Janis Brenner & Dancers presents its New York Season from Thursday, June 1 - Saturday, June 3, 2017 at 8pm at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, 280 Broadway (entrance at 53A Chambers Street), NYC. Tickets are $20 in advance, $25 at the door, and are available at 646-837-6809 or www.gibneydance.org/performance/pop/janis-brenner.

The company premieres Once You Are Not A Stranger, created in collaboration with Bosnian-born, electro-acoustic composer Svjetlana Bukvich, Slovenian-born installation artist Eva Petric, lighting designer Mitchell Bogard, and costume designer Sue Julien. This interdisciplinary work looks at the ideas of empathy and "otherness" in a multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious world and uses the dance company as a microcosm of this world. Video projections are embedded in the center of an elaborate set-piece, playing a personal and imagistic role in the work. Performed with live music, including Ms. Brenner on vocals and Ms. Bukvich on keyboards.  This work has been made possible by a commissioning grant from the O'Donnell-Green Music and Dance Foundation.

JB&D's work Soul River/Blues, originally created in collaboration with Maya Dance Theatre in Singapore, completes the evening: inspired by the music of Ry Cooder and BV Bhatt's "A Meeting by the River" the work poetically mixes Eastern and Western ideas of the "soul," the body taking leave and the significance of water as both ritual and force of nature.