Lionel Popkin and Agnès Benoit-Nader met at Bennington College in 1997 while working on their MFAs. "32 Years Collaboration" is a 7 minute improvisation that was spontaneously performed that year and since then they have continued to perform it in venues that include Philadelphia, Rochester and return engagements at Bennington College - and they plan to go on performing it until the year 2029!

This fifteen minute solo for Popkin premiered at Philadelphia’s DanceBOOM! 2007 Festival. Hailed as “delightfully mercurial” and filled with “fabulous actions” by The Philadelphia Inquirer and paradoxically described as “humorously improvised” by The City Paper and “tightly choreographed” by The Bulletin. The Bulletin summed up Ahead of Myself as a dance that “toys with the idea of audience criticism” and then “turns critical analysis into kinesthetic movement”. The Philadelphia Inquirer captured the dance’s essence by writing, “I enjoy seeing Popkin’s shifting from solid to liquid to gas and then to just a flash of wide smile.”

Commissioned by the San Diego’sLower Left Satellite Project, Elephant Gardens is a 15 minute piece for five dancers that combines light fluidity with a full-bodied love of gravity. This elegant and intricate dance reveals a sensuous paradox that is both grounded and sublime. That combination prompted The San Diego Union-Tribune to call it “the most purely beautiful” piece, while San Diego Arts praised it for accomplishing that rare feat where “risks led to beauty as well as complexity.”

This 25 minute duet for Lionel Popkin and frequent collaborator Carolyn Hall, has played to critical and audience acclaim nationally and internationally. And Then We Eat looks at companionship and asks what it takes for two people to sit down together and not just eat, but share a meal. The Village Voice praised it for its ”strong, pliant” dancing that “yields first to the senses” and then to “intimate adventures”, while The Los Angeles Times  called it a “30-minute tour de food” that “reached a zenith of corporeal possibilities.” London’s Performance Channel remarked how the choreography put the performers’ “technical excellence to expressive use”. With original music by Andy Russ, the two dancers chop onions, perch on top of each other, add spices, dance in circles, and in the end, eat.

Made in 2002 with an original score by Andy Russ, Open Air Corners is a 10 minute solo for dancer Carolyn Hall that The New York Times noted for its “important, momentous event” and the New York Gay City News called “a mysterious, mesmerizing dance”. At times the piece is slow and deliberate, allowing the dancer to mark and define her immediate surroundings, while at other times it is unbalanced and tumbling, as she gets pushed and pulled through the vagaries of her space. Blending pure movement with glimpses of narrative, the dance lets us watch a woman with a mature outlook on life plot a course, lose her way, find it, and start off down that road again.

Peggy Piacenza. The elephant is a rich and contradictory image in this work. First it evokes Ganesh, the mythological god of fortune and the remover of obstacles, but it also retains its long-standing relationship to memory; which is, of course, a very difficult obstacle to overcome. Finally, the bulkiness of the elephant’s body shifts our perception of the dancing figure and what it should look like. The distinction between the zoologically costumed body of the elephant and the human under layer, serves as an apt metaphor for how external skin as a marker of identity is in contrast to the underlying complexity of the person underneath. The piece will be touring from fall 2009, and is designed with the idea of a fluctuating cast in mind. On tour, for instance, many of the roles could be performed by guests that toured with the work, or were from the local community. This hybrid structure, where some of the dancing guests

are local and some travel with me would mean Popkin would come to the site early, teach workshops and rehearse with the local cast. The piece features costumes by Jean Landry, lighting by Kathy Kaufmann, and original music by “Obie” and Bessie” winning composer, cellist, and vocalist Robert Een.