About
Dancing Crane
Celebrating Tradition and Art
We are Georgian Performance Arts Specialists.
Our Georgian Cultural Center in Brooklyn serves as a school, as the home of our performing ensembles and as a venue for many special events, performances, art exhibits and cultural programs.
Our History
Our founder, Victor Sirelson, during the early days of Dancing Crane
We were formed in 1996, gave our first full concert in 1997 and incorporated in 1999. Our Georgian Dance Ensemble and our Musical Ensemble were formed during this period with professional immigrant artists and have presented hundreds of concerts of Georgian dance and music as well as workshops, classes and lecture demonstrations. We established our Georgian Theater of New York in 2008 as the only professional Georgian repertory company in New York.
Traditional Georgian Folk Dancers from a more recent performance
Our emphasis has consistently been to create a home in New York for living Georgian traditions.
We began our Georgian theater company in 2008. We write our own plays. We opened our first studio in Brooklyn in 2009 and in 2011 moved to a larger space where our Georgian School-Studio of the Arts has a growing program of children’s classes and performance in Georgian dance, music, theater, language and culture. This has brought us into much closer contact with Georgian families. We currently have over 65 children in our classes with new interest each week. We organize frequent evenings in our studio which include visiting performers from Georgia and our own events as well. Our programs serve an audience of 5000-10000 each year.
During the past several years we have put more emphasis on education and the development of innovative programs that encompass several disciplines.
Our children’s dance classes and choreographic ensemble “Lost Legends” have currently over 35 children between the ages of 4 and 17. The instructor/choreographers are Ilia Svianaidze and Tamar Tsivilashvili, both professional dancers from Georgia. Our music classes have 24 children who take classes in voice, guitar, piano, violin and folk instruments, with instructor Tengiz Shautidze.
Children’s Ensemble “Lost Legends”
View our ensembles pages to learn more about the professional dancers, musicians, singers and actors at Dancing Crane Georgian Cultural Center.
Our focus is culture and Georgian immigrant life.
Our Mission
As an organization we are motivated by a commitment to improve the quality of life of our society. We aim to do this through the medium of Georgian traditional performance arts. Our broad vision integrates these arts with the developing cultural life of contemporary Georgian society in New York. We aim to be a bridge between Georgian traditions and American cultural life.
Our mission has evolved to provide an environment to combine professional level performance in Georgian traditional arts with an all around education for children through the study and practice of these arts and to provide opportunities for the growing Georgian immigrant community to establish healthy roots within New York City and American society
The original Georgian Dance Ensemble