Outstanding Production:
Geoff Sobelle *
HOME
BAM Harvey
For exploring and exploding the relationship between house and home.For collaborating with a brilliant team using dance, illusion, live music, scenic engineering and audience interaction to create a moving, poignant and zany theatrical work.
Hofesh Shechter
Grand Finale
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Grand Finale, is a masterful collaboration with choreography and music by Hofesh Schecter, lighting designer Tom Visser, set designer Tom Scutt, 6 musicians and 10 Schecter Company dancers. This wholly original work pulsates with raw energy and stark images of a fatally fractured world. It is terrifying, bleak and beautiful… an expression of belief in life in the face of painful chaos.
Matthew Bourne
The Red Shoes
New York City Center
Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes is a sophisticated and engaging synthesis of choreographic ingenuity and theatrical vision. Bourne’s layered, vivid portrayal fluidly and swiftly presents passionate, eccentric characters from the beloved 1948 film, depicting the onstage and backstage world of a 1940’s touring ballet company
Bouchra Ouizguen
Corbeaux (Crows)
Brooklyn Museum CLF
Corbeaux combines ancient ritual and utter immediacy, responding to the site in which it was performed. The sculptural dance of repetitive group movement and arresting gestures performed by a mix of dancers and non-professionals also confronted the issues of museum politics and which bodies have access to culture within its walls.
David Thomson*
he his own mythical beast
Performance Space New York
For demolishing the idea of a ‘neutral’ body in a revelatory excavation of his own mythological identity as a dancer, performer, artist, man, person. For the team creation of an inexhaustible, ecstatic, sweaty swirl of voice and movement addressing race, gender, and the many selves contained within a body.
Marjani Forté-Saunders*
Memoirs of a… Unicorn
Presented by New York Live Arts at Collapsable Hole
For an installation and performance that digs underground to mine memory and mythology; conjuring family, friends, and ancestors as she navigates a magical landscape to reflect on our current reality.
Kota Yamazaki
Darkness Odyssey Part 2:I or Hallucination
Baryshnikov Arts Center
An evanescent and lucid journey through weather and life, Kota Yamazaki’s Darkness Odyssey Part 2: I or Hallucination is a dance of highly sensitized, nearly vaporizing movement for four accomplished choreographer dancers. The choreographer focuses on the inner emotional realm, using it as a source for movement of startling physicality, both concentrated and wild.
Jonathan Gonzalez
ZERO
Danspace Project
For an episodic performance that reveled in the shadows and real lives, the history and the timelessness of black bodies in St. Marks Church, ZERO used striking images and other-dimensional soundscapes to unearth lineages and find a way forward. #blackboymagic.
Gillian Walsh
Moon Fate Sin
Danspace Project; Co-presenter: PERFORMA 17
The audience encounters a slow dark mass as they enter a room filled with fog. Ever so slowly the fog lifts and the dancers are revealed, specters moving in glacial time. Emptiness is the material being investigated; a visitation of thought and presence experienced in a timeless landscape. What we don’t see feels as strong as what we do.
Jimmy Robert
Imitation of Lives
The Glass House; Co-commission: PERFORMA 17
An audience of 15 entered into Guadeloupe French artist Jimmy Robert’s installation-performance of 3 powerful dancers within the iconic mid-century Glass House of Philip Johnson. Working in this “white elitist” cultural space amidst objects of “good taste”, the performers provoked us with their roles of security guards, interlopers occupying the inside and outside of the transparent house, a couple inhabiting the intimate bedroom. Through their rich vocabulary of formal poses, lyrical dance, reading of text, and aggression/regression emotional states, the work makes us question authority, power, access, color of skin, while indulging us in the splendid setting.
Nami Yamamoto*
Headless Wolf
Roulette
For an entertaining and profound journey through the range of human experience.
For interweaving five distinctive performers, a puppet, and yards of paper into a total work of theater, a contemplation of birth and death and all in between.
2018 Outstanding Revival Nominees
Early Shaker Spirituals
The Wooster Group
Performing Garage
For their beautiful revival of an innovative work that itself revives a defunct dance style. The Wooster Group’s Early Shaker Spirituals brings to life vintage records of Shaker songs through controlled, deliberate, non-commenting singing and carefully choreographed dancing, executed with commitment by a stellar cast.
40th Anniversary Retrospective*
Jane Comfort and Company
Ellen Stewart Theatre at La MaMa
For a program highlighting four decades of illuminating work delving into politics, family, friendship, and pure dancing. For a pivotal exploration of language, music and movement in pieces addressing social issues in ways that continue to have impact in the current moment.
Rite of Spring
Pina Bausch
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
After 30 years, Tanztheater Wuppertal’s Rite of Spring returned to the BAM stage with all its sweat, dirt, dance, passion and sexual politics. The work, seen by many for the first time, retained its impact and relevance.
Outstanding NY Dance and Performance Award for Outstanding “Breakout” Choreographer (*indicates award recipient)
Hadar Ahuvia
Hadar Ahuvia bravely interrogates the complex and fraught history of Israeli folk dance’s past and present through innovative, contemporary techniques that integrate dance, video, text and the audience. “Everything You Have is Yours” is startling, very funny, beautiful, and starkly moving.
Lauren Lovette
Lauren Lovette is an inspired, theatrical, boundary breaking choreographer who has created acclaimed ballets for New York City Ballet and The Vail Dance Festival. In her creations she is reimagining movement within the classical ballet structure.
Kyle Marshall
Kyle Marshall’s choreography works between dance forms and their many value systems to engage contemporary issues of identity on the concert stage. His use of rhythm and timing, a compelling, tight, visceral use of vocabulary, energy, and group work transports his dancers into different relationships and realities.
Mariana Valencia*
For seamlessly blending ethnography, memoir, and observation of cross-cultural identities in choreography that engages from start to finish. For a unique vision that uses humor and sadness, reality and imagination, to push dance and performance into new territory.
2018 Juried Bessie Award
Kyle Marshall
For exploring important ideas around race and sexuality in dances that embody rather than illustrate complicated issues. For drawing on a variety of movement styles to create accomplished, witty, and immensely engaging choreography.
2018 Bessies Angel Award Recipients:
Deborah Sale and Ted Striggles
For a lifelong commitment to supporting dance
For working to better the lives of dance artists on and off the stage
For warmly gathering and connecting the dance-making community across decades
Lifetime Achievement in Dance
Simone Forti
For her revolutionary, fearless, and widely influential approach to movement, pushing the boundaries of what dance could be—–in her dance constructions and improvised work. For years of investigation into the human body in motion, finding poetry in gravitational forces, the movement of animals, and the natural world.
Service to the Field of Dance:
Marya Warshaw
For her visionary work at the Brooklyn Arts Exchange creating a space for choreographers of all identities and backgrounds, and for students of all ages and incomes. For finding new and comprehensive ways to support the long process of creation through pioneering residencies and by fostering of a true home for dance artists and innovators.
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Digital photos are available on request.
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Outstanding Performer:
Courtney Cook*
Sustained achievement with Urban Bush Women, Maria Bauman, and Marguerite Hemmings
For bringing a powerhouse presence and a soulful strength to every performance
A riveting performer of searing vocal work and sensuous explosive movement, who brings her rich range of dance forms and unique theatrical power to the work of Urban Bush Women, Maria Bauman and Marguerite Hemmings.
Duane Cyrus
Virago-Man Dem
Choreographer: Cynthia Oliver
BAM Fisher
For a nuanced performance that explored the internal and external forces of gender, power and masculinity from the perspective of a black man in the twenty-first century. Through a prismatic layering of movement, theater and song, Cyrus embodied the trauma, courage, joy and contradictions of living life fully in one’s own skin in Cynthia Oliver’s Virago-Man Dem at BAM.
Julian Barnett
Darkness Odyssey Pt 2:1 or Hallucination
Choreographer: Kota Yamazaki
Baryshnikov Arts Center
For unrelenting investigations in ferocious flow; Barnett brings a vibrant and mercurial synthesis voice and body in the works of Kota Yamazaki, Jeanine Durning, Wally Cardona, Larry Keigwin, Johannes Wieland, and Christopher Williams.
Shamar Watt
Sustained achievement with Nora Chipaumire
For powerful performances in the work of Nora Chipaumire. Watt both expresses and extends the choreographer’s vision, while making the work forcefully his own.
William Roberson
Indumba
Choreographer: Fana Tshabalala
Deeply Rooted Dance Theater
BAM Fisher
For a fearless performance that expressed the torment and anguish of a broken soul and a traditional practice of cleansing and healing a community. Roberson accessed a spiritual realm with clarity, empathy, and the weight of humanity and returned with strength.
Germaine Acogny*
Mon élue noire (My Black Chosen One): Sacre #2
Choreographer: Olivier Dubois
BAM Fisher
For her fierce, fearless embrace of the “sacrificial one” in a reimagined Rite of Spring created especially for her. No longer doomed, she performs a powerful solo celebrating her heritages in dance, and women, and black women dancing in Mon élue noire (My Black Chosen One): Sacre #2 by Olivier Dubois at BAM Fisher
Elizabeth DeMent*
17C
Choreographer: Big Dance Theater
BAM Harvey
For her cool, intelligent presence, exquisite dancing, and ability to move seamlessly between spoken text and virtuosic dance.
For a brilliantly nuanced performance, comic and serious and continuously captivating as a 17th century woman and the narrator of the piece.
in 17C by Big Dance Theater
BAM Harvey
Kaneza Schaal
Petra
Choreographer: Dean Moss
Performance Space New York
For her virtuosic title role in Dean Moss’ PETRA, at once majestic and vulnerable, silky and hard-edged, minimal and extravagant. Schaal delivered a commanding performance of text and body in an intense chamber drama.
Laurel Atwell
ANTHEM
Choreographer: Milka Djordjevich
The Chocolate Factory
Watching the dancers of Milka Djordjevich’s ANTHEM execute a repetitive complex movement vocabulary that evolves as they rotate hypnotically within the confines of a square, one realizes that Laurel Atwell seemed to be the lens through which the content of the piece was transmitted. Her way of being inside the piece, with her interior self, and of being in the music highlighted the dance’s complicated core. She is a performer equally able to reveal emotion and physicality, to be inside herself and communicating that inner experience to an audience.
Sara Mearns*
For sustained achievement with New York City Ballet, and various artists
For her work as a mesmerizing ballet dancer and insatiable dance explorer, known for consummate musicality, imagination, and theatricality. For an extraordinary season in which she boldly immersed herself in work by masters of hip hop, classic modern, experimental post modern, and theater ballet.
Jacqueline Green
For sustained achievement with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
A regal and powerful dancer, Green has the versatility to go from Judith Jamison’s A Case of You and Robert Battle’s No Longer Silent to Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s Shelter and Alvin Ailey’s Cry. She brings spirit and precision, emotional depth and physical command to every work she dances.
Zoey Anderson
For sustained achievement with Parsons Dance
Zoey Anderson brings strength, articulation, concentration, and an extraordinary level of quality to dance after dance in David Parson’s company. The thread running through her quicksilver rhythms, explosive movement, and playful performances is a clear and infectious love of dancing.
Outstanding Visual Design:
Black Kirby (John Jennings and Stacey Robinson) and John Boesche
Virago-Man Dem
Choreographer: Cynthia Oliver
BAM Fisher
For their innovative collaboration in the design of Cynthia Oliver’s Virago-Man Dem. Graphic and comic illustrators, Black Kirby aka John Jennings’ and Stacey “Blackstar” Robinson’s images destabilize ideas of “Blackness,” and of the outsider who discovers identity and creates a new world, underlying Cynthia Oliver’s choreography. John Boesche edited, adapted, and animated Black Kirby’s images setting them in motion.
Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen
Keen [No. 2]
Choreographer: Ivy Baldwin
Abrons Art Center; co-presented with The Joyce Unleashed and The Chocolate Factory
Wade Cavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen’s set for Keen [No. 2] had a formidable presence– installed with sensitivity to the space and the dancing. It became a living being that quietly transformed from silent to loud, still to moving. Nuanced and sublime, their design forms an essential part of Ivy Baldwin’s riveting choreography.
Mimi Lien, Peiyi Wong, Tuçe Yasak, Meena Murugesan, and Richard Forté*
Memoirs of a… Unicorn
Choreographer: Marjani Forté-Saunders
Presented by New York Live Arts at Collapsable Hole
For creating a mythical, multi-sensory and immersive design in the industrial basement space of Collapsible Hole. For beautifully integrating all the visual elements in a way that heightened the emotional impact of the choreographer’s journey through time and memory.
Lez Brotherston, Duncan McLean, and Paule Constable
The Red Shoes
Choreographer: Matthew Bourne
New York City Center
The Red Shoes creative team for sets, costumes, and lighting brilliantly brought to the stage what previously could only be seen on film. The transformation of scenes (theatre, beach, home, backstage) through the extraordinary choreography of the designed curtain that rotated and traveled was a stroke of genius, allowing all parts of the production to collaborate in the creation of a seamless whole.
2018 Outstanding Music Composition / Sound Design Nominees
Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste*
Sustained achievement in music composition with choreographers Jaamil Olowale Kosoko, Jonathan Gonzalez, André M. Zachery/Renegade Performance Group, and Will Rawls
For mobilizing the technologies of the age to conjure new worlds. For bringing forth hidden languages and primal presences via layered soundscapes in his own work and in collaborations with Jaamil Olowale Kosoko, André M. Zachery/Renegade Performance Group, Jonathan Gonzalez, and Will Rawls.
Zen Jefferson
Let ‘im Move You: This Is a Success and Let ‘im Move You: A Study
Choreographers: jumatatu m. poe`and Donte Beacham
American Realness at Abrons Arts Center, co-presented by Gibney
For DJing a shared experience among performers and audience helping to shape Jumatatu Poe’s tribute to J-Sette, Let ‘im Move You. Jefferson masterfully draws musical connections between the sounds of the African diaspora and its reach into current polyrhythmic Black music creating an intimate, private and joyful experience.
Alim Qasimov, Johnny Gandelsman, and Colin Jacobsen
Layla & Majnun
Choreographer: Mark Morris
Rose Theater at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Alim Qasimov, Johnny Gandelsman & Colin Jacobsen’s luminous arrangement of the 1908 opera Layla & Majnun brilliantly integrated the improvised singing of a traditional song-form from Azerbaijan with the varied timbres of western Silk Road Ensemble. The music captured the emotional power of this seminal love story and its mystical reverberations, fully supporting Mark Morris’s choreography with its blend of eastern and western movement traditions.
Ryan Seaton
What will we be like when we get there
Choreographer: Joanna Kotze
New York Live Arts
For Ryan Seaton’s immersive electronic and accoustic layering in Joanna Kotze’s What Will We Be Like When We Get There. Working with complex unpredictability, he engages as a multi-instrumentalist moving in response to the environment, materials, and entire cast in a total collaboration.