The Dash Ensemble Brings a Little New York to Dallas

Not everyone moves from Dallas to New York — it can happen the other way around. Gregory Dolbashian and The Dash Ensemble left New York for Dallas three years ago, and now that they've settled in they're debuting a new iteration of their work The Power of Collision for The Elevator Project at AT&T Performing Arts Center.

Dolbashian, The Dash Ensemble’s artistic director, came up in a family of artists in New York. With his mother a singer and his father a percussionist, he made his professional stage debut at a mere 8 years old with the Glimmerglass Opera Company.

At 17, he started his formal training in dance with The Ailey School, a modern dance school in New York, before graduating from SUNY Purchase dance conservatory.

“That’s where I started choreographing,” Dolbashian says. “I felt like choreography was an incredible platform to bring together all the arts training that I’ve been fortunate enough to have.”

This passion grew, and after putting up pieces throughout New York, Dolbashian knew he wanted to found a dance company.

“I knew I always wanted to try to make something that was bigger than just me. I didn't want it to be Gregory Dolbashian Dance Works or something like that,” he says.

For the name, he went back to the first piece he had made, titled “The Dash.” The name had a good ring to it, especially when you pick up the phone, he says. (“Hello, this is The Dash Ensemble” — it has an undeniably good rhythm, sleek cadence.)

Beyond the name’s phonetic quality, it also signifies the ethos of the company itself.

“Your birth date, and your death date, and the dash that's in between those things is your life,” Dolbashian says. “Everything that we create and we make is centered around the pictures we want to paint and the lives that we’re leading.” That is, life is the dash.

For Dolbashian, it seems his dash is centered on bringing people together — through dance and through this company. Since its founding in 2010, the group has performed in New York’s major venues from Central Park SummerStage to Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out and toured throughout the country.
But during the pandemic and the company’s 10th anniversary, Dolbashian and The Dash Ensemble relocated to Dallas.

By 2019, Dolbashian had already been dividing his time between New York and Dallas, so the 2020 relocation was not entirely arbitrary. Three years later (some of which were pandemic years), The Dash Ensemble is still “learning the lay of the land as far as venues [and] what’s the appetite for live events,” Dolbashian says.

This July, the company is performing its third iteration of The Power of Collision.

“What’s exciting about this is it’s pushed us to expand the length and development of the show, a fuller evening,” Dolbashian says. “It’s pushing our prowess and creativity with the hybrid approach we are taking with the use of visual magic and illusion and all of these contemporary dance forms.”

The show is performed in three acts.

“The first act deals with what we call the buoyancy of hope and how joy and potential can be,” Dolbashian says. “Our second act is basically when that buoyancy of hope disappears, how heavy things can get and how we deal with the weight of consequence, responsibility, challenge, disappointment, rejection and loss. Our third act is basically what we call the spark that’s held between the two.”

For them, the joy and tragedy are inevitable, but they are more interested in what binds those two together.

“I think that the fire that sits between this, the spark of encouragement, is the thing that makes us active in response to all of these things,” Dolbashian says. “How we grow out of these things always comes from this spark of encouragement.”

The show’s ethos is all in their motto: “We seek the fire from the spark that’s already within us.”

The cast includes dancers from both New York and Dallas, many of whom have worked with Dolbashian for years.

Trained in hip-hop, break dance and ballet, company member Carlos Franquiz has known Dolbashian for eight years.

“He’s helped us develop as artists inside of the Dash and outside of the Dash,” says Franquiz. “He’s not just our director of the company, he’s also a mentor.”

Taking advantage of the support and platform provided by The Elevator Project, this upcoming iteration of The Power of Collision uses silks, sleight of hand and levitation techniques to convey their story.

“We're taking bigger risks when it comes to that stuff we are doing with the magic and the dancing,” says Destin Morisset, who met Dolbashian while in high school. He started training in hip-hop at his local Queens dance studio at the age of 5 before attending LaGuardia High School of Music & Performing Arts and SUNY Purchase, where he received a BFA in dance.

Combining dance and magic has forced the cast to flex new muscles. Gillian Clifford, who started competition dance as a teenager and pursued a BFA in dance at Howard University, is dancing with The Dash Ensemble for the second time this year.

“The process is very interesting because you are both creating movement, contemporary movement, but also melding it with different tricks and illusions as well,” says Clifford. “It's definitely kind of like a two-part process, but they also go hand-in-hand in some ways. It's kind of like learning a new skill and then pairing it with a skill you've been training your whole life for.”

Currently dancing and working with The Dash Academy, Maddie Hanson met Dolbashian in New York while doing her undergraduate at The Juilliard School. For Hanson, rehearsals for this upcoming show began mid-June.

“The first day always has a certain kind of magic,” she says. “It's great bringing all of this back together, working as a community, getting the creative juices flowing.”

The Dash Ensemble does not take the transition to Dallas lightly. The group knows the challenges that come with relocating. For them, this upcoming show is a way to plant their feet in the city’s professional dance landscape and meet more Dallas audiences.

“We’re really excited to start to connect with more people in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and make a mark here because I feel like it's just such a great city and community,” says Hanson.

For the group, this performance is ultimately about the audiences with which they are sharing it.

“At some point it becomes less about yourself and more about what you want to give,” says Clifford. “I’m looking most forward to how this impacts people and what they take home with them.”

Dolbashian agrees, “We’re most excited to share this work with audiences that we've already started to slowly cultivate and hopefully make some new members of that audience through this performance run.”

Tickets are on sale now for The Power of Collision at the Wyly Studio Theatre, 2400 Flora St., with performances July 28–30.