2nd Best Dance Company creates, performs, and teaches physically rigorous, sometimes virtuosic, almost always slapstick dance-plays. We connect to audiences, students, and professionals alike as we share emotionally accessible work that is relatable, honest, and resonant.

Our work… 

• believes in art-making that is exploratory, empathetic, and goofy. 

• values feeling over reality and seeks our truest sensations over absolute truth. 

• blends humor and tragedy while tackling “topics like death and queer identity through rigorous, inventive movement and wit” (Dance Magazine). 

• grapples with big ideas in very human ways (aka messy ways).

Since our founding in 2016, we have used our practice and platform to play out absurdist scenes: we move, perform text, sing, utilize props, unconventionally handle proscenium spaces, and ask the audience to play active roles or even perform in the work alongside us. The unpredictability of live performance excites us, as does building a nexus between dance and text, humor and tragedy, viewer and performer. We tackle big topics, play very seriously, and lean into hunches that take us to uncertain and often ridiculous places all to ask: what does it mean to be alive?

Pursuing these interests, our work has gone past the traditional dance proscenium to include collaborations in sculpture, animation, theater, film, and site-specific works. Led by Hannah Garner, a recipient of the Dance Magazine’s 25 to Watch in 2020, 2nd Best continues to seek multidisciplinary partnerships, explore limits of the body, and find solace in the humor of being human. 

Recently, 2nd Best has been an Artist in Residence at Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, GALLIM’s Moving Women Residency, Atlantic Center for the Arts (New Smyrna Beach, FL), The Croft (Horton Bay, MI), and Triskelion Arts. In 2019 2nd Best was selected as one of two commissioned dance-mobile artists by Gibney Dance and given the opportunity to bring free dance to the community through the outdoor performance series in Brooklyn Bridge Park. 2nd Best has toured nationally, taking our 2019 production RED to Montana and Washington

Hannah’s work has been commissioned by GroundWorks DanceTheater, Kizuna Dance, the SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Dance, The Wassaic Project, A-Y/Dancers, and the Hartt School, as well as musical artists like Snail Mail, Half Waif, and Frankie Cosmos. 2nd Best productions have been presented through Gibney Dance, GALLIM, Arts by the People, Mark Morris Dance Group, The Ace Hotel, Triskelion Arts, Friends Seminary, Dixon Place, The Wassaic Project, WOW Cafè Theatre for The New York International Fringe Festival, and Chen Dance Center, among others.

A note from Hannah:

“2nd Best is kind of a messy catch-all phrase for myself mostly, and my collaborators who dance for me. I had been making work outside of school and then it became a pretty consistent group of people, so it made sense to gather it all together. We were kind of exploring similar worlds and themes and ideas in a medium and a vocabulary that started to become more constant. 2nd Best is a company where anything is allowed. We are a dance company, but we also act and sing and use props and invite the audience to participate inside of the performance and use traditional spaces in nontraditional ways.”