GARTH FAGAN DANCE
 Saturday, January 24, 2009, 7:30 p.m.
 Tickets: $40/$25.
 For tickets, call 607-734-8191 or 
   800-724-0159; or... 

          Photo by: Basil Childers

Acclaimed for his Tony® Award-winning choreography of Broadway’s The Lion King, Garth Fagan remains one of the great reformers of American dance. He has honed his incomparable, revelatory technique –a blend of ballet, modern and Afro-Caribbean movements –for nearly 40 years. 

Garth Fagan Dance, now in its 37th anniversary season, is at the top of its profession. The dancers in this Rochester, NY-based company are renowned for their individuality, unmannered approach, and virtuosity.

"The handsome, exotic, completely concentrated Fagan dancers move as if they were born speaking Fagan's language and they love the feel of it in their bodies," wrote Elizabeth Kendall in Vogue. "The dancers he has trained," said David Vaughan in Ballet Review, "are virtuosi, no doubt about it, and fearless too, able to sustain long adagio balances, to change direction in mid-air, to vary the dynamic of a turn, to stop on a dime."

The Fagan company has been cited for its excellence and originality with a New York Governor's Arts Award. Their distinctive movement quality comes from years of training in Fagan Technique, the teaching method Garth Fagan, company founder and artistic director, developed hand-in-hand with his own dance vocabulary when he started the ensemble in 1970. The company has had five winners of "Bessie" Awards (New York Performance Awards) in its ranks: Garth Fagan, Norwood Pennewell, Steve Humphrey, Natalie Rogers and Sharon Skepple.