Jessica Lang Dance to Disband in April, After 7 Seasons

NEW YORK — The end is near for Jessica Lang Dance: The small-but-vibrant company founded seven years ago by choreographer Jessica Lang announced Monday that it would close this spring.

The company — which has performed in New York at the Joyce Theater, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Lincoln Center — will disband in April after a season that will take it to 19 cities.

Lang’s choreographic career has been flourishing: She has created dances for American Ballet Theater, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and a production of Verdi’s “Aida” performed at San Francisco Opera and Washington National Opera. But there have been signs that the company was struggling.

Plans to open a 6,100-square-foot dance complex in 2016 Long Island City, Queens, which were announced with some fanfare, came to nothing. Lang, who said in a statement that creating the company had been “deeply rewarding,” did not respond immediately to an email or phone message seeking comment.

Her manager, Margaret Selby, said in an interview that Jessica Lang Dance’s closing showed how difficult it is to keep a small dance company running these days. “You have to raise so much money, the smaller companies don’t have enough staff, and Jessica was running the company for the last seven years without a day off,” she said. “She wants to focus on creative work.”

The company, made up on nine dancers, performed a repertory of 25 of Lang’s dances, inspired by subjects as varied as Shakespeare, soldiers and the music of Tony Bennett. The company danced in 35 states and seven nations.

In an interview last year with DanceTabs, Lang was asked where she saw her company going in the long run.

“I see more, bigger, better,” she replied. “I want to create. This is what my driving force is — creative process, creative opportunities.”

The company still has a number of performances planned before it disbands, including Nov. 30 through Dec. 1 at the Zellerbach Theater in Philadelphia, where it will premiere a new work called “us/we.”