Dance
Lucinda Childs’s conceptual work emerged as part of the Judson movement in the 1960s, before she forged her own path with more formal, rigorous dances incorporating pedestrian and balletic movement, repeating phrases, and musicality. We spoke by phone in May.
Firebird always left me cold. The story was too simple, like a crayon drawing of a house with no door. I couldn’t get inside it, couldn’t understand it, maybe because though there is an enchanted bird and a prince, they don’t fall in love. Instead, he goes for a blandly beautiful princess.
Liz Lerman spoke with the Brooklyn Rail about her new book, embracing the flow of shape and momentum, and what we can learn from witches.
Recently premiered among other performances engaging in political and cultural commentary during the twenty-first annual La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival, Center for Fiction: This is Not May 68. exists in the continuum of revolutionary action that defined the global anti-imperialist uprisings of 1968.
As the doors to the Chocolate Factory opened just past the hour—3 p.m. and raining—wordlessly and more swiftly than most beginnings I’ve experienced lately, Ayano Elson’s Control began—began in that time lengthened upon the lone Amelia Heintzelman, and the air was cleared of something unnecessary and uncertain, and attention narrowed into her form.
In Angelic Architectures, “bitch” contains multitudes. From the derogatory to the familiar to the wondrous, the word’s meaning shape shifts like the best of slang in Symara Sarai’s deft choreopoem.
I’ve long been a fan of Sari Wilson’s 2016 novel Girl Through Glass, so when it came time to publish my own dance novel, Immersions—out this May from Tin House—I wanted to call Sari up to discuss bringing dance to the page.
Jonathan González and their collaborator of ten years, Marguerite Hemmings, dance in a room painted red—red as wine so delicious you take a deep gulp even though you only meant to take a sip.
In artist Maya Man’s incisive solo exhibition StarPower, we encounter a series of lilac-colored prints that uncannily evoke this stock vocabulary.
Maikel Dobarro is an Argentine dancer, teacher, and self-described queer tango “agitator.” He organizes La Fuga, a dissident tango space that hosts weekly classes and a monthly milonga, or social dance, at a queer cultural center in Buenos Aires.
In their double bill at NYU Skirball, Ivy Baldwin and Jeanine Durning explored durational aspects of practice and performance, such that the program itself became an exercise in sustained attention and a meditation on presence.
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.