Company Returns from Poland

Nai-Ni Chen Returns
Triumphant from Poland
collaborates With Westfield Symphony and Boheme Opera of New Jersey on
Turandot
to be presented in two venues in September and November, 2006.

Fort Lee, NJ – The Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company, one of the New Jersey’s foremost dance troupes, has returned from its multi-city two-week engagement in Poland. A tour highlight was the European premiere of American Landscape in Chelm, where the Company represented the United States during the American Embassy’s American Days celebration. Then, in Bytom and Krakow, the Company once again represented the United States in the Silesian Dance Theatre’s XIII (Thirteenth) Annual International Contemporary Dance Conference and Performance Festival’s American Platform. The Company performed to full houses, cheered by audiences who welcomed the return of these remarkable American dancers to Poland for the third year.

In addition to performing, the Company led more than 20 workshops for students and professionals from across Poland and other EU countries and engaged in several youth outreach activities that culminated in a performance of Nai-Ni Chen’s Ribbon Dance for SDT’s junior conference festival—the III Little Dance Conference. The Company will return to Poland in October 2006 for the Konfrontation Theatre Festival in Lublin to perform Dragons on the Wall.

The tour was supported through funds from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, the American Embassy in Poland, the Silesian Dance Theatre, and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. Both American Landscape and Dragons on the Wall were commissioned by Baraka Sele, Curator of the Alternate Route Series of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.

Immediately upon her return, Ms. Chen began choreographing for a major new project with two NJ partners. She is working with David Wroe, Conductor of the Westfield Symphony, and Joseph Pucciatti, Artistic Director of the Boheme Opera, to develop dances for their productions in autumn 2006 of one of Puccini’s most famous and beloved operas, Turandot. The Westfield Symphony will present, in partnership with the New York City Opera, a concert version of Turandot at the PNC Arts Center in Holmdel, NJ, on September 27th; the Boheme Opera will present a fully staged production of the opera in the Patriots Theater at The War Memorial in Trenton on November 3rd and 5th, 2006.

The Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company, Westfield Symphony, and Boheme Opera are supported by grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Department of State, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

Audiences who missed the Company’s performance of American Landscape at NJPAC can see an abbreviated version at the Company’s website.