About Christopher Caines Dance

“It’s a pleasure to watch a choreographer play with forms and dynamics as if that were the best game in town.”
—Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice

Founded in New York City in 2000 by artistic director and choreographer Christopher Caines, Christopher Caines Dance (CCD) is a project-based contemporary chamber ballet company whose mission is to support dance, music, and operatic productions created by Christopher Caines and offer them to the broadest possible audiences. In his work, Caines seeks to explore, experiment with, and celebrate great music through dance while reconsidering the dramatic possibilities of choreographic structure and form.

Live music has always been essential to Caines’s vision. CCD has appeared exclusively with live music since its inception, played and sung by a outstanding New York City–based instrumentalists and singers, ranging across the genres of vocal, choral, and chamber music, and from late medieval and Renaissance polyphony through the baroque, classical, romantic, and modern eras to newly commissioned scores by American composers.

CCD began in 2000 when, after a decade of creating dances, evening-length dance-theater pieces with his own music, two full-length solos, and numerous scores for other choreographers and directors, Christopher Caines assembled a pianist, two singers, and six of his dancer friends, and made ARIAS, a program-length suite of dances set to solo vocal music extending across five centuries of song. The work earned high critical praise, with a featured review in The Village Voice and an extended essay in The New Republic.

“Real, honest-to-goodness dances ... dance-making drenched in intuitive musicality and cultivated musicianship ... a feast.”
—Mindy Aloff, The New Republic

Today, CCD comprises a family of dancers, musicians, and designers Caines draws upon for each new project. CCD’s New York seasons and special projects have been presented at such New York theaters as the Construction Company, City Center Studios, Manhattan Movement and Arts Center, the Clark Studio Theater at Lincoln Center, LaMama ETC, and Danspace Project, and 92Y, as well as in several nontheatrical venues for site-specific ventures.