Tonight marks the first of three Bermuda Festival performances by The Parsons Dance Company at City Hall theatre, and by all accounts an outstanding experience is in store.

Since 1987, The Parsons Dance Company has been thrilling audiences on six continents with its modern dance repertoire. It has given well over 1,500 performances, and conducted many educational and community outreach residency activities in its mission to make modern dance accessible to the widest possible audience throughout the world. Indeed, the Company has given hundreds of master classes, lecture-demonstrations and workshops, benefiting thousands of people of all ages.

Its home is in the creative heart of New York City. It has nine full-time dancers, and maintains a repertory of over 70 works (20 with commissioned scores) by David Parsons.

One of the Company's primary goals is to allow Mr. Parsons to create as many new works as possible, and to commission original musical scores and theatrical designs from leading artists, as well as introducing new dances created by Company members.

The Company is in great demand internationally, and conducts extensive tours of the United States each year at such prestigious venues as the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC., the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Central Park Summerstage, City Center and more. It also numbers Spoleto in Italy; Charleston, Melbourne, and Jacob's Pillow among the many Festivals at which it has performed, as well as at theatres in Italy, France and South America.

Critics from the US, Canada and Australia have hailed the Parsons Dance Company for its "electrifying qualities", "recipe for thrilling audiences", "lush, springy, athletic movement; traces of mischievous wit; and go-for-broke dancers", "vitality and theatricality as individual as a fingerprint", and ability to "elevate the world of modern dance".

"One of the most successful modern dance companies in the world" is now NBC's 'Today Show' summed up Parsons.

Whether an aficionado or not of modern dance is irrelevant. The Parsons Dance Company is guaranteed to beguile its Bermuda audiences with its pizzazz, humour and eclecticism, and choreography that is consistently intelligent, witty, and well-crafted.

• For performance times see the Bermuda Calendar. For ticket information visit the Bermuda Festival box office adjacent to the ferry terminal on Front Street; telephone 296-5774 between 12 noon and 2 p.m.; or visit website www.bermudafestival.org