Winter in New York City can be cold and bleak, but thankfully, it’s also full of opportunities to sit in warm theaters with like-minded people and experience some beautiful dance performances. Here are some recommended shows to look into (and look forward to) in the exciting season ahead.

For those who love pure dance

If you are a fan of dance that is non-narrative and abstract, more like a work of moving visual art, you are in luck. Some of the biggest names in postmodern and classical contemporary dance will be performing in New York in the coming months.

Pam Tanowitz, known for her precise and geometric choreography that appears to have its own mathematical logic on the stage, is bringing her company, Pam Tanowitz Dance, to Lincoln Center January 11-13 to perform Pastoral (2025). The critically-acclaimed evening-length work inspired by the natural world features Ludwig van Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony reimagined by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw, and décor by painter Sarah Crowner.

The Lyon Opera Ballet will perform a double bill at New York City Center, February 19-21, as part of the second Dance Reflections Festival by Van Cleef & Arpels (which has an incredible lineup spanning five weeks and venues across the city). Their first piece will be Merce Cunningham’s tech-forward masterpiece BIPED (1999), which layers digital and live images on the stage, and the U.S. premiere of the rising Greek choreographer Christos Papadopoulos’s Mycelium (2023), inspired by “the fascinating interconnectivity of mushrooms.”

There is another chance to see Cunningham’s innovative choreography in Trisha Brown Dance Company’s Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown and Cunningham, onstage February 26-28 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), also part of the Dance Reflections Festival. The program includes Brown’s fan favorite Set and Reset (1983) with music by Laurie Anderson, and Cunningham’s Travelogue (1977) with music by John Cage. Both feature set designs by the iconic visual artist Robert Rauschenberg.

For balletomanes

If ballet is more your thing, the New York City Ballet has a promising Winter 2026 Season at Lincoln Center planned for January 20 through March 1, with world premieres from both resident choreographer Justin Peck and artist in residence Alexei Ratmansky. Another highlight is the two-week run of Peter Martins’ dreamy The Sleeping Beauty (1991).

Ballet also comes to The Joyce Theater from January 14-25 for Sons of Echo, curated by international ballet star Daniil Simkin. The program features Simkin along with four male principal dancers from around the world-Jeffrey Cirio (Boston Ballet), Osiel Gouneo (Bayerisches Staatsballett), Alban Lendorf (Royal Danish Ballet), and Siphesihle November (National Ballet of Canada)-dancing to works by powerhouse female choreographers Lucinda Childs, Drew Jacoby, Tiler Peck, and Anne Plamondon.

For those looking for something edgy and different

If you prefer your shows to be multidisciplinary, genre-defying, and bold, the Pioneers Go East Collective’s 2026 Out-FRONT! Festival, January 3-11 at Judson Memorial Church, is for you. Now in its fourth year, the festival, curated by founder and artistic director Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte, co-founder Philip Treviño, and cultural organizers Remi Harris and Joyce Isabelle, centers queer and feminist voices. One highlight is Suzzanne Ponomarenko’s and Dominica Greene’s split bill on January 3 and 5. Ponomarenko’s world premiere Selections From: Tapestries is a dance-theater piece inspired by The Unicorn Tapestries or Hunt of the Unicorn (1495-1505), “reimagined through the queering out of Ukrainian folklore and tales.” Greene’s world premiere openings is a conceptual performance rooted in improvisation and audience participation. Another highlight is the U.S. premiere on January 11 of Norway-based artist Corentin JPM Leven’s Birds of Ill Omen (2022), a theater performance that investigates the medicalization of the Queer body.

And if you’re into immersive performance, the NY premiere of Benjamin Millepied’s Romeo & Juliet Suite (2022) at the Park Avenue Armory, from March 2 to March 21, is going to be incredible. The founder of L.A. Dance Project and the choreographer behind the Oscar-winning film Black Swan (ever heard of it?) will create a site-specific immersive dance-theater piece that reimagines Sergei Prokofiev’s classic ballet through a contemporary, hi-tech, gender-bending lens.

For those who want to travel the world without leaving NYC

If you’re culture-curious and find yourself coming down with a bad case of wanderlust mid-winter, do not fear. The coming months are jam-packed with fascinating international performances.

The Joyce Theater is bringing the world-renowned flamenco company Noche Flamenca to premiere a new work, Irrationalities, from January 27 to February 8. Inspired by Francisco Goya’s etchings, the evening-length performance features four singers, two guitarists, and six dancers from all over Spain. (If you are a fan of flamenco, also check out the 25th Flamenco Festival happening at New York City Center from February 26 to March 8.) From February 10-15, the Havana-based Malpaso Dance Company returns to The Joyce with a lineup of contemporary Cuban dance. And in March, you can see the French-Algerian choreographer Hervé Koubi’s uplifting Sol Invictus, presented as part of the Dance Reflections Festival. Compagnie Hervé Koubi is renowned for its crowd-pleasing blend of capoeira, martial arts, and street dance (they will also be performing an encore run of What the Day Owes to the Night (2013) at The Joyce in January).

And thanks to the Dance Reflections Festival, you can also see two more thought-provoking U.S. premieres: the French multidisciplinary collective (LA)HORDE’s internet-inspired Age of Content (2023), performed by Ballet national de Marseille, February 20-22 at BAM and the South African choreographer Robyn Orlin’s We wear our wheels with pride… (2021), a tribute to the Zulu rickshaw drivers of her country’s complicated past, at NYU Skirball March 13 and 14.

The Rockettes are kicking their way through the Christmas Spectacular, the Rockefeller Center Tree is lit and Bryant Park’s Winter Village is shoulder-to-shoulder packed, which means it’s time for another New York City holiday tradition: Peter & the Wolf, presented by Works & Process at the Guggenheim. Since 2007, families have gathered in the Peter B. Lewis Theater at the Upper East Side museum to experience Sergei Prokofiev’s 1936 musical fable for children, narrated by the inimitable Isaac Mizrahi. For several years, different artists were invited to join the show, and the results were exciting but varied. In 2013, Mizrahi (a performer and producer as well as fashion designer) stepped in as director and designer and brought in former Mark Morris dancer John Heginbotham to choreograph. In their new dance-theater production, each character not only has its own assigned instrument but its own dance vocabulary as well. The bird, for instance, is balletic and moves to the flute, while the cat is jazzy and moves to the clarinet.

That version was such a success that Peter & the Wolf at the Guggenheim hasn’t changed much since. The 2025 performances will be accompanied by Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect and conducted by Michael P. Atkinson. Observer spoke to Mizrahi about this production that has become his “yearly dream moment,” the importance of live theater and the enthusiasm young audience members bring to the show.

How did you first get involved with Peter & The Wolf?

The producer Charles Fabius left a message on my voicemail saying, “We’re hoping to get you to read Peter & the Wolf. It’s the Juilliard band, and George Manahan is conducting, and Andrew Scott Ross is doing an installation on stage.” Who could say no to that? In that beautiful room at the hub, you know? What Ross did was so smart. It was this miniature black-and-white sculpture, almost like a three-dimensional storyboard, with tiny little figures. And everybody in the audience got binoculars, and they looked at the sculpture. It was so beautiful. And then we had the Campana Brothers join one year and some other artists, and then it occurred to me that I should try it.

At the time, I was working for Opera Theatre of St Louis and had just finished directing A Little Night Music for them. They wanted to do something else with me, and I proposed doing The Magic Flute, which they accepted. I was thinking about different choreographers to hire, and I thought of my dear friend John Heginbotham, who is so incredibly talented. And then I thought how amazing it would be to work with him on this too, to create a kind of dance story of Peter & the Wolf–dance and narration and that incredibly beautiful and, I think, extremely danceable score. So I approached John, and we agreed it would be a good idea to work together on a short show like this first, to get used to each other, and then work together in St Louis.

What’s funny is, we worked so hard the following full year on that damn production of The Magic Flute. It had its shows, and it was well received, and that was that. We never heard from it again. And then Peter & the Wolf has had this incredible life. Every single season, it comes back to roost.

Over the years, has your design changed at all?

The costume design has not changed much, no. It has been only slightly altered here and there to suit different bodies in different casts. I will tell you one thing that has changed, though. Originally, I conceived of the bird as male and en pointe, and for a few years it was. It was this incredible dancer, Maxfield [Haynes], who was perfect en pointe, because he was in [Les Ballets] Trocadero [de Monte Carlo]. And the thing is, it made the hugest noise. When you see something in a big theater like the Met Opera or Covent Garden, and there’s a lot of music going on, you don’t really notice the sound of pointe shoes. But for some reason in that room, it’s cacophonous, and it takes you out of the story. We tried a woman en pointe, too, but the effort and the noise were still too much, so we dropped it and just made it a demi-pointe. Albeit a very severe, as-high-as-you-can-get-up relevé, a full-on, giant, sort of Joan Crawford version of relevé.

What were your initial inspirations for the costume designs?

I think I have always been inspired by “poor theatre” where you just find things. I love that so much more, and I love the idea of presenting that now, because I feel everything is so synthetic and overproduced and overcostumed and over-everything. So when I first conceived this, I thought, “You know what? The duck is going to be in a little tutu, and she’s going to have a little sweater that she found that she wears. She will have a PBS tote bag, because that’s who she is. She’s that woman you see on the Upper West Side with a PBS tote bag, right? And her duck bill is going to basically be a pair of cheaters with a duck bill attached, and she’s going to be this kind of studious little woman. A ballet teacher. The joke is that the duck is trying to be the ballerina, right? And it’s very funny, especially since Marjorie Folkman is beyond. She brings it. When Misha [Baryshnikov] came to see it, he was like, ‘Darling, you were born to play this part!’ Marjorie was born to be the duck. Because inside every modern dancer, there is a ballerina waiting to emerge. Anyway, it’s a joke we have. And all year long, she and I send each other videos of ducks trying to do things.”

When I look back on it, the “poor theatre” quality extends beyond the costumes. Even the action that takes place around the capturing of the wolf–the little noose that goes around his tail and the way we executed it—feels “poor” and it’s great because these kids will understand simple mechanics, as opposed to computer graphics or something. Nobody needs another lesson in the capabilities of A.I. I feel like what you need to know as a person on earth right now is just mechanics. Like, there’s a hook on his tail. And you obviously see it, and it’s hilarious. For me, that’s what theater is about. That’s what live theater is about. What ends up coming across is this kind of weird, Saul Steinbergian, New Yorker-like humorous piece. A real funny bone. It’s a real funny bone show.

What have been some of your favorite reactions from both children and adults?

We love reactions from children. I mean, children just say things. In the times when you can actually hear a pin drop, some kid will scream out, “No, don’t do it!” It’s the greatest thing in the world. Like, “He’s behind the newspaper!” or “He’s right behind you!” We love that. We’re all gratified by that. And I’ve had adults come up and tell me they saw Peter when they were young, and I’m like, “Oh, Jesus, I’m so old!” But some people come to see the show year after year after year, and they say it is the highlight of the season for them, because it is so intimate and real. And I feel like those are the memories of theater that I hold dearest, when a show is real and intimate and meaningful.

I remember the first time I saw Merce [Cunningham], it was in a small theater, and I was so mesmerized. It felt so real and so little. I was 10 or 12 years old, and I could not understand a minute of it, but I was so captivated by it because of the bodies and the beauty on the stage. It was different from all other shows because it was so straightforward. It was so much about the mechanism, the body. It hooked me in, that incredible intimacy. I kept looking at it, and looking at it, and finally, as one does with Merce, you have to create an interpretation of your own. There is no way to say what that work is about.

It’s funny because I’m not a dancer, but I swear to you, when people would ask me what the greatest inspiration was to me, when I was designing clothes, I used to say [George] Balanchine, because his work was pure design. If you watch the floor patterns of those dances, you kill yourself, right? It’s so beautiful. Also, Mark [Morris]. He used to inspire me a lot because his work was so beautifully designed.

How did the collaboration go with John?

He let me do my thing, and I let him do his, and we accomplished something incredible together. He would give me notes, and I gave him notes, and everybody worked really well together. I love his choreography. John and I see exactly eye to eye in that kind of “poor” way. It’s a challenge. It’s found objects, styled and modeled together until it becomes this incredible thing that flies on its own because of all of the consideration, all of the parts that get put together. I think that makes us part of a generation. Not postmodernist, but maybe post-postmodernist or something. If you watch John’s work, it’s about these gorgeous pieces that get wrought together, like an Alexander Calder sculpture or something. Just a piece of metal and a wire, but then it has this incredible animation because of the balance of it, the poetry of it.

What do you love about narrating it?

Well, it’s terrible, but I have to say it—I really love keeping these kids in my thrall. I love capturing their attention. I love being like a sort of uncle. Joan Acocella called me “avuncular” in her original review for the New Yorker, and I love that adjective. I love captivating them in that “crazy uncle” way. I love thrilling them and maybe scaring them just a little bit, because I think it’s so fun to be scared. I think as a youth, it can be a thrill to be just a little terrified.

I grew up listening to the Leonard Bernstein version of Peter, but my favorite of all time is the one by David Bowie. He has that great accent. The most insane one I’ve ever seen was with a chamber orchestra in Bridgehampton with the fabulous Elaine Stritch. Darling, you have not lived until you’ve seen that!

And what are you looking forward to about this upcoming season of Peter & the Wolf?

I’m excited for the few new cast members—they’re great. And I’m excited that it’s a tradition that will continue and live on.

Works & Process at Guggenheim New York’s Peter & the Wolf opens today, December 5, and runs through December 14 in the Peter B. Lewis Theater at the Guggenheim.

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While the audience was still settling into the massive Grand Hall of Powerhouse Arts, a former power plant in Brooklyn, a man in a blue suit walked down the aisle and onto the stage. He moved slowly, as if in a trance, and the music began just as slowly—pulsing and muffled. The house lights stayed on, but the audience quickly quieted. He paused to look over his shoulder at us, then slipped between the curtains and was gone. Black out.

This was how Theatre of Dreams began. The new evening-length work, nominated for a 2025 Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production, is by the Israeli-born German choreographer, composer, and filmmaker Hofesh Shechter, a former member of the world-famous Batsheva Dance Company, and performed by his U.K.-based Hofesh Shechter Company as part of the new Powerhouse: International arts festival.

Here is how it continues: when the curtains peek open, the man (let’s call him The Dreamer) is standing there, staring at us. Then the curtains close. When they partially open again, there’s now a group of people standing there, staring at us. Black out/close. Lights up/open, and the group is slow-motion club dancing in a dim, hazy glow. They dip back, arms raised, and bounce to the music’s steady beat, the bass so low we can feel it in our seats. From the side, hunched-over dancers cut across them like creatures of the night. The group keeps dancing like they haven’t noticed, but we have. Black out.

Then we’re back to The Dreamer, who is opening a second set of curtains further back and crawling through. (This game with the audience continues throughout: several sets of curtains open and close, revealing new layers of the stage and the subconscious, and the dark red and blue lights pop on and off, creating flashes of dreamlike sequences.) The Dreamer peeks into the closed-again curtain, and someone leaps out at him. He catches them as the music explodes into its headbanging rhythm and the curtains finally open all the way, and all 12 dancers are getting down as if they’ve always been there.

At one point, someone brings out a microphone from the wings and says, “Good evening, everyone, and welcome to your theater of dreams.” The “your” is telling. It’s not their dream, it’s ours. Later, three musicians in red (Yaron Engler, Sabio Janiak and James Keane) come onto the stage and start playing over the electronic score. This layering runs throughout the piece in various ways—sounds over sounds, curtains behind curtains, bodies beneath bodies.

Over the course of 90 minutes, the dancers rarely stop moving. They seem to appear out of nowhere and disappear into thin air. They hobble like monkeys and slither on their bellies like lizards, scratch their heads and backs and kick their back legs like dirty dogs. They gyrate like they have no joints left in their bodies, or maybe too many. They dance like we all wish we could dance when no one is watching, then sit on the ground, criss-cross applesauce, to watch us.

Theatre of Dreams is a surreal masterpiece, in large part because of Shechter’s primal, deep-down choreography (influenced by his time with Batsheva and Ohad Naharin’s Gaga movement language, while also remaining uniquely its own), but also due to the dancers’ ability to take it on full force with their entire beings. And because the movement and the music both came from Shechter’s mind, there is a creative seamlessness that results in the beat becoming the body and the body becoming the beat. The Dreamer is us, and we are The Dreamer. While the work is unified, it contains many different vibes: a rave at 3:00 a.m., a zombie apocalypse, a psychedelic folk dance, a bonfire on the beach, a near-forgotten childhood memory.

But the brilliance of Tom Visser’s lighting design cannot be overstated. It, along with the set design by Shechter with Niall Black, created a cinematic atmosphere and narrative, and without those elements, the piece wouldn’t be itself. The costumes, designed by Osnat Kelner, were a perfect addition—pedestrian and cool but slightly askew.

Near the end of the piece, there is a loud climax where the dancers move in flawless unison, and everyone is wide awake. They lunge and spin, and the joy is palpable, and when the music cuts off, the silence feels like a salve. My ears were thick with it, my body humming, as the dancers slowly swayed into the darkness.

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For the first time in its 71-year history, the Paul Taylor Dance Company has two resident choreographers, and both will present world premieres during the company’s Lincoln Center season (November 4-23). While they come from very different worlds—Lauren Lovette is a former principal dancer with New York City Ballet (NYCB), and Robert Battle performed with the athletic, contemporary Parsons Dance before founding his own Battleworks Dance Company and later serving as artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater for 12 years—they both represent an aspect of Paul Taylor’s (1930-2018) distinct aesthetic.

“I don’t think it can be underestimated how much Balanchine influenced Paul,” Taylor’s artistic director Michael Novak told Observer. George Balanchine invited Taylor to be a guest artist with NYCB when he was a member of Martha Graham’s company and even created a solo for him in Episodes (1959). And while Balanchine made neoclassical ballets and Taylor made modern dances, both choreographers shared a deep reverence for music. Balanchine always listed the composer before the choreographer in his program copy, and Taylor followed suit. “Lauren represents that lineage in terms of her craft and musicality,” Novak said, “and breaking down conventions of what a form is expected to produce. Through Balanchine, she understands Paul intuitively.” He was drawn to this aspect of her choreography when he hired her as the company’s first resident choreographer in 2022. “And,” he added with a smile, “there’s a rebellious side to her that has always fascinated me.”

Battle comes by the Taylor lineage more directly. Though he never danced in the company, his mentors Carolyn Adams and David Parsons were both former Taylor principal dancers. When Battle brought a Taylor work to Ailey, he was able to meet Taylor and talk with him. “Paul liked Robert,” Novak said. “So there was a relationship there.” Battle, who came in as resident choreographer in 2025, also brings a physicality and sensibility similar to Taylor’s.

“Combined,” Novak said, “they are an incredible intersection of Paul’s journey as a choreographer.” Lovette’s and Battle’s new works, which both premiere on November 11, are strikingly different, yet share overlapping themes: looking to the past in order to look inward, self-acceptance and—just like Taylor and Balanchine before them—a reverence for music.

Lauren Lovette’s stim

Lovette’s stim, her seventh work for the company, is set to John Adams’s Fearful Symmetries and inspired by her experience with ADHD. “I have pretty intense ADHD,” Lovette told Observer. “I’ve always known that about myself and felt that it was a negative thing, something to be frustrated by. But now I realize, especially after making this piece, that it’s actually a really cool thing. It’s what helps me do what I do.” Lovette made stim in only four weeks—the shortest time she’s ever had to create a work—during a period of major personal transition. She moved upstate and gave birth to her daughter in the midst of the process and realized she could thrive under pressure. “I was super focused. Now that I can step back and see it, I love this piece and think it’s not something I could have come to if I were in the other half of my brain, or trying to just line everything up perfectly. It had to come sporadically, in pieces.”

The work for seven dancers bows to its intense score. Lovette danced to the same music in Peter Martins’s Fearful Symmetries (1988) while in the corps at NYCB, and—even though that work used to give her stress nightmares—she wanted to create a modern take on it. “The music is perfect because it has this really rapid-paced, relentless, anxious score and I wanted to explore anxiety. I wanted something with a high breath because that’s how I’ve been feeling lately, and what I’m seeing in the world right now.” The score is indeed relentless and complex. Lovette channels that energy in her choreography, layering solos, duets, trios and quartets without pause. “They just continuously dance,” she explained. “Each dancer will go very hard for a minute or two and then go off stage and breathe for 30 seconds, then come back out. So it’s a marathon piece, but it just fits. Everybody gets just enough rest to get through it.”

Like Balanchine and Taylor, Lovette is fascinated by musical detail. “They do a lot of tricky little moves in small amounts of time. I enjoy listening to each little note, finding an underlying phrase, and then bringing that to life through movement. And there’s also a lot of running. I think if I had to dance it,” she laughed, “I would complain.”

The creative process was eye-opening for Lovette. Despite her physical and mental load—or perhaps because of it—she finished the work in record time. “I wasn’t able to doubt myself. I couldn’t nitpick. Instead of trying to silence all the ideas that pop into my head every ten seconds, I just let go of trying to control things and used them. I let the dancers bring themselves into the piece, and I’m so happy with the result.”

Robert Battle’s Under the Rhythm of Jazz

Battle’s Under the Rhythm of Jazz—his first work for the company—features 15 dancers and is set to a series of jazz, gospel and swing songs by Wycliffe Gordon, Ella Fitzgerald, Mahalia Jackson, and Steve Reich. It is inspired by the woman who raised him, an artistic and vibrant figure who introduced Battle to poetry, jazz and the importance of community.

“I didn’t start out thinking I was doing an ode to my mom and her influence on my life,” Battle told Observer, “but as I was choosing the music, it just sort of came out that way… All of it ties back to my youth and to her profound influence on me—not just as a person, but as an artist.”

One section in particular brings their relationship into sharper focus. It is set to Steve Reich’s Clapping Music, overlaid by a poem. “I was going to recite it and record it, but I was at my mom’s house in Miami, and I was telling her about the poem, and she took the piece of paper and started reading it. I was like, oh my goodness, it has to be her! And so you hear her voice, and mine underneath, reciting this poem. It’s our first collaboration together.”

While Battle’s movement style remains powerful and sleek, its tone has evolved. “I think I’m less afraid to be personal in this work than I have been in the past. I’m feeling like, in this next phase of my career, I don’t have to hide my true voice or disguise it, or be tough or be whatever. Just say what you have to say. Let it come from the heart. Alvin Ailey said some of the greatest works of art are those that are the most personal. And that really resonates with me now at this point in my life.”

There’s vulnerability in the work—and joy too. “My mom was always joyous,” he said. “She lived through a lot more than we have—segregation, racism, bigotry—but there was always laughter, always comedy, always a sense of joy. And I wanted to touch on that as a form of resistance. In many ways, this work is a celebration of things that I’ve learned observing her over the years.”

For Battle, choreographing for the company felt like a homecoming. “[Taylor has] been in my orbit throughout my dance career, and now it feels more than serendipitous that I’m becoming a part of the legacy.” He also appreciated getting to know the dancers more deeply. “I can’t say enough about how amazing they are as artists and how wonderful they are to work with. I think sometimes people think that’s an obvious thing, but it always needs to be said because they are the physical manifestation of the legacy.”

Other works this season

Along with the two world premieres, the company will perform a range of Taylor classics: Scudorama (1963), Esplanade (1975), Diggity (1978), Sunset (1983), Company B (1991), Offenbach Overtures (1995), Cascade (1999), Troilus and Cressida (reduced) (2006), Beloved Renegade (2008), Gossamer Gallants (2011) and Concertiana (2018). A highlight is the revival of Speaking in Tongues (1988), last performed in 2013, a work about American religious extremism that earned an Emmy Award for its television broadcast. Most pieces will be performed to live music by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s.

Also on the season are the return of Lovette’s Solitaire (2022) and Jody Sperling’s Vive La Loïe! (2024), the company premiere of Battle’s Takademe (1999) and the New York premiere of Hope Boykin’s How Love Sounds (2025).

“We took on a lot of Taylor’s comedic pieces this season,” Novak said, “which was intentional. I needed it, and the company needed it. There’s something about comedy that is so powerful for morale. It’s good for us, and the audiences, too.” Speaking in Tongues and Beloved Renegade are heavier works that explore faith in contrasting ways, but the majority of the pieces are heartwarming. “It’s an emotionally generous, warm repertory for the most part, and we can’t wait to share it.”

Paul Taylor Dance Company is at the David H. Koch Theater for its Lincoln Center Season through November 23, 2025.

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Just north of New York City, the Katonah Museum of Art (KMA) and the Pocantico Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund have joined forces for the first time to present “Shen Wei: STILL / MOVING.” The dual-venue exhibition, on view through mid-April, spans almost three decades of visual art, dance and film created by the world-renowned Chinese American MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow Shen Wei.

Shen Wei was born in Hunan, China, in 1968. From a young age, he trained in Chinese opera, traditional painting and calligraphy. He performed with the Hunan State Xian Opera Company before becoming a founding member of the Guangdong Modern Dance Company, one of the first of its kind in China. He moved to New York City in 1995 and founded Shen Wei Dance Arts in 2000. Since then, his award-winning company has performed in over 30 countries and his paintings and dance installations have been shown at major institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Asia Society Hong Kong Center, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Shanghai Power Station of Art.

Shen Wei has always been more than one thing, so it is fitting that his body of work should span more than one art form and require more than one venue to present it. The exhibition at the KMA explores the space where his mediums meet—how movement has influenced his visual art and how visual art has influenced his movement—while the Pocantico Center exhibition focuses on his more recent abstract landscape paintings. Observer spoke at length with Shen Wei about his evolution as an artist and dancer, his lifelong love of solitude and his thoughts on the new exhibition. What follows is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

You have said that by age six, you were already interested in dance and painting. What drew you to both of those artistic practices at that young age?

I always ask myself that question. I think it has to do with my personality. I was born in the year of the monkey. I like moving around and expressing myself through movement. But another part of my personality is that I’m so quiet. I’m kind of a shy person. When I’m not doing performing arts, I’m totally different. I don’t really like to be around lots of people. I don’t celebrate birthdays. I don’t like that kind of big attention. I like to be quiet and I also like to be alone.

I remember once when I was little, six or seven years old, I was drawing balloons. I used different calligraphy pens to color in each balloon with lines and I made the balloons more colorful than they really were, their colors better than they were in real life. And I remember that making something even prettier than what it really was made me feel so happy. I’d somehow achieved something and I had done it alone.

I still like to be alone. Holding a book, going to the park, sitting down, making drawings, writing. You can have this kind of dialogue with yourself and digest the world. It gives me time to question myself, to find the real things, to be more sensitive to what’s going on. You can be more aware when you’re alone than when you’re with a bunch of people.

Your father was involved with the Chinese opera?

Yes, my father retired as an opera director. He was also a writer and sometimes he made the designs for his productions. A lot of things I do are similar to what my father did, but he was working in the traditional art forms and I’m doing it in a more contemporary way. Maybe I was inspired, or it’s in the DNA, I don’t know. My two brothers are also painters and my mother was a producer.

How did you discover modern dance and Western forms of painting?

When I was in the Chinese opera school, we had a book about art and ideas. One chapter talked about Western art. Of course, they had some old classical art. But they also introduced Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. We didn’t understand that one but thought it was interesting. Is it just one person or many people? Are they really nude? That was when I was like ten or twelve.

In the 1980s, China kind of opened the door to the West and all the Western paintings, or the books about them, came to China. Around 1984, I bought a book of Western paintings and it included Da Vinci and Michelangelo. I was shocked by how beautiful the drawings were. They were so different from the ones I’d seen. I learned the Chinese way, Gongbi. But when I saw the Western paintings, they were more realistic. They had dimension, perspective. You could see the real person within the paint, like the whole human being. I started to copy it, to teach myself. And then after I graduated in 1984, a friend started to teach me how to do oil paintings with Western techniques.

I didn’t see modern dance until 1986 or 1987 when I went to Beijing to study painting. There was a company—I think it was a ballet company doing modern work—and it was the first time I saw a girl dancing without shoes and wearing something more like pajamas. And oh, she danced beautifully! I never thought people could wear those kinds of clothes on stage without shoes. It’s the opposite of Chinese opera. We wear so much! So many costumes. After seeing that performance, I understood that there could be modern dance, just like modern paintings.

In 1988, I went to a dance competition because I needed the money to study painting. I wasn’t really a professional dancer, but I was good with movement. So, I made my own dance piece and I wore normal clothes. I used my Chinese opera technique but made it contemporary. Everybody was performing traditional repertoire and then I played Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 and danced like crazy and they were shocked. In the end, I got the special first prize. It gave me confidence. The judges all loved me and I realized I had another possibility—to be a dancer. But I still wanted to make paintings too.

What made you want to come to New York?

After studying modern dance for five years and also being the first generation to participate in the first modern dance company in China called Guangdong Modern Dance Company, I was doing really well—I was a dancer but also the choreographer, building all the works for the company—but I thought, “I’m not enough. I have to learn more.” It’s like a hunger. I want to be challenged. That’s kind of my personality. I like to learn more things. I like to learn things I don’t understand. I want to be better. Always.

I thought, “Let’s go to the tough place, the best place. New York City. They have all the dance and art.” So I applied for a scholarship to study [with the Nikolais/Louis Dance Lab] there and somehow, I got it.

When did you start combining your two art forms?

While I was dancing with Guangdong, I was painting the dancers in the company all the time. They were my models. But when I got to New York, it was really tough. I had no money or friends and didn’t speak English. So, I had more time to paint. I also made a film at that time about how lonely I was. In 1998, I did an exhibition of my paintings [at Dance Theater Workshop] because I’d made so many during that time. And I was dancing. But I hadn’t yet figured out how those things would merge.

In 2003, I made a set for my company’s Rite of Spring that was a big painted canvas that the dancers performed on. When it premiered at the Lincoln Center Festival, I also showed a series of my paintings that were studies for Rite of Spring. That was the first time that my visual art and performance were publicly shown together.

And then in 2004, I created Connect Transfer, where I actually used my body as a brush on the big canvas. And around that time, I also used my body to make paintings, in the Slide-turn series.

Some paintings from both those series—Study for Rite of Spring and Slide-turn—are on view at the KMA. I love this idea of using your body as a paintbrush. Tell me more!

Yes. You don’t stop when you’re dancing. You just keep going like a paintbrush on the floor. Really silky, flowing movement. It’s a part of Natural Body Development, a technique I created for my dancers. It’s like calligraphy, how the hand keeps going. You use the internal energy to move continuously. This was not something I’d learned from my past. I wanted to make something that was better, more interesting. Different. It reminds me of the balloons—I wanted to make better balloons than the ones that I saw.

The technique has really benefited my dancers and affected my painting, too. The Slide-turn series, definitely, but also the series Suspension in Blue [on view at the Pocantico Center]. The technique trains the dancers to suspend. You extend your energy out and float in the air as long as you can before gravity takes over. That moment, right before you’re falling, I call the “suspension moment.” You use that moment to dance, which means you’re never really in your center, but you’re never completely falling off. In the Suspension in Blue series, there is a feeling of floating in the air, falling, but not hitting the ground yet. It’s the same kind of idea, whether in dance or painting.

In what other ways has your background in dance affected your paintings?

When I was making the Slide-turn paintings with my feet, I wasn’t just thinking about sliding and turning, but also how slow, how fast and how much weight I should put on it. Most people think about what paintings look like—what the shapes look like—but I’m interested in what the speed looks like, what the time looks like, how the energy looks. The movement. My paintings always involve movement, even the landscape paintings.

I am also interested in the series at the KMA where you list the songs you had been listening to while creating the paintings and a QR code so we can listen too. The musicians range from Tom Waits to Li Xiangting to Mozart.

It’s music I personally love to listen to. And I wanted to discover what is the movement of the music? And what does the movement of the music look like? They’re abstract, visual studies of the feelings and textures of the music.

At the Pocantico Center, where the more recent works are, I noticed that there are oil, acrylic and watercolor paintings. Do you have a favorite medium to work with?

I started with oil, then acrylic, because it felt more controllable. What you see there spans about ten years of work. I started using watercolor during the pandemic. I used it when I was little, doing Chinese painting, but watercolor is the hardest to control and usually I don’t like to use it. But I’d been doing so much acrylic and oil and I needed to challenge myself a little bit. It took half a year to figure out how to paint in watercolor again in a new way. And then I started using it on canvas, which is even more difficult because it doesn’t absorb anything and can be easily damaged. You have to be more careful.

Watercolor has a problem. It looks so light, no weight. For a few years, I’ve been trying to figure out how to make watercolor have weight like oils. I really want to achieve with watercolor what oil painting can do with its depth and heaviness. I’m still working on it.

What are you interested in now, in terms of your new work?

In both my new paintings and dance work, I want to give people more hope. More light. I want to bring back a sense of balance for the audience and some joy. People think contemporary art should challenge society, but I’ve done that for so many years. I still want people to think about life, but I want them to embrace it too. The new dance is lighter, less dry. And the paintings are, too. More colorful. I want people to feel warm, but it’s not trying to be cheesy entertainment. I have to be deep and thoughtful to embrace the goodness of life, in both painting and dance.

And now I’m creating everything together. When I’m making the paintings, I’m thinking about the dance. And when I’m making the dance, I’m thinking about the paintings.

When did that start happening, that the dancing and the painting were in constant dialogue?

In the last few years. The elements used to be connected, but not entirely. Now, when I create, they slowly inspire each other. I have to make a painting to help me understand the dance movement I’m working on, for instance. Everything is conceptually related.

How was it seeing your work presented in this way, as a dual-venue exhibition? What were your favorite parts?

I’m so happy to see some of the work I haven’t seen for a while. It’s like seeing your babies again. People don’t realize how strange that is for me. I’ve spent so much time alone with each painting. One of the works took five years! I’ve never been with any person as long as with my paintings. So when they’re here, 25 years of paintings, it’s like showing my journals to people. My soul, my feelings, my senses. It’s kind of vulnerable for me. When I see each painting, I’m immediately back in the memories of that time. But the watercolors make me happy because they’re my newest achievement. They’re fresh, like a new baby.

This is my first time having my work separated into different spaces and periods. The Katonah exhibit is more abstract, about music and movement and choreographic development. And at the Pocantico Center, it’s more spiritual, colorful, in the landscape direction. So they’re both, curatorially, so clear. The audience will see a totally different environment, and have a totally different experience in each. I hope they see both.

“Shen Wei: STILL/MOVING” is on view at The Pocantico Center through April 18, 2026, and at the Katonah Museum of Art through April 19, 2026.

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On the evening of Thursday, January 11, 1940, the curious audience at the Center Theatre in New York City held playbills that read The Ballet Theatre: America’s First Ballet Theatre Staged by the Greatest Collaboration in Ballet History. The first part of the description wasn’t entirely accurate—across the country, Adolph Bolm had founded the San Francisco Opera Ballet in 1933, renamed San Francisco Ballet in 1942—but the second part just might have been.

In the playbill’s An Introduction to the Ballet Theatre, journalist Lucius Beebe wrote: “It has been the purpose of the Ballet Theatre to stage, organize and undertake ballet for the sake of dancing… The other determination of the Ballet Theatre is to present the greatest possible variety of choreographic repertory. It essays the staging of the best that is traditional, the best that is contemporary and, inevitably, the best that is controversial.”

The brand-new company, founded by American dancer Lucia Chase and Mordkin Ballet’s Colorado-born director Richard Pleasant in the fall of 1939, organized a jam-packed first season that consisted of 18 ballets by 11 of the greatest choreographers of the day, like Agnes de Mille, Anton Dolin, Michel Fokine, Bronislava Nijinska and Antony Tudor. The large cast featured 20 principal dancers, 15 soloists and a company of 56, which included units for both “Spanish” and “Negro” dancers. In the segregated America of 1940, it was almost unheard of for Brown and Black dancers to be seen on a large-scale concert stage. This inclusion, though imperfect in its execution, was quite a radical act for its time.

Much has changed in the past 85 years: the Center Theatre was demolished in 1954 and is now a 21-story office building; most, if not all, of the people involved in that inaugural season are now gone; Ballet Theatre was renamed American Ballet Theatre (ABT) in 1957; journalists don’t often use “essay” as a verb anymore (though maybe we should); and the Company is now very diverse, with principal dancers and soloists hailing not only from the U.S. and Europe but also Argentina, Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico and South Korea.

But some things have stayed the same: ABT is still committed to presenting “the greatest variety of choreographic repertory” from the past and present and pushing the boundaries of what ballet can be and do. Their 85th Anniversary Fall Season, running from through November 1 at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, is a testament to that vibrant spirit.

What to See

ABT’s Fall 2025 Season has started off as jam-packed and exciting as its first. There was the historic Fall Gala on October 22 honoring Misty Copeland, the Company’s first Black woman principal dancer, a special performance planned for families on November 1 hosted by Copeland and programs featuring 15 ballets, including a world premiere, several company premieres and a well-curated sampling of ABT’s expansive repertory from the past 85 years.

If you were to see every piece in this season, you would gain a profound understanding of not only the Company’s identity and range—because its eclectic range is its identity—but also of the art of classical ballet and how it has evolved in America. It would be an unparalleled immersive history lesson. If you can’t, though, and missed “A Retrospective of Master Choreographers” but still want to experience that range, I recommend seeing “Innovations Past and Present” (on the evenings of October 29 and 30, and the matinee and evening on November 1).

“A Retrospective of Master Choreographers”

The very first ballet that was performed on the very first night of Ballet Theatre’s very first season was Michel Fokine’s Les Sylphides, danced by Karen Conrad, Nina Stroganova, Lucia Chase and William Dollar (followed by Eugene Loring’s absurdist ballet-play The Great American Goof and Mikhail Mordkin’s Voices of Spring—what a lineup!). Fokine was an innovative Russian choreographer, and Les Sylphides is one of his masterpieces. The one-act plotless “ballet blanc” set to music by Frédéric Chopin was first performed by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes superstars Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, Vaslav Nijinsky and Alexandra Baldina at Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, France, in 1909. It is dreamy and ethereal, and a prime example of early 20th-century ballet.

Ballet Theatre’s resident choreographer (from 1940-1950) was the English choreographer Antony Tudor, who is often credited with creating the Company’s artistic conscience. He is known for his psychologically complex, often dark works, though his piece on the program, Gala Performance, is one of his lighthearted satires. Set to music by Sergei Prokofiev, it was first performed by the London Ballet at the Toynbee Hall Theatre in London in 1938, and by Ballet Theatre at the Majestic Theatre in New York City in 1941. The comedic piece, which comments on ballet’s often competitive culture, was last performed by the Company in 1998. Clinton Luckett, who joined ABT as a dancer in 1992 and is now its assistant artistic director, enjoyed dancing Gala Performance and told Observer he is looking forward to seeing how the current talented cast will interpret it.

Also on the program is a ballet by one of the Company’s most important woman choreographers, Agnes de Mille. Rodeo, first performed by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1942 and by Ballet Theatre in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1950, is set to music by Aaron Copland. Now considered an American classic, the narrative ballet is a love story set in an idealized Wild West. Its popularity proved that the Company could take on humorous and modern theatrical works.

“Innovations Past and Present”

While the prior program is an excellent introduction to the Company’s origins, the “Innovations Past and Present” program features a sampling of important works spanning the 1940s to the present day.

In 1947, a year before George Balanchine founded the New York City Ballet, he created a piece for Ballet Theatre starring Alicia Alonso and Igor Youskevitch set to music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Theme and Variations is an homage to Balanchine’s classical training at the Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg. It follows the 19th-century classical structure but is otherwise abstract. It is always interesting to see current dancers tackle one of the earliest examples of neoclassical choreography.

After Chase and her co-director (since 1945), scenic designer Oliver Smith, retired from ABT in 1980, the world-famous dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov came on as artistic director until 1989. During those years, he pushed the Company into more daring choreographic territory and attracted a new enthusiastic audience. ABT’s historian Elizabeth Kaye explained that Baryshnikov also improved the Company’s morale by promoting more dancers from within the corps to be soloists and principal dancers. In fact, it was Baryshnikov who spotted the young Susan Jaffe, ABT’s current artistic director, and turned her into a star.

After Baryshnikov left the Company, the next long-term artistic director was the former Company dancer Kevin McKenzie, who served from 1992 to 2022. McKenzie was a steady guide for ABT. He brought more full-length story ballets into the repertory, acquiring several works by Frederick Ashton and leading stagings of classics like Don Quixote (1995), Giselle (1998) and Swan Lake (2000). But perhaps two of the most important things he did during his directorship were to recruit a strong group of male dancers (Judy Kinberg’s 2003 documentary Born to Be Wild: The Leading Men of American Ballet Theatre followed Jose Manuel Carreño, Ángel Corella, Vladimir Malakhov and Ethan Stiefel as they made a new work with modern choreographer Mark Morris) and hire the Ukrainian choreographer Alexei Ratmansky to be ABT’s artist in residence from 2009 to 2022.

These two accomplishments converge in one of the pieces Ratmansky made for the Company in 2016, Serenade after Plato’s Symposium. Set to music by Leonard Bernstein, it is one of his most abstract yet soulful works and is, essentially, a piece for men, which, Luckett said, “is an extremely rare thing.” Seven men (and one woman) dance “in such different ways, with such different qualities.” And the still-impressive group of male dancers is more than able to take it on.

And finally, there is the newest piece of the season, the world premiere by Juliano Nunes: Have We Met?! With a newly commissioned and, according to Luckett, “very big, very emotional” musical score by Luke Howard. Since Jaffe became artistic director in 2022, the Company has focused even more on commissioning works that feature diverse choreographers and styles, building on programs like ABT RISE, and Nunes’s era-spanning love story set in New York City promises to be another great addition to the repertory.

The most homogeneous program in the season is “Twyla@60: A Tharp Celebration,” which included three works by the postmodern American choreographer Twyla Tharp, who—fun fact!—has made more pieces for ABT than any other choreographer: Push Comes to Shove (created for Baryshnikov in 1976 and last performed in 1999), Bach Partita (created for ABT in 1983 and last performed in 2014) and the company premiere of Sextet, made for Twyla Tharp Dance in 1992.

And the most romantic program in the season, “Classics to the Contemporary” (through October 28), includes former ABT principal dancer Natalia Makarova’s 1974 The Kingdom of the Shades (from Act II of Marius Petipa’s 1877 La Bayadère), Jaffe’s new staging of Petipa’s 1890 The Sleeping Beauty, Act III, and assorted pas de deux (Victor Gsovsky’s 1949 Grand Pas Classique, Ashton’s 1980 Rhapsody, Tharp’s 1998 Known by Heart and Christian Spuck’s 1999 Le Grand Pas de Deux).

The season is impressive, spanning 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century ballets, from the first dance the Company ever performed to one created just weeks ago. It also includes many large works, which keep the corps busier than usual. This is a good thing because, as Kaye said, “The corps is sparkling. They are absolutely sparkling.”

As are the principal dancers and soloists. “I don’t remember the Company ever looking better,” she added. And part of that, no doubt, is due to Jaffe’s warm and inspired leadership. She’s exactly the right person to lead ABT into its future. “It’s a good time, and only going to get better. Something is happening there that I want people to come and see, because ballet is a haven, and we need that now, and American Ballet Theatre is offering that haven to people.”

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In 2022, New York City Ballet’s beloved ballerina Tiler Peck curated a show for New York City Center’s inaugural Artists at the Center program: Turn It Out with Tiler Peck & Friends. The show received critical and audience acclaim in New York City, went on to perform at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London (where the piece Time Spell received an Olivier Award nomination for Best New Dance Production) and then toured Peck’s home state of California. It is now returning to City Center for an encore presentation from October 16 to 19—great news for those of us who missed the popular show the first time around.

The program includes fresh (as in, they first premiered in 2022) works of ballet, contemporary and tap dance from some of the greatest choreographers working today. It opens with the quartet The Barre Project, Blake Works II by modern ballet pioneer William Forsythe, set to music by James Blake, followed by Peck’s sextet Thousandth Orange, set to live music by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw. After that is the duet Swift Arrow by San Francisco’s king of contemporary ballet, Alonzo King, with music by jazz composer Jason Moran. And closing the program is the City Center commission Time Spell, a collaboration between Peck, tap dance queen Michelle Dorrance, and Emmy-nominated contemporary choreographer Jillian Meyers, with music by Aaron Marcellus and Penelope Wendtlandt. Peck dances in all the works except her own, and the show’s all-star cast also includes fellow NYCB company members India Bradley, Chun Wai Chan, Christopher Grant, Mira Nadon, Quinn Starner, and Ryan Tomash, along with Boston Ballet principal dancer Jeffrey Cirio, dancer and So You Think You Can Dance season 14 winner Lex Ishimoto and tap dancer Byron Tittle.

Observer recently spoke with Peck—always warm, humble and on the move—about her excitement for the show’s encore presentation, her bottomless desire to grow as an artist and her love and admiration for her friends.

How did Turn It Out with Tiler & Friends first come together?

I have curated other shows, but this is the only program I’ve ever created from scratch. None of these pieces existed before I asked the choreographers to make them. So Turn It Out with Tiler feels the most special to me, because it’s kind of like my little child.

I started working on it during the pandemic. I’d always wanted to work with Bill Forsythe, and he had wanted to work with me, but we could never get our schedules together. So I called him and said, “Hi, Bill, I know everything’s, like, shut down, but would you want to work together? I know it’s not ideal.” And he was like, “When can we start?” And I was like, “How about tomorrow?” And so that’s how that piece came about. We just started working together over Zoom. We didn’t know what it would become. After a while, he said, “I think we need to bring some gentlemen in.” And so we did. After we finished The Barre Project, we released it on film so people could see it. But the first time it was ever performed live was at City Center for this show, and the only time we’ve ever done it with the original cast, the way he created it, is during this particular Turn It Out with Tiler show that we tour.

What about the Alonzo King piece?

It was the same thing. I called Alonzo and said, “I really want to work with you. How would you feel about creating something for me?” And he said, “Oh my gosh, I would love to.” And so we made a little bubble in San Francisco. There were just four of us in the room. And he created a pas de deux for Roman and me during that time, which has also only been seen whenever this show is done. My choreography, Thousandth Orange, began at the Vail Dance Festival, but this version we perform is very different. Time Spell was created specifically for this show and has only ever been performed in this show.

How has it been returning to Thousandth Orange, a work you created a few years ago?

It’s nice because I can adjust it for the dancers who are doing it now. It doesn’t have to be a museum piece. That’s one great thing about being a living choreographer—you can still make those changes!

When you first performed the show and toured it, what responses did you get from the audience?

I think Time Spell really transports people. When I’m in the wings listening to Penny and Aaron sing, I feel that, but I wasn’t sure how the audience would react. It’s really hard, I think, to try to mix styles without it looking like “Oh, there’s a tap dancer and there’s a ballet dancer and contemporary dancer and they’re all trying to dance together!” But to me, the seamlessness of how this is blended, you don’t even realize that you’re watching so many different forms of dance in one piece. And so many of the dancers are multitalented. Like Lex is tapping alongside Michelle Dorrance, but then doing a pas de deux with me, because he can do ballet too. A lot of people have told me Time Spell does not leave them. They don’t always understand how to explain it, but they’re so moved by it. And that’s been the case every time we’ve performed it.

How did you go about making that piece?

I wanted to work with Michelle, and Michelle had the idea to bring Jillian Meyers in, too. So the three of us really worked together. They’re so talented. I just helped blend the ballet into it. But everybody was super collaborative. Michelle is just… I don’t know, she’s just like the most talented person I know, and this is, I think, one of her favorite things she’s ever made.

What excites you about returning to this program again?

The nice thing about getting to do something more than once is that you get to dive deeper into each piece and role. And I feel like that’s what’s so beautiful about the show now—it’s really finding its roots, and everybody feels comfortable in it.

These are the most incredible artists to be surrounded by. I think all of us love being in the room together, because we each feel like we grow by getting to work with one another. We all push each other. And we become a really tight family of people. I think that feeling comes across in the show because the works were created during a time when nobody was able to be together. This was the first thing we could do. We were in masks when we first started! And so it really has this feeling of longing, of not being with somebody, and then coming back, and the intersections that happen there. I feel like the more that we all understand the work, the richer it’s become. And because we don’t get to do it often, every time we dance together, it feels fresh.

What’s it like dancing styles so different from what you normally do at NYCB?

Growing up, I wasn’t a classical dancer at all. I took ballet so that my technique would be strong, but I was really a jazz contemporary dancer. So I think that’s why I feel so comfortable in these types of work. At this point in my career, I want to be pushed by choreographers, and not just physically. Alonzo really digs deep into the human side of dancing. He is kind of like a philosopher, and I was interested in growing that way as a dancer. When you’re in the studio with him, you learn so much about yourself and about dance and the world. He has this way of sharing that’s unlike any other choreographer, I think.

And Bill is the most musical person ever, so working with him was like a dream. The way he would explain things like compressing and stretching time, it felt like I was getting a lesson on how to choreograph and dance at the same time every time we worked.

And you’re so musical, too—that’s a great pairing!

You know what’s funny? The one person who makes me feel not musical is Michelle. She can hear notes and beats that my ear doesn’t even go to, and I think I’m musical, so that’s why I’m always so interested in working with her. She’s constantly pushing me to hear and see and explore even further. What I love about this show is that it’s everything. It combines so many types of dance forms into one. I only wear pointe shoes for one of the pieces! It’s more than just a ballet performance. It’s an evening of dance.

Turn It Out with Tiler Peck & Friends is at New York City Center October 16-19, 2025.

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The Brooklyn-based artist and choreographer Barnett Cohen sits cross-legged in the folding chair: tall and tattooed, dressed in their signature all-white street clothes. Despite their almost intimidatingly cool looks, they have an unassuming, gentle presence. When they lean back and say, “Okay, let’s go from the top of movement four,” it’s an invitation, not a command. Six hip yet humble dancers nod and rearrange themselves in the large studio space, take a collective breath and start moving in silence.

At first, the gestures were minimal and recognizable: arms raised in a V, feet tucked behind ankles in coupé. Their sneakers squeaked on the floor as they stepped in and out of clean formations reminiscent of cheerleading routines, bird migrations or both–Cohen’s work is never just one thing. Then someone started speaking, “High octane octaves / intrusive thoughts out of hand / we cohabitate with the nasty / we live with the worst,” and the piece jolted awake.

Cohen and his dancers were rehearsing the 4th-9th sections of their latest evening-length performance, anyyywayyy whatever, a tightly woven work of text and movement that will premiere in Brooklyn at Amant on September 26. A few minutes into the run-through, the dancers dropped to the ground and spread their legs. “We!” they shouted at the space in front of them. “Are! Queer!” They slapped the ground with each syllable, then spun around and repeated the same phrase. “We! Are! Queer!” Then they paused and, in a sing-song voice, teasingly added, “It’s true.”

“So this,” I thought as I watched, “is what it’s about.” I was right but also wrong. Cohen is not interested in ‘abouts’ or narrative legibility. They are many unpindownable things, and so are their performances.

“It was a very slow build into this type of work,” Cohen told me, meaning the combination of movement and spoken text which they call ‘movement art.’ (They are wary to call themself a choreographer, as they weren’t trained in dance; I will bestow that well-deserved title on them). “When I was a child, I wanted to be a poet and an actor, and those two things sort of converged in the creation of the work that I’m making now.” They followed that dream, studied theater and wrote poetry—they often appear at poetry readings around town and published a collection of poems with dancer/artist/writer Simone Forti, began a prolific painting practice and founded the Mutual Aid Immigration Network, a trilingual free assistance hotline for people detained in immigration detention centers across the United States. While living in Los Angeles, they experimented with what they call performances of the mind: reading aloud long lists they’d written in their studio to audiences asked to close their eyes. Then, slowly, they started to introduce movement into their work, which has since appeared at Canal Projects as part of Performa 2023, Judson Memorial Church as part of Movement Research and The Center for Performance Research, among other venues.

The first iteration of anyyywayyy whatever was a two-person show (performed by Maddie Hopfield and Ray Tsung-Jui Tsou) commissioned by Caterina Zevola for the inaugural Performissima at the Centre Wallonie Bruxelles in Paris in October 2024. This new commission premiering at Amant extends the piece to an hour and includes four more performers (Laurel Atwell, Sally Butin, Deja Rion and Fiona Smith).

When asked about the work’s title, Cohen said it refers to the frustration and despair they feel about the current state of the world; both a personal failing and cultural inability to “fully absorb the multiple crises that we are all experiencing.” A common response to crises, they’ve noticed, is to look away, to keep scrolling, to keep walking by. “For a lot of people it’s like ‘anyway, whatever.’”

Cohen started working on the piece’s text-based score at the beginning of 2024. “I tend to think of myself as a channeler or a kind of conduit. Not only am I writing what’s on my mind, but I’m also accumulating language that then ends up in the writing itself.” Cohen reads voraciously and widely, and glimpses of those influences—ranging from science fiction writers to queer theorists to philosophers and poets—make their way into the footnotes of the score, which will be printed as a chapbook created by artist and poet Leslie Rosario-Olivo and distributed to the audience. Metallica lyrics and lines from Star Wars make their way in, too, as do excerpts of conversations and text exchanges with friends. “There’s brilliance there at times,” Cohen said, “in our conversations with people.”

The result is multilayered. “There’s writing about the genocide, but it’s not about that. There’s writing about my sex life, but it’s not about that. There’s writing about sex and queerness in general. It’s not about that. It’s this kind of mosaic of ideas that overlap and intersect.”

Cohen then brought the completed score into the rehearsals, though it was further edited as they all built the piece together. The performers’ slips of tongue, Cohen explained, often charged the writing with more energy and meaning.

The next step was creating the movement, which, for Cohen, is always a very collaborative process. They will offer a suggestion (like “What if we did some energetic ballet-like movements?” or “Do something a little like Graham.”), and the dancers will move around and say, “Like this?” This conversation continues until Cohen has shaped the movement into a phrase. “It’s like throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks,” they said. “I have to go through a lot of bad ideas to get to what makes sense stylistically.” The movement vocabulary, as wide-ranging as the text, draws from hip-hop, ballet, stage combat, modern dance and post-modern dance.

Along the way, Cohen merges the spoken text with the choreography in a way that isn’t redundant or interpretive. “We’re trying to devise movements that not only push back against the writing, but also amplify it in a different way…There are what I would call material juxtapositions of movement and sound.”

One way the performers achieve this juxtaposition is through specific tones of voice. They often employ certain registers that they’ve given labels to, like “internet voice,” “yoga mom voice” and “bro voice.” Universally recognizable tones that evince narrative but, in this case, are disconnected from any specific story. Sometimes the tone matches the text; sometimes not. Sometimes the tone matches the movement; sometimes not. There are common vernaculars–both sonically and physically–that appear and disappear within the work, portholes through which the audience can comfortably enter before realizing they actually have no idea where they are.

For example, the line “my roommate will be back soon so” feels, for many of us, familiar. We’ve all asked someone to leave without asking them to leave, or been awkwardly asked to leave ourselves. Originally, Butin said this with an “fboy” tone while embodying an “fboy,” which was overkill. Cohen decided to have Butin keep the tone but embody a fierce runway model while looking an audience member directly in the eye when saying it. At another point, Butin and Hopfield do a “ballet-adjacent phrase” while Tsung-Jui Tsou and Atwell try to bring everyone together. Butin punches Atwell in the stomach while crossing the stage, to emphasize the line “without suicide / with out WHAT.” The elegance of ballet is layered with the intense text and random physical violence in a way that doesn’t further any specific narrative, but offers, nevertheless, a strong statement.

The heart of the piece can be found in the text and movement, but design takes the performance to the next level. The cast is styled by JenniLee in elevated streetwear by New York-based designer Melitta Baumeister. And the lighting design, inspired by raves and queer nightlife spaces, is by Bessie-nominated Sarai Frazier.

It turns out anyyywayyy whatever isn’t one thing but all the things: poignant, political, funny, sexy, of-the-moment, intellectual, serious. It’s a wakeup call to our apathetic culture and also a reminder that we are not alone. That we are all in this together, for better or worse.

Barnett Cohen’s anyyywayyy whatever is at 306 Maujer Street, Brooklyn, on Friday, September 26 at 7:00 pm, and Saturday, September 27 at 4:00 pm and 7:00 pm.

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It’s rare that a performance and a venue align so seamlessly. I rarely even consider how the two intersect, since they usually emerge from separate worlds—the universe of a show contained within a given space. But the North American premiere of Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow, despite being created and first staged in Zürich, Switzerland, in 2021, seems as if it were made for the Park Avenue Armory’s 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall in 2025.

The dance-theater-fashion show, directed and choreographed by U.S.-born and Zurich-based Trajal Harrell, unfolds on a bright 150-foot runway designed by Harrell and Erik Flatmo in the style of a Mondrian grid painting. The audience sits on either side of the runway like A-list celebrities, but with oversized programs in stadium-style seating that is more akin to theater. The Armory, long known for its big unconventional productions, has also hosted fashion shows. Fittingly, the building sits nearly midway between the birthplaces of two movement styles central to Harrell’s choreography—Harlem’s ballroom voguing and Judson Dance Theater’s postmodern dance, both from the 1960s. And even though the piece was made during the COVID pandemic and can be read as a meditation on the human need for communal gathering, its themes speak uncannily to the present: What is freedom? Who gets to express themselves freely? What does it mean to look a stranger in the eye?

Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow begins with Harrell rising from a seat in the audience and introducing himself as Chloé Malle (Anna Wintour’s successor at Vogue). Harrell/Malle welcomes the crowd and recounts her phone conversation with Harrell, who asked her to open the show, sharing the quote “If you live, sometimes you have to dance.” In this way, we are immediately dropped into the show’s tone—performative, sly and deliberately breaking the fourth wall.

Two people then peel back the large plastic sheet covering the set, so carefully that the audience at opening night even applauded their effort. On the Mondrian-like floor are low white nightclub-style couches and a central table beneath which an assortment of toys and household objects—props, perhaps—sit poorly concealed.

Suddenly, music explodes into the vast space. Someone steps onto the red, white, blue and yellow stage, and the show begins again. Performers enter one by one, striding counterclockwise along the perimeter to Samm Bennett & Chunk’s “Part of the Family,” which dissolves into Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good.” The so-called fashion show is immediately off-kilter: “models” wear bathrobes over gowns, rollers in their hair, empty sleeves trailing behind them. Soon it veers stranger—performers stumble and dishevel themselves. Across the evening, 60 costumes designed by Harrell appear, mixing labels from Comme des Garçons to Walmart. Some performers wear shoes, some go barefoot, but every catwalk dazzles.

The cast is large—17 dancers plus Harrell, all part of his Zürich Dance Ensemble—and they reappear in bold looks until one finally steps off the grid, a rupture that feels both wrong and exhilarating. Another hikes a skirt above the knees and kicks wildly. A sneakered group forms at one end, shifting arms fluidly as though warming up, or channeling birds, or conducting an unseen orchestra. A performer picks up a mic from the couch and declares, “Section 2, The Tale,” hinting at narrative (spoiler: it never fully arrives, perhaps intentionally).

Much transpires in Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow. The five sections stretch nearly two hours without intermission. The perimeter-walking continues with such persistence that it becomes a heartbeat, only noticeable when it halts. At one point, a woman is carried to a couch and begins reading the Declaration of Independence aloud—radical in its delivery. At another, a man atop a couch performs a Butoh-inspired solo, his body twisting in slow contortions. Later, Harrell dances alone to Imani Uzuri’s “Love Story,” moving like someone tipsy and unguarded at home with a glass of wine. Costumes change relentlessly, poses strike with force and the soundtrack ranges wildly—from Earth, Wind & Fire to Laura Nyro to Steve Reich. Two performers roam in sparkly panda suits.

There is too much to take in; you are always missing something. Afterward, walking downtown, I kept replaying how the acts of watching and being watched felt strangely new. Perhaps it was because the house lights stayed up until the final abstracted folk dance, letting performers gaze directly at the audience. Perhaps it was Harrell’s direction that exposed the human beneath the performance. Would I ever watch a passerby on the street with the same intensity as a dancer on stage? Not usually. At times, I even looked away when a performer neared. But why?

I also thought about freedom. The freedom of expression here—in fashion, in movement—was striking. The performers inhabited the atmospheres of the New York ballroom scene, club culture, lonely apartments, even the subway at 4:00 a.m., each in their own register.

In the program, Debra Levine writes that Harrell wanted to create a work without a preconceived theme. That choice explains the stream-of-consciousness feel and the lack of narrative arc, and I’m grateful for it. It allowed me to recognize my own desire for story, for the hidden props to be used, for a message to land. But that’s not how life works. Life is messy, and art can remind us not to look away.

Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow is showing at the Park Avenue Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall through September 20, 2025. 

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“This season is personal for us,” Alison Manning, co-executive director of the Harkness Dance Center, tells Observer. “We as an institution are pointing to the fact that we’re in a cultural moment where women’s rights and bodies and voices seem to be under renewed threat. Dance has always been a space for storytelling and truth-telling, and we believe that who tells the story matters. By centering women and female-identifying artists, we’re looking to amplify those voices that have been historically sidelined and create a season that is as much a statement as it is an artistic offering.”

Indeed, women have long been sidelined in the dance field, and while progress has been made in the past few decades, there is still more work to be done. According to the Dance Data Project’s most recent reports (of the 2023-2024 season), gender inequity is alive and well. Of the 2,221 ballet, contemporary, and modern dance works presented at 116 performing arts centers in the U.S., only 31.4 percent were choreographed by women. Women choreographed 30.2 percent of full-length works and 32.3 percent of mixed-bill works. Theaters with the largest seating capacity programmed the smallest number of women-made works (22.2 percent). Of the 217 artistic directors leading classically based dance companies in the U.S. and internationally, only 65 (30.0 percent) are women. And of the 202 choreographers currently holding resident positions in companies, 90 are women (44.6 percent) and 110 are men (54.5 percent). Remember that the dance field is majority female—CareerExplorer data shows that 87 percent of working dancers are female and 13 percent are male.

But enough about numbers. When Manning and her team chose the title “Women Move the World” for this history-making season, the word “move” initially referred to physical movement, but over time, the word started resonating for them in new ways. Movement can also imply progress and momentum. “For centuries, women have been moving this art form forward, but often without equal visibility,” Manning said. “And so move in this context also means, for us, to inspire, to create change, to claim space.”

But enough about words. On to dance! “Women Move the World,” which runs from September through May at 92NY, will feature performances from big-name choreographers and beloved hometown companies, as well as emerging voices and international artists. There will be an immersive opening celebration, six genre-spanning programs and three diverse festivals.

What to expect on opening night

The season will open on September 13 with Swing Out Loud: Women Move the World—part Authentic Jazz/Lindy Hop dance lesson, part swing dance party, part performance—led by Bessie Award winner LaTasha Barnes and accompanied by One BadA** Swing Band.

Even though the season’s mission is serious and carries significant weight, Manning wanted to open it with a party. She said, “I am also trying to drive us—’us’ meaning 92NY and the artists on this program, and also the wider dance community in New York-towards this idea that in the face of all of this, we must have joy. We must have celebration, and we must uplift one another.”

As for who should lead the opening celebration, Manning immediately thought of Barnes, who embodies so many qualities this season strives for—joy, resistance, representation, legacy—and had been part of 92NY’s inaugural Uptown Rhythm Dance Festival last season.

Barnes comes from a long line of “movers and shakers and innovators” and is an internationally recognized tradition-bearer of Black American Social Dance. When asked how she felt about opening the season, she said, “The word that’s coming to mind, honestly, is ‘magnanimous,’ but that may be a little too flowery for what’s actually happening. It’s really quite humbling, and it’s really inspiring for me.”

The night will begin with Barnes’ “very exciting and fun hybrid dance lesson,” starting with Authentic Jazz for those who want to dance alone, followed by Lindy Hop for those who want to be partnered. Then the floor will open for the swing dance party, interspersed with live performances, “offering some perspective into how badass the women in New York swing are and how badass their collective artistry is and can be.” Performers range from young protégés like Reyna Núñez to seasoned veterans “who just swing their faces off like Gaby Cook, and some of our most esteemed elders and ‘keepers of the flame,’ as we call them, but I’m calling them the ‘keepers of the beat.’”

92NY’s social dance nights are often packed and intergenerational, drawing families with young children up to people in their 90s, dancing the night away. “I hope everyone will come out to celebrate,” Barnes said. “It is ‘Women Move the World,’ but we want everyone in the space to be able to dance with us.”

The movers and shakers of the season

92NY’s dance history is rooted in American modern dance. Harkness Dance Center was founded in 1935 by Doris Humphrey and attracted other modern dance pioneers like Martha Graham, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, José Limón, Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham and Alvin Ailey. So it is no surprise that most of the programs in the season feature modern and contemporary dance.

Some choreographers, like Yue Yin (whose company YY Dance Company will present the world premiere of Elsewhere on October 17 and 18), Heidi Latsky (presenting the talk/performance Who Am I Now? on January 10 and 11), and Aszure Barton have longstanding relationships with 92NY. Although Andrea Miller has taught at Harkness Dance Center, her critically acclaimed company GALLIM will perform BLUSH for the first time on their stage on April 30 and May 1. The French-Canadian Hélène Simoneau Danse will perform the world premiere of Late Bloomer on November 14 and 15, and Jodi Melnick and New York City Ballet principal Sara Mearns will broaden the landscape with the crossover ballet-contemporary world premiere of Superbloom (Dancing into Choreographic Forms) on March 27 and 28.

Barton, who will be closing out the season with An Evening with Aszure Barton on May 21, explains that, “92NY has been home to generations of incredible humans breaking new ground, and being part of this ongoing evolution of dance is deeply meaningful.” The one-night-only performance will showcase the breadth of her style while bringing together “some of the most exquisite dancers” she’s had the privilege to work with over the years, from Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Gauthier Dance//Dance Company Theaterhaus Stuttgart, and elsewhere.

Then there are the festivals

The Uptown Rhythm Dance Festival (“Which I am,” Manning says, “no pun intended, super jazzed for!”) returns for the second year on March 2-8. The programs at 92NY are co-curated by Manning and tap sensation Michelle Dorrance and co-presented with Works & Process at the Guggenheim and Dormeshia’s Ladies in the Shoe Tap Conference.

The week-long festival will include performances, discussions and classes “that celebrate the power, artistry and cultural impact of women in rhythmic dance.” This year’s roster of all female and female-identifying artists will perform tap, hip hop, flamenco, Kathak, street dance, Irish step, Appalachian flatfooting and more.

The Future Dance Festival returns for its fifth year on April 17-18 (the Online Dance Film Festival will be streaming on April 16-23), uplifting emerging choreographers and filmmakers as always, but this year the applicants, panelists and curators will all be women and female-identifying.

And, according to Manning, for the first time, the season will include a “wildly exciting and hard to pull off” day-long festival on February 21 dedicated to Indian classical dance and music: What Flows Between Us: A Festival of India’s Classical Arts in Cross-Cultural Dialogue, curated by renowned Kathak artist Rachna Nivas. The daytime program will include performances by musicians and dancers from the North Indian and South Indian lineages, traditional food and “space for gathering across generations.”

Nivas says that while women have had a complicated history with Indian classical dance over its 2000-year existence, they are currently well represented and respected in the field. The imbalance is more obvious in Indian classical music, so she is thrilled to highlight female lead musicians alongside a few male accompanists. “It’s really pretty extraordinary to have a festival like that for us, because we don’t…,” here she pauses and laughs knowingly, “…that’s totally not the case, usually.”

Nivas is grateful to have been surrounded by so many incredible women, her ‘dance sisters,’ who were also training with her guru, Pandit Chitresh Das. “He would constantly tell us, and tell the audience when there was one, that women were more powerful and stronger than men, and that men needed to understand that. Which was really radical.”

The festival will culminate in an evening performance of SPEAK, a collaboration between Nivas, Rukhmani Mehta, Michelle Dorrance and Dormeshia, accompanied by an Indian classical and jazz ensemble. This conversation between Kathak and American tap picks up where another one left off. Nivas’ teacher, Das, collaborated with Dorrance’s mentor and friend, Jason Samuels Smith, in an all-male show called India Jazz Suites (2005). Because of that relationship, Nivas and Dorrance have known each other for years. “At some point,” Nivas says, “We thought it was time for us to write a new chapter of this conversation between Kathak and tap, and have the ladies give it a go.” SPEAK premiered in California in 2017 and even toured to India, but this New York premiere is not to be missed.

“I’m so grateful for this bold, courageous thing that Alison and the rest of the team at Harkness Dance Center are making,” Nivas said. “It’s just another testament to when women come together, the sky’s the limit for what can be accomplished.”

All performances for “Women Move the World” will be held in the historic Kaufmann Concert Hall and in Buttenwieser Hall at the Arnhold Center at 92NY. Tickets are available here.

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Summer in the city brings to mind many things—some good, some bad—but a hands-down highlight is the abundance of outdoor performing arts festivals. Among those focused on dance, Battery Dance Festival (New York City’s longest-running free public dance festival) is one of the most culturally and stylistically diverse, with a curated lineup of high-quality local and international companies taking part. This year, starting today, the 44th Annual Battery Dance Festival in Rockefeller Park will present both emerging and established American companies alongside dancers from Indonesia, Spain, Germany, South Korea, Romania, Bangladesh, India, the Netherlands, Taiwan and North Macedonia.

After launching in 1982, the festival—then called the Downtown Dance Festival—would host noontime performances by Battery Dance company members in public spaces throughout lower Manhattan, including South Street Seaport, One Chase Plaza and City Hall. Battery Dance eventually invited other companies to join the popular performances and, after Superstorm Sandy in 2012, the festival found a safer, more settled home in Battery Park City. From there, audiences grew exponentially, attracting crowds of more than 12,000 dance enthusiasts summer after summer.

The festival’s lineup, which changes every year, is usually created through an open call to dance artists; last year, there were 350 applications. This year, however, Battery Dance founder and artistic director Jonathan Hollander curated the festival himself, drawing from his deep knowledge of the local dance scene and longstanding relationships with international consulates. The 2025 roster includes a few returning companies—the acclaimed Buglisi Dance Theatre will be performing in the festival for the tenth time—but the majority are festival first-timers.

What not to miss at this year’s Battery Dance Festival

Friday, August 15, is India Day, a mixed program of classical Indian dance around the theme of Shakti, or divine feminine energy. It will feature several groups and styles, including Nandanik Dance Troupe from Pittsburgh with choreographer and soloist Subhajit Khush Das from Kolkata, in a world premiere about the goddess Kali.

The other programs are purposely mixed, both culturally and stylistically, which Hollander says is the essence of this festival. “The idea is that people get exposed to things that they would never have seen before or even chosen to buy a ticket to. So this gives them that, like a tasting menu,” he told Observer.

One of the many international choreographers bringing a unique style to the festival is Faizah Grootens, a Netherlands-based native of Curaçao who is a house choreographer with Korzo Theatre in The Hague. She will be presenting two works: On-Still, recently created in collaboration with Battery Dance, and the duet While you’re here – Tanten bo t’aki. This will be her first time at the festival, which she has long appreciated for its commitment to cultural exchange and artistic inclusivity. Its “ability to bridge cultures through movement and storytelling is essential in today’s world,” she told Observer. “The festival is searching for points of view that bring us closer to compassion, justice, equality and a beautiful sense of belonging, no matter all our differences.”

Other international highlights include the Romanian company Platforma 13’s U.S. premiere of Balkan Ballerinas, a work exploring the impact of Western stigmas and stereotypes imposed upon Balkan identity, which Hollander describes as “really edgy and fun and new and exciting”; the world premiere of Madrid-based UNARTE Cía’s Verso Roto featuring two soloists from the Spanish National Ballet deconstructing traditional Spanish dance; and Bulareyaung Dance Company’s NYC premiere of the typhoon-inspired Colors, choreographed by Bulareyaung Pagarlava, an Indigenous choreographer from Taiwan who previously performed with Battery Dance as well as internationally with Cloud Gate Dance Theatre.

Closer to home, longtime friends Dorchel Haqq and Kar’mel Antonyo Wade Small, both graduates of LaGuardia High School and Purchase College, are looking forward to seeing each other’s work as much as presenting their own premieres at the festival. Haqq’s swallow is “an unraveling of a stream of consciousness…about taking the time to listen to oneself and digest the autonomy of our blackness,” while Small (also a member of Battery Dance) will present the solo La Manta de Reina “based on the history of the Caribs of the island of Grenada and the sacrifice they made to escape French enslavement.”

Along with presenting Grootens’ On-Still, Battery Dance will perform the world premiere of Caribbean-American interdisciplinary artist Damani Pompey’s Empty Hand, a piece about “emptying oneself” and relinquishing attachments.

Buglisi Dance Theatre, the festival’s most mature returning company, will present the revival of the tragic duet Sospiri, choreographed by Jacqulyn Buglisi and first performed in 1989 by the Martha Graham Dance Company at New York City Center. Buglisi, who has been involved with the festival for over 25 years, told Observer she appreciates how it allows her company to reach a great diversity of audiences and generations, as well as “the incredible environment—nature, the sky, the grass, the river. People are relaxed, sitting on blankets, eating their dinner… It’s always wonderful to be performing in the Battery Dance Festival and sharing this performance amongst so many amazing companies and dancers.”

The 44th Annual Battery Park Dance Festival will hold free performances at 7:00 p.m. at Rockefeller Park in Battery Park City starting today through August 16.  

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I recently drove up to one of my favorite places, Jacob’s Pillow, but I didn’t see a single dance performance. Instead, I spent the afternoon exploring three new exhibitions, staged throughout the National Historic Landmark’s beautiful Berkshires campus. Jacob’s Pillow dance festival—the longest-running one in America, founded by modern dance pioneer Ted Shawn in 1933—is currently celebrating its 93rd season, and the lineup is as impressive and varied as usual. In August, you can see the usual ballet, contemporary dance and tap, as well as Cambodian classical dance, Hawaiian dance, Afro-Latin jazz, 3D holographic choreography and even ice dancing. Artists hail from New York and the Berkshires, Norway, Korea, British Columbia and Taiwan. In addition to the ancillary lectures, classes and workshops, the venue has added three dance-focused exhibits. The first of these, not far from the entrance in Blake’s Barn, is “Connecting Through Time: 50 Seasons with Norton Owen.”

If you have ever visited the Pillow, it’s likely you’ve run into Norton Owen, the ever-smiling director of preservation. He has been a part of the community since 1976, when he first arrived at the festival as a scholarship student. The following year, he was on staff as assistant box office manager and worked his way up to become the first-ever director of preservation in 1990. Since then, he has created one of the most extensive and accessible dance archives in the world, and the exhibit, curated by Pillow alum Wendy Perron (dancer and choreographer, dance historian and former editor-in-chief of Dance Magazine), celebrates Owen’s remarkable career and contributions to the dance field.

In “The Griot of Jacob’s Pillow” are photographs of Owen with dance luminaries. Here he is speaking with avant-garde composer John Cage in the Tea Garden in 1984, with dancer and former artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Judith Jamison at a PillowTalk in 2012 and with ballerina Misty Copeland at the signing of her book Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina in 2014. In “Memoirable Moments: Old and New,” nineteen past Pillow artists share notes about their favorite ‘Norton Moments’ alongside beautiful photographs spanning 1941-2017 (don’t miss Shawn in his Mevlevi Dervish (1951) right above the 1982 photo of Mark Morris performing the same dance). An unexpected treat is a case from Owen’s 2000 exhibition of choreographer Paul Taylor’s “eccentric” visual art, with the adorably creepy Dear Departed and aptly named These are two shoes, stupid.

A primary theme of the exhibit is juxtaposition—a defining feature of Owen’s career that curator Perron nods to here. A few incredible pairings are Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers performing Shawn’s The Dome in 1940 and Adam H. Weinert’s dancers performing it again in 2016, Talley Beatty performing his Mourner’s Bench from Southern Landscape in 1948 and Taylor Stanley performing it later in 2022 and a portrait of José Limón in 1946 beside a similarly posed one of Bill T. Jones in 2008.

After exploring the Pillow’s past, continue to the Ted Shawn Theatre lobby to learn about the festival’s long relationship with modern dancer and choreographer Alvin Ailey in “Ailey Connections.” The exhibit, which is the smallest of the three but jam-packed with information, was curated by Owen. Documents displayed here highlight the organization’s connections to Ailey and his company, spanning over 70 years. (Fun fact: Carmen de Lavallade holds the longest-lasting performance record of any dancer in Pillow history—1953 to 2014.)

Ailey made his Pillow debut in 1955 with the Lester Horton Dance Theatre (which he had just been made director of after Horton’s unexpected death) and then returned to perform with his own company in 1959, 1961 and 1963. Believe it or not, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has not danced at the Pillow since then, but will make a historical return to perform August 20-24. Video footage loops alongside sixteen stunning photographs of Ailey and Ailey-related artists at the Pillow throughout the years. Take your time here—the details are not to be missed.

From the Ted Shawn Theatre, head to the Doris Duke Theatre gallery, where you can explore dance’s future in the interactive movement technology exhibit “Dancing the Algorithm,” curated by dance and multimedia artist Katherine Helen Fisher. It features works—mostly video—by artists at the intersection of dance and technology and is well described as “a meditation on movement in the algorithmic age.” Though many of the works contain sound, the gallery space coalesces through an ambient score composed by Josh Kadish.

A highlight of this exhibit is Lamentation: Dancing the Archive, an installation featuring a 360° film of Martha Graham’s iconic solo, created by Xin Ying with Fisher, Alan Winslow and Kate Ladenheim. Some works are playfully interactive. Shimmy Boyle, Mingyong Cheng and Fisher’s Bodies in Hyperreality is a real-time, audience-driven choreographic interface that “reimagines the body through dance history and algorithmic aesthetics.” Think dance history meets generative A.I. When you stand in front of the screen, you see two things: yourself, and an A.I.-generated scene inspired by dance history prompts created by Owen and Pillow archivist Patsy Gay. When I did it, my scene was “dancer posing on the Pillow Rock.” I lifted my arm, and she lifted her arm. I leaned to the side, and she did too. In Entroplay (Armon Naeini)’s ID Part 1, your body and movements are broken up and remixed to create a “recursive augmentation of the self,” and in David Wallace Haskins’s Time Mirror IV, you see yourself reflected back, slowed down and multiplied.

Some works are more interesting for their aesthetics. Memo Akten and Katie Peyton Hofstadter’s Superradiance is especially beautiful. The multichannel video and sound installation explores the idea of “embodied simulation” (when you observe another person moving, you feel their movement in your own body). Anthropomorphic shapes blend with nature to create moving forests, oceans and deserts while someone whispers through the speaker above you. Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti (Operator)’s Human Unreadable brilliantly layers dance footage and data visualizations, and Daniel Sierra, Cameron Surh, Zelia ZZ TAN and David Wexler’s Pathways is pure, flowing parametric design.

While each of these exhibits can be enjoyed on its own, I recommend taking the time to visit them in sequence. In conversation, they offer a unique opportunity to consider not only Jacob’s Pillow but dance’s incredible past, present and future.

“Connecting Through Time: 50 Seasons with Norton Owen,” “Ailey Connections” and “Dancing the Algorithm” are free and open to the public through August 24, Tuesdays through Sundays from noon to final curtain.

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“We call snake years ‘mini dragon’ years,” Tan YuanYuan, former principal dancer with the San Francisco Ballet, tells Observer. “Snakes are real, unlike dragons, but they’re still powerful creatures.”

According to the Chinese zodiac, 2025 is the Year of the Wood Snake. In Chinese culture and mythology, snakes are associated with transformation (shed that skin!), growth and renewal. We are now halfway through the year, and what better way to pause and celebrate these formidable serpents than to experience the international premiere of Shanghai Grand Theatre’s dance drama Lady White Snake, with artistic direction by Tan, which lands at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center this weekend.

Lady White Snake reimagines the thousand-year-old Legend of the White Snake, one of China’s Four Great Folktales, through a contemporary and feminist lens. The traditional tale is somewhat like the original The Little Mermaid, in that a beautiful supernatural creature becomes a woman to be with the mortal man she loves, but a villain intervenes and tragedy ensues. Themes of love, loyalty and betrayal run through the legend, which has been the inspiration of many great operas, movies and plays. Lady White Snake is the first major dance production to tackle it.

The story of Lady White Snake, written by Luo Zhou, differs from the original in several ways. First, it is set in the present day, with occasional dips into a surreal, ancient dreamscape. The characters are altered a bit, too. The White Snake is now “the Wife” and is already married to “the Husband” (Xu Xian). The Green Snake, who is usually the White Snake’s sister, is now Xiao Qing—the Wife’s alternate, younger self. And Fa Hai, who is usually the nefarious monk, is now a psychologist bent on “curing” the Wife. But perhaps most importantly, in this new version, the Wife/Lady White is interested in more than her eternal love for her husband. In this version, she chooses to save herself.

The production has been a long time in the making. Tan was first approached by Shanghai Grand Theatre to lead the project in 2018, with plans to begin in 2020, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the production was put on hold and wasn’t picked up again until 2022. It had its well-received world premiere at the Shanghai Grand Theatre in November 2022, with Tan participating as both the artistic director and dancing the role of the Wife.

The creative team then made revisions to the production, including bringing on a new choreographer (Wang Peixian, who has worked with world-renowned companies such as Martha Graham Dance Company, Nederlands Dans Theater and Tao Dance Theater), and presented this updated version, which Tan called “Lady White Snake 2.0,” in February 2025. It is this version—with just a few more minor revisions—that will have its international premiere in New York on July 26.

“Of course, nothing can be perfect,” Tan explains. “But as artists, we always want to be better. That’s the beauty of a performance on stage—you can always change it. We can keep shaping it. Carving it, just like a sculpture. Or like an oil painting, you can always add something on top.”

The freshly carved production coming to Lincoln Center, directed by Zhou Ke, is impressive, with set design by Gao Guangjian, an original recorded score by Xu Zhong featuring a full orchestra and traditional Chinese instruments, lighting design by Xiao Lihe, video design by Feng Jiangzhou and costumes by designer Zhang Viola.

The two casts of four leads—hailing from Suzhou Ballet Theatre, Cincinnati Ballet, Shanghai Ballet and Béjart Ballet Lausanne—and twenty-nine dancers from the Shanghai Opera House Dance Ensemble perform a fusion of Eastern and Western dance languages: ballet, Chinese folk dance, Chinese contemporary dance, classical Chinese dance and Kung Fu. “It’s kind of martial-artsy,” Tan says. She added that the dancers have enjoyed working together and learning from each other. “The modern dancers take ballet classes, and the ballet dancers ask, ‘How do you do this roll on the floor?’” She laughs. “Because we never usually go on the floor.”

Tan is excited to bring Lady White Snake to new audiences, especially those without a deep cultural knowledge of the original legend. She recommends reading the script in the program before watching, but even those who don’t dive into the storyline will still be fascinated by the dance. The unique blend of movement is something most New Yorkers will likely have never seen and may never see again.

“It’s been my privilege to work on this program since the beginning as both a dancer and artistic director,” Tan finishes. “I’m proud to bring this show to the United States and share this Chinese fairytale and our beautiful dancers with an international audience.”

Lady White Snake comes to the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center for three performances on July 26 at 1:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. and July 27 at 1:30 p.m.

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It’s not often that an established and acclaimed dance company marking its 45th anniversary presents a world premiere by its founder that is far and away the celebration’s highlight. To say that You’ve Got to be Modernistic steals the show in Mark Morris Dance Group’s current program at The Joyce Theater is a bold statement because the other pieces in Program A—The Muir (2010), Silhouettes (1999) and Mosaic and United (1993)—are beloved Morris classics. But let me tell you why.

Let’s start with that word in the title: “modernistic,” a subtle but revealing choice. It’s not simply modern or even modernist. Modernistic implies not only the present but also innovation, experimentation and architectural design. The title as a whole is slightly off-kilter, and being slightly off-kilter is a theme that weaves its way through the work, most notably with “The Charleston” being played in 5/4 time instead of 4/4 time, which gives the familiar song a satisfyingly odd tilt.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. You’ve Got to be Modernistic is set to the music of James P. Johnson, composer of the famed Charleston, arranged and played live by Ethan Iverson. Iverson, MMDG’s former music director and now frequent collaborator, has been a longtime admirer of “The Father of Stride Piano.” Johnson’s compositions (which hadn’t been written down; Iverson had to transcribe them by listening to old recordings) are somewhere between ragtime and jazz, that in-between place that yields some incredible music. The score and Iverson’s playing of it are half the delight of You’ve Got to be Modernistic.

Another delight is the costumes, designed by Elizabeth Kurtzman—slinky pants with a satin sheen and loose tops, all in a soft and unusual color palette of rose gold, brown and blue. The fabrics shine when Mike Faba’s lighting design pops on, and when the seven dancers cluster close, they swing their long pearl necklaces to the swingy beat.

Which brings us to the movement. Mark Morris is a genius at delving deep into a musical score and bringing it to life—something his loyal audiences already know—but this time, the choreography does so much more than that. It visualizes the mood of the music while making a statement on cultural significance that is visceral, not anthropological.

We see The Charleston right away, though not in its usual form: hands clasped and elbows out, the dancers’ swinging arms appear to be aiming for a baseball. The quintessential 1920s dance appears again and again throughout the piece, deconstructed and always a bit different. Other dances from that period show up too if you know what to look for—the Shimmy, the Black Bottom, the Bee’s Knees, the Camel Walk—but these Jazz Age staples are always seen as if through a funhouse mirror, distorted and silly. I found myself giggling, and I don’t often giggle while watching modern dance. I wanted to jump onto the stage and join the fun. I wanted to wear those pants and do those loosey-goosey, tappy-flappy moves (In fact, I might have gone home and tried a few later that night, alone in the dark.)

At one point, the cast spins their necklaces around their necks like hula hoops. One dancer, Billy Smith, is particularly talented at this trick and keeps going while the others circle him. It is not easy (I tried that move at home, too, and it didn’t go well.)

Another off-kilter moment occurs when a line of dancers walks forward in unison, arms around each other’s shoulders—something that happens several times. This is normal enough, except they are not all stepping with the same feet, and the break of form that saw some starting right and some left had a profound effect on me. It felt “wrong” in my viewing body, which fascinated me. Yet another way Morris plays with us.

Though You’ve Got to be Modernistic was my favorite, the other works on the program are strong too. The Muir is an upbeat, witty opener featuring six dancers dressed in Renaissance-light costumes (also designed by Kurtzman) set to a collection of Irish and Scottish folk songs arranged by Ludwig van Beethoven and played live by the MMDG Music Ensemble. Three couples declare their love, get their hearts broken and swap partners, and not always in that order. The women pose with their hands on their hips. They wag their fingers. The men lift them up and spin them around. It seems to be a playful melodrama, but then things get more serious and break down, and one is left to wonder who or what is pulling the strings.

In the duet Silhouettes, Aaron Loux (wearing pajama bottoms while his partner, Christina Sahaida, wears the matching top) excels as an ideal Morris dancer. His lower body is clean, the footwork precise, while his upper body is loose and graceful. And perhaps most importantly, he is funny.

Mosaic and United, which closes the program, is perhaps the most challenging of the four works. It mimics the changing tones of Henry Cowell’s string music, also played live. Sometimes the movement is eerie (women crawl, very slowly, cat-like across the stage), and sometimes it is postmodern (arms tick-tock sharply like a metronome). It is the murkiest, most haunting of the pieces.

When I left the opening night performance (but before I attempted the necklace trick), I considered the selections of Morris’s work from 1993 to the present. His most recent piece seems stripped away of any darkness, any narrative, any pretense. You’ve Got to be Modernistic, despite its title, goes back to the basics of dance: music, movement and joy.

Program A is at The Joyce Theater through July 19. Program B, featuring the world premiere of Northwest alongside Ten Suggestions (1981), The Argument (1999) and Going Away Party (1990), will run from July 22-26.

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One of William Shakespeare’s most famous stage directions comes from his play The Winter’s Tale: “Exit, pursued by a bear.” This near-impossible creative challenge is not the only reason the play translates well into the expansive language of dance, but it is definitely one of them. The tragicomedy is full of fantastical moments like that, as well as a complicated cast of characters who feel a range of deep emotions—something acclaimed English choreographer Christopher Wheeldon felt could be expressed not better than The Bard’s words, but differently, through movement. And he was correct, as evidenced by the fact that his award-winning work, which had its world premiere in 2014 by The Royal Ballet at the Royal Opera House in London, is considered a modern ballet classic.

Lucky for those in New York City, the American Ballet Theatre (ABT) is bringing Wheeldon’s The Winter’s Tale to the Metropolitan Opera House for the first time from July 1-5 as part of a diverse 2025 Summer Season.

This year’s focus, ABT’s associate artistic director Clinton Luckett told Observer, is full-length story ballets. There are only so many of these of a certain caliber in existence, so it’s always thrilling when a new one comes along. Choreographers like Wheeldon and Wayne McGregor (whose Woolf Works was featured last year and will also be part of this year’s program) are “at the top of their game right now,” Luckett said. “What’s wonderful about these 21st-century full-length ballets is they’re more cinematic. They have constant scene changes, constant visual fluidity. They are immersive.”

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The Winter’s Tale is indeed visually stunning, due to sets and costumes designed by Bob Crowley, projections by Daniel Brodie, silk effects by puppeteer Basil Twist and lighting design by Natasha Katz. The original score is by Wheeldon’s longtime collaborator Joby Talbot.

The production was also appealing to ABT because, unlike the older ballets that often feature only two lead characters, The Winter’s Tale has multiple leading characters, which is great for a large company like theirs. “It gives people stuff to sink their teeth into,” Luckett said.

The Winter’s Tale follows the dramatic marriage of King Leontes and Hermione through its romantic ups and tragic downs. Company soloist Carlos Gonzalez dances the character of Florizel, the son of King Polixenes (Leontes’ friend-turned-enemy) of Bohemia. Florizel falls deeply in love with Perdita, a young shepherdess who, in a great Shakespearean twist, is later revealed to be Leontes’ daughter. To prepare for his role, Gonzalez researched Florizel’s emotional evolution to better understand how to portray him. He also had to build up his physical stamina and figure out how to distribute his energy effectively, as Florizel dances almost nonstop in Act II.

Gonzalez told Observer that Wheeldon’s choreography can be very challenging, noting that, when first learning it, the dancers often worked for hours in the studio to figure out how to make a specific step or lift look good. “Luckily, his choreography also tells the story through the steps that were choreographed. They are always musical, and they always have intention and meaning behind them. So you don’t feel like you have to add on to it to make it look ‘extra’ or ‘performative.’ The story is already there, in the choreography and the music.” He is also happy to be dancing with Catherine Hurlin as his Perdita. “She’s my friend and also a very positive, hard-working and supportive person.”

Luckett said that while Wheeldon’s choreography can be challenging for the dancers, it’s very accessible for audiences. “He doesn’t just use the language of ballet in his works. There’s a lot of tremendous physical movement that’s very powerful. You don’t need specific knowledge of ballet to appreciate it.” Luckett has noticed that people sometimes think the ‘new’ ballets are going to be more challenging to watch and take more effort to sit through, but that isn’t true. “In some ways, it’s like going to see a film… the production really comes to you. It speaks to you.”

The Summer Season opened with Kevin McKenzie’s Swan Lake, celebrating 25 years since its world premiere, followed by McGregor’s Woolf Works, inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf. Ahead is the haunting Romantic-era classic Giselle (through June 28), choreographed by Jean Coralli, Jules Perrot and Marius Petipa, followed by Frederick Ashton’s mid-century mythical love story Sylvia (July 8-12). Closing out the season is another week of Swan Lake (July 14-19). The July 18 performance will mark beloved principal dancer Gillian Murphy’s own Swan Song, as she dances Odette/Odile for the last time before retiring from the company.

Tabula Rasa Dance Theater, the New York-based contemporary company founded in 2018 by Felipe Escalante, brings two powerful works to El Museo del Barrio starting today (June 20) as part of Sin Fronteras – No Borders. The program pairs Border of Lights, a visceral portrayal of the dehumanizing realities faced by immigrants in America, with the world premiere of Escaramuza, Escalante’s tribute to Mexico’s fearless all-female equestrian teams, known for their synchronized, side-saddle maneuvers performed in traditional dress.

Escalante was born in Querétaro, Mexico. He studied folkloric and classical dance and trained with Guillermina Bravo—widely regarded as the most important figure in Mexican Modern Dance—at the National Center of Contemporary Dance, before moving to New York City in 2010. An immigrant himself, it is important to him that his company remains culturally diverse, and the current roster has dancers from Italy, Jamaica, Argentina, Ecuador, México, Haiti, Venezuela and the United States.

Observer recently caught up with Escalante to talk about the upcoming show, shooting stars and the importance of art.

How did you decide to collaborate with the museum for this production?

El Museo del Barrio is a great organization. We applied for a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts to perform at the museum because we think its members are similar to our members and that this might interest them all. Their theater was just restored two years ago, and it’s very nice. We are very happy to be there.

Tell me about the show’s title, Sin Fronteras – No Borders.

At this point in time, I don’t think we should be thinking about borders anymore, you know? Also, I believe that Mexicans, wherever we go, carry no borders. We just have to be who we are.

You will be presenting two pieces in the program. Tell me about Border of Lights.

We created it in 2023. It’s a big piece, eighteen dancers, set to Mozart’s Requiem. It grew out of the phenomenon of demonizing immigrants. Not only in the United States, but everywhere. In Europe and South America, too. But I focus more on the immigrants here, because I came from México. We are called “criminals” and “invaders” and worse. Using this xenophobic language, I was able to make stories and explore, for example, why someone spits at another person. Where does that anger come from?

What does the title Border of Lights mean to you?

It was challenging to title this piece. In the beginning, I thought we should call it “Borders,” because it’s about walls, and we want audiences to understand that the walls that exist are, historically, not great in many ways. But then I thought about how immigrants—any immigrants coming from anywhere—are like shooting stars. They create their own paths to go wherever they have to go. So “Border of Lights” refers to shooting stars. Constellations of lights.

I want to hear about the new piece!

Escaramuza is about México’s female equestrian riders. I’ve had this idea since I was 18. I heard the Violin Concerto by Philip Glass and thought, “I want to do a piece about horses to this.” And finally, this year, I said, “Okay, it’s time to do it.”

It’s really fun. Ten women are literally jumping and running the whole time. It’s twenty-six minutes total, so even though it’s fun to watch, it’s very hard for the dancers.

I grew up with horses in México. One of my cousins was an escaramuza, and when I went to see her in the rodeo, I could not believe that these female riders were riding on their side, like nothing, and making crosses so dangerous and at such an incredible speed. They embody a very fierce and strong femininity, I think. It’s fantastic to see them.

It’s a challenging piece, but the dancers have finally tamed it. It’s quite animalistic, the whole thing. You’re always running, always jumping. There is a moment when you can’t keep going, but you have to, and there’s something in your body that keeps telling you, “Go, go, go, go!”

How does it feel to be presenting this show right now, in the state of our world?

There are a lot of narratives about immigrants, but ours isn’t a common one. We are a dance company that creates work on a professional level, with professional dancers who are also immigrants.

I’m proud and excited to show that Mexicans are not only the people working in the fields gathering food or working in restaurants washing dishes. I’m happy to show that any person who comes from a Latin American country can be a choreographer, a director, a creator of something from their own traditions, music and cultural ideas, and be part of the community in New York.

What would you say the importance of art is at this moment?

I think human beings need a lot of art. We need now, more than ever, to go to museums and to the theater. Humans need to become critical. They need to understand different views. They need to be exposed to all of it. Not only my dance on immigration, but anything. Everything. We are in a challenging process of understanding that we might not be as intelligent as we thought we were, especially with artificial intelligence. It’s hard, but I have hope.

What art have you been consuming lately to escape or get smarter?

I see as much as I can. Dance–big companies, small companies–the orchestra, museums. It’s not easy to try to do and see everything, but art always reminds me of my reason. I become a human when I consume art. It keeps me reasonable. It’s easy to fall into a dogma or an idea, but when you see other points of view, something clicks in your head differently. That’s what I think.

What do you hope audiences will experience at your show?

I hope they experience a mix of feelings. A lot of feelings. I’m looking to touch people in any way I can. I believe that if you come with an open heart and an open mind, you will be touched the way you need to be touched.

Tabula Rasa Dance Theater performs Sin Fronteras – No Borders on June 20, 21 and 22, 2025, at 2:00 p.m. at El Museo del Barrio.

“I feel like I’m losing a part of myself when he steps away from me,” Kristin Draucker told Observer. “Thoughts come into my head about how he’s looking down at me, or how I’m moving away from him, then moving back towards him, trying to find the reasons for why we come together… Sometimes it feels like we’re trying to come back together as one. Sometimes it feels like we’re fighting each other for dominance.”

You might well assume Draucker was talking about a fraught romantic relationship, but she was actually sharing what she thinks about while dancing in Tablet, a duet choreographed by Paul Taylor in 1960 that hasn’t been performed in almost 50 years. The work has been meticulously reconstructed, along with another early piece, Churchyard (1969), for Paul Taylor Dance Company’s return to The Joyce Theater.

This is a love story, in the way that all reconstructions of old masterworks are a type of love story—there is passion, dedication and obsession. But as stories go, it is also a mystery. When reviving a dance created 65 years ago and not performed since 1976, one has to look for clues and gather evidence. In the case of Tablet, the evidence was sparse: photographs, a dark and soundless video of a single rehearsal, some stick figure renderings in Taylor’s notebook, a few reviews and interviews, and the muscle memory of two dancers who can no longer recall any of the steps—only “the sensation” of the piece.

When artistic director Michael Novak, Taylor’s successor since 2018 and a former dancer with the company, was putting together the program for The Joyce, he went back to “the vault,” as he calls it, to find rarely seen or forgotten works to perform alongside Taylor classics Cloven Kingdom (1976), Polaris (1976) and Esplanade (1975). As the leader of a legacy repertory company, he knows it is his responsibility to look at the founder’s extensive archive and bring back works that are “important for our dancers, important for our audiences and important for our field.”

Tablet caught Novak’s eye for several reasons. “It’s whimsical, it’s quirky, it’s athletic, it’s hard,” he laughed, “and I can’t think of anything else like it in the repertory in terms of duets. And I like the fact that audiences won’t have seen it for 50 years. Even though it’s ‘old,’ it still feels like a world premiere in the sense that everyone’s experiencing it new for the first time.” It was the only time Taylor collaborated with abstract artist Ellsworth Kelly, and one of the only pieces he made for Pina Bausch (partnered with Dan Wagoner, who danced with Taylor in the Martha Graham Dance Company at that time). Many people don’t know that Bausch danced for Taylor.

When it came to who would reconstruct Tablet, Novak knew Richard Chen See was the man for the job. Chen See danced with the company from 1993 to 2008, has been staging Taylor’s dances since 1999 and is now the company’s director of licensing. Chen See knows Taylor’s aesthetic, his mind and the way he worked on a bone-deep level. He was excited to take on the role of detective, “digging into every kind of evidence that I could find.”

Bausch and Wagoner are no longer with us, but Chen See knew Wagoner well and was familiar with Bausch’s work. He brought his knowledge of how they both moved to the table, along with the video and other sparse findings. Novak chose Draucker to take on Bausch’s role (“her angularity reminds me of Pina”) and Devon Louis to take on Wagoner’s (“his muscularity and power and partnering remind me of Paul”). The two have been paired together before in, as Draucker said, “quite a few tricky and rather dangerous things,” so they have a built-in trust.

“Paul used to say, ‘I look at the success of my work when it still speaks to me, no matter who’s dancing it,’” Chen See told Observer. Bausch and Wagoner leave big shoes to fill, but Draucker and Louis have stepped into them with gusto, and the work definitely still speaks.

For Draucker, dancing a role originated for Bausch is a dream come true. She fell in love with Bausch’s work at the same time she did Taylor’s. When Bausch passed in 2009, she remembers thinking, “Now she’ll never see me dance.” But after watching the dark and grainy video of Bausch twisting, ribbon-like, in Tablet, Draucker realized that “through this work I could connect with this woman who has influenced the way I think about dance so deeply, in a way in which I could never have imagined. So it feels like such a rare, precious gift that I’m holding super close to my heart, artistically.”

Louis was thrilled to help resurrect the duet as well. For him, it’s an opportunity to connect with a younger version of Taylor, with whom he never got to work. “For a large portion of the dance, I kind of go into a trance state,” he explained. “Not because I’m not focused and not interested, but because dance really is like church for me. Once I get the movements and the timing and all that out of the way, it feels like I’m floating, honestly.”

Thanks to Chen See’s research, Tablet’s choreography is as close to the original as possible. The music, a challenging commissioned score by David Hollister, is original, too. Novak said, “It reminds me of Stravinsky a little bit,” Louis said. “It makes no sense sometimes.” Draucker called it “surprising” and “playful.”

The bright costumes and backdrop, originally designed by Kelly, are being faithfully recreated as the artist wanted them to be. Novak noted that “the interplay of color is very distinct in this duet. It’s not muted. It doesn’t accentuate humanity. This is moving visual art.”

Taylor didn’t like to talk about his work, believing dance shouldn’t be tied down by words, so no one—not even Chen See—knows what Tablet is “about.” When I asked those involved, everyone had different interpretations. Draucker thought it was about one being separated into two. Louis said it’s about “a form of unity… Masculine and feminine energies working as a unit, being stronger on their own and then coming back together to make one full image.” Novak said, “You can look at it through the lens of binary and soft versus rigid and stuff like that… I see it more as an exploration of shape and form and color.” Ever the detective, Chen See pointed out that a program from 1962 refers to the piece as “an archaic courtship.”

But all agreed that the process of reconstruction was a joy, and they’re thrilled to bring it back to the stage at The Joyce. “I’m looking forward to the newness of it,” Novak said. “It feels fresh, feels unique. I love it when the curtain goes up and the audience doesn’t know what they’re about to see. And I especially love it when it’s something that is from an era long gone. I think it creates a conversation about bringing your history forward, not just abandoning it. I think it creates curiosity and excitement about Paul, even though he’s no longer with us. And I think it fosters an appreciation for his genius that if we only did the masterworks wouldn’t have the type of nuance we get if we show him in his maturation as a choreographer.”

Draucker said her favorite part is when she first runs at Louis and he picks her up. “I’m in this kind of star shape, perched almost on his shoulders. It feels somewhere between being so happy as a little kid and jumping on top of your father’s shoulders, and being so in love with someone you just want to be on top of them. I have to remind myself that I probably shouldn’t be smiling at that moment, but it feels like my body wants to smile.” It is, after all, a love story.

Tablet is running at The Joyce Theater through June 22, 2025.

“We gather here tonight not only to celebrate dance, but to celebrate a visionary,” said H. E. David Červenka, the Czech Ambassador to Norway. He stood in the sun-drenched foyer of the iconic Oslo Opera House beside the sparkling Ingrid Lorentzen, artistic director of the Norwegian National Ballet, at the opening reception for Wings of Time, the most comprehensive collection of work by the world-renowned Czech choreographer and multimedia artist Jiří Kylián ever presented. “Culture is often used to build bridges,” Červenka said. “Jiří Kylián is the bridge.”

Kylián, 78 years old and dapper and unassuming in a black leather jacket and jeans, hesitantly joined them on the platform. “I wasn’t going to speak,” he said. “This is a very unique experience for me. I’m very humbled and a happy boy.”

Later, Lorentzen—a former principal dancer with the ballet—said to Kylián, “You’re not going to like this word, but when I first met you, I felt I was in the presence of a god.” He just shook his head and laughed. Later still, the Opera House’s Norwegian architect and co-founder of Snøhetta, Kjetil Trædal Thorsen, complimented the festival’s use of the entire iceberg-shaped building, from its slanted glass façade to its walkable roof to its three theaters and backstage. “What is life about? It’s about where my body is. At all times,” he said. “Your pieces are continually related to space.” Kylián responded, “Everything is about time and space. Time never stops, and space never stops.”

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These conversations happened days apart, but they all took place in the Opera House’s bright oak-walled foyer and have melded together in my recollections. Time did a funny thing during my three days at the festival in Oslo, bending in on itself before ceasing to matter. At the opening reception on May 29, Kylián ended his speech to the hundreds of international audience members by saying, “In this troubled world, to be able to do something like what we are doing here is remarkable. Extraordinary. And we deserve it. We deserve some kind of spirituality. We deserve culture. We deserve these things, so enjoy this moment. It’s now. Enjoy it.”

Wings of Time is extraordinary in its breadth and its execution. It celebrates Kylián’s impressive artistic legacy by presenting seven of his greatest ballets alongside his films, sculptures, photographs and installations.

Kylián was born and raised in Prague, Czechoslovakia. His mother, a dance prodigy, instilled in him a love of movement and music and took him to see his first ballet when he was nine years old. He began studying dance at the Prague Conservatory and then at the Royal Ballet School in London, where he met John Cranko, who invited him to join the Stuttgart Ballet. He soon began choreographing his own ballets to great acclaim and was invited to be the artistic director of Nederlands Dans Theater, where he remained from 1975 to 1999 before leaving to focus on his artistic projects. He has created nearly 100 dance works over the course of his career.

So, why is this retrospective of a Czech-born, Netherlands-based artist being organized by the Norwegian National Ballet? Kylián has had a long and faithful relationship with the company. They have performed twenty-seven of his works over nearly 40 years, and when the Oslo Opera House opened in 2008, it was with his work Worlds Beyond. The Norwegian National Ballet has been, in a way, Kylián’s artistic home away from home.

The ballets

Seven of Kylián’s ballets (spanning 1978 to 2008) are presented as part of Wings of Time on the Main Stage in two programs: Day Before Tomorrow and Day After Yesterday. (I admit it took me a minute, but they both mean “now.”) Before each performance, the audience is invited to witness a flash mob of Norwegian students dancing an excerpt from Chapeau (2005) on the Opera House’s roof. With colorful, sparkly top hats and jazzy kicks set to Prince’s “The Work,” it’s the perfect apéritif before the hearty meal.

Day Before Tomorrow, which I saw at its premiere, consists of three of Kylián’s more recent works, each its own beautiful beast and more stunning than the last. In Wings of Wax (1997), a tree is suspended upside down at the center of the stage. Eight dancers move in a classical then disjointed style to Heinrich von Biber, John Cage, Philip Glass and Johann Sebastian Bach. They slow-motion fly-walk and flutter their feet, flocking with V arms before splitting into pairs. I thought of Icarus and Daedalus, of flying and falling, and as a dangling light rotated around the stage–the cycles of darkness and light. Gods and Dogs (2008) is starkly different. Set to Ludwig van Beethoven’s “String Quartet No. 1 in F major” (interrupted by Dirk Haubrich’s electronic composition), the eight dancers use a more contemporary, grounded movement vocabulary to explore their animalistic and divine sides. Someone slither-crawls off the stage and reappears from beneath the back curtain. Another creeps over a lit candle. A video projection morphs from an amorphous white mass to a large dog, open-mouthed, running straight at us, and then a man is lit up like his body is made of stars. Bella Figura (1995), which closed the program, cuts up the space with curtains that close and open, rise and fall, to block out and zoom in on the dance in a way I’d never seen before.

The second program, Day After Yesterday, features four of Kylián’s earlier ballets, all set to live orchestra: Forgotten Land (1981), No More Play (1988), Petite Mort (1991) and Symphony of Psalms (1978). The ballets on this program are more traditional and collaborate with the music in a truly remarkable way. The movement seems to bring out the music while the music brings out the movement. Together, they are more than the sum of their parts, though their parts are themselves masterpieces too. In Petite Mort, a favorite when I saw it on May 31, six men dressed to appear undressed dance with their backs to us, swinging swords. They pose and preen to one of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s piano concertos before grabbing six scantily clad women, who rush out and collapse as if they are dead or can’t wait to die before rising again. The pairs soon separate into duets, and this is where Kylián’s talent shines. He is a master at partnering, with a seemingly bottomless supply of emotionally honest, evocative choreography for two.

The films

It turns out Kylián is not only a master choreographer but also a brilliant filmmaker. Emotion Pictures, presented in the Opera House’s Stage 2, features four of his films. While classified as “dance films” (they are choreographed and have no dialogue), they are somehow different from any in that genre I have seen before. Kylián’s style harkens back to Czech surrealism and Ingmar Bergman’s existentialist cinema. They are dreamlike, absurd, occasionally humorous and sometimes harrowing.

All four of the films star Kylián’s wife and longtime muse Sabine Kupferberg, who is as talented an actress as she was a dancer and still very much the love of his life. (During a press tour, Kylián said, “She stood with me at the beginning of my career, we will probably end our careers together, and preferably die at the same exact moment.”) Two of the films, Between Entrance and Exit (2013) and Car-Men (2006), were made in collaboration with director Boris Paval Conen. These two are more narrative and character-driven. The first is a deeply psychological study of a couple’s all-consuming love and grief. The latter is a quirky retelling of Georges Bizet’s Carmen set in a desolate scrapyard. Schwarzfahrer (2014), set in a historic Prague tram from 1930, is a humorous glimpse at the perhaps imagined or remembered meeting of two passengers, and Scalamare (2017) is a visually striking exploration of a couple on the 40th anniversary of their honeymoon, set on the steps of the Monumento ai Caduti in Ancona, Italy.

When I attended the premiere of Emotion Pictures, the great Liv Ullmann was in attendance. During the post-show Q&A, she stood and said that watching these films had been one of the top art experiences of her life.

The installations

Along with being a master choreographer and brilliant filmmaker, Kylián is also an extraordinary visual artist.

Moving Still is a sculptural installation depicting eight of his dancers’ bodies (3D-printed at 138 percent) on the façade of the Opera House. The bodies appear to move through the glass wall, half on the outside and half in the foyer. “The flight between one kind of being and another kind of being,” Kylián said. “Between life and death.”

In the backstage space, Free Fall is an immersive photographic study of Kupferberg, set to music by Bach. “We are all more than one person,” Kylián said of this installation. “And we are all in a state of free fall, until one day we will land for sure.” From there, viewers can walk through Moving On, a purposely imperfect mirrored corridor. “In life, you think everything is straight, but it never is.” That path leads to Ensō, a large installation featuring sand and a rotating mirror, set to Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel.”

It was here, with Ensō, that the festival reached its climax for me. The installation encapsulated everything I’d experienced–Kylián’s use of beautiful music, his obsession with light and dark, with the cycles of time. The night before I left Oslo, I went back to view this piece alone. I stood there for a while, listening and looking down on the sandy Zen Buddhist symbol of everlasting life, watching the huge mirror reflect and turn, reflect and turn, and I knew I was seeing the work of an artist at the height of his abilities. I was understanding something about time and space and life and death that I’d never understood before. I was humbled and a happy girl.

“It’s been a mission of mine to transform the way audiences view and experience tap dance,” critically-acclaimed dancer and choreographer Ayodele Casel told Observer. “Every show I do is an opportunity for that to happen.” We were discussing the world premiere of The Remix, which opens at The Joyce Theater tomorrow (May 28) and runs through June 8. This is her third show at the venue, but this one is different from anything else she’s presented there. “It’s very chill,” she said. “It has the feel of a living room, a lounge, a club. We have the dancers on stage. We have couches on stage. It’s like Nuyorican Poets Cafe meets Smalls Jazz Club meets Joe’s Pub meets The Joyce.”

Part of what Casel wants to transform is the expectation that tap dance should only entertain or only move “fast and funky.” She wants more people to understand that the genre has always been sophisticated, with a depth of expression. “Historically, we have seen that in the beauty of a soft shoe. We have seen that in the showmanship of the Nicholas Brothers and the cool, classy style of Sammy Davis, Jr., and the funky authenticity of Gregory Hines.”

The Remix, which Casel co-created with her wife and creative collaborator, Torya Beard, is rooted in history, but in a more recent period. It remixes highlights from Casel’s two-decade repertoire while paying tribute to the music, movement and cultural spirit of the 1990s. The nineties are significant for Casel for two reasons: it was the time of the major tap renaissance in the U.S., brought on in large part by Savion Glover’s hit musical Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk (1995), and the beginning of her career as a tap dancer.

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Casel, who was born and raised in The Bronx (minus a few formative years spent in Puerto Rico), did not grow up taking formal dance classes, but that didn’t stop her from wanting to be a Janet Jackson dancer. “I was, like, Rhythm Nation-ing myself all over the place,” she said with a laugh. “With my friends, and alone in my living room.” She also grew up watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies, enthusiastically “faking” their footwork in front of her bedroom mirror.

While attending NYU Tisch School of the Arts to study drama, Casel took her first tap class and experienced “the sheer joy of pretending that I was Ginger for a year.” But it was when she met classmate Baakari Wilder (“a real tap dancer”) that Casel saw what tap could do and be. She realized that tap was more than show tunes and movie musicals, that it had vast expressive possibilities. And it was when she first saw Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk at The Public Theater in 1995, that she understood that the history of tap came from her ancestors, rooted “in the souls and the feet of Black people,” that this was something she, too, could do.

Casel devoted herself to this percussive art form that was rapidly changing before her eyes. She “showed up to everything and practiced like a maniac.” She begged a construction worker for an extra 4×4 piece of wood and dragged it through Union Square and onto the 5 train so she could practice at home. She danced to the music she was listening to then, “as a young Black and Puerto Rican human woman in the Bronx”—mostly Hip Hop and R&B.

In 1997, Glover spotted her tapping after a show at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the Lower East Side and was impressed. He invited her to join and tour with his new company, Not Your Ordinary Tappers, along with Jason Samuels Smith and Abron Glover. This is where she received, as she says, the best education on the road.

Casel was feeling nostalgic about that time in her life, when she would tap to The Fugees and Digable Planets because it felt so good on her body and in her feet, when she spent most of her time practicing with and learning from friends. Beard said, “Well, maybe we should make a show about that.” So they did.

The Remix is a 90-minute show choreographed by Casel and directed by Beard, containing reimagined excerpts from Casel’s diverse body of work, including Audrey (2005), Where We Dwell (2021), Funny Girl (2022), Push/Pull (2022), and Diary of a Tap Dancer (2024), along with new works by guest choreographers Naomi Funaki & Caleb Teicher, Quynn L. Johnson, and Ryan K. Johnson. The result is a celebration of Casel’s career, and also something entirely new.

The ensemble consists of nine top-of-their-game tap artists (including Casel), a poet (Tony McPherson), a freestyle artist (SuB a.k.a. Elijah Bullard), and two musicians (Keisel Jiménez on percussion and Raúl Reyes on bass). Liberty Styles will DJ as well as dance, and tap artist Jared Alexander created a new musical score inspired by the music of the 90s, with odes to Queen Latifah, A Tribe Called Quest, and The Fugees woven throughout.

Casel has worked with all of the artists (except SuB, who she described as “the missing link”) for many years, so creating a show that celebrates community, friendship, and collaboration came easily for everyone. “In this time, in 2025, with everything that is going on in the world, everybody can use a jolt of joy,” Casel said. “That is one of the things that I hope people feel when they sit down and join our living room.”

She also hopes audiences feel a deeper understanding and appreciation of the art form she’s dedicated her life to. “Tap is constantly evolving,” she explained. “So when you come to see us, you have to expand beyond what you expected to see and or hear. These are world-class artists. They are constantly investigating. So stay with us. Go with us on this journey. And stay open.” You just might be transformed.

Ayodele Casel’s The Remix runs May 28 through June 8 at The Joyce Theater in New York City.  

New York City Ballet galas are always elegant affairs, and last week’s, chaired by Liz and Jeff Peek, Deborah Roberts and Diana Taylor, was no exception. Despite near-bursting clouds, guests in color palettes darker than usual for a spring event—NYCB principal dancers Tiler Peck and Gilbert Bolden III looked particularly divine—braved the unsure weather, strolling around Lincoln Center Plaza and posing by Revson Fountain before heading indoors to sip champagne or “The Waltz,” the evening’s hibiscus-topped signature cocktail, on the David H. Koch Theater’s Promenade among cherry blossoms and pink lights.

The co-chair committee was a Who’s Who of Hollywood, with actors Claire Danes and Hugh Dancy, Ariana DeBose, Nina Dobrev and Diane Kruger. Spotted among the glitterati were cultural philanthropist and power donor Michael Bloomberg, literal rockstar Debbie Harry, choreographer and Mick Jagger fiancée Melanie Hamrick, author Jill Kargman (who once told Observer that “To me, the term ‘socialite’ negates actual work as the social part eclipses any career”), actress Bianca Lawson, actress Nia Long, TV personality Al Roker, beauty and fashion influencer Jessica Wang and many more.

After cocktails (and before a delightful sit-down dinner), we followed the crowd down into the theater for the evening’s performance. First on the program was See the Music…, an insightful musical exploration of the score of George Balanchine’s ballet Vienna Waltzes, led by the New York City Ballet Orchestra’s music director Andrew Litton and last performed in 2013.

After the orchestra pit rose so the audience could see all sixty-two musicians—what a treat!—Litton explained that the Viennese Waltz, made popular in the late 1700s, has a rhythm slightly different from other waltzes. The second beat of the triple beat gets played slightly early (instead of ONE, two, three, it is more like one, TWO, three). He told the assembled dance enthusiasts that this is an example of the music adapting to the dance, instead of the dance adapting to the music.

To illustrate just how the waltz has evolved over time, the orchestra played excerpts from the ballet’s sections, composed by Johann Strauss II, Franz Lehár and Richard Strauss, and then the pit descended to its usual position, the musicians quieting as the house lights dimmed.

Vienna Waltzes first premiered in 1977 to much acclaim, and it’s easy to see why. The five-part piece, which has only ever been performed by NYCB, shows off Balanchine’s exemplary musicality as well as his collaborators’ talents. The choreography for over fifty dancers is lovely, but Rouben Ter-Arutunian’s scenery (ranging from an Austrian forest to a dance hall to a society café to a grand mirrored ballroom) and Barbara Karinska’s lavish costumes (the last she made for the Company) are absolutely extraordinary.

The ballet opens with two dancers (Emilie Gerrity and Peter Walker) strolling through an evening forest, all verdant greens and deep blues. They are very refined in white gloves, a suit, and a petal pink gown. More couples join and begin waltzing, but the original couple stays on after everyone else leaves, still spinning. It’s all very romantic.

In the second section, the two trees at the front of the stage lift, revealing beautiful dangling roots. A dancer (Megan Fairchild) rushes on, and we are suddenly thrust into the world of ballet. She is wearing a tutu and pointe shoes. She is dancing. Her partner (Joseph Gordon) soon joins, and he is dancing, too. The third section is perhaps the oddest, moving into the world of Americana polka, but then in the fourth, the rest of the trees lift and their roots become drapery dangling from the ceiling. Mira Nadon leads a theatrical half-ballet and half-ballroom segment with magnetic grace.

The fifth section, the ballet’s finale, is an amazing spectacle. The backdrop lifts again to reveal mirrored walls and branchy chandeliers, and we are suddenly in a grand ballroom, watching a woman (Sara Mearns) in a long white gown dance with herself. Many others join, but Mearns glides across the stage as if this is her very own dream, and maybe it is.

Hazel Wang, Jessica Wang and Capri Wang

Guests with Deborah Norville (center), Diana Taylor (center right) and Michael Bloomberg (right)

Christian Zimmermann, Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia

Debbie Harry and Harrison Ball

Diane Kruger

Nina Dobrev

Deborah Norville and Karl Wellner

Gilbert Bolden

Tony Marion and Ariana DeBose

Spencer Peters and Nia Long

Rommie Tomasini

Deborah Roberts and Al Roker

Claire Paull, Steven Beltrani, Ivan Pol and guests

Jean Shafiroff

Luke Preute and Alexa Maxwell

Elizabeth “Lizzie” Asher

Olivia Bell

Allyson Tang and Rob Pollock

Diana Taylor

Caryn Zucker, Deborah Roberts, Crystal McGuire and guests

Jeff Peek and Liz Peek

Bianca Lawson