Orlando Hernández & the Knee-Heart Connection
At Outdoor Henry J. Leir Stage: Jul 24
Event Dates
About
Orlando Hernández & the Knee-Heart Connection
Thursday, July 24 at 5:30pm | Henry J. Leir Stage
Pillow Debut | Live Music
Lauded as “a onetime tap prodigy who’s grown into a history-mining experimentalist” (The New Yorker), Orlando Hernández is a performer, choreographer, theater-maker, musician, and writer who came up in the tap dance community in New York. He now presents a variety of stories and performances that thrillingly blend live music, tap dance, theater and storytelling, and embodied rhythm. His play La Broa’ (Broad Street), composed of real-life stories from Latino communities in Rhode Island, was recently produced at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, in a run The Boston Globe called “heartwarming and magical.”
The Knee-Heart Connection is a tap dance-theater project led by Hernández, using techniques and technologies of tap dance, mask-work, physical theater, jazz music, and improvisation to create unique experiences of rhythm and reflection, with a particular perspective in the Puerto Rican diaspora. This work was developed with support from New York Live Arts, the Center for Performance Research, the CUNY Dance Initiative, Snug Harbor, JKW Collective Fund, the Changing Times Tap Initiative, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, and the Jerome Foundation.
As a member of the New York-based tap dance and live music company Music From the Sole, Hernández has performed at Jacob’s Pillow, Works & Process at the Guggenheim, The Joyce Theater, Fall For Dance at New York City Center, and Vail Dance Festival. He is also a member of the Boston-based tap dance company Subject:Matter, directed by Ian Berg, and dances with Michela Marino Lerman’s Love Movement.
