2025 Minnie Untermyer Series: Christopher Williams Dance

Saturday, June 21at 5:00 PM, RAIN DATE Sunday, June 22 at 5:00 PM.

is a suite of solo and duo vignettes for various icons of classical Greek and Roman mythology appearing in contemporary incarnations set to selections from Denis Gaultier's eponymous eleven suites for Baroque lute. The unique suite crafted for this performance at Untermyer Gardens features dancers Cemiyon Barber, Janet Charleston, Maxfield Haynes, Burr Johnson, Cynthia Koppe, Justin Lynch, Logan Pedon, Deniz Erkan Sancak, and Christopher Williams.

About Christopher Williams Dance:

A curious “alchemist of theatre" aiming to transcend boundaries between a variety of art forms, Christopher Williams continues to hone a distinctive personal style combining contemporary dance with visual design, music, and/or puppetry to yield multifaceted movement-based performance works in his own mythopoetic genre. Preferring to cast each new project specifically rather than maintaining a set company, he assembles a wide variety of performers that juxtapose many body types, ethnicities, genders, and orientations as well as span many ages, in order to instill each of his works with a varied and inclusive corporeal counterpoint.

Williams is particularly interested in expanding the scope and meaning of contemporary dance by exploring the potential relationship of mythology, folklore, historic literature, early and contemporary music, sculptural costume, mask, and a variety of puppetry forms to the gesture of the human body. He notices an intricate harmony between traditionally disparate art forms due to their common potential for movement, and seeks to build polyphonous compositions drawing upon each of their innate properties. In his work, dancers' bodies can move independently or become bases for prosthetic accoutrement, musical vessels, media through which puppets can rouse, and even magical shapeshifters.

Fascinated by the ways in which early bands of humans ritually engaged with supernatural denizens of otherworlds, Williams creates works that present his own contemporary queer testimony to a primeval cultural impulse to journey beyond the known realm. By combining highly technical choreographic vocabulary with vivid visual designs and music integral to each new work, Williams aims to revive and reimagine ancient sensibilities of ritual and spectacle in order to immerse a broad public in fantastical new worlds.

***RAIN DATE: Sunday, June 22 at 5:00 PM***

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