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A massive installation constructed out of white paper (by the artists Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen) fills the back wall of the Abrons Playhouse. Its elaborate, vaguely ominous assemblage of coils, tendrils, and vortexes loom over a single dancer alone in the space, but her bright orange leotard and grounded, deliberate movements hold their own, commanding our attention. Later, the stage is overtaken by a group of similarly attired women: trilling with increasing aggression, they gradually assemble into a pack, crawling in circles in a feral display until they exhaust themselves and lay quiet.

“Death is serious,” the poet Howard Nemerov once wrote, “or else all things are serious except death. A player who dies automatically disqualifies for the finals.”

Grief is a force that seizes the body from within and works its way--by covert pathways and on its own timetable--throughout and through. Although humans have devised various rites for directing and honoring its expression, there's no controlling its urges and its dimensions. As such, grief has much to teach the conscious mind that humbly attends to it.

The Taste of LIC is The Chocolate Factory Theater’s Annual celebration of LIC’s cultural and culinary excellence, for 1,200 of our closest friends, now on The Lot at Kaufman Astoria Studios.

Master of Ceremonies:Honorable Jimmy Van Bramer ,NYC Council Majority Leader / Chairman, Committee on Cultural Affairs

Grief is a force that seizes the body from within and works its way--by covert pathways and on its own timetable--throughout and through. Although humans have devised various rites for directing and honoring its expression, there's no controlling its urges and its dimensions. As such, grief has much to teach the conscious mind that humbly attends to it.

Keen [No. 2] builds upon Baldwin’s recently premiered Keen (Part 1) for the Philip Johnson Glass House in New Canaan, CT. Keen grows out of an open-eyed exploration of that which we uncomfortably avoid: the contours of grief. Baldwin and her all-woman cast mine the emotional and physical experience of loss, memory and holding love.

What happens when a choreographer loses her muse? During the past two and a half years, Ivy Baldwin has been wrestling with such a loss. In 2015, her close friend and longtime dancer Lawrence Cassella, an exuberant presence in her work since 2003, died at 38 after a three-month struggle with HLH, a rare immune system disease. For Ms. Baldwin, there was no moving past it.