From Lydia Johnson Dance:
Lydia Johnson Dance returns to New York Live Arts June 18–20 for a three-performance season featuring two world premieres alongside signature works from the company’s repertory.
Principal dancer and LJD School ballet instructor Laura Di Orio. Photo Steven Pisano
Cara Mc Manus & Oscar Antonio Rodriguez in rehearsal. Photo Steven Pisano
Now in its 26th year, the company continues to be a home for Johnson’s choreographic voice that sits between ballet and modern traditions, with an emphasis on musicality and the relationships between dancers. The program includes the world premieres of Evening and Ode, alongside the return of Legacy (2024) and Undercurrent (2018). Across the evening, Johnson brings together a multi-generational cast of dancers, including a number of children, creating a layered portrait of community that reflects both continuity and change.
LJD School students rehearsing in NYC
“Ms. Johnson also has a gift for integrating children and teenage girls unsentimentally into her dances, almost as added texture,” The New York Times
Johnson’s work unfolds through the interplay of music and movement. Drawing on composers including Nico Muhly, Henryk Górecki, and Aleksandra Vrebalov, each piece builds an emotional landscape where gesture, spatial design, and relationships between dancers carry meaning. For Johnson, choreography begins and ends with music. “When we listen to music, we don’t feel the need to explain what it means,” she says. “Dance can be experienced in the same way.”
LJD Company and Lydia in the studio with composer Aleksandra Vrebalov.
Ode, making its world premiere, is set to music by Vrebalov and reflects an unsettled emotional terrain, tinged with loss and grief yet grounded in tenderness and connection. A quiet awareness of the world beyond the studio lingers within the work, surfacing through tone, texture, and shifting emotional currents. Evening, making its New York premiere, arrives in a different register entirely — a quieter, more formal sensibility built from duets, a quartet, and ensemble passages that echo social and ballroom traditions, suggesting an interior world that is restrained, intimate, and subtly shifting.
LJD men in rehearsal for Ode.
Together, the works offer an evening that moves between intensity and stillness, structure and spontaneity, inviting audiences to experience dance as something felt as much as seen.
PERFORMANCE AND TICKET INFORMATION
Lydia Johnson Dance’s Spring Season will take place Thursday, June 18 Friday, June 18-19 at 7:30pm, and June 20 at 3:00pm.
Tickets start at $20 . LJD at New York Live Arts
VENUE DETAILS
New York Live Arts is located at 219 W 19th Street between seventh and eighth avenues and accessible by the 2, 3, F, M, and A, C, E to 14th Street.
