Who Owns a Dance Move? Jeremy Nedd at PS21

June 26–27, 7:30pm | Chatham, NY | Tickets required

Brooklyn-born, Basel-based choreographer Jeremy Nedd brings "from rock to rock... aka how magnolia was taken for granite" (sic) to PS21's Pavilion Theater for two performances, June 26 and 27. The piece arrives in Chatham after launching the Lincoln Center Contemporary Dance Festival, where Voice Mag called it a "truly stunning production" that "strikes a delicate balance between social critique and jubilant celebration."

The work takes its starting point from the Milly Rock—the viral dance move created by rapper 2 Milly that helped define mid-2010s hip-hop culture, and which became the subject of a copyright infringement lawsuit between the rapper and a video game company after the move turned up as an unlicensed in-game emote.

Nedd and his company of five dancers use that lawsuit as a way into bigger questions: can a dance move actually belong to anyone, and when the answer is yes, who actually profits from it? It's a sharp angle into a conversation that touches on intellectual property, cultural appropriation, and the way social dances created in Black communities tend to get extracted and monetized by people who had nothing to do with creating them.

Nedd's broader practice has consistently worked this territory—integrating social and vernacular dance styles into contemporary dance spaces rather than treating them as separate categories. He won the Swiss Performing Arts Award in 2023, has performed and collaborated at the Schauspielhaus Zürich with Trajal Harrell, held engagements at the Semperoper in Dresden and Ballet Basel, and recently completed a master's degree in Expanded Theatre at HKB Bern. The piece premiered in September 2023 at Kaserne Basel and has toured through several European co-producing venues since.

The PS21 weekend continues the following day with a second Nedd work, "slidin' thru," staged outdoors on the PS21 grounds June 27 and 28.

Pavilion Theater, PS21, 2980 Route 66, Chatham, NY. Tickets at ps21chatham.org.