Blurring the lines of concert, dance, and music performance, Music From the Sole is a tap dance and live music company that celebrates tap’s roots in the African diaspora.
“House Is Open, Going Dark,” the culmination of the company’s multi-year Guild Hall William P. Rayner residency and the work’s premiere, will be performed Friday at 8 p.m.
The co-founders, Gregory Richardson, a composer and bassist, and Leonardo Sandoval, a Brazilian tap dancer and choreographer, draw from Afro-Brazilian, jazz, soul, house, rock, and Afro-Cuban styles.
In a New York Times review of the group’s performance in the city last year, Siobhan Burke wrote, “The Joyce Theater has rarely felt as electric as it did on Tuesday, when 14 musicians burst through a door at the back of the house, singing and drumming as they paraded through the audience toward the stage. Within seconds, the crowd was clapping and cheering, some people on their feet.”
Before the show, audience members have been invited to join an onstage house party with Music From the Sole and Our Fabulous Variety Show featuring spontaneous dance, improvised riffs, and plenty of popcorn.
Tickets range from $51 and $46.50 for members, to $86 and $75.50.
“Julio Torres: Color Theories” will bring the comedian, actor, writer, and style savant to Guild Hall on Sunday at 8 p.m. Mr. Torres, who comes from El Salvador, arrived in Manhattan in 2009 to attend the New School. After working as a writer on “The Chris Gethard Show,” he was hired by “Saturday Night Live,” where he was nominated for four Emmys as part of the show’s writing team.
After stints with HBO’s “Los Espookys” and “Fantasmas,” both of which won Peabody awards, he wrote, directed, and starred in “Problemista,” a surrealist comedy starring Tilda Swinton and Isabella Rossellini that was released in the United States last year.
“Color Theories” arrives directly from Soho Theatre in London after a weeklong run. In it, according to The Guardian, “the charismatic Salvadoran American comic reveals another string to his bow: ‘I’m sent all over the world to find colors,’ he confides, daring us to doubt him. . . . Though he may have failed in his color-scouting mission, this hour leaves you tickled pink.”
Tickets run from $51, $46.50 for members, up to $86 and $75.50.
The Academy Icons series will return next Thursday at 7 p.m. with Daryl Roth, a member of Guild Hall’s Academy of the Arts, and Anna Deavere Smith, a playwright and actress, for a conversation about their friendship, careers, and shared commitment to the theater.
A 13-time Tony Award winner, Ms. Roth has produced some of the most thought-provoking productions in New York City, among them “Indecent,” “The Normal Heart,” “A View From the Bridge,” “August: Osage County,” and “Proof.”
Ms. Smith is credited with having created a new form of theater, one that combines the journalistic technique of interviewing subjects with interpreting their words through performance. Her honors include the National Endowment for the Humanities Medal and the George Polk Career Award in Journalism.
Tickets are $51, $46.50 for members, or $86 and $75.50, with a handful priced at $29.
