FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Award-winning dance artist and choreographer Lila Kushner to debut
“This Time Tomorrow (I’ll Be Seeing You)” at PDT July 5 and 6
Lila Kushner, Philadelphia-based contemporary dance artist, choreographer and teacher, has announced the premiere of “This Time Tomorrow (I’ll Be Seeing You)” on July 5 and 6, 2024. Both performances will take place at 8 p.m. at Philadelphia Dance Theatre (PDT), located at the New Covenant Campus on the border between the city’s Mount Airy and Chestnut Hill neighborhoods (7500 Germantown Ave.). Currently a teaching artist with Pilobolus and a recent winner of Regional Dance America’s 2024 National Choreography Award, Kushner will bring together 11 exciting, young professional dancers from around the country for the premiere. “This Time Tomorrow (I’ll Be Seeing You)” is a 50-minute exploration of journeys and transitions built around the metaphor of a train ride. The dancers — all connected to Kushner from her years of dancing — will join Kushner to perform a series of solos, duets, trios and larger group dances that evoke the powerful emotions associated with the universal human experiences of travel, change and coming together in a common meeting place.
“Community is paramount in my work, both in the artistic environment and in the final creation,” says Kushner, who earned her BFA in contemporary dance performance with an emphasis in composition from the Boston Conservatory at Berklee in 2023. “I’m excited by the architecture of groups and the ways that people gather to go in the same direction, like a morning train commute, students in a dance program, or dancers coming together to rehearse and perform,” she says. “Those are the types of shared journeys that informed this show’s narrative.”
For Kushner, a Mount Airy native whose training at Philadelphia Dance Theatre began at age 7, having PDT host her professional debut is both a celebration of community and a homecoming.“ PDT has played such an important role in my life,” she says. “It’s the premier classical ballet school in the region, but its mission goes far beyond that. PDT and its director, Joy Delaney Capponi, create well-rounded dancers by including all styles. Their training fosters a love for the arts and instills lessons that we can use in other parts of our lives. To me and so many other Philadelphia dancers, PDT provides a dance-focused community center — and an extended family.”
After training at PDT and graduating from Germantown Friends School, Kushner’s intensive dance education continued at Boston Conservatory at Berklee in 2018, where she performed works by notable artists including T. Lang, Victor Quijada, Brian Brooks, Bradley Shelver and Aszure Barton. In Boston, Kushner danced with Hybrid Motion Dance Theatre.
In 2020-2021, she returned to PDT to teach and train as part of a gap-year experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her dedication to the artform and desire for versatility have inspired her to enrich her training with intensives at Mark Morris Dance Group, Jose Limón Dance Company, Batsheva Dance Company and Vim Vigor Dance Company.
Kushner has choreographed work for the Boston Conservatory Summer Intensive and PDT. Her work “Parola” won the 2023 Regional Dance America Northeast Emerging Choreography Award, for which she received a full scholarship to the 2023 National Choreography Intensive (NCI) in Dayton, Ohio, where she was inspired by NCI’s director of choreography, award-winning Chicago-based dance artist Stephanie Martinez. Kushner earned the 2024 National Choreography Award for “If, By Chance,” an eight-minute piece featuring 19 dancers.
*Presale tickets are available here for pre-set up seats that have prime view of the stage. Additional tickets will be sold at the door via cash or venmo but guests will be required to bring their own chair or blanket to sit on and view won’t be as central. All tickets are $10.
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More info: lila-kushner.com
Media contact: Hillel Hoffmann, hillel.hoffmann@gmail.com, 267-896-1301