Shannon Hummel/Cora Dance

“(Hummel) is a modern-dance choreographer with her own take on the world, and the kinds of quirkily, sweetly private things dance can express and the ways it expresses them. It is probably the kiss of death these days to describe choreography as delightful, but Ms. Hummel’s dances are just that, as well as poignant, funny and remarkably assured and perceptive.”

–The New York Times

“Calia Marshall and Katie Dean articulate the ins and outs of long term love in down here. Down here focuses on the ebbs and flows of long-term relationships and is unnervingly articulated by (the) dancers…”

–Brooklyn Based

“The dystopian fantasy that is Shannon Hummel’s “Gifts” is even better the second time around…Dean and Kramer never break their absoluteness of task.”

–Dance Enthusiast

 “…enormously sophisticated. The choreography quivers with subtle emotions, like the writing to Virginia Woolf, to stage pictures that remain beautifully calibrated whether the figures are still or running amok. Do I hear anyone suggesting a Bessie nomination?”

–The Village Voice

“…uncommonly committed performers in choreography as vivid and true as a Eudora Welty story. Ms. Hummel is quite a storyteller. You can hear the quiet tearing of a heart that might be your own.”

–The New York Times

In the News

Students, residents relive school dance nights at 10th Annual Red Hook Community Prom

News 12

June 12, 2022

The annual Red Hook Community Prom was back for its 10th year on Saturday night.

Brooklyn residents of all ages and students danced the night away at the South Brooklyn Community High School in the name of nostalgia to relive their high school prom nights.

DLSCC Holds Culture Day

The Virginian Review

April 30, 2022

Dabney S. Lancaster Community College’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee sponsored Culture Day at DSLCC’s Moomaw Center, Thursday, from 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm.

“This is an effort to bring unique people together from different backgrounds with different perspectives to learn from one another,” said Dr. Sandra McHenry, Instructor and D and I Committee Chair at DSLCC.

A dance was performed by Professional Dancers Z’yanah Gonzalez and Anais Dallett of Cora Dance Studio, Brooklyn, NY.

Shannon Hummel honored with a Bessie award for Service to the Field

December 14, 2020

For her dedication to providing “dance for all“ to the Red Hook, Brooklyn community through the organization Cora Dance, founded in 1998. For offering a “pay-what-you-can” program, committed to excellence, equity and community integration, providing child pick-up services, meals, homework help, and dancewear for students, working parents, and children.

Stepping Up: How the Dance Community Has Given Back During COVID-19

Dance Magazine

September 7, 2020

When dance venues closed, some organizations used the empty space to help feed their communities. San Francisco Ballet staff and dancers volunteered to distribute bags of groceries every week, using their loading dock as a pop-up food pantry to help out the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank. Mark Morris Dance Center became a distribution site for World Central Kitchen, offering free, prepacked meals to locals. Also in Brooklyn, JACK performance space partnered with the aid group We Keep Us Safe Abolitionist Network to help distribute food, while Cora Dance hosted a giveaway of free pet food and supplies secured by Red Hook Dog Rescue.

Brooklyn  nonprofit  says 
preliminary budget plan needs changes

News 12

May 26, 2020

MOVERS & SHAPERS:
Podcast No.34 – SHANNON HUMMEL

movers & shapers: a dance podcast

October 25, 2016

An interview with Shannon Hummel, Artistic Director of The Cora Studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn, which is home to her professional company Shannon Hummel/Cora Dance and its pay-what-can dance school, Cora Dance.

A Summer Guide to Dance, Music, Drama and Art in Red Hook

dna info

June 1, 2014

Cora Dance, a neighborhood dance school and studio, will premier phase 1 of “Common Dances” this summer, a collection of short works that are performed in common, sometimes unusual, spaces throughout Red Hook like cars, benches, paths and doorways.

Common Dances will be performed at 8 p.m. on the lawn of 14 Coles St. in Red Hook with a picnic potluck. Attendees are encouraged to bring a blanket or chair to watch the 15 short dances. After the performances, the audience will be asked to share its thoughts and offer suggestions for other “common” places in the neighborhood.

Red Hook Transfer School's Cheerleading Team Is Only for the 'Tough'

dna info

January 27, 2014

RED HOOK — Only the strong survive.

That’s how some of South Brooklyn Community High School’s cheerleaders describe their first official squad that started last fall.

The team started in 2012 at the transfer school — which serves students ages 16 and 20 years old . After staff decided to create a first-ever cheerleading team to complement the new boys' basketball team, more than a dozen girls signed up. 

Bette Midler’s New York Restoration Project Brings the Arts to Community Gardens

metrofocus (pbs)

September 3, 2014

“The New York Restoration Project approached BAM about making suggestions for dance, music and movies. We had suggested working with Urban Bush Women and with Cora Dance and with Lemay Dance,” said Amy Cassello, associate producer of the Next Wave Festival.

Keeping the faith:
Dance fund-raiser to aid Red Hook church repair

new york daily news

August 5, 2011

A Brooklyn dance group wants Visitation Church in Red Hook to have a full resurrection.

Cora Dance, a Red Hook-based dance school and performance group, will perform its dance concert, "Prey," at the Richards St. church on Aug. 18.

Half the proceeds will go to the 157-year-old church to help make desperately needed repairs and renovations and pay off debts.

The church basement and the church-owned Lyceum Theatre have been forsaken. A stained-glass window that blew out during a storm needs repair. And the church is $26,000 in debt to the Brooklyn Diocese.

"When we heard the church was in trouble, we decided we'd like to put the show in the church to help build visibility," said Cora Dance artistic director Shannon Hummel. "As an artist, I need to help preserve something that's so culturally and historically important."

Cora Dance presents "Gifts"

dance enthusiast

November 22, 2019

The dystopian fantasy that is Shannon Hummel’s “Gifts” is even better the second time around…Dean and Kramer never break their absoluteness of task; without this precision none of it works.

Youth Programs in Red Hook and Gowanus to Get a Boost With $1 Million in Federal Funding

BROWNSTONER

March 28, 2022

Eleven youth and educational organizations based in Red Hook and Gowanus are receiving $1 million in federal funding to boost their programming, Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez announced on Tuesday.

More than 250 organizations initially applied to receive the funding, Velázquez said at a press conference, but the money was only supposed to be allocated to 10 groups. Then, a collective of youth-based organizations approached her with a new idea.

On the hoof: Dance show sends audience hunting across Red Hook

brooklyn daily

September 17, 2015

This show is guaranteed to move you.

A combination scavenger hunt and dance festival will send audiences scattering across Red Hook on Sept. 19 and Sept. 26 in search of world-class dance. High-stepping visitors will have to track down members of the Cora Dance Studio, and in the process will discover side of the neighborhood they may never have seen before, says the show’s organizer.

Touchdowns and Tour Jetes

dance teacher

September 1, 2015

On a January morning, two weeks before New Jersey hosted Super Bowl XLVIII, ballet teacher Courtney Cooke set up a combination in the form of a three-person pass play. Tomboyish with a headband around her blonde pixie cut, she positioned one pre-teen boy as quarterback in second position plié.

He wore a winter beanie, gym clothes and athletic socks, and held his beginner ballet posture as best he could. “Remember, we’re using our turnout in this class,” Cooke said. Another boy in ballet slippers squatted in front of the QB clutching a foam football, while a third waited as receiver on the other side of the studio.

It was the final combination of a FOOTBALLet class, part of a six-week dance program for boys ages 9–13 at Cora School for Dance in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Though she had never thrown a football before, Cooke designed the workshop in hopes of introducing a new group of athletes to ballet.

Bringing Arts to Brooklyn and Bronx Community Gardens

New york times

May 14, 2014

Spring is bringing more than new flowers to the community gardens operated by the New York Restoration Project. The nonprofit group, created by Bette Midler in 1995, is collaborating with the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Bronx Museum of the Arts on a new series, Arts in the Gardens, that will present music, performance art, poetry, dance and film at four gardens in the Bedford-Stuyvesant and Gowanus neighborhoods of Brooklyn and three gardens in the Tremont, Melrose and Highbridge neighborhoods of the South Bronx.

Thirsty in the Big Sea

offoffoff

March 8, 2013

After an intermission to dry out and resettle, Calia Marshall and Katie Dean dance out the drama of their relationship, with a brilliant twist, or twists, in down here. Rather than parade onstage the scores of people that come into and through our lives as we try to negotiate a friendship or partnership, Cora Dance choreographer Shannon Hummel uses tinfoil. As Marshall and Dean sit fuming at each other, a leaf of foil falls from the sky and one of them forms a little person with it, to play with or to avoid dealing with the other big person. After a blackout with mysterious shaking and rustling, the lights reveal a sea of foil people.

New Work Reignites a Choreographer’s Creative Spark

BROOKLYN BASED

March 5, 2013

After the birth of her first child and the founding of her own dance studio, there was a period of time when Shannon Hummel seriously questioned whether she’d ever choreograph again.

“It was the feeling that opening this space to be a home for my work…consumed all of my time, so I had no time to make work,” says Hummel, who premiered her first new choreography in five years, Down Here, at The Cora Studio on Richards Street last week during her dance company’s 2013 New York season opening.

Dancing on Unconventional Stages

brooklyn based

October 20, 2011

Red Hook’s historic Visitation Church may soon experience the same revitalization through performance. Shannon Hummel, artistic director of Cora Dance says that when she created Prey, a dance piece that will return to the church in an encore performance on Oct. 27 and 28., the music–Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light–called for an extreme environment. “Almost immediately, I knew the space had to be one where the audience could be right up close to dancers experiencing very intimate moments and at other times, watching them move through enormous amounts of space,” Hummel said.

Site Specific Dance In Support of a Church and a Dance School

brooklyn daily eagle

August 31, 2011

Performance is always a meeting of performers and audience. This is particularly true in site-specific choreography, where, without the constraints of seats and stage, the audience is a visible and audible presence. When stages change during a single performance, it requires additional chorography for the audience, through guides, signs or spoken instructions. These can add to the performance or break into its magic.

Eloquent choreographer gives the expression 'tough love' new meaning

village voice

March 22, 2005

Fear, hostility, loneliness, frustration, despair, numb stoicism, and frenzied hysteria wrack the five women who people Shannon Hummel's new Elsewhere. These conditions leave them little opportunity to offer or accept love. But—and this is the crux of Hummel's theme—they never quit trying, the hand of one reaching out tentatively, time and again, to a sister body likely to rebuff it. Hummel, who credits her dancers with collaboration on the choreography, creates this affecting world by combining instinctive, everyday postures and actions (the body's natural "speech") with "learned" movement (the artistic inventions of classical ballet and the major moderns). The results are enormously sophisticated on several levels, from the nuanced gradations of feeling expressed—the choreography quivers with subtle emotions, like the writing of Virginia Woolf—to stage pictures that remain beautifully calibrated whether the figures are still or running amok. Do I hear anyone suggesting a Bessie nomination?

Cora Dance’s Wordless Production Speaks a Universal Language

red hook star revue

March 5, 2013

“What’s the ugliest way you can stuff your pants with the dolls?” Shannon asks.

It’s 1 pm; Katie and Calia are halfway through their rehearsal.  They have spent two hours working through kinks, practicing specific sequences and exploring possible costume malfunctions. The duo is about to embark on their first full run. Opening night is one day shy of two weeks away.

down here is a new evening length work choreographed by Cora Dance’s Shannon Hummel in collaboration with dancers, Katie Dean and Calia Marshall. The show is Shannon’s first evening length work in five years.

Evoking Emotion Through Gestures

the new york times

March 2004

But Ms. Hummel herself has once again achieved the potent form of dance narrative that seems uniquely hers. She lets her audience ponder whether these childlike women, one dreaming and the other grabbing fiercely at the moment, are sisters, mother and daughter or lovers. At times they seem to be all three and perhaps not even alive. Whoever they are, and the mystery is a part of the dance's pleasure, when they draw close and pull away you can feel the quiet tearing of a heart that might be your own.

The Prom Where the City Councilman Dances the Jennifer Grey Part from ‘Dirty Dancing.’ And He’s Not Bad.

new york times

June 27, 2019

At a prom earlier this month, Carlos Menchaca, a city councilman from Brooklyn, wore a shiny ball gown to dance the Jennifer Grey role from the climax of “Dirty Dancing.” The prom was an annual fund-raising event for a community school called Cora Dance in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and Shannon Hummel, who runs the school and a dance company of the same name, took the Patrick Swayze role. The dance was Mr. Menchaca’s idea.

“Every city councilman should wear a sequined top,” Ms. Hummel said.

It was that kind of night.

Grab Bag of Wit and Pathos:  Cora Dance Presents ‘Stories’ at BAM Fisher

new york times

January 30, 2015

Shannon Hummel founded Cora Dance in 1997 as a dance company, but in recent years her organization has branched out in its aims and activities. Committed to increasing access to dance, she has opened a pay-what-you-can community-center studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and taken her choreography and workshops to parks and public housing developments. “Stories,” the program that opened at BAM Fisher on Thursday, is designed as a “container,” as she put it, for all that Cora Dance now is.

NYRP, BAM present Arts in the Gardens series

Brooklyn Eagle

July 4, 2014

New York Restoration Project (NYRP) and Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) have partnered to present a season of free arts programming in select NYRP community gardens in Brooklyn. NYRP gardens are available for anyone to volunteer in, grow produce and host their own events. With the goal of raising awareness and further activating NYRP’s wider network of public green spaces, the Arts in the Gardens series will bring communities together to enjoy performing arts in an outdoor setting. The event series will feature a mixed line-up of family-friendly events, including a music festival; movement, dance and rhythm workshops; a performance art installation; dance performances and a dance-themed film series. The events will take place in four Bedford-Stuyvesant and Gowanus gardens from June through September.

Charities that Inspire Kids: Cora Dance

the new york times

Dec 31, 2013

My 13-year-old daughter, Nora, interned for a month over the summer to help give back to an organization that has not only inspired her to become a dancer, choreographer and teacher but has also opened a whole new world to her. After a long seven months of being on the receiving end of volunteers’ generosity to help rebuild our home after Sandy, she decided it was time to give back.

Dance on Benches, Cars and Hills Bring Outdoor Performance to Red Hook

dna info

June 25, 2013

Walk through the neighborhood this summer and you might find seemingly common people seated on a bench or arguing in a car.

Linger for a moment, because if you hear music in the air, ordinary life could turn into a dance performance right before your eyes.

In cars, on paths, hills, swings and doorways, the Cora Dance is bringing their newest work to the streets with “Common Dances,” based on human relationships.

Impressions of Cora Dance in "down here"

dance enthusiast

April 3, 2013

Shannon Hummel’s newest evening-length duet down here asks questions about existence and identity while exploring a volatile relationship between performers Katie Dean and Calia Marshall. In the intimate space of the Red Hook Studio- Theater, we feel part of the action.
 
Dean and Marshall, primal beings, standing hunched and withdrawn, move toward each other at an unnervingly sluggish pace. They seem in a perfect position to embrace when, quite suddenly, Marshall charges Dean, who in response, attempts to hold Marshall back with strongly flailing arms.

Cora Dance 'Pop-Up' Performances Turn Hook Benches, Doorways into Stages

dna info

August 21, 2012

Park benches, bus stops and doorways will transform into outdoor dance halls in Red Hook on Wednesday. Cora Dance, a studio and dance company based at 201 Richard St., is performing a pair of "pop-up dances" called "Bench" and "Door" in various locations in Red Hook from 1:30 to 7:30 p.m. Aug. 22 and Aug. 29, and from 4 to 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 7.

Sandy-Damaged RH Dance Studio Presses on With 2013 Season

dna info

December 6, 2012

Despite having to start searching for a new home because of damage to its Red Hook studio caused by Hurricane Sandy, Cora Dance pressed on with the opening of its 2013 dance season.

From Feb. 28 to March 2, and March 5 to 9, the studio will stage "Down Here," a 30- to 45-minute work choreographed by artistic director Shannon Hummel and performed by dancer Katie Dean and dancer Calia Marshall.

Hummel Probes the Inexplicable Relationships We Can't Do Without

village voice

March 9, 2004

Stay, choreographed by Shannon Hummel in collaboration with her dancers, is an ambitious extended duet for two women—a small, feisty, dominant figure (Vanessa Adato) and a willowy, gentler one (Donna Costello). Repeatedly, with mounting intensity, they play out an agenda of tentative yet helplessly compelling seduction, awkwardly calibrated connection, and near-violent collapse that's apparently rooted in a terror of intimacy. This situation is central to Hummel's work. Typically, the figures of her imagination relate intensely to one another, while the hows and whys of their liaisons remain enigmatic. Here, as usual, the movement language is gratifyingly plain—strong and visceral in the center of the body, often delicate and naturalistic in the action of the hands and face. As the dance progresses, the two are drawn inextricably deeper into a folie à deux they might have anticipated, but didn't. It's almost like real life.

Ecstatic Resolutions Amid Life's Young Journeys

new york times

February 6, 2001

A young woman turned and walked forward slowly in ''Simple Work,'' the opening dance of a program presented by Shannon Hummel and her company, Cora, on Thursday night. Such was the dancer's calm authority that one assumed she was the choreographer. And the simplicity of those opening moments promised much.

The first assumption was wrong. Each of the eight dancers in Ms. Hummel's all-female company performed with a proprietary commitment that made the pieces glow. But Ms. Hummel is clearly a young choreographer of exceptional promise.

Arts & Entertainment:
Exponents of Idiosyncratic Movement

written by Carrie Stern

Brooklyn Daily Eagle

July 26, 2006

Shannon Hummel/CORA has also been nurtured by BAX where she has been both faculty and an artist-in-residence. Her roots in rural Virginia are evident, at least so I imagine, in Elsewhere. Five women stand each in their own world. In white dresses, with bodices of white straps that extend into streamers, I am reminded of straight jackets. One begins running, she’s searching frantically, the others ignore her; they breathe audibly. Kettledrums play topped by a high sound, like singing glass. At first they seem lost, working in a pastoral setting or members of a restrained society of sisters. But they become frightened, angry, confused. One grasps and thrusts herself at another, she pulls her hair, they crowd with elbows, is someone escaping? Pulling away, the dancer tries to rouse the others; she wants them to react, she wants love. We do not know their names but the characters are clear through their movement. One nuzzles, one hugs, one shoves, one leads, and one dances little folk steps. I don’t know whose story I’m telling, Hummel’s or mine, but it doesn’t matter. In Elsewhere Hummel has managed that rare feat of enveloping the viewer in the world she has created, welcoming us, making us part of the story.