Another Parade is presented in the 2009 Season of the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival at The Ailey Citigroup Theater at The Joan Weill Center for Dance. Another Parade celebrates the singular, exhilarating experience of being on stage. This evening length work features four ungainly winning performers who flirt with subtlety while wearing their hearts on their sleeves. Another Parade is a go for broke, all out dance event that packs much punch while straddling awkward and debonair.

Photos by Steven Schreiber

Game Face is a site specific work commissioned by LMCC's SITELINES festival. The cast of six die-hard dancers (Anna Bass, Monica Bill Barnes, Deborah Lohse, Mindy Upin, Lindsey Kelley and Mary Ann Wall) perform their hearts out in the midst of tour buses, passing summer time crowds and the heat, using the entire site as their personal stage.

Photos by Emily LaHaie

Two small women stand on top of a dining room table. In silence, carefully navigating the table top, they send silverware crashing to the floor. Simultaneously hilarious and painful, Suddenly Summer Somewhere explores how the passage of time affects the collective lives of two people.

Photos by David Wilson Barnes

Thank You and Good Night is an evening length work commissioned by Dance New Amsterdam that addresses the idea of sharing the stage with someone else and the many meanings of upstaging, being seen and making a scene.

Photos by Steven Schreiber

Limelight is a site specific work originally commissioned by San Diego Dance Theater's Trolley Dances and later customized for performances in fountains in New York, City and Philadelphia. This water-based extravaganza features some dozen dancers performing an energetic group number that they seem convinced is the star turn of their respective careers.

Photos by Eric Bandiero, Jim House, Art Piccalo,
and Jacques-Jean Tiziou

Nothing comes easily to the characters in Hollywood Endings. However, humor does co-exist alongside pain in Barnes' world, and hope (as well as slapstick) bubbles up regularly. Set in a very intimate and homey performance space, and accompanied by the earnest music of Presley and Patsy Cline, this collection of solos, group work and vocal renderings is both compelling and heartbreaking to watch.

Photos by David Wilson Barnes

The Happy Dance (or what started out ok) commissioned and presented by Danspace Project is a droll exploration in hopelessness, in which a whimsically dark duet is trapped in a land of aggressive showgirls and an endlessly wandering parade.

Photos by David Wilson Barnes

Selected Photos from various site specific projects and theatrical works, including Home (San Diego Trolley Dances 2001), When we were pretty (Danspace Project 2002), Gallery Project (PPOW Gallery 2003), Yesteryear (San Diego Trolley Dances 2006)

Photos by David Wilson Barnes and Jim House