Aynsley Vandenbroucke’s AND lives in the wide little Underground Theater of Abrons Arts Center with a particular intimacy conjured by a piece about structures and spaces. The stage’s three shallowly angled walls are treated as screens. Two chairs and tables, touting their own Ikea-ness, are in the center of the space with a microphone.

To the untrained eye, the first several weeks of each January in New York might seem sleepy and inoffensive. Little would you know of the torrent of activity and creativity stirring within the city’s theaters that is APAP—the conference in conjunction with the Association of Performing Arts Presenters and the numerous showcases and festivals that align with it, an often fraught meeting place of presenters and choreographers.

In the ’70s, dancing and sex were not at all dangerous, and there was a lot of both going around,” the performer, choreographer, dance curator, and educator Ishmael Houston-Jones told me in a coffee shop this October. “There was a sort of exuberance, especially coming after Stonewall and ’69. There was this feeling in the gay world that life was this celebration. And suddenly 1981 happens, and it’s like a brick wall.”