Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company Announces the World Premiere of FRICTION at Ailey Citigroup Theater

Twenty-six years later, Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company continues the challenge. This October, they invite audiences to FRICTION, the company’s first full evening-length work in New York City since 2019, at Ailey Citigroup Theater, 405 W. 55th Street, New York, NY, 10019 on October 29 & 30 at 7pm and October 31 at 3pm. Tickets are $38 general admission, $26 for students and children under 12, and are available at bit.ly/3Rs9GqR.

FRICTION: a dance exploring AI, humanity, and the sparks where tension, technology, and fractured relationships collide and ignite.

It prickles your skin. Pricks. Fastens. Adheres. Sticks. Is Stylized. Edgy. Of this moment. Fault Lines. Schisms. Chasms. Seismic action. Tectonic shifts. Land and people and minds. Tension. Fraying. Relationships. Relations to Self. Friction.

Friction is that moment a fire can start. It cannot start without. Neither intercourse. Neither love. Straddling the lines separating technology from humanity, a theme DGDC has portrayed since its first evening-length work, Plasma Field in 1999, through 2023’s e-Motion, investigating sentience in AI, ahead of the curve [Dance Magazine on e-Motion].

What’s the divide between artificial intelligence and real intelligence?

Daniel’s choreographic style was best articulated by dance critic Deborah Jowitt: “blending casualness with precision.” In FRICTION, Gwirtzman is pushing both the casualness and the precision to the max. In the group section “LARGE LANGUAGE MODEL,” which previewed June 25/26 at New York City Center’s IN THE STUDIOprogram, the dancers become bytes, pushing against their will, against their consciousness, executing dense, intricate movements at relentless speeds. The dance contains an archive of excerpts from dances in the Company’s repertory, pieces of dances torn up, recontextualized, fed to the machine and regurgitated.

FRICTION captures the tensions and tenor of our time, days before the midterm election, harnessing the fraught emotions that characterize our incivil society.

The score has been generated in full in collaboration with the large language model Claude. Daniel has used a range of additional programs to generate various voices, which mirror the thicket of data on display in the dance.

Dancers: Derek Crescenti, Daniel Gwirtzman, Sarah Hillmon, Vanessa Martínez de Baños, Johnny Mathews, and more to be announced.

ABOUT DANIEL GWIRTZMAN DANCE COMPANY

Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company, known for its optimistic ethos, was formed in 1998. Since its inception, it has demonstrated a commitment to education, operating with the philosophy and programming that everyone can join the dance. Incorporating dance and story into the film medium has been a consistent practice along with creating original programming for the stage. The repertory has earned praise for its humor, musicality, stylistic diversity, and accessibility. The Company’s acclaimed creation, “Dance With Us,” a free online educational resource, received leadership support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and is designed to demystify choreography and increase comfort viewing and speaking about dance. The digital resource showcases the Company’s decade-long practice working in the dance for camera genre. Lincoln Center and The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts presented the Company in 2023 during its 25th Anniversary season in a stand-alone program called Everybody Can Dance. In the summer of 2024, DGDC was in residence at the American Dance Festival where it developed its newest evening-length dance, Flashpoint. In 2025, the Company’s AI-themed theater/dance work e-Motion, a collaboration with playwright Saviana Stanescu, made its NYC premiere at La MaMa during the La MaMa Moves! Festival, which Culturebot reviewed as “profoundly chilling,” noting Daniel’s performance as “masterful.” Also in 2025, Framing Ménerbes, a film created by the Company in Provence, premiered in France, followed by its US premiere at the Dolby Screening Room in Manhattan with guests Donald Byrd and Jovani Furlan leading the post-screening conversation. Since then, the film has screened in theaters in Upstate New York—Binghamton, Ithaca, and Rochester—and in Ann Arbor, MI and Vancouver, WA. The film will screen next in San Francisco at the Alliance Française in January 2027. Other highlights include performances at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, The Kennedy Center, Battery Dance Festival, Fire Island Dance Festival, Bryant Park, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. The Company’s robust summer 2026 season included two IN THE STUDIO programs at New York City Center along with a tour of its SUMMER MIX program to Ithaca, NY, with six performances at the Kitchen Theatre Company July 16-19, 2026: gwirtzmandance.org/summermix.

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