Periapsis Music and Dance was founded in the fall of 2012 by composer/pianist Jonathan Howard Katz and dancer/choreographer Leigh Schanfein in response to the growing gap between dance performance and live musical performance in the NYC arts scene. Inspired by our own experiences creating art together, we wanted to give others in the dance and music communities opportunities to collaborate on new performance pieces. Jonathan and Leigh created several new repertoire works together as composer and choreographer, including two that they had first developed pre-Periapsis, as well as some pieces with other collaborators.

As we began our third season, we welcomed choreographers Erin Dillon and Hannah Weber to our company. Erin had been a guest choreographer during our first season, and Hannah started with us as a featured dancer in season two’s Laid upon the children. While serving as resident choreographers, both also participated in the ensemble as dancers, and the contrast between their unique artistic styles enriched our growing repertoire. Leigh departed from the ensemble in the winter of 2015, and our core company coalesced into an ensemble of roughly six dancers and six musicians.

Commissioned guest choreographers and composers became an important feature of our work beginning with The Portrait Project in season four. From this point on, we grew our repertoire through a balance of resident artists and guests, giving our dancers a breadth of experience unusual among small companies. It also offered our audiences a surprising variety of work at our shows, and we became a recognized leader in interdisciplinary artistic collaboration. See below for a full list of choreographers and composers who contributed to our repertoire.

The fourth season (2015-16) was also the year we formalized and expanded various programs that served the larger dance and music communities outside of our company—the Periapsis Open Series, the Emerging Artist Residencies, our online resources, and more. These programs continued to varying degrees through our history, some reaching hundreds of artists worldwide. Learn more about them on our services page.

Further company shifts took place in 2020-21, as Hannah relocated to the southeast, and Erin left to pursue other genres of performance. Rohan Bhargava and Evita Zacharioglou, both company dancers since 2019, became resident choreographers, and Annie Nikunen joined the ensemble, making her debut in 2021 as choreographer, composer, dancer, and flutist, all at the same time.

The post-COVID landscape brought new challenges into an already difficult arena, and our final full season show turned out to be 2022’s UNBEKNOWNST. A fitting farewell, it featured all of our current choreographers and composers, an impressive roster of guest choreographers and musicians, plus new dancers from our most recent auditions as well as dancers who had been with us for years. We continued to work into 2023 and developed some new repertoire, signing off with a retrospective event in June.

For a look at our company and repertoire over the years, visit our video libraries. You can also check out our retrospective video, with clips from nearly every repertoire piece and performer in our history.