Choreography

Mr. Tyson has choreographed over 50 works. Notably, he has created works for a broad range of companies such as Ailey III, Ailey II, Dance Compass, Brooklyn Dance Theater, Nanette Bearden Contemporary Dance Company, Premiere Dance Theatre, Milwaukee Dance Connection, City Ballet Theatre, Milwaukee Ballet II, Dance Wisconsin, Ballet Forder Zentrum /Nuremberg, Germany, Dance Point /Osaka, Japan and de Theaterschool Jazz Dance Company / Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Tyson has a knack for quirky phrases that stick in the brain...
Tyson wedded phrases to specific themes to achieve formal clarity.

Mr. Tyson was the recipient of a 1982 New Jersey State Council of the Arts Fellowship Grant for choreography. He served as an assistant to Talley Beatty in the restaging of his work The Road of the Phoebe Snow on Ailey II, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, and the Nanette Bearden Contemporary Dance Company 1985-1990. He also assisted Mr. Beatty during the restaging of his The Stack Up on the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company for the American Dance Festival in 1988. In 1994, Mr. Tyson was invited to participate as a guest choreographer at the prestigious Carlisle Project. He was the featured choreographer for Toenails of Steel & Ruby Red Text, a program produced as part of the 20th anniversary season for the Thelma Hill Performing Arts Center in Brooklyn, New York in 1996. Here his work, Lost Boyz, was presented as part of a collaborative project of other black Gay and Lesbian composers, poets and choreographers under the Artistic Direction of Ron K. Brown. He restaged Alvin Ailey’s Sinner Man and Mean Ole’ Frisco for the 65th Anniversary Celebration of Men Dancers at Jacob’s Pillow in 1997.

Since his arrival in Milwaukee 1998, Mr. Tyson was selected to choreograph Chancellor Nancy Zimpher’s Inaugural Celebration at UW-Milwaukee in 1999. He has developed an affiliation with Ko-Thi Dance Company, one of the country’s pre-eminent independent companies focused on works of African and Afro-Caribbean origin. Mr. Tyson has performed as a Guest Artist in 2000 and serves as Creative Consultant for the company. Mr. Tyson went on to receive a grant from the Alvin Ailey Dancer’s Resource Fund that same year. In 2003 he received a grant from the UW-Milwaukee Arts and Humanities Award Program and choreography for the University’s Viennese Ball in 2004. Mr. Tyson expanded his choreographic talents to musical theater with a very successful and well reviewed restaging of Ain’t Misbehavin for the Skylight Opera that same year. He was a 1999, 2005 and 2006 recipient of a grant from the Faculty Development Fund of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts Department of Dance. Choreographic endeavors from 2005 through the present include; Juke Joint a second collaborative offering with Ko-Thi Dance Company under the musical direction of Milwaukee Jazz legend Berkley Fudge, Armatrading a poignant work set to music of Joan Armatrading at UW-Milwaukee PSOA Sketch Pad and Personal IMPERATIVES for AAADT /Joan Weill Center for Dance. Additionally, Mr. Tyson presented the world premiere of awt@vestiges.com for The Milwaukee Ballet, a work using digital media that deals with society’s interdependency with technology. At the California Institute of the Arts Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance he has presented Sketch Pad 2: Impulses and Fending.