Year: 2025-2026
DanceForce Member: Missy Pfohl Smith
Artist: Ephrat Asherie
Community Partners: Hochstein School of Music & Dance; Rochester Institute of Technology Dance; University of Rochester Program of Dance & Movement; UR Institute for the Performing Arts
Audience: 540
County:Monroe

Ephrat Asherie will bring her new collaborative show “Shadow Cities” to Rochester, a work created with Grammy award-winning jazz musician and composer Arturo O’Farrill. Bringing together Ephrat Asherie Dance’s exhilarating choreography that remixes and reconnects various street and club dance styles with music and an original composition featuring O’Farrill’s trademark Latin jazz sound, “Shadow Cities” explores what it means to be and to feel in-between. The company will perform one public performance followed by a Q and A, have an open rehearsal, teach a dance workshop on the UR campus, and teach a workshop in the community at the Hochstein School of Music and Dance. All activities will be open to the public. The company travels with 6 dancers, 4 musicians, and 2 technicians for this show.

The work explores how we are split between cities, memories, and generations; and how we are an amalgam of cultures, fully embodied and fragmented all at once. While identities are fixed and infinitely fluid, EAD’s movements are concurrently malleable and explosive. This work asks how and why – halfway between so many disparate extremes in time, space, and state – we sometimes feel most at home and our most enlivened selves. With a cast of six dancers and four musicians, Shadow Cities is a reflection on the beauty, vastness, and joy of the in-between.

This will be the first formal collaboration in dance with the Hochstein School and the UR, both respected and known institutions in Rochester. All workshops and the open rehearsal will be free and open to the public, and the performance will be free to students. We expect that we will fill our 160 seat theater for the show, and that the workshops will be full to capacity as well. The UR Program of Dance and Movement will celebrate its 14th annual inspireJAM all-styles (hip-hop) battle in 2026. This residency will coincide with this event that has supported and celebrated the hip-hop community in Western and central New York, providing another perspective on how this dance form is evolving and spreading to the concert dance world. inspireJAM has also existed in connection with Rochester Institute of Technology’s hip-hop Dance Camp for the past 3 years, so this residency will not only build on what has been developing in Rochester for regional hip hop dance artists, but will also draw audiences from this community to support the EAD work.

Ephrat “Bounce” Asherie is a NYC-based director, choreographer, performer and b-girl and a 2016 Bessie Award Winner for Innovative Achievement in Dance. Asherie has received numerous awards to support her work including Dance Magazine’s Inaugural Harkness Promise Award and two National Dance Project Awards. In 2019 she was the recipient of a NYFA Fellowship and is currently a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow.