National Dance Day Festival at Fort Tryon Park —  Broadway and Dongan Place Entrance

Celebrate National Dance Day with an immersive, multi-disciplinary arts production in Fort Tryon Park! A guided walk through the park leads audience members to view Uptown Dance Collective’s (UDC) “Alterations and Repairs: Nature and Us” with dance, music, and spoken word all woven into the landscape of the parkland. Audience members will also take a little journey to Brazil and learn Samba dance at the end of the walk and some Bomba from Puerto Rico along the way.

UDC dance artists Lisa Green, Amy Kail, Navarra Novy-Williams will be joined by Shanik Garcia, Juan Usera, Paul Thompson, and Rishauna Zumberg. This group of dance artists collectively draw from diverse traditions including Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Puertorican, and European and U.S. Modern Dance in creating and performing their dances. John Ehlis, Matthew Gonzales, and Jessica Lurie perform original music on Saxophone, Flute, Guitar, and Drums; and poets Alison Stone and Peter Bulow share poems created for the day. Student dancers Camila Alvarez, Alexis Camacho, Victoria Lopez, and Valerie Quito from The Center Dance Studio in Inwood will also join us this year!

We encourage our audience to bring light pillows, blankets, or folding chairs you can easily carry as we go from site to site.