Danspace Project’s Community ACCESS series provides subsidized off-season rental opportunities for Danspace Project community members.

can I have it without begging is a live music and dance event created and performed in collaboration with acclaimed composer Eve Beglarian, the dancers of Megan Williams Dance Projects, five new music luminaries, and the Young People’s Chorus of NYC. The evening will be comprised of four connected repertory dance works that live in and around existing compositions from Beglarian’s expansive catalogue, as well as inside of two newly commissioned world premiere works. 

Works include:

My Great Desire, a large ensemble “ballet” to five sections of Eve Beglarian’s MACHAUT IN THE MACHINE AGE series, that interrogates and agitates the classical lexicon while forging a narrative around attention, longing, and the finely drawn and oft-severed line between desire and love. Beglarian has been writing responses to 14th century Guillaume de Machaut’s secular songs since the 1980s and has added a new world premiere piece for these performances.  

Play Like A Girl, a raucous and contemplative suite of short dances to Beglarian’s keyboard variations of the same name based on the Bulgarian tune “Kaval Sviri”(sung by the Young People’s Chorus of NYC in these performances) that reveal embodied memories of the physical struggles and joys of girlhood that fuel our collective adult sense of self.

Five Things is a reboot of a duet that originally premiered in the DANCE NOW Festival in 2018, and is now reimagined for Megan and Esmé Boyce. It jumps head first into the musical dialogue and zen text in Beglarian’s work that was written in October 2001 and was the first piece Beglarian’s wrote after the events of early September of that year to the text of Thomas Cleary’s translation of a Song Dynasty (10th to 13th century) letter to a Zen Master Xiang.

Swift Bird, a newly commissioned world premiere companion piece to Five Things, is a rigorous solo for Megan Williams that explores and exposes the vulnerability and solitude of aging.

Dancers: Esmé Boyce, Robert Mark Burke, Derek Crescenti, Réka Echerer, Mary Lyn Graves, Chelsea Hecht, Courtney Lopes, Amelia Pagliaro, Joshua Tuason, and Michael Wang

Musicians: Margaret Lancaster (flute), Tristan Kasten-Krause (bass), Amy Garapic (percussion), Thomas Feng (piano), Huizi Zhang (toy piano/synth)

Lighting design: Kathy KaufmannSound design: Sam CrawfordCostume designer: Barbara Erin Delo