The Equus Projects /OnSite NYC
The Equus Projects creates site-specific performance works for rural and urban landscapes.
The Equus Projects
Creates site-specific performance works that viscerally engage with the geographic and cultural environments. Their work often brings dancers and horses into shared landscapes.Equine works are created in collaboration with local equestrians and their horses.
While not all Equus Projects performances include equines, their horsemanship training deeply informs choreographic content, and has shaped the company's studio practice, their teaching methods, approach to performing and choreographic methodologies. They bring a unique inter-species lens into their dance practice that focuses on Physical Listening, heightened merging of sensing and thinking, and strategic decision-making.
All Equus performances are constructed as complex scored events, merging rigorous choreographic material with improvised structures and challenging the performers to function with real time decision-making.
Repertory Excerpts: 2003-2013
The Equus Projects has been commissioned by The Flynn in Burlington, VT, the Myrna Loy in Helena, Mt, Saratoga Arts Festival, Perry Mansfield in Steamboat Springs, CO, River to River Festival in NYC, Bates Dance Festival in Lewiston, ME and Klinten Kultur in Hassleholm Sweden.
Meditation Without Words
The Equus Projects has produced a series of small films including a series created by filmmaker Gabe Bienczycki
The Equus Projects produces
site-specific performances for urban landscapes in their OnSite NYC series.
Since 2012 OnSite has brought dance to plazas, parks, stores fronts, lawns, and community centers throughout Manhattan, in Brooklyn and Long Island City.
Excerpts: OnSite NYC
Even in this highly choreographed piece there are many moments when the dancers are improvising
Parelli Center
Pagosa Springs, CO
Equus Fun Facts
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When The Equus Projects goes on tour, the company cooks all its own meals.We also LOVE to get invited for dinner...
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The Equus Projects sometimes performs in traditional theater spaces but more often they perform in museums, parks, city plazas, on hillsides and once, on a polo field in for the Saratoga Arts Festival in 2008.
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The Equus Projects features equestrian artistry from multiple disciplines ranging from dressage to cutting and reining. In 2008 Pat Parelli put Equus dancers in an arena with some of his cattle and cutting and reining cowboys. We learned a lot about clarity of spatial intention!
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In 2014 and 2015 we presented a traveling performance piece titled Elephant Shenanigans that toured throughout NYC with a giant inflatable elephant. Different phrases were performed depending on what questions spectators asked!
OnSite works source content from the site history, its function in urban landscape, the flow of pedestrian traffic & spectator access.
Equus Projects maintains a core company of dancers, who engage in on-going studio practice and are all trained in natural horsemanship.
In every performance the performers are merging precision choreography with real-time decision-making and horsemanship. strategies