Dance aesthetics, as encoders of meaning, are like IT storage devices: They must upgrade or become obsolete. Judging by a showcase of works by young Japanese artists shown at Japan Society in 2011, the Japanese dance aesthetic of previous decades—glacial pace, micro-action, austere design—went out with the floppy disk.

Tap virtuoso and choreographer Jason Samuels Smith brought New York City audiences to their feet in 2009 with his Charlie’s Angels, inspired by the music of Charlie Parker and the dancing of Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, Michelle Dorrance, and Chloe Arnold.

The award-winning tap dancer Derick Grant, 38, is a veteran of Broadway and international stages. He’s also among today’s tap vanguard—improvising, choreographing, producing, and sharing his expertise with beginner and professional students alike.

Sometime back in the late 1990s, Michael Jackson lay on a dance studio floor, studying the quicksilver feet of Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards. “How do you make all those sounds so fast?” he wanted to know.

Since you’re reading this article, chances are you’re an experienced, contemporary dance-goer and don’t need me to tell you that a piece of choreography can look like anything but. Nonetheless, there’s strange and there’s strange-er. Donna Uchizono’s longing two (June 1-5) belongs in the second category.

Back in the early 1990’s, choreographer Dana Reitz and lighting designer Jennifer Tipton set up a laboratory at The Kitchen to investigate the “essential natures of movement and light.”

A broken white line rushes through the dark. We hurtle with it, as on a highway, until the line splits, becomes a barcode, a chromosomal map, a latticework of alphabetic sign. A woman emerges from the black; she’s joined by a man and they dance, ballroom style, their swirling figures tattooed by the light of the criss-crossing graphics.

On the Saturday afternoon in March of 70 mile an hour winds and trees crashing into houses, the line of those aspiring to participate in Marina Abramović’s 700+ hour MoMA performance piece, The Artist is Present, hadn’t budged for five hours.

In like a lion, out like a lamb—but for
dance-loving New Yorkers, this March also promises three anticipated film events. First, dance film pioneer Elaine Summers is honored over three evenings at Danspace Project at Saint Mark’s Church and one afternoon discussion at the New Museum, which will explore her influence on a younger generation of artists.

Each time the HERE Arts Center door opened on January 12, another down-swaddled body squeezed inside the tiny lobby, and we got a blast of frosty air.

“She dances like a man,” an audience member gushed about one of the tap stars in Jason Samuels Smith’s Charlie’s Angels. I’ve heard it said of women tappers before, but what, exactly, does it mean? (Not to mention, why is it a virtue?)

Pierre Rigal’s Press, which had its U.S. premiere at the Baryshnikov Arts Center September 10-12, is built around a central gimmick: a man moves within a small box of a stage whose ceiling lowers progressively through the course of the hour-long solo. I attended opening night and, against my better judgment, accepted a seat in the front row where audience members were subjected, unwittingly, to a kind of extreme sensory assault before the show began: blinding hot stage lights beat into our faces from above.

One hundred years ago, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes burned the stage of Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet with its debut season. Dancers of unprecedented virtuosity performed ballets with exotic, Orientalist themes that expressed seething passions and defied the stiff formalism of the danse d’école.