As seen at APAP 2025

2nd Best Dance Company presents RED (excerpts)

Saturday, January 11, 2025 @ 5:05-5:25pm EST

Ailey Citigroup Theater (located at 405 W. 55th Street)

RSVP here!

More on RED through Dance Manager's Collective!

“RED had the atmosphere of an absurdist late-night talk show and the intrigue of a lurid fan fiction written by a hopelessly romantic high schooler. Familiar scenes warped and waxed larger-than-life; known narratives took hairpin turns into strange territory. Heroes and villains impersonated each other and walked into the sunset holding hands. Who’s to say if they lived happily ever after.” - The Dance Enthusiast

Additional performances and touring history:

Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center in Oklahoma City, OK (2024), Arts Mission Oak Cliff in Dallas, TX (2024), First Street Studio in Austin, TX (2024), the Westside Theater in Missoula, MT (2022), the Loft in Greenwich, CT (2020), the Fremont Abbey in Seattle, WA (2022), Triskelion Arts in Brooklyn, NY (2022), the Queens Theatre in Queens, NY (2021), the Ace Hotel in NYC (2019 & 2020), Triskelion Arts (2024, 2022)

RED

90 minutes // 5 dancers

This evening-length work walks the fuzzy, shag-carpet line between dance performance and narrative play, leaning into both text and movement to tell an abstracted version of a well known fictional story of survival: Little Red Riding Hood. By cycling through distinct characters, either true to the original story or entirely new, 2nd Best Dance Company will explore how we confront the many-faced “big bads” that lurk on our personal wooded paths. In RED (choreographed, written, and directed by Hannah Garner), four performers brave the unknown by way of spectacle, sentimentality, glamour, mortality, and answering the phone. Read the most recent review here! Additional Press: Oklahoma Contemporary, Oklahoma City Free Press, The Dance Enthusiast (NYC), Oyedrum

The myth of forward motion (or, The Box Dance)

75 minutes // 6 performers

Utilizing both text and contemporary dance, The Box Dance is a 1.25 hour narrative dance-play examining the sensation of being stuck – in a place, a memory, a thought pattern, or a life headed in one particular direction. The 6 performers employ tactics both sensical and ridiculous to confront their questions: half- understood science helps to reason away their fears, invented definitions for well known concepts make sense of their world, imagined and real obstacles help them contemplate what gets in the way. With very serious play, the cast invites audiences to witness their Sisyphean attempts to maneuver a landscape of ephemeral materials: vanishing ideas, cracked foundations, starting over, and lots of cardboard.

Slumber

90 minutes // 5 dancers

Slumber is an evening-length work that reimagines the ultimate story about waiting: Sleeping Beauty. Slumber counters the perception that waiting is a passive state, wonders how we make meaning, and questions what is valued in live performance and, subsequently, what is valued in life itself. A work for 5 dancers created during COVID and inspired by the lockdown, Slumber uses story, humor, and movement as an attempt at reconciling fears, indulging in magic, and begging for what is needed. This is a love letter to performing.

Here to Here

25 minutes // 6-20 dancers

2nd Best joins forces with local dance communities to present Here to Here, a theatrical work volleying between large ensemble dances and intimate vignettes. By juxtaposing compassionate duets with verbal competitive commentary or adagio moments with rapid-fire narration, text and movement are combined to ask: how do we choose to present ourselves and how can we better navigate the sensitive subject of inconsistency?

Note: Here to Here offers a unique experience by inviting 5-15 professional, pre-professional, or student dancers into the ranks of 2nd Best. Over the course of a week, Hannah incorporates the invited dancers into the 25 minute work through a series of rehearsals to perform alongside company dancers. Since the cast is ever shifting no two shows are exactly the same! Ideal partners include: college dance programs, local dance studios and/or local dance companies. Ages 16 and up, dance experience required.

Mixed Rep Program

50 minutes // 6 dancers

2nd Best performs an evening of mixed repertory works highlighting their signature style of original dance-theatre, incorporated text, movement, humor, and story through these 4 diverse works that differently examine relationship and community.

This mixed repertory program includes Starting for Beginners, a simultaneously silly and heart-wrenching solo exploration of the pressures and preparations of performing for an audience, Lullabye, a queer duet between 2 women performers set to barbershop quartet The Gas House Gang, and the cornerstone of the evening, Welcome Suite, a 5-performer dance exploring yearning for connection, the contradictory nature of desire, and the navigation of uncertainty through a theatrical lens. The program closes with Devour Duet, a sincere and sentimental duet investigating all-consuming, collaborative love.