EMERGE125 Announces 2025-2026 Season
EMERGE125 Announces 2025-2026 Season - Harlem-Based Arts Company Shines in the New Year
Over an active and exciting ten-year period under the leadership of Artistic Director Tiffany Rea-Fisher, EMERGE125 has remade itself as one of the most innovative movement arts companies in New York City. E125 has held a vital and continuous presence in New York City’s dance ecosystem for more than four decades, touring internationally, presenting work on prominent stages, and contributing meaningfully to the American modern dance canon. Since 2016, Rea-Fisher’s governance has redefined our organization’s identity while remaining true to its founding vision.
Through a set of core values that includes prioritizing artistic excellence, dancer care, community impact, reliable execution of planned programming, EMERGE125 has fully entrenched itself as a thriving, self-sustained organization that consistently produces high-caliber work. Under Rea-Fisher’s visionary leadership, we have expanded our staff, cultivated strong and lasting partnerships, and scaled our programming, all while maintaining our uncompromising commitment to our mission of artistic excellence. As we celebrate the first decade of Rea-Fisher as the creative head of E125, we are proud to present our 2025/2026 season, with an impressive range of community actions, collaborations, education incentives, and choreographic premieres that reflect the ingenuity and diversity of EMERGE125.
E125’s 2025/2026 season begins on November 8 with our annual autumn fundraiser, Fall for E125. Staging at National Dance Institute in Harlem, this production will feature a preview of a new work by Rea-Fisher and provide opportunities for conversation and connection with the company’s staff and dancers. Tickets for this fundraising event are on sale now. Starting in November, Rea-Fisher will rejoin her ongoing engagement as an instructor at the prestigious Steps on Broadway studio.
E125 welcomes the New Year in New York City with a pair of company showcases as part of the 2026 Association of Performing Arts Presenters’ Conference as a guest of the Dance Managers Collective. EMERGE125 will be presenting at New York City Center in Studio 5 at 2:30 pm January 9 and at Ailey Citigroup Theater that evening at 9:15 pm. Access to these showcases is free with RSVP, click here to find out more.
The company heads south in late January to take part in the 2026 Alabama Dance Festival and the Annual Conference and Festival of the International Association of Blacks in Dance (IABD) in Atlanta, where EMERGE125 will be teaching, lecturing, and auditioning for our upcoming summer workshops. Many of our senior staff are originally from the American south, including Kat Files, our Director of Education. This trip across state lines is both a homecoming and a great opportunity to cross-pollinate between our shared arts communities.
EMERGE125 is proud to announce the location of our annual season of live performances from April 30 - May 2 at El Museo del Barrio in Spanish Harlem. Last year’s season at El Museo marked a milestone in public engagement, with audience attendance more than doubling from the previous year. That growth reflects not just the company’s increasing visibility, but its deepening roots in the Harlem community and broader cultural relevance across the city. This new location has provided the company with a larger stage, more seats, and easy access for our core uptown fanbase. We very much look forward to returning to 104th street for our second engagement!
Our 2026 performances will feature three important new works by Rea-Fisher. The first honors the California grizzly bear. Emblazoned on California’s state flag, this exemplar of American wilderness has been extinct in the state for nearly a century. That powerful irony inspires Rea-Fisher’s work in collaboration with the California Grizzly Alliance (CGA) and environmental awareness non-profit-organization Vildwerk, which explores the possibility of reintroducing grizzlies to their native habitat. Through original choreography, projection art, and sustainable costume design, Rea-Fisher uses the emotive power of dance to connect audiences to nature and inspire conservation action. This 30-minute piece presented with blessings from Indigenous Tribal Leaders, will feature nine diverse dancers from across the U.S. CGA serves as both creative and educational advisor, joining performances to distribute toolkits and resources promoting re-wilding and broader environmental engagement. This dance work features a live soundscape, incorporating tribal music, forest ambiance, and the guttural calls of bears to sonically represent and honor the animal’s presence.
Our second premiere, Migrate, addresses the intersection of natural migration and human immigration. This performance is scored with a new chamber music work by composer Jackson A. Waters, as commissioned by the New York Youth Symphony.
In 2026, EMERGE125 will also premiere a third bold and as-yet-untitled interdisciplinary work that places the creation of original music and dance in dynamic conversation. Composer Fredrick Kennedy and Music Researcher Deadra Hart, both accomplished musicians and scholars of protest music, will collaborate directly with Rea-Fisher to unite movement and sound. This 30-minute full-company piece featuring nine EMERGE125 company dancers will embody the tensions of protest in expressive physicality. Resident designers Rachel Dozier-Ezell (costume designer) and Christopher Brusberg (lighting designer) will echo the grounded and theatrical juxtapositions inherent within the work. These collective collaborations serve as an immediate and timeless call to action, a manifestation of the truth that expression through protest has been an omnipresent act throughout history in response to injustice. Together, we are forging work that is original, resonant, deeply artistic, and socially impactful.
EMERGE125 staff and dancers plan to participate in the Juneteenth March through Central Park, co-created six years ago with Rea-Fisher. Also this summer, in service of continuing to expand and diversify E125’s audiences, Classical Theatre of Harlem (CTH) continues as a noteworthy collaborator to the company. Now in our tenth year of partnership with Tiffany serving as CTH’s Resident Choreographer, these regular collaborations have become a cherished tradition for both the Harlem community and the company members of CTH and E125. CTH’s summer 2025 production of MEMNON at Marcus Garvey Park was seen by a record-breaking 27,000+ audience members. These performances are free of cost, creating a welcoming environment for all. The 2022 production of Twelfth Night was so successful that it was subsequently restaged in February 2023 at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Arts. We expect this year’s production to be a significant flashpoint of attention for the company and an excellent opportunity for Rea-Fisher’s choreography to reach an even larger audience.
In July, EMERGE125 will host our 3rd NYC Summer Workshop, offering Intermediate and Advanced level dancers access to one-on-one and group instruction from the company’s Teaching Artists and Directors. Comparable information from last year’s workshop is available here.
Alongside this formidable lineup of live events, E125 will continue its significant commitment to education at our partner schools, including Stars of Tomorrow Project, Repertory Company High School for Theater Arts, P.S. 481 (The STEAM Bridge School), and Trinity School, throughout the 2025 and 2026 calendar years. We hope to see you out this season!