*Annotates award recipient in each category
Lifetime Achievement Award:
*Nai-Ni Chen
Nai-Ni Chen was a force in the dance community with her unique choreographic body of work that fuses Eastern cultural forms of Chinese dance and the Western world of modern dance. Her vision of the immigrant’s journey of crossing cultures and adapting to a new home provided endless inspirations and opportunities for creative expressions that enrich the human experience.
Service To The Field Of Dance Award:
*Christine Jowers
Jowers is an example of generosity, dedication, and commitment in service to the dance field. After her career as a dancer performing in England and the U.S., Jowers devoted herself to supporting dance artists, to writing about them with respect, truth, and love. In times when dance reviews and writers are almost extinct, when publications and dance journalists are disappearing, Jowers and The Dance Enthusiast value and care about dance criticism and documenting performances. She has and continues to ignite the dance community with passion, curiosity, and conversation.
2022 Bessies Angel Award:
*Emily L. Waters
Waters is being recognized for her advocacy of dance in times when artists need it the most, for ensuring dance is brought to the table, as a former professional dancer; for being a trailblazer for dance in the philanthropic setting.
2022 Bessies Juried Award:
*Tatiana Desardouin
Desardouin’s “groove,” embraces the relationship of time with an individual’s true nature. Each moment becomes fully realized and progresses forward to reveal the dancer’s authentic self. Just as her “Passion Fruit Seeds” provide a sourceable root for individuals to create and sustain, she and her works are a galvanized source of inspiration and dopeness for the Street and Club dance community and everyone she encounters.
2022 Bessies Jury: LaTasha Barnes, Molissa Fenley, and Abby Zbikowski
Outstanding Choreographer/Creator:
Kyle Abraham
An Untitled Love
Brooklyn Academy of Music
For grounded virtuosity, deft manipulation of time and space, and keeping the audience attendant to the soul and marrow of each performer. Abraham’s work is a testament to atmosphere, states of being, and story communicated through the exquisite caliber of physicality and imagination.
Sidra Bell
SUSPENDED ANIMATION
New York City Ballet Fall Fashion Gala at David H. Koch Theater
Camille A. Brown
Fire Shut Up in My Bones
The Metropolitan Opera
For creating a contemporary choreo-score that is grounded in traditional African American dance and embodied rhythms to assist in telling a story about a young Black boy’s rites of passage in navigating poverty, the loss of innocence and eventually discovering self determinism. Brown is adept at finding balance between celebration and reproach throughout the journey of the protagonist.
*Leslie Cuyjet
Blur
Open Call at The Shed
Intimate, vulnerable, bold, and enigmatic, this visceral piece is a quiet merging of Cuyjet’s inner worlds. With sequences of highly orchestrated, improvised structures that are exacting, charged, and in the present, Cuyjet creates a vast, living landscape.
Indigenous Enterprise
Indigenous Liberation
The Joyce Theater
For creating a piece that called the performer’s ancestors into the theatre with the audience, for a powerful and awakening experience. From displaying dance names on a beautifully animated projection to vocal origins and dance significance, this performance needfully showcases indigenous dance forms.
*Bill T. Jones, Janet Wong, and Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company
Deep Blue Sea
Park Avenue Armory
For a visionary, large-scale work incorporating around 100 dancers and a nontraditional use of space and production elements, culminating in a creation both universal and deeply personal.
Rashaad Newsome
Assembly
Park Avenue Armory
For offering Black Queer artistry with boldness, rigor, joy, and righteous indignation. The movement curation and arrangement offered a new experience of an enduring art form.
Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born
On the way, undone
Crossing the Line Festival 2021 at Weeksville Heritage Center
For creating an entrancing environment through striking visuals, live polyphonic choral singing and richly evocative ritual. A vibrant work that effortlessly eschews conventions and boundaries between disciplines and genres.
Eiko Otake
The Duet Project: Distance is Malleable
NYU Skirball
Otake creates an exuberant and rich exploration of the relationship between death and life. Pushing the fourth wall, poetic and human, this work is an inspiration for every generation.
*Anna Sperber
Bow Echo
presented by XØ Projects Inc and The Old American Can Factory
With keen attention to detail in choreographic structures that relate to the environment, Sperber creates a visual, exciting rooftop ritual with movement invention and materials that break the conventional expectations of an audience.
*Raúl Tamez
On Limón Dance Company
Migrant Mother
The Joyce Theater
For creating a tributary piece to the immense grief and emotional pain that migrant mothers endure. From technically complex choreography, using space and bodies to sculpt eye-catching negative and positive space, to the blended use of modern-day sound bites with music, this is a deeply somatic experience.
Sasha Waltz
In C
Brooklyn Academy of Music
A magnificent exploration of the creative and intellectual mind of Waltz. From the 71 phrases of movement, theme and variations, dynamic execution and commitment of the dancers, to the outstanding music composition – all performed live (from Can on a C) – this a dance composition lesson.
Outstanding Breakout Choreographer:
Flex Kingdom: Jabari Gooding, Obinnaya Williams, and Diamond DuBose
For flex dancing the story of the song “Liberian Girl” with choreography that is exquisite, simple, and mesmerizing. Gooding, Williams, and DuBose perform as one force, and also as individual, unique artists carefully attuned with the utmost respect for all the intricacies the music provides.
Sun Kim
For a signature style of choreography with artistic vision and execution. Through spoken words, accompanying acoustics, and Popping-based expressive dance, “Lost and Found” invites one to explore finding something within oneself after feeling lost. Kim highlights the dilemma of finding the balance between when to keep fighting and when to surrender.
*Princess Lockeroo
For artistry that moves the audience from spectator to fellow performer quite seamlessly, teaching about dance culture in the process. Princess Lockeroo is a multifaceted artist who has always been fully dedicated to her craft and does not miss any details in creating a full, immersive experience for her audience.
Angie Pittman
For offering grounding and depth in a virtuosity that tunnels inward rather than externally. The work of Angie Pittman in “I’ll tell you, but please be still” brings together many of the themes Angie has been exploring throughout her career while changing expectations through inventive use of movement, stillness, and vocalizations that develop a strong throughline.
Outstanding Sound Design Or Musical Composition:
*Marc Álvarez (arrangement)
Carmen
By Johan Inger
Performed by Compañia Nacional de Danza
The Joyce Theater
For remixing music using Bizet’s original composition with a contemporary twist. There is a seamless transition from classical to contemporary that makes the music one.
Donald Eaton, Jerome Hunter, Abdel R. Salaam, Kweku Sumbry, and K. Osei Williams
TERRESTRIAL WOMBS
By Abdel R. Salaam
Presented at DanceAfrica
Brooklyn Academy of Music
For playing music to share their culture, to incite the dancers to dance, to provide a connection point between one performance and the next. The live musicians hold the entire spiritual experience together.
Efraín Rozas
Puro Teatro
By luciana achugar
The Chocolate Factory Theater
Rozas’ live accompaniment using percussion sets, objects, and sticks is compelling, appropriate, and exacting. Thoughtful and dynamic, Rozas’ composition creates a character that stands on its own yet is in harmony. The contrapuntal composition structure is arranged like a Fugue: Interwoven and meshed with the choreography. At times, it anticipates each/next energetic shift, other times, it follows the movement unfolding like a bundle of clothes on stage.
Kwami Winfield
STELLAR
Virtual Performance
By Kyle Marshall
Baryshnikov Arts Center
For musical composition inspired by the echoes of Jazz and the stars that is enigmatic, compelling, and appropriate. Deeply rooted in Afrofuturism and improvisational and digital musical genres, the soundscape is sometimes clipped, other times smooth and dynamic, always in harmony and echoing the three solo dancers.
Outstanding Revival:
A Jamaican Battyboy in America
Performed by Nikolai McKenzie Ben Rema
Original production in 1996 by Arthur Avilés, original title “A Puerto Rican Faggot from America”
Hemispheric Institute at NYU & BAAD!
For boldly recontextualizing a work that was timely when it was first created and is still absolutely vital. Aviles brought his decades-long craft to bear in a feat of artistry, directing, dancing and mentorship that made the art sing and cry, perhaps even more poignantly than the art certainly cried out in the first rendition. Both film archival and live dance performance, the work is compelling and a genuine and passionate celebration of art, love, lust, same-sex intimacy and male bonding. Although originally a solo, in this revival, we see on stage both the original auteur and interpreter, Arthur Aviles, and the stunning dancer Nikolai McKenzie who dances the part of Aviles, revealing naked truths and embodying Queerness in the present.
L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato
Performed by Mark Morris Dance Group
Original production in 1988 by Mark Morris
Brooklyn Academy of Music
For a vibrant, colorful revival of “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato,” a Mark Morris masterpiece. It is human, inspirational, humorous, refined. Morris’ dancers run joy into a whirlwind that the audience cannot escape. A classic for the modern dance repertoire.
*Set and Reset/Reset (2021)
Choreographed and Co-Directed by Abigail Yager
Co-Directed by Jamie Scott
with assistance from Diane Madden
Performed by Candoco Dance Company
Original production Set and Reset (1983) by Trisha Brown
Brooklyn Academy of Music
The Set and Reset/Reset Project is a revival of Trisha Brown’s choreographic process through which a new compositional form emerges. The process of revival or re-construction, as opposed to replication, is a negotiation between freedom and limit – an exploration of endless compositional possibility born of the current dancers’ impulses and instincts in relation to the defining structures that anchor a dance to itself. Projects like these recast the notion of preservation in terms of living legacies, are of both past and present, and are as alive and ever-changing as the people who dance them.
For a dynamic, fully embodied vision/revision of Trisha Brown’s Set and Reset (1983). Candoco dancers fully speak Brown’s vocabulary while also creating new ways to speak. With the fabric Brown laid out for them, the dancers create a vibrant tapestry that shimmers and moves with fluidity and grace. Beautiful and moving, the dancers leave the audience with much to rethink.
Treading
Performed by Martha Graham Dance Company
Original production in 1982 by Elisa Monte
The Joyce Theater
The concept of Treading, Elisa Monte’s beautifully distilled choreography, investigates the nexus of intimacy, motion, and shapes defined by dynamic and sensuous bodies as abstract art. Impactful and evocative, the work includes a series of transcendental choreographic passages featuring flowing bodies, sculptural shapes piercing through dramatic lighting in chiaroscuro, bodies crossing planes, and carving physical space and time, coming together at once.
Outstanding Performer:
*Soledad Barrio
Soledad Barrio & Noche Flamenca
By Soledad Barrio
The Joyce Theater
For stamping the fire and passion of flamenco into the heart of the observer, making everyone want to be from Spain. Barrio’s blended precision, rhythm, and expressiveness do not just move with the music, but sing back to it.
Krudxs Cubensi
Black Healing Portal II: Más allá del tiempo / Beyond Time
Queer Hip Hop Cypher
Park Avenue Armory
For headlining Black Healing Portal II: Más allá del tiempo/Beyond Time, a queer Afro-Cuban hiop-hop cypher featuring dance, drumming projections, procession and community offerings. The performance of Odaymar and Olikrude is the glue that links Afro-Yoruba spiritual practices to modern rapping for an intimate exploration of race, religion, gender, class, and sexuality.
*Kayla Farrish
December 8th
By Kayla Farrish in collaboration with Belinda McGuire
The Eva Yaa Asantewaa Solo for Solo Showing
Gibney
For a tumble and waterfall of physicality and phrasing that at times takes one’s breath away, and at times quickens the blood. Farrish is in full control from start to finish, and is also able to offer vulnerability and heart through her performance.
Carla Forte, Ildiko Toth, Joanna Lesnierowska, Ermira Goro, Rosalynde LeBlanc, and Colleen Thomas
Light and Desire
By Colleen Thomas
New York Live Arts
For the excellence of individual and collective experience brought to the performance. The combined force and presence onstage makes each of these women stand out fiercely.
Antonio Granjero
Soledad Barrio & Noche Flamenca
By Soledad Barrio
The Joyce Theater
For providing the intensity, emotion, and vivaciousness of Flamenco for an exhilarating percussive performance. Granjero embodies passion and rhythm that fill the stage and reach into beating hearts of the audience.
Lloyd Knight
With Martha Graham Dance Company
Treading
By Elisa Monté
The Joyce Theater
For Lloyd Knight’s outstanding performance in Treading by Elisa Monté With Martha Graham Dance Company. A beautiful interpreter of contemporary dance, this exhilarating, joyful duet showcases Lloyd’s ability to bring urgency and physical abstraction to the stage, dancing using lights and shadows to build sculptural poses evoking Renaissance ‘chiaroscuro’ Paintings. Lloyd creates precise, angular, sensual, and muscular dance sequences.
zavé martohardjono
TERRITORY: The Island Remembers
By zavé martohardjono in collaboration with x, Ube Halaya, Raha Behnam, Marielys Burgos Meléndez, Julia Santoli, Katherine De La Cruz, Jordan Reed, Theresee Tull, Proteo Media + Performance, Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitsky and Maya Simone Z
Gibney
For offering the insides of himself with grounded precision and unabashed viscerality. The performance is a tunnel of fire delivered with focus from martohardjono’s body.
*Nikolai McKenzie Ben Rema
A Jamaican Battyboy in America
By Arthur Avilés
Hemispheric Institute at NYU and BAAD!
For interpreting and adding to a revival with precision, poise, and evident generosity of spirit. McKenzie Ben Rema becomes at once a channel and a generating vessel with bold and mesmerizing dancing.
Doron Perk
Grandfather Visit
By Doron Perk
Presented through LABA: Laboratory for Jewish Culture at the 14th Street Y
For a refined high-caliber athletic performance that is at once delicate, joyous, sad, and queer. Perk uses his precise moving body as a vessel for grief, loss, and celebration in this outstanding memorial to his grandfather.
*Antonio Ramos
Puro Teatro
By luciana achugar
The Chocolate Factory Theater
Ramos embraces achugar’s choreographic vision to create a living landscape where bodies are in the present, joyful, courageous, vulnerable, funny, connecting, and intersecting with one another. Ramos’s movements of improvised structures are exacting, highly-skilled, charged, and playful.
Yesenia Selier
Cosmic Exu
Queer Hip Hop Cypher
Park Avenue Armory
For evoking a spiritual laughter and visceral enjoyment for all the audiences to shake off the energies of sitting down and move mentaly, spiritually, and physically into an Afro-futurist portal.
Shannon Tyo
As “Afong Moy”
The Chinese Lady
By Lloyd Suh
Directed by Ralph B. Peña
The Barrington Stage Company and Ma-Yi Theater Company Production
The Public Theater
For engaging in a deeply meditative state of performing that pulls audiences intimately into the story of “Afong Moy,” the first female Chinese immigrant to the United States. Tyo delicately holds her character’s personality with cultural gestures and movements that reveal the vulnerability of her racialized body in a foreign setting.
Outstanding Visual Design:
Elizabeth Diller – DS+R, Peter Nigrini, and Robert Wierzel
Visual Environment, Video Projection, and Lighting Design
Deep Blue Sea
By Bill T. Jones, Janet Wong, and Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company
Park Avenue Armory
For combining together theatrical lighting and large scale projections that become a movement of their own, a conversation between performers and spatial surroundings. For creating an ocean, a battle ground, a mirror within one space.
Indigenous Enterprise
Projection, Costume Design, and Lighting Design
Indigenous Liberation
By Indigenous Enterprise
The Joyce Theater
For the crucial aspect of educating audiences with a beautifully animated projection that provides clear vocal and visual guidance of the origins and significance of the dance.
Andrew Jordan and Joe Levasseur
Costume Design and Lighting Design
Narcissus
By Christopher Williams
New York Live Arts
For outstanding genre and gender bending costumes that are bold, inventive, and fearless combined with perfect lighting design to support and match every nuance of the scene and choreography.
*New Affiliates – Ivi Diamantopoulou, Jaffer Kolb, and Rashaad Newsome Studio with Truman T. Brown Jr.; Howie B., Kimberly Joneś, and Randy Rosenthal
Set Design and Costume Design
Assembly
By Rashaad Newsome
Park Avenue Armory
For an exciting multi-arts spectacle, a true celebration of African culture disseminated into current society supporting dance, music, and poetry through textiles and visual art. An impressive amalgamation of unsuspecting elements making a unified whole.