Summer on the Hudson and Kinesis Project dance theatre, the New York City and Seattle large-scale, outdoor dance company, led by Melissa Riker, is thrilled to announce the 2025 September performances in Riverside Park. The company known for their colorful, surprisingly intimate, yet spectacular works is offering a new colorful performance for visitors of Riverside Park.
Kinesis Project dance theatre builds a stunning evening experience of dance, music and dramatic colors along the river amongst the unique spaces of Riverside South. The performance will last an hour and traverse from Locomotive Lawn (62nd Street) to the Transfer Bridge (68th Street).
Rebecca Kanach’s costumes mixed with Celeste Cooning’s quilt-inspired art pieces evoke a sense of finished, yet unfinished elements. Choreographer Melissa Riker explains “Bridge Matter/The Reach is a dance of care, echoes and how our very human ways of bridging our “cracks” parallel the Earth’s constant processes.” This colorful work is the dance company’s second collaboration with geologist Dr. Missy Eppes and her colleagues, specifically Dr. Stephen Laubach and Rob Lander, all three are award winning and internationally respected scientists.
Beginning at Locomotive Lawn, audiences will experience a dance that appears in surprising spaces, invites them to move along the edge of the Hudson and mimics the colors of the sunset - with performances and movement collaboration by Kinesis Project NYC: Aryanna Allen, Jorgie Ingrahm, Ryan G. Smith, Stephanie Shin, Gioia von Staden. Costumes are created by Rebecca Kanach with Visual Art Design by Celeste Cooning. There will be improvised music lead by Grammy winning saxophonist, Johnny Butler with saxophonists Matt Nelson and Nick Lyons.
A MAP Fund grantee, Kinesis Project has been developing and creating Bridge Matter/The Reach since 2024 in NYC and Seattle, in partnership with Summer on The Hudson.
Johnny Butler is a Brooklyn-based, Grammy-award winning musician and arranger for his work on Beyoncé's "Love on Top." Butler received a 2022 Lucille Lortell Award and a 2023 Obie Award for his work on Heather Christian's Oratorio for Living Things (2022). Butler plays the saxophone, flute, clarinet, piano, guitar, composes, engineers audio, dances, and makes films. Butler uses a wireless microphone and handful of electronics to create vast soundscapes while dancing onstage, blending the music, the dancer, and the daydream.
Celeste Cooning is best known for creating large-scale integrated art installations. Aside from various exhibitions, her work adorns city parks, storefronts, special events, and the stage. 2013 marked the transformation of Cooning’s signature cut paper aesthetic into a permanent outdoor sculpture for the city with support from 1% for Public Art and Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture. Bounty functions as a threshold for Jackson Park Perimeter Trail in north Seattle’s Pinehurst neighborhood. The stylized, ornate fronds function as a bouquet of sorts extolling the virtues of the Pacific Northwest landscape. Cooning’s 21’ x 21’ swirling and back-lit Seed of Life can be found on a central wall in the city of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.
Rebecca Kanach is a Barrymore Award-winning costume designer. In New York, her work has been seen in at The Lincoln Center, The Guggenheim, Ars Nova’s ANT Fest, La MaMa, The New Ohio, Joe’s Pub and outdoors in NYC and Seattle with Kinesis Project dance theatre. Regionally, her work has been seen at companies including The Arden Theatre Company, Opera Philadelphia,and People’s Light and Theater Co. Academic work includes Bryn Mawr College, Drexel University, Temple University, Swarthmore College, and University of the Arts. As a skilled draper, many of her builds can also be seen throughout numerous productions in the region.
Rebecca is a co-founder and the resident costume designer of The Bearded Ladies Cabaret, and a company member of Lightning Rod Special, whose performance of The Appointment was listed as one of the New York Times’ Best Theater of 2019. She is a MFA graduate from NYU Tisch, USA 829.
Melissa Riker is Artistic Director / Choreographer of Kinesis Project dance theatre. She is a dancer and choreographer who emerged as a strong creative voice in the mid 2000’s NYC performance world. Riker is the Executive Producer of the EstroGenius Festival, Founder and Co-Director of Women in Motion and Founder and Collective Member of Dance Rising. Riker’s dances and aesthetic layer her training in ballet, modern dance, martial arts, theatre and circus. She invents large-scale out-door performances and spontaneous moments of dance for public spaces.
In 2022 Riker was the Artist in Residence for the Progressive Failure of Brittle Rocks Conference (PRF22) an international conference of Geologists, Geomorphologists and Mechanical Engineers, convened by Dr. Missy Eppes and her colleagues. In 2023, Riker’s work as a dance advocate is through Dance Rising and Dance/NYC as a community organizer and master facilitator of the Dance Industry Census Roundtables.
Martha Cary (Missy) Eppes, PhD, is a professor of earth sciences at UNC Charlotte. Her research interests center on natural rock fracture, soils, and landscape evolution on Earth and other planetary bodies. Dr. Eppes is a fellow of the Geological Society of America (GSA) and a US Fulbright Research Scholar. She is a recipient of GSA’s Kirk Bryan award – their highest honor awarded for quaternary geology and geomorphology – and the American Geophysical Union Earth and Planetary Surface Processes group’s Marguerite T. Williams Award given for her “groundbreaking, interdisciplinary research linking rock fracture mechanics and surface processes.”
Summer on the Hudson is a season-long celebration of culture, nature, and New York City, brought to you by the Riverside Park Conservancy in partnership with NYC Parks. From May to October, join us from 59th to 181st Streets for over 300 events, including full-day festivals, concerts, movies under the stars, dance parties, fitness classes, learning opportunities, and so much more!
Kinesis Project is a dance organization that creates dance as public art, facilitates educational programs and produces site-specific performances with diverse communities. A company at the forefront of the international discussion of placemaking, art engagement and the cultural imperative of art in public space, Kinesis Project dance theatre invents large scale, space-changing, breath-taking experiences.
