Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui  and his company EASTMAN will be perfoming the US premiere of a specially created version of PUZ/ZLE with a live music performance by musicians from around the world.

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s debut as a choreographer was in 1999 with Andrew Wale’s ‘contemporary musical’, Anonymous Society. Since then he has made more than 20 full-fledged choreographic pieces and picked up a slew of awards, including the Fringe First award in Edinburgh, the special prize at the BITEF Festival in Belgrade, the promising choreographer prize at the Nijinsky Awards in Monte Carlo, the Movimentos award in Germany and the Helpmann award from Australia in 2007. In 2008 Sadler’s Wells named him an Associate Artist and in 2009 the Alfred Toëpfer Stiftung conferred its Kairos prize to him in recognition of his artistic philosophy and his quest for cultural dialogue. In 2008 and 2011 he was declared Choreographer of the Year by the dance magazine Tanz.

In 2012 he created Puz/zle with 11 dancers and the Corsican men’s choir A Filetta, Lebanese singer Fadia Tomb El-Hage and Japanese musician Kazunari Abe. He also helmed the choreography for Anna Karenina, the film by Joe Wright, featuring ao Keira Knightley and Jude Law.

Dance Salad Festival is a project of the Houston International Dance Coalition, and is committed to a multi-cultural presentation of diverse dance disciplines at the highest professional level. Dance Salad Festival provides a venue for local, national and international choreographers, across dance disciplines, to present their work to the Houston community in a collaborative-curated performance at the city's premiere theater complex, the Wortham Center.

Artistically, Dance Salad performances are conceived as three carefully woven evenings of dance from well-known and emerging choreographers. All the pieces of choreography, each of the highest professional artistic quality, must stand alone while also blending into the evening as a whole. The performance event in the festival becomes several fully curated concerts that stand by themselves yet link over consecutive days through common invited companies and their works. Dance Salad is a unique idea in dance presentation: a festival within each evening from many international and national companies that would never be seen together anywhere else, an artistically rich evening of dance with each production.