instability, with key sources of funding being pulled by both private and governmental sectors, it is more important than ever to support the work of incredible organizations such as Danspace. To learn more about Danspace’s mission and programming, visit their website here.

Want to join us in celebrating Danspace Project and our other inspiring awardees? To be a part of the free community celebration at our Annual Meeting and Village Awards on Wednesday, June 11th at 6 pm at Cooper Union’s Great Hall, REGISTER HERE.