Dance
Two writers in the April Dance section witness the buzz, violence, and booty bouncing of LA(HORDE)'s Age of Content. One sees the live collective experience as a balm for our chronically-online time; the other sees the work participating in the visual fetishization it seeks to subvert.
In the opening section of Noé Soulier’s evening-length dance The Waves, the dancers inhabit individual worlds that briefly cohere into rushing moments of unison, only to easily dissolve back into solos, not so unlike the tide that animates and inspires the Virginia Woolf novel of the same name.
Entering the vast Martha Graham Company studio space quietly, I slide into my customary seat on a church pew beneath arching windows. The dancers, warming up, stretch, torque, and twist, each in their own way. Inward gazes alternate with breath-pauses. Even after more than fifteen years’ observing and writing about the Graham corpus, I remain enthralled.
The founder of the L.A. Dance Project has been refining his company’s Romeo & Juliet Suite since 2022, and in March, the production had its New York City premiere at the Park Avenue Armory. It was thrilling to see Benjamin Millepied’s ambitions play out at large scale, and to follow his lively, ardent dancers in their risk-taking.
Two writers in the April Dance section witness the buzz, violence, and booty bouncing of LA(HORDE)'s Age of Content. One sees the live collective experience as a balm for our chronically-online time; the other sees the work participating in the visual fetishization it seeks to subvert.
Leïla Ka cycles. She cycles through movements with unforgiving repetition. She cycles through dress upon dress, each article constricting or extending the body. She cycles through shades of womanhood, the dancers transforming before our eyes through abstractions of different life stages. A sense of nobility, or prophecy, sustains Maldonne like a pulsating heart.
Around February, winter in the Hudson Valley can feel eternal. Cue the Dark Festival, newly minted at PS21 under the eye of new artistic director Vallejo Gantner. This ambitious slate, with a home base at PS21’s idyllic campus in Chatham, encompassed twenty venues, sixty artists, and thirty productions.
Jodi Melnick and Sara Mearns return to 92nd Street Y in March to present the world premiere of Superbloom (Dancing Into Choreographic Forms). The new evening-length piece for five dancers is inspired by female choreographers who have shaped the American modern and postmodern dance scene, as well as 92NY’s own storied history.
The choreography of AA—or Narcotics Anonymous, or Co-Dependents Anonymous, or any other possible twelve-step program—opens Paradise Container, an ambitious room-to-room performance that theorizes a movement of addiction.
Performer and arts writer Sarah Cecilia Bukowski speaks with Medlyn on tracing themes of sex, death, and the divine through his life and work, and what it means to hold something sacred in the medium of performance.
The mise en scène for Narcissister’s Voyage Into Infinity was a grand assemblage of ropes, pallets, ladders, fabric sheets, paint buckets, oil drums, and exercise equipment. Everything connected to something else. The multi-story proscenium of NYU Skirball’s eight-hundred-seat theater fully rigged (both in height and depth) with a precarious construction ready to be tipped into motion.
Michael Trusnovec has brought his dancer’s perspective to the curatorial team of the Dance on Camera Festival for six seasons. Dance on Camera Festival 2026 will have a selection of thirty-three films from twelve countries, including a special seventy-fifth anniversary screening of An American in Paris.
I sat down with Đoàn in Sài Gòn [Ho Chi Minh City], Vietnam, in the suspended time before their departure to New York City, when no plan yet needed to formalize.
A rising glow illuminates five characters glitching through their own sitcom arcs. Propelled by a warm, synth-heavy sound score by Ryan Gamblin, Jo Warren’s All Mouth turns off the subtitles as we watch images of the archetypal suburban American family crack, distort, and rebuild.
History of Collage debuted in May 1988—a month after Arnie Zane died on March 30, 1988, of AIDS-related lymphoma. Originally staged at New Contemporary Masters Festival at City Center, Collage Revisited, performed at New York Live Arts as part of the Live Artery festival, honors Bill T. Jones and Zane’s last collaboration nearly forty years later.
In d. Sabela grimes’s Parable of Portals, the LA-based choreographer transports audiences far beyond the tragedies of today.
The terms of service for Sacha Vega’s PINCH are bolded and neon.
After the three-year-long process of bringing Times Four into 2025, Cardona dances Gordon’s duet with Molly Lieber in the same SoHo space it was performed fifty years ago, and where Gordon and Setterfield, seminal artists of the postmodern movement, lived and worked for decades.
For Every Body Knows, presented as part of the Performa 2025 Biennial Studio section, Evans takes over the Performa Hub in SoHo: a vast storefront she transforms for two weeks into an immersive, open-door studio for dancing, watching, talking, debating, studying, and being together.
In sweeping port de bras, wrists met overhead with flamenco flair and opened wide as if to gather up the horizon. Legs dipped in deep lunges and swung across the body in bent knee attitudes. The unison effort from such a range of perspectives and bodies felt sacred. In the Limón version of church, they gathered as a diverse congregation, coming together once again for a hymn.
Six Quiet Dogs evokes a living room on stage. Baskets of oranges hang from the rafters, and the space is trimmed with floor-to-ceiling strips of butcher paper covered in scrawled marks. I get the sense that, like a child’s drawing pinned on the fridge, these sketches are sentimental, not just set decoration.
An exercise in obsession and control, Alexa West’s candy-coated Jawbreaker Part 1 Part 2 pushes its dancers into states of total fixation. Together they strut, convulse, and struggle toward perfection.
Near the beginning of Eiko Otake and Wen Hui’s chilling new performance, What Is War, the duo walks toward and past each other, ever so slowly, on a long stretch of dirt that spans the width of the stage. Over the course of several silent minutes, they seem to move through all the stages of grief.
Skatepark is the latest project of Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen, who likes to work with performers not trained as dancers. Some of us are curious about what a choreographer will make of skateboarding culture. Some are here for a vicarious thrill.
The quickest read of Kimberly Bartosik’s bLUr, world premiering at New York Live Arts, is as a study of emergency. The show’s program describes it as a “landscape of physical and emotional crisis” inspired by an unspecified traumatic event, with a tightly timeboxed, 47-minute duration.
Eighteen months ago, the choreographer Juliana F. May and I started sending each other voice messages. I started to transcribe the messages I received, and what follows are a selection, edited for clarity and privacy. They’re an artifact of an artist’s process unfolding. You could even call them a collection of optimistic voices.
In ms. z tye’s newest body of work, Counter, presence is mandatory and the act of looking is turned back on the viewers. Playing on the word “clockable”—meaning to be perceived as a trans woman—she breaks from the linear understanding of transition, instead implying an endless becoming guided by spectres of the past.
In anyyywayyy whatever, Barnett Cohen drops us into a world of assembled discourse, the queer gaze, and contemporary body politic.
In Martha@BAM—The 1963 Interview, Move and Tony Award–winning Lisa Kron recreate a little-known live interview that Graham gave to dance critic Walter Terry at the apex of her career. The show will run as part of Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave 2025, October 28–November 1, at BAM Fisher.
In suzuki’s work, the internet is a choreographic structure: memes, gestural vocabularies from YouTube or TikTok videos, and quotable or “load-bearing” tweets inform scores, dialogue, and relationships between performance collaborators.
Mims designed Marooning Bodies to help players imagine societies they’d like to live in. As participants play, they explore questions related to their community’s decision-making processes, resource distribution, rituals, and responses to harm.
Spearheaded and run by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the CUNY Graduate Center and working with city parks and local community organizations, Down to Earth offered a wide range of free performances in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan parks.