New York City Ballet principal dancer Sara Mearns hovers in a side lunge. Her left leg is straight as a knife, and her calf slopes towards the ground like a ripe mango.

It’s Sisyphean to track the history of human strife in a single performance; the nine artists who appear in the work, though, approach this task with a seriousness and intensity

Tiffany Mills Company’s Blue Room, which debuted at the Flea Theater this September, seizes on the thrill of a life set to sound.

In Constance Rourke’s 1931 American Humor: a Study of the National Character, the writer and folklorist presents America as an itinerant nation in search of an identity. Amidst this apparent flux, she identifies three distinct American archetypes: the Yankee peddler, the frontiersman, and the blackface minstrel. Each member of “the trio,” she argues, wears a mask for his own protection. He allows his social superior to think he is deferential and submissive; through this masquerade, he gains some degree of freedom and power.

In the summer of 1991, a construction team converged on a patch of land near New York’s City Hall. It set out to build an office space; instead, it uncovered a mass grave. As researchers sifted through bone fragments and relics from the site, they traced them back to 419 people, all of whom belonged to New York’s African community between the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Monk presents Cellular Songs as the latest in a series of performances that explore humans’ collective relationship with their environment. Her 2014 evening-length work On Behalf of Nature is a meditation on ecology. And as far back as 1994, Monk was examining how humans navigate their surroundings; in her site-specific work American Archaeology, performers directly communed with nature—seventy of them gathered at the Roosevelt Island Lighthouse Park and Renwick Ruin.