NDT in NYC

NEW YORK CITY   Nederlands Dans Theater returns to New York City Center for the first time since Emily Molnar took the helm. William Forsythe’s N.N.N.N. is joined by a pair of U.S. premieres: Imre and Marne van Opstal’s The Point Being and Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar’s Jakie. April 3–6. nycitycenter.org. —Courtney Escoyne

Centering Latina Voices

SAN FRANCISCO  The Carmen premiering at San Francisco Ballet this month won’t look or sound the same as usual. Choreographer Arielle Smith (a 2022 “25 to Watch” pick) sets the tale in contemporary Cuba—specifically at the family restaurant to which the titular heroine returns with her new husband after the death of her mother—while refocusing the story on Carmen and emphasizing the depth and complexity of the characters with cinematic flair. Escamillo, whom Carmen falls in love with, is recast as a woman, and the new score by Arturo O’Farrill only references the familiar Bizet opera as it layers in Cuban folk music. Joining the new ballet on the Dos Mujeres program is Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s Frida Kahlo–inspired Broken Wings (which SFB artistic director Tamara Rojo commissioned and starred in during her English National Ballet tenure). The evening marks the first double bill choreographed by women and the first full program dedicated to Latinx stories at SFB. April 4–14. sfballet.org. —CE

Eclipsing All Else

NEW YORK CITY  Ahead of the Great North American Eclipse on April 8, the feath3r theory alights at NYU Skirball to premiere a devised dance theater work about a group of friends who team up to watch the celestial event and miss it. Raja Feather Kelly draws on Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, the popularity of the science fiction concept of the multiverse, and the ways social media exacerbates loneliness and society’s inability to face it for The Absolute Future (or Death, Loneliness, and The Absolute Future of the Multiverse, or How to Cover the Sun with Mud). April 5–6. nyuskirball.org. —CE

Carnival of Politics

SEATTLE  Choreographed and directed by Francesca Harper and performed by dancer Wendy Whelan and poet Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Carnival of the Animals reframes the Camille Saint-Saëns classic to consider the animals of a political jungle as it responds to the January 6 insurrection and contemplates the future of democracy. The SOZO-produced work premieres at the Meany Center for the Performing Arts on April 6. sozoartists.com. —CE

Memories of Matriarchs

HOUSTON  With three “Bessie” Awards, the Rome Prize, and a sumptuous stage presence, Jasmine Hearn is one of the most acclaimed contemporary dance artists to come out of Houston. But Memory Fleet: A Return to Matr, a performance, installation, and online archive that preserves the memories of eight Black Houston matriarchs, is their first major commission in their hometown. Commissioned by DiverseWorks, the multidisciplinary project includes original sound scores, choreography, and garments, along with guest performances by former Houston Ballet soloist Sandra Organ Solis and additional vocals and performances by local dancers and “Houston Aunties,” as Hearn calls them. The premiere at Houston Met April 6–7 will be followed by tours to Pittsburgh and New York City. diverseworks.org. —Nancy Wozny

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

COSTA MESA, CA  American Ballet Theatre presents the North American premiere of Woolf Works, Wayne McGregor’s three-act meditation on the writings of Virginia Woolf, at Segerstrom Center for the Arts. Inspired by her novels Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves as well as her letters and diaries, the critically acclaimed ballet eschews narrative adaptation to take a stream of consciousness approach to the modernist writer’s oeuvre. April 11–14. abt.org. —CE

Packed With Premieres

CHICAGO  South Chicago Dance Theatre returns to the Auditorium Theatre for an evening filled to the brim with premieres by Donald Byrd, Joshua Blake Carter, Monique Haley, Tsai Hsi Hung, Terence Marling, and founding executive artistic director Kia Smith. April 27. southchicagodancetheatre.com. —CE

The Weight of a Lie

ZURICH  Cathy Marston brings her penchant for literary adaptation to Atonement, her first new work as Ballett Zürich’s director. In Ian McEwan’s novel and Joe Wright’s acclaimed film adaptation, teenage writer Briony Tallis tells a deliberate lie about her older sister’s lover and spends the rest of her life attempting to make up for its unintended consequences. Marston transfers the action to the world of ballet, making Tallis a choreographer while wrestling with the story’s questions about the fallibility of memory and the nature of self-deception and guilt. April 28–June 7. opernhaus.ch. —CE

A Jazzy Centennial

Dance artists join the nationwide celebration of iconic jazz drummer and composer Max Roach.

Max Roach 100 at The Joyce Theater

NEW YORK CITY  Richard Colton curated The Joyce Theater’s Max Roach 100 program, which will feature a new work to Roach’s Percussion Bitter Sweet album by Ronald K. Brown for Malpaso Dance Company and EVIDENCE, A Dance Company; Rennie Harris Puremovement in The Dream/It’s Time; and a solo by tap star Ayodele Casel set to a series of duets by Roach and Cecil Taylor. April 2–7. joyce.org. —CE

Bill T. Jones at Harlem Stage

NEW YORK CITY  Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company revisits Degga, a 1995 collaboration between Jones, Max Roach, and Toni Morrison, as part of Harlem Stage’s E-Moves program. Also on offer is a new work by Roderick George. April 19–20. harlemstage.org. —CE

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Clarissa Rivera Dyas

Freelance dancer and choreographer

Clarissa Rivera Dyas thrives most in collaboration with other artists, and layers different art forms with sophistication. She created Something Remains, her 2022 evening-length choreographic debut, with visual artist and composer Jakob Pek. In it, Dyas and her three dancers pushed the boundaries of physicality as they danced with long rolls of paper and paint, serving as both brushes and canvas. Her dynamic movement, which defied predictability as it showcased both strength and vulnerability, served as the perfect counterpoint to Pek’s experimental score.

Dyas, a sought-after performer for artists like Robert Moses, prioritizes disrupting norms, challenging expectations, and embracing the raw, vulnerable, and even sloppy in her work. “How can we involve the idea of failure?” she asks. “As a Black queer artist, there is little room for failure. How can we allow for failure?”

In 2021, after recurring experiences of being tokenized in the largely white-led Bay Area dance scene, she co-founded the nonhierarchical artist collective RUPTURE alongside fellow queer Black artists jose e. abad, Stephanie Hewett, Gabriele Christian, and Styles Alexander. “It’s about being in process with collective rest, play, and somatic experimentation as resistance,” she says, “challenging what it means to be in dance and performance.” A RUPTURE event might include dance, live sound design, spoken word, visual art, multimedia elements, community engagement, improvisation, and play. In June, the cohort will present a new work at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture.

—Rachel Caldwell

Danielle Swatzie

Freelance dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker

If any contemporary dance artist captures the spirit of Atlanta’s up-and-coming generation, it’s Danielle Swatzie. Take her solo The Fleeting Serenade. In the section set to Ella Fitzgerald’s rendition of the jazz standard “Angel Eyes,” Swatzie whirls across the stage, her legs slicing arcs, arms gesturing in staccato bursts as she embodies the emotional turmoil churning beneath the song’s smooth surface.

A graduate of Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, Swatzie is equally compelling in front of or behind a camera. She creates an aura of honesty, thoughtfulness, and fearless compassion combined with a drive to unpack­ inner emotional landscapes. Her dance films, which illuminate a vision of a more equitable world, have been garnering increasing attention. META, a solo reflecting on family, generational trauma, and feminine empowerment, received the 2021 BronzeLens Film Festival Award for Best Music/Dance Video. Her growing roots through concrete was selected for American Dance Festival’s 2023 Movies By Movers festival. The film features seven young women artists, Black and white, who join together in precarious group counterbalances to confront individual experiences with racism and find wholeness as a community—as Swatzie says, through “radical connection and radical love to manifest radical change.”

—Cynthia Bond Perry

Grace Rookstool

Soloist, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre

Last season, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s statuesque Grace Rookstool made a pair of major debuts. The then–corps-member embodied emotional resilience as Mina in Michael Pink’s Dracula and showed off her commanding stage presence and technical prowess as Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty. She dances with an assuredness that artistic director Adam McKinney says got her promoted to the rank of soloist for this season. “She is a consummate professional, a classicist, and has a natural sensibility to embody music,” he says of the 23-year-old.

Born and raised on Whidbey Island, Washington, Rookstool trained at Pacific Northwest Ballet School and in its Professional Division Program. While there, she was selected for an exchange program with Dresden Semperoper Ballett and danced in its production of La Bayadère. She joined PBT’s corps de ballet in 2019.

A truly versatile dancer, Rookstool says she most enjoys high-flying jumps. Expect her career to soar in 2024.

—Steve Sucato

Erina Ueda

Dancer, Giordano Dance Chicago

Erina Ueda’s breakout moment with Giordano Dance Chicago came last April in Kia Smith’s Luminescence. With a cast of 22 dancers filling the cavernous Harris Theater, the piece starts and ends with Ueda completely alone, in a solo showcasing her unbridled facility and unflappable joy. Giordano’s dancers are known for their silky jazz technique balanced with razor-sharp precision. Ueda has that and more, bringing honesty and authenticity to the company’s rep. 

Ueda earned a BFA in dance with a minor in psychology from the University of Arizona, not too far from her hometown of Chandler, Arizona. Born in Japan, she was the first Asian woman to join the 60-year-old Giordano company. She’s upped its digital game, too, as the company’s social media manager and video content producer since her arrival in 2022.

—Lauren Warnecke

Donovan Reed

Dancer, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham

Nature metaphors spring to mind as you watch A.I.M by Kyle Abraham’s Donovan Reed. They seem driven by wind, buoyed by water, licked by fire. They might stop a liquid phrase cold with a thorny angle—not breaking the spider’s thread of movement, but rather snapping it taut. They can make the unlikeliest shapes look organic. (Though these qualities never feel less than authentic to Reed, they are very Abraham-esque: Reed, who’s danced with A.I.M since 2018, can channel the choreographer with uncanny precision.)

But Reed is an unmistakably human performer, too. In Abraham’s MotorRover—a duet that responds to Merce Cunningham’s 1972 work Landrover—they temper Cunningham’s signature formality with playfulness and wit, carrying on a danced conversation with partner Jamaal Bowman that seems full of little inside jokes. Reed’s a force of nature with a soul.

—Margaret Fuhrer

Kaitlyn Sardin

Irish and hip-hop dancer

You might know her as @kaitrock: the artist whose one-of-a-kind, Irish-dance-meets-hip-hop mashups have earned her an avid following on Instagram and beyond. While traditional Irish dance, with its strict verticality, might seem at odds with more full-bodied and grounded ways of moving, Kaitlyn Sardin finds their common thread: rhythm. Through drumming feet, swiping arms, or swiveling knees, she can tease out the intricacies of whatever sound is fueling her. (Beyoncé, Tinashe, and Victoria Monét are a few current favorites.) In every aspect of her short-form solos—including her colorful fashion choices—she is unabashedly herself.

A former competitive Irish dancer with a foundation of razor-sharp technique (she grew up training at the Watters School in Orlando), Sardin broadened her dance horizons as a student at Hofstra University, where she began adding forms like dancehall and vogue to her vocabulary. She has toured with the Chicago-based Trinity Irish Dance Company and is gearing up for new projects in 2024. From February 14–March 3, you can find her performing in Jean Butler’s What We Hold at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan. 

Being Black and queer in the mostly white, sometimes culturally conservative world of Irish dance, she’s aware that younger dancers who break with convention might see themselves in her. Her advice for them? “Just go for it. Don’t be afraid, and the world will embrace you.”

—Siobhan Burke

Jake Roxander

Corps member, American Ballet Theatre

Watching Jake Roxander as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet last July, it was hard to believe that he was making his Metropolitan Opera House debut in the role. Without a trace of nerves, the 21-year-old American Ballet Theatre corps member fully inhabited the character—cocky, loveable, magnetic, with flashes of hot-tempered recklessness. Then there was his dancing: Each solo was thrillingly virtuosic and highly musical, with pirouettes that paused momentarily on relevé—just enough time for him to give an impish grin before he was on to the next feat. 

Roxander comes from a family of dancers; he and his brother Ashton, a principal with Philadelphia Ballet, were trained by parents David and Elyse Roxander at their studio in Medford, Oregon. He spent a season with Philadelphia Ballet’s second company before joining ABT’s Studio Company in 2020, where he stood out in Balanchine’s Stars and Stripes and a duet from Twyla Tharp’s Known by Heart.

ABT has wasted no time pushing Roxander to the forefront since he joined the main company in 2022. This fall he danced principal roles in Harald Lander’s Études and Alexei Ratmansky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and debuted in the role of Puck in Sir Frederick Ashton’s The Dream. With his powerful, unforced technique and boy-next-door charm, he is making a name for himself, and fast. 

—Amy Brandt

Jindallae Bernard

Choreographer, filmmaker, and corps member, Houston Ballet

Jindallae Bernard’s portrayal of the jealous Lady Rokujo in Nao Kusuzaki’s Genji, an Asia Society Texas Center commission, exuded chilly charm and understated, seductive sensuality. Her quiet authority and stoic elegance also served her well in Stanton Welch’s neoclassical Tu Tu at Houston Ballet, though she proved equally capable of turning up the voltage in Balanchine’s Stars and Stripes. And her talents extend to choreography and filmmaking, too.

Bernard joined Houston Ballet’s corps in 2022. She’s been with the organization since she was 6 years old, rising through the Academy and Houston Ballet II before landing an apprenticeship in 2021. During her training, she took on several choreographic opportunities. Her whimsical short dance film Phase, created in 2020 during a virtual summer program composition class, so caught the eye of artistic director Stanton Welch that the company showcased it during its first live performance after the pandemic pause. “Her work feels so high-end, from the story to her use of color and light, and her directorial insight,” says Welch. He selected her to premiere a new ballet in December for the company’s annual Jubilee of Dance, for which she created Parodie de l’histoire du ballet. Says Bernard: “My goal is to contribute in as many ways as I can.”

—Nancy Wozny

Kia Smith

Executive artistic director, South Chicago Dance Theatre

Last year’s premiere of Memoirs of Jazz in the Alley proved a perfect showcase for choreographer and director Kia Smith. The evening-length “dance opera” exemplified her choreographic voice—note-by-note precision, fluid torso movement, unexpected gesture, powerful unison—and marked the debut of her 7-year-old company, South Chicago Dance Theatre, at the Auditorium Theatre, its largest venue to date. The work paid homage to Smith’s childhood experiences at her musician father’s weekly Jazz in the Alley gatherings. That background surfaces in the way her dances feel born out of the detail and nuance of jazz music.

Smith’s success lies not only in her artistic acumen but also in the way she considers dance and the business of it on a large scale. The Chicago native is both artistic and executive director of SCDT, which has expanded its presence at home through the South Chicago Dance Festival and abroad with its Choreographic Diplomacy international exchange program. Amidst a growing list of outside commissions—notably including the rousing Luminescence for Giordano Dance Chicago’s 60th anniversary last spring—this year Smith will bring her company on tour to Seoul, South Korea, and return to the Auditorium Theatre with another world premiere.

—Maureen Janson

Hohyun Kang

Sujet, Paris Opéra Ballet

A morbid teenager involved in a murder-suicide isn’t exactly an easy first major role. Yet from the moment South Korea’s Hohyun Kang, who joined Paris Opéra Ballet in 2018, stepped out as Mary Vetsera in Mayerling last season, she found logic and purpose in Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s choreography. As she draped herself around Paul Marque, her Prince Rudolf, her lines sizzled with dramatic tension.

It was an arresting breakthrough for the 28-year-old, who had been on balletomanes’ radar for her easy, radiant musicality and technique in ballets such as Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco. A graduate of Korea National University of Arts, she was noticed by William Forsythe shortly after joining POB and landed a soloist role in his Blake Works I, before quietly making her way up the ranks and becoming a sujet (soloist) last season. She is already slated for a Kitri debut in April—and may well follow in the footsteps of Paris’ first South Korean étoile, Sae Eun Park.

—Laura Cappelle

Karla Puno Garcia

Musical theater choreographer

When last year’s Tony Awards had to go without a script and instead lean on dance to set the scene, host Ariana DeBose knew just the choreographer who could pull it off: Karla Puno Garcia. The resulting opening number brought viewers on a danced journey through the United Palace theater, using Garcia’s spunky, sassy movement to amp up excitement for the night. Later, Garcia’s unapologetically feminine flair and super-satisfying musicality showcased DeBose and Julianne Hough in a duet that felt both timely and timeless.

Garcia was the first woman of color to choreograph the Tonys. But it’s far from her only brush with the event. A Broadway vet who’s been dancing on the Great White Way since her college days at New York University, she previously performed with the casts of Gigi and Hamilton at the Tonys and was a dancer and associate choreographer in 2021 when Sergio Trujillo choreographed the opening number. Soon, she may even be up for a Tony herself: She’s making her Broadway choreographic debut this January with Days of Wine and Roses, which she co-choreographed with Trujillo.

For his part, Trujillo thinks she’s “unstoppable” as a choreographer: “Karla’s like a musician that can play all the instruments with her feet and arms and body,” he says. “She comes across as incredibly gentle, but she’s a force to be reckoned with.”

—Jennifer Heimlich

Kuu Sakuragi

Soloist, Pacific Northwest Ballet

With a raw physicality matched with bighearted sensitivity, Kuu Sakuragi is quickly heading toward rockstar status at Pacific Northwest Ballet. He creates electrifying spectacles onstage, delivering one jaw-dropping performance after another. His big technical jumps look as if he’s floating on air, an impression only heightened by his gravity-defying turnin David Parsons’ Caught, while his warmth and humility come through as deference to the other dancers onstage, as in Alexei Ratmansky’s Wartime Elegy. A PNB DanceChance student and Professional Division graduate, Sakuragi joined the corps in 2020 after dancing with Alberta Ballet for three years and was promoted to soloist in November. “Certain dancers live more completely in the moment when they’re dancing,” artistic director Peter Boal says. “Nureyev, Wendy Whelan, Carla Körbes come to mind. Kuu is one of them.” 

—Gigi Berardi

Sydnie L. Mosley 

Founding executive and artistic director, SLMDances 

In the spring and summer of 2020, conversations about racial equity and social justice erupted across the dance field. How could exclusionary systems be transformed? How could imbalances of power be corrected? How could people better care for one another?

For the choreographer, performer, educator, and writer Sydnie L. Mosley, these questions were nothing new. The Baltimore-born Mosley has been envisioning a future free from oppression—with dance as one way to get there—at least since 2010, when she founded her Harlem-based collective SLMDances. For people just beginning on that journey, she and her collaborators became a guiding light.

A self-described “creative home for trans, cis, nonbinary, queer, disabled, fat, masculine presenting, Black women and femmes of many generations,” SLMDances takes seriously the term “collective,”operating through a model of shared leadership and responsibility. Their community-engaged, joyfully interactive works have tackled issues like street harassment (The Window Sex Project, 2012) and the economics of dance (BodyBusiness, 2015). Their latest, PURPLE: A Ritual in Nine Spells, honors the Black feminist playwright, poet, and dancer Ntozake Shange, whose legacy Mosley extends through her own intertwining of movement and language. Premiering at Lincoln Center last summer, PURPLE marked a turning point for Mosley in its visibility and scale. Her vision persists; what’s changed, perhaps, is the world’s readiness to join her.

—Siobhan Burke

Laila J. Franklin

Independent dance artist

Contradictions power Laila J. Franklin’s charisma. She can shift from sly comedy to earnest sincerity over the course of an eight-count. She moves with disarming frankness, making even complex gestures look straightforward and open; she also seems to keep part of herself closed to the audience, protective of her own mystery.

That sense of unknowable-ness sits right at the center of choreographer Miguel Gutierrez’s I as another, which Gutierrez and Franklin performed in New York City last spring. The intimate, probing duet suggests we can never truly know each other, or even ourselves—but we can try. In I as another, Franklin showed a kind of virtuosic empathy, living fully inside Gutierrez’s creative vision without erasing herself. Forget walking in someone else’s shoes—she can dance in their feet.

Franklin, who earned a BFA from Boston Conservatory in 2019 and an MFA from the University of Iowa in 2021, is also a choreographer, teaching artist, and writer. Maybe over time we’ll get to know her better through her own work. Maybe she’ll always keep part of herself a mystery. Either way, she’ll be holding our attention.

—Margaret Fuhrer

Lucy Fandel

Independent dancer and choreographer

In the semi-improvised, place-based dance Lucy Fandel creates, the land is something alive, not just a backdrop. “The inhaling clouds, quivering blades of grass, swarms of gnats, or the occasional romping dog pulled us in,” she writes of her and Bailey Eng’s creative explorations during a residency in Spain. In a section of their filmed field notes, Fandel responds viscerally to these movements in the environment while dancing atop a rocky outcropping, at once fluid and angular as she articulates through her hands, rib cage, pelvis. 

A dance artist, writer, and arts outreach worker, Fandel grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, and Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France. “Switching languages forces you to think differently,” she says. She later crossed borders yet again, moving to Montreal to study contemporary dance and sociology at Concordia University. Fandel’s attachment to sociology field work influenced her dance perspective and, today, she’s at the forefront of the burgeoning sustainable eco-dance movement in Canada. She’s right at home engaging with the landscape during her outdoor research (“conversations,” as she calls them), examining the vectors of science and dance while sensitizing people to the natural environment in all its ambiguity and transformation.

—Philip Szporer

Miguel Alejandro Castillo

Choreographer and freelance performing artist

Onstage, Miguel Alejandro Castillo emanates a warmth and wit that creates instant connection. An incredibly committed performance in Faye Driscoll’s whirlwind ensemble work Weathering last April highlighted this generosity. As part of a precarious flesh sculpture that teetered off the edges of a spinning raft, Castillo maintained an active, intense bond with his fellow performers, even as his ponytail swept the ground and it became increasingly unclear whether he was being supported or smothered.

Castillo brings a bright presence and big love into the studio, Driscoll says, alongside an impressive conceptual curiosity. “He’s embracing the full range of human experience,” she says, “connecting the light and the dark.” In his own choreography, the Venezuelan artist, who started in theater, explore­s his native country’s diaspora, blending forms to forge a kind of future folklore.

Castillo recently completed a New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks residency and acted as movement director for the David Lang opera Prisoner of the State. He’ll keep building on that momentum in 2024: In addition to choreographing John Adams’ opera The Gospel According to the Other Mary for Volksoper in Vienna and touring Weathering, Castillo will be a choreographer in residence at both PAGEANT performance space in Brooklyn and Abrons Arts Center in lower Manhattan. 

—Candice Thompson

Naomi Funaki

Tap dancer and choreographer

During the in-person debut of Ayodele Casel’s Chasing Magic, Japanese tap artist Naomi Funaki commanded attention with her clear, confident sounds. She modulated her tones and phrasing to cover a broad emotional spectrum, from contemplative to exuberant, as she floated through a duet, in a role originated by Casel, with joyful ease. “Her technical prowess and rhythmic voice are dynamic and contain so much depth and nuance,” says Casel, who invited Funaki to make her choreographic debut last April during Casel’s Artists at the Center engagement at New York City Center.

Casel is not alone in her sentiments. Funaki was the recipient of a 2023 Princess Grace Award and is an apprentice with Dorrance Dance. She performed in the December premiere of Caleb Teicher’s reworked Bzzz, a tap-meets-beatbox show for which she also served as assistant choreographer, and in January will show off her range in Leonardo Sandoval’s samba-inflected I Didn’t Come to Stay with Music From The Sole.

Ultimately, Funaki’s goal is to bring the spirit and professionalism of the New York City tap community back to Japan. Casel has every faith that she will, and along the way inspire a whole new generation of tap dancers.

—Candice Thompson

Olivia Bell

Corps member, New York City Ballet

Some dancers demand your attention. New York City Ballet’s Olivia Bell politely requests it. But the elegantly understated dancer is no wallflower. A fervent musicality powers her fine-grained technique, giving it a lush, romantic sweep. 

Bell, who only joined New York City Ballet’s corps in May, still has surprises in store. At last summer’s Vail Dance Festival, she danced Balanchine’s Tarantella, a mile-a-minute showstopper that must have been nearly impossible to survive at Vail’s one-and-a-half-mile elevation. Bell handled the challenge with not just polish but sparkle, nailing the work’s witty musical phrasing and showing off the prodigious pirouettes that most of us had previously only seen on her Instagram page. Here’s to more surprises, and soon, on NYCB’s stage. 

—Margaret Fuhrer

Pauline Casiño 

Commercial dancer

Pauline Casiño booked her Broadway debut without an in-person audition. She learned about casting for Once Upon a One More Time, directed and choreographed by Keone and Mari Madrid, after the first round of auditions had already concluded and asked her agent to help find a way in. “I always knew of Keone and Mari,” she says. “As a fellow Filipino, I wanted to be part of something they’re creating.” Even though she had never taken class with the Madrids, let alone worked with them before, she landed the part of Esmeralda through a video submission. Onstage, she brought the ensemble character to life with her unforgettable fluidity, powerful femininity, and magnetic presence.

Casiño, who moved to the Bronx from the Philippines at age 12, grew up thinking dance was extracurricular. While studying chemistry in college, she danced in commercial choreographer Candace Brown’s The Soul Spot and BTS’ Love Yourself: Speak Yourself New Jersey concert, but it wasn’t until she graduated in 2020 that she fully embraced dance as her profession. Since then, she has performed with Anitta and Doja Cat at MTV’s Video Music Awards, as well as choreographed and directed her own dance visual. Only three and a half years into seriously pursuing a dance career, Casiño has already proved she has star quality. 

—Kristi Yeung

Rafael Ramírez

Flamenco dancer and choreographer

With fluid arms, deep, effortless lunges, supple contractions, and rapid, complex footwork, Rafael Ramírez spellbinds. But it is his old soul, which adds sensual vulnerability to his performances, that leaves an indelible impression.

Ramírez’s prowess in both traditional and contemporary flamenco captivates across venues, from Spain’s most prestigious tablaos to international theaters with the companies of famed choreographers such as David Coria and Rafaela Carrasco. He’s also garnered critical recognition: In 2021, he won the highly coveted Desplante Masculino at the International Cante de las Minas Festival and, last year, received the 2023 Best New Artist Award from the prestigious Festival Jerez for his Entorno. He carried that momentum into the 2023 Bienal de Málaga, where he premiered Recelo, a collaborative work with prize-winning dancer Florencia Oz exploring the primal emotion of fear, and into a 10-city U.S. tour of his solo show, Lo Preciso, this past fall. With more performances of Recelo ahead, Ramírez enters 2024 on the road to international recognition.

—Bridgit Lujan

Yuval Cohen

Corps member, Philadelphia Ballet

An elegant carriage and genteel demeanor make Yuval Cohen an ideal storybook prince. But behind that refinement lies impressive power. His explosive, elastic leaps and strong, centered turns had everyone buzzing at last summer’s USA International Ballet Competition in Jackson, Mississippi. The 21-year-old Israeli dancer, a newly promoted Philadelphia Ballet corps member, was the first from his country to medal, taking home the senior bronze.

Cohen’s USA IBC coach was his longtime mentor, Nadya Timofeyeva, with whom he trained at the Jerusalem Ballet School. In 2018, she took him to a competition in Russia, where he won first prize and a spot at the Vaganova Ballet Academy. After becoming the school’s first Israeli graduate in 2021, Cohen joined Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet. But the pandemic created visa complications, forcing him to return home that summer. 

Cohen joined Philadelphia Ballet II in October 2021 and became a company apprentice the following season. He’s already gained notice in a range of featured roles, including a Stepsister in Cinderella, the Gold variation in The Sleeping Beauty, and Escamillo in Angel Corella’s new production of Carmen, which premiered this fall.

—Amy Brandt

Sean Lew 

Commercial dancer and choreographer

In viral YouTube videos, two seasons of NBC’s “World of Dance,” performances with stars from Janet Jackson to Justin Bieber, and his own hour-long dance film, II, Sean Lew has won over millions of fans with his articulate athleticism, honest storytelling, and undeniable charisma. The 22-year-old is far from new to the industry, but he’s still taking his career in new directions. In 2023, he conquered his biggest fear: battling. “It’s not just if you’re good at dancing, then you can battle,” Lew says. “People live, breathe, and eat battling.” He amped up his fitness training and studied freestyle genres such as house and krumping, and, after a humbling early-round loss at his first battle, he went on to win the Red Bull Dance Your Style Los Angeles regionals in April. He then brought home the national title in May and represented the U.S. at the global competition in November.

Despite his newfound commitment to the competitive freestyle scene, Lew continues to grow his career in other areas. Over the last year, he launched his first fitness and dance intensive, Artist Range, with trainer Karl Flores; was a first-time creative director for Jackson Wang’s Coachella performance; and was a first-time co-producer on a Dermot Kennedy music video. “The beauty and curse of my life,” he says, “is I just want to do everything.”

—Kristi Yeung

Solal Mariotte

Independent choreographer and dancer, Rosas

In EXIT ABOVE — after the tempest, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s typically minimalistic world suddenly seemed looser and brighter. The reason? A new generation of dancers, led by French newcomer Solal Mariotte, who got his start in hip hop. The curly-haired 22-year-old acted as a mercurial leader, shifting easily from floor work to the air, launching himself into arresting dives to the floor.

At 18, looking for a challenge, Mariotte applied to P.A.R.T.S., the school founded by De Keersmaeker in Brussels, where he immersed himself in contemporary dance while co-founding a breaking crew, Above The Blood, on the side. In addition to joining Rosas in 2023, he is also developing projects with his crew and as a choreographer. In January, a new version of his solo Collages/Ravages will premiere at the prestigious Suresnes Cités Danse festival in France. With his influences now cross-pollinating­ in captivating ways, a shape-shifting career beckons.

—Laura Cappelle

Kamala Saara

Dancer, Dance Theatre of Harlem

Midway through William Forsythe’s Blake Works IV last April, Kamala Saara transfixed the audience in a soulful, introspective solo. She stretched her long limbs expansively, pulling every inch out of them before retracting dynamically into the next phrase. She seemed to be lost in a dream, her arms sweeping through an unseen atmospheric viscosity. And while the solo is deeply internal, Saara invited the audience at Dance Theatre of Harlem’s New York City Center season into her world. 

Saara, 21, grew up studying at the Yuri Grigoriev School of Ballet in Los Angeles, spent two summers at the Bolshoi Ballet Intensive in New York City, and at 16 was invited to Moscow to perform at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy’s annual gala. She moved to New York in 2019, training first with Andrei Vassiliev before entering the School of American Ballet. SAB’s focus on speed and lightness, she says, made her more versatile.

Meanwhile, then-DTH artistic director Virginia Johnson had had her eye on Saara since Chyrstyn Fentroy invited her to take company class at age 15. Saara joined DTH in 2020, shining in Stanton Welch’s Orange and Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante. This season, she takes on the principal role in Balanchine’s Raymonda-inspired Pas de Dix, adding a glamorous ballerina part to her repertoire. 

—Amy Brandt

Water Street Dance Milwaukee 

Contemporary dance company

In Milwaukee, ballet is king. But funders, dancers, presenters, and audiences are all sitting up and taking notice of Water Street Dance Milwaukee, giving the city the top-shelf contemporary company it deserves. The company, which rehearses in a suburban Milwaukee enclave, launched just as the pandemic hit, but still managed to build a roster of impeccable dancers, create a dance festival, and form pre-professional programs. The city’s dance community is mobilizing around Water Street’s momentum as the company produces new festivals, outdoor pop-up performances, and shared auditions. It performs all over the Midwest, but directo­r Morgan Williams’ goal is to take Water Street international. He sprinkles up-and-coming choreographers, like Kameron­ N. Saunders, Madison Hicks, Braeden Barnes, and Leandro Glory Damasco, Jr., into the rep alongside his own choreography. At just 33, he is a savvy director and choreographer with support from some of the region’s sharpest dance leaders and a long runway ahead.

—Lauren Warnecke

Header collage photo credits, left to right, top to bottom: Ryoko Konami, courtesy Naomi Funaki; Michelle Reid, courtesy Kia Smith; Todd Rosenberg, courtesy Giordano Dance Chicago; Laura Irion, courtesy Karla Puno Garcia; Rosalie O’Connor, courtesy American Ballet Theatre; Angela Sterling, courtesy Pacific Northwest Ballet; Kat Stiennon, courtesy Water Street Dance Milwaukee; Erin Baiano, courtesy New York City Ballet; Jay Spencer, courtesy Miguel Alejandro Castillo; Isabella Herrera, courtesy Kaitlyn Sardin; Julien Benhamou, courtesy Paris Opéra Ballet; Nir Arieli, courtesy Dance Theatre of Harlem; Steven Pisano, courtesy A.I.M by Kyle Abraham; Lawrence Elizabeth Knox, courtesy Houston Ballet; Alex Harmon/Red Bull Content Pool, courtesy Sean Lew; Robbie Sweeny, courtesy Clarissa Rivera Dyas; Anne Van Aerschot, courtesy Rosas; Bailey Bailey, courtesy Laila J. Franklin; C-Unit Studio, courtesy Pauline Casiño; Anita Buzzy Prentiss, courtesy Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre; Nicole Mitchell Photography, courtesy Danielle Swatzie; Gabriel Asensio, courtesy Rafael Ramírez; Camille Augustyniak, courtesy Lucy Fandel; Arian Molina Soca, courtesy Philadelphia Ballet; Travis Coe, courtesy Sydnie L. Mosley.

The post Introducing Our 2024 “25 to Watch” appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The venue kicks off its 20th-anniversary season on September 9 with a celebration of the Harris’ 28 resident companies—15 of which are dance companies, service organizations, and education partners. 

The original vision for the theater was to cater to local music­ and dance organizations that were lacking sufficient space. The 1,499-seat venue was ideal for the city’s jazz and contemporary dance companies at a time when there were few choices between 40 and 4,000 seats. Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and Giordano Dance Chicago were among the first to sign up as resident companies. In more recent years, the Harris has been a launchpad for rising stars like South Chicago Dance Theatre.

But the resident-company program has been far from perfect. Throughout the theater’s 20-year history, questions have swirled around whether the Harris truly provides an affordable model for midsized dance companies, despite its stated mission to provide a state-of-the-art venue for Chicago’s performing artists.

That may be in part because of the other prong in the Harris’ two-pronged mission: Harris Theater Presents, which programs world-class artists from outside Chicago. The initiative has produced some of Chicago’s most thrilling dance moments, including the 2019 North American premiere of Akram Khan’s Giselle and the Chicago premiere of Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring last year. (For the 2023–24 season, it will usher in the return of New York City Ballet, which kicked off the program in 2006 with the company’s first Windy City visit in over 25 years, as well as the Chicago debuts of Khan’s Jungle Book reimagined and New Zealand’s Black Grace.) But for years, local artists felt devalued compared to Harris Theater Presents.

“I think there was this expectation, when you open the doors of this big building that has this big vision for itself, that we would be all-knowing of how to do that right from day one,” says president and CEO Lori Dimun, who was drawn to the Harris specifically by the resident-company program. “The reality is it’s taken bumpy roads and working together. That’s all been part of this learning journey over the past 20 years.”

Dimun started at the Harris in operations in 2011and quickly rose through the ranks, overseeing all aspects of production and facility management and serving as previous CEO Patricia Barretto’s right hand. Barretto died March 3, 2020, after a battle with breast cancer. Dimun thus found herself leading a grieving organization through an unprecedented pandemic.

And yet, the Harris stepped up. Regular resident-company check-ins became a de facto support group and think tank for organizational leaders to strategize how to navigate the pandemic. Rather than each company having to build out their own digital platform, they were able to use the new HT Virtual Stage. And the building itself became an asset that helped Chicago­ dance to keep going.

“Success doesn’t always mean you have 1,500 people in the house,” Dimun says. Some resident companies and service organizations, including See Chicago Dance and Chicago Dancemakers Forum, have office space at the Harris; community partnerships have made better use of the theater’s available rehearsal and lobby spaces.

“We’re letting it take shape in a way that feels supportive of our community and organic, but also still serves our mission,” says Dimun. “Word has spread that we are open to being creative partners beyond just companies that have the ability to present on the stage.”

The post The Harris Theater Celebrates Two Decades of Bold Moves in and for Chicago appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Returning to Form

SAN FRANCISCO  Carrying the theme “IN DIASPORA: I.D. for the New Majority,” San Francisco International Arts Festival boasts a dance card that is practically overflowing. On tap are premieres from Liz Duran Boubion’s Piñata Dance Collective, Ranko Ogura, Jessica Fudim, Abhinaya Dance Company, and Annie Kahane’s Alive & Well Productions, as well as performances from Ensambles Ballet Folklórico de San Francisco, Natasha Adorlee’s Concept o4, inkBoat, Nash Baroque & Dance Through Time, STEAMROLLER Dance Company, Diamano Coura West African Dance Company, and Samudra Dance Creations. June 8–18. sfiaf.org.

Rituals, Remembrance, and Radical Joy

NEW YORK CITY  An evening-length choreo-poem inspired in part by the work of Ntozake Shange, PURPLE: A Ritual in Nine Spells premieres at Lincoln Center’s Clark Studio Theater this month. Devised and performed by Sydnie L. Mosley’s SLMDances collective, the dance-theater work features a multigenerational, femme ensemble of 12, illuminating sisterhood as a force for social change. Created in community with senior residents of the nearby Amsterdam Houses, this iteration of PURPLE appears as part of Lincoln Center’s ongoing Legacies of San Juan Hill project, which examines the diverse neighborhoods that were forcefully displaced in the name of the performing arts center’s construction in the 1950s, and is presented in association with Gibney Presents. June 9–11, 16–18, 23–25. lincolncenter.org.

A Triumphant Tribute

CHICAGO  South Chicago Dance Theatre makes its Auditorium Theatre debut with the premiere of Memoirs of Jazz in the Alley, an evening-length tribute to jazz saxophonist Jimmy Ellis, the father of choreographer and SCDT executive artistic director Kia Smith. June 10. southchicagodancetheatre.com.

What Is Remembered

SANTA MONICA  Originally planned to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust in 2020, Memoryhouse makes its long-awaited debut with Los Angeles Ballet at BroadStage this month. Set to Max Richter’s album of the same name, the work marks artistic director Melissa Barak’s first evening-length ballet, debuting at the end of her first season leading the company. June 15–17. losangelesballet.org.

Fairy Tales Go Feminist

NEW YORK CITY  Following its pandemic-delayed premiere in Washington, DC, in 2021, Once Upon a One More Time finally heads to Broadway. Keone and Mari Madrid direct and choreograph the Britney Spears jukebox musical, in which a rogue fairy godmother introduces a book club of fairy-tale princesses to the work of feminist writer Betty Friedan—and the idea that there might be more than one path to happily ever after. Opening night is set for June 22 at the Marquis Theatre. onemoretimemusical.com.

Feel the Illinoise

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY  Justin Peck and Sufjan Stevens join forces once again for Illinois. Peck directs and choreographs a theatrical journey through the American Midwest, set to a genre-spanning new arrangement of Stevens’ critically acclaimed 2005 concept album and led by a story from Peck and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury. The production headlines Bard SummerScape, premiering at the Fisher Center June 23–July 2. fishercenter.bard.edu.

Foxes and Fortune

BOSTON  Kairos Dance Theater teams up with vocal ensemble Renaissance Men and sinfonietta Sound Icon Orchestra for its Folktales, Fables & Feasts program. On tap are FOXY, a contemporary cabaret interpretation of Stravinsky’s Renard—a satire based on folktales concerning a cockerel and a hungry, deceitful fox—and Tavernous, a contemporary take on the “In the Tavern” movement of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana featuring gambling, gluttony, and the fickleness of fortune. June 24–25. kairosdancetheater.org.

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Dancin’ Back to Broadway

NEW YORK CITY  More than four decades after its original Broadway bow, Bob Fosse’s DANCIN’ returns to the Great White Way. Original 1978 cast members Wayne Cilento and Christine Colby Jacques direct and reproduce Fosse’s choreography, respectively, with additional reconstruction by Corinne McFadden Herrera, while a formidable cast tackles Fosse’s notoriously specific moves in the packed musical revue. Previews begin at the Music Box Theatre March 2, with opening night set for March 19. dancinbway.com. —Courtney Escoyne

Presence/Absence

NEW YORK CITY  Inspired in part by her work as a hospital chaplain, Keely Garfield’s The Invisible Project looks for hope as it considers disappearing acts and the interplay of presence and absence. Garfield is joined in the ritualized performance, premiering at NYU Skirball, by frequent collaborators Molly Lieber, Paul Hamilton and Angie Pittman. March 10–12. nyuskirball.org. —CE

Facing Love

CANTON, MI  Ballet 5:8 premieres a new evening-length work this month. BareFace, choreographed by artistic director Julianna Rubio Slager, is inspired by C.S. Lewis’ final novel, Till We Have Faces, which was itself a retelling of the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of the latter’s sister. March 11. ballet58.org. —CE

Time for a Reckoning

NEW YORK CITY  The Reckoning, Francesca Harper’s response to the 2010 killing of 7-year-old Aiyana Mo’Nay Stanley-Jones­ by police, receives its live performance premiere at Works & Process, performed by members of Ailey II and FHP Collective and set to original music by Nona Hendryx. Commissioned by ARRAY’s Law Enforcement Accountability Project, the film and performance project is being presented in conjunction with the Guggenheim exhibition “Nick Cave: Forothermore.” March 11. guggenheim.org. —CE

Spanish Soul

ON TOUR  When flamenco luminary Sara Baras lets loose with footwork, the floor breaks out in banter, protest, jubilation, firing up her onstage collaborators. Alma, her latest production, bares the soul of that art in numbers both intimate and expansive. Striking design and a tight team of dancers, singers and instrumentalists bring theatrical flash to illuminate flamenco’s embrace of Cuban bolero. The show kicks off its American tour by headlining Flamenco Festival Miami XIV (March 16–19), which also features acclaimed guitarist Rafael Riqueni and a premiere from rising bailaora Irene Lozano, before heading to New York City Center (March 23–26) and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (March 29–30). arshtcenter.org, nycitycenter.org and kennedy-center.org. —Guillermo Perez

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Latest

NEW YORK CITY  Broadway mainstay Phantom of the Opera may be set to close next month, but a new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical arrives in its wake: Bad Cinderella, with choreography by JoAnn M. Hunter, contemporizes the fairy tale, questioning traditional beauty standards and adding a few new twists. The production’s opening night at the Imperial Theatre is set for March 23. badcinderellabroadway.com. —CE

Squaring the Past

NEW YORK CITY  A journey through time, space and identity, Christopher “Unpezverde” Núñez’s The Square: Displacement with no end recounts his nomadic Indigenous ancestors’ encounters with colonial geographies over the last two centuries. March 23–25. abronsartscenter.org. —CE

60 Years of Jazz

CHICAGO  Giordano Dance Chicago is doing it up big for Celebrate Giordano, its 60th-anniversary extravaganza. The jazz institution will showcase notable works from across its history: founder Gus Giordano’s rarely seen Sing, Sing, Sing (1983), Randy Duncan’s Can’t Take This Away (1997), Ron De Jesus’ pivotal Prey (2003) and Liz Imperio’s La Belleza de Cuba (2013). Former GDC dancer and associate director Michael Taylor offers Celebrate 60, an opener crafted specifically for the occasion, while Kia Smith contributes a premiere honoring Homer Hans Bryant, featuring dancers from GDC, Giordano II and her own South Chicago Dance Theatre—the collaboration a notable first for GDC. March 31–April 1. giordanodance.org. —CE

The post 8 Performances We Can’t Wait to Catch This March appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Dandara Veiga

Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s Doña Perón, created for Ballet Hispánico, does not shy from darkness. Its portrait of Eva Péron devotes ample time to the shadowy aspects of the controversial Argentine first lady’s life. But such is the brilliance of Dandara Veiga’s charisma that, should you see her in the title role, you’ll inevitably come out admiring Evita. 

The kind of dancer who can make psychological turmoil legible in her body, Veiga brings us not just into Perón’s world but into her churning mind. Her dancing and acting share a clarity of purpose: Every element is well-defined, though free of melodramatic overstatement. In Veiga’s hands (and limbs, and face), Perón becomes a person rather than a caricature.

Veiga has been a standout since joining Ballet Hispánico in 2017. But Doña Perón, the company’s first commissioned full-length work, gives her room to expand into her artistry. It’s a star vehicle, and Veiga is a star. —Margaret Fuhrer

Cameron Catazaro

Steady strength and lyrical pliability put a bloom on Cameron Catazaro’s dancing. His carriage—at over 6′ 2″, he stands tall in the corps of Miami City Ballet—adds nobility and romantic magnitude to his portrayals, a combination that has earned him a bouquet of eye-catching roles, with Prince Siegfried in Alexei Ratmansky’s Swan Lake at the forefront. Catazaro credits his Swan Queen, principal soloist Samantha Hope Galler, with inspiring him to build, through a diligent work ethic, dramatic dimension. His knack for characterization has also heightened the father’s solemnity in Prodigal Son and put youthful vigor into an old legend through Prince Ivan in Firebird.

Canton, Ohio–born and trained, Catazaro spent a year each at Ballet Academy East and MCB School fine-tuning Balanchine-style technique, which sped him, after joining the company in 2019, to featured roles in “Emeralds” and Stravinsky Violin Concerto. And his repertoire keeps growing. Just this fall he took the lead in John Cranko’s Romeo and Juliet. For the season ahead, he’s learning Jerome Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun and is set to perform Martha Graham’s Diversion of Angels, in which he spread his first-timer’s wings at Jacob’s Pillow last summer. —Guillermo Perez

Guillaume Diop

Becoming the face of diversity at a venerable institution like the Paris Opéra Ballet is no small burden to bear—and can magnify the pressure of a high-profile debut. For a split second, early in Guillaume Diop’s first performance as Solor in La Bayadère last season, a flash of panic registered on his expressive face as the 22-year-old struggled to keep French star Dorothée Gilbert balanced in his arms.

Yet not only did Diop recover, but he improved as the evening went on, with supple elevation in Solor’s treacherous variations and unaffected poise. Born to a French mother and a Senegalese father, the young corps member—who trained at the Paris Opéra Ballet School, but credits a summer intensive with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater as a personal breakthrough—has handled every challenge with grace in his four years with the Paris Opéra.

In 2020, he was among a group of Black employees who pushed for progress around racial issues at the institution. The following year, Diop, who was still a quadrille—the lowest corps rank—was given the last-minute opportunity to replace an injured principal as Romeo in Nureyev’s Romeo and Juliet. Under heavy scrutiny, Diop’s joyful elegance won over the audience, a feat he repeated as Solor and as Don Quixote’s Basilio. This fall at the internal concours de promotion, he was promoted to the highest corps rank, sujet. The road to becoming the French company’s first Black étoile may be long, but Diop has all the makings of a trailblazer. —Laura Cappelle

Adelaide Clauss

As Terpsichore in Balanchine’s Apollo this summer, The Washington Ballet’s Adelaide Clauss mesmerized the audience—as well as Apollo—with adroit, sharp-edged dancing coupled with a flirtatious allure. Gifted with ribbonlike épaulement and an ardent work ethic, Clauss is a consummate artist.

A Buffalo, New York, native, Clauss trained at The Neglia Conservatory of Ballet and American Ballet Theatre’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School. Catching the eye of TWB artistic director Julie Kent shortly after joining ABT’s Studio Company in 2015, the now-24-year-old is currently in her sixth season with TWB and a bona fide company star.

“Adelaide has this mystery, imagination and luminous quality that allows her to lose herself in whatever roles she is performing,” says Kent. With Clauss having done so in plum roles including Odette/Odile in Kent and Victor Barbee’s Swan Lake and The Lilac Fairy in their The Sleeping Beauty, along with the Sugar Plum Fairy in Septime Webre’s The Nutcracker, Kent foresees her having many more opportunities to further develop as a storyteller in 2023 and beyond. —Steve Sucato

Andrew McShea

Rooted yet explosive, his wingspan like that of some ravenous bird, Whim W’Him’s Andrew McShea creates shapes that seem impossible. “His bones are like liquid,” says artistic director Olivier Wevers of this astonishing shape-shifter. McShea easily claims the focus onstage, evoking haunting narratives as he creates characters that are bold, vulnerable, unnerving. In Ethan Colangelo’s a vanishing thread, he’s a painter, the space is his canvas, and every part of his body adds color to his story and character. In Wevers’ Cannibalistic Sanctuary, it’s the torque of his torso, head, then limbs, all wildly flexible, that makes him become the crawling creature, the wounded son. The past three years with Whim W’Him have brought great leaps in artistry and confidence for this dancer, who is, more than anything, a storyteller. “He invites me into a dance fantasy,” says Wevers. “An incarnation of the contemporary dancer I wish I could have been.” —Gigi Berardi

Ishida Dance Company

It’s rare, in Texas, to witness the level of dancing and dancemaking that Ishida Dance Company consistently achieves in a single evening. Since debuting the company at the beginning of 2020, artistic director and choreographer Brett Ishida has recruited dancers with a flair for drama and rare movement qualities from top companies and choreographers from all parts of the globe. The result? One-of-a-kind shows in Austin and Houston, which project a boutique international festival vibe. Ishida, who has a background in literature, crafts evenings that alchemize into a cohesive whole. Creating a poetic structure that begins with her own work—which typically stems from a written script—and choosing guest choreographers and movers who complement the narrative thread, the gentle impresario orchestrates events that transcend what’s expected of the typical pick-up company model. The season ahead offers new works by European choreographers John Wannehag, Kristian Lever and Mauro Astolfi. Judging from the growth of audience enthusiasm, Ishida, who’s begun nabbing increasingly prominent commissions, and her eponymous company are enjoying a warm Texas embrace. —Nancy Wozny

Mac Twining

Choreographer Christopher Williams’ works often evoke both the immediate present and the mythical past, the earthly and the unearthly. While those oppositional forces might pull uncomfortably at some performers, Mac Twining, a dancer of great freedom and sweep, handles them with easy grace. As the Poet in Williams’ queer reimagining of Les Sylphides, Twining is a hero for both the Romantic and the modern era. Playful, breezy, open-hearted—shades of Timothée Chalamet—he becomes the perfect foil for the more introspective elegance of ballet star Taylor Stanley’s Queen of the Sylphs.

Twining also performs with Stephen Petronio Company, bringing the same relaxed naturalness to Petronio’s harder-edged, thoroughly contemporary works. Wherever he’s dancing, Twining seems very much himself, and right at home. —Margaret Fuhrer

Amanda Castro

Amanda Castro never wants audiences just to see her when she dances. “I want you to feel things,” she says. “It’s not about me. It’s about what you walk away with.” It’s a somewhat paradoxical desire for a dancer whose luminous stage presence is almost addictive—you fear you’ll miss a clever improvisation or a flash of joy if you let your eyes wander to another performer even for a moment. Her warmth, her vivacity linger long after the curtain closes. 

Castro usually practices her onstage magnetism in tap shoes, frequenting the works of the genre’s heavy hitters like Dormeshia, Ayodele Casel, Jared Grimes and Caleb Teicher. But that wasn’t always the case: Castro danced with Urban Bush Women for four years, taking tap classes whenever she could, before transitioning into musical theater (including a high-profile tour as Anita in West Side Story). It was while working on UBW’s 2015 Walking With ’Trane, inspired by the music of John Coltrane, that she had a realization: “The whole process, I just wanted to have my shoes on,” she says. It didn’t take long for Castro to become one of New York City’s most in-demand tap dancers (winning Grimes’ Run the Night competition in 2016 didn’t hurt). 

Recently, Castro has been expanding her “rhythmic storytelling,” as she puts it, through Soles of Duende, a collaboration with kathak dancer Brinda Guha and flamenco dancer Arielle Rosales that’s quickly amassing critical praise and institutional support. Broadway and an evening-length solo work are still on Castro’s bucket list—blink, and she’ll have already checked them off. —Lauren Wingenroth

Águeda Saavedra 

In flamenco it is not so much what you do as how you do it that is most important—and this is where Águeda Saavedra excels. She nullifies the need to perceive her movement as either contemporary or traditional; rather, she is a vessel of movement expression that recontextualizes time from moment to moment. Her deep backbend can go anywhere; with castanets it evokes an old style of decades ago, while with a head roll while seated on the floor, we are swept into today’s world. 

The 27-year-old has been described in the national Spanish press as the “present and future of flamenco.” Performing with top companies on international stages since her late teens, Saavedra has worked under the direction of award-winning contemporary flamenco choreographers Manuel Liñán, Daniel Doña, Marco Flores and Mercedes de Córdoba as well as the Ballet Flamenco de Andalucía, and regularly appears in Spain’s most prestigious tablaos. 

“I have a personal and artistic need to expose myself in a solo work, in a way that I have never done,” Saavedra says. With the coveted Best New Artist Award from the 2022 Festival de Jerez and what she describes as “an unbeatable team” in hand, it seems such a project is only a matter of time. —Bridgit Lujan

Vidya Patel

Following in the footsteps of Akram Khan and Shobana Jeyasingh, Vidya Patel brings together her knowledge of classical Indian and contemporary dance to mesmerizing effect. In a dance film created in fall 2021 as part of her two-year tenure as a Sadler’s Wells Young Associate, she executes quintessential kathak turns and gestural flourishes with her own personal twist. Delicate and intentional, she switches deftly between fluid, almost meditative motions and sudden staccato slices and foot taps. Performing an abstract piece of choreography, Patel’s earnest eyes follow each of her movements with an intensity that gives them narrative meaning. Her talent for storytelling is also evident in the film Trinity (2021), by visual artist Hetain Patel, where she was not only required to dance but also act.

Trained in kathak, Patel first caught the British dance scene’s attention when she represented the South Asian category in the Grand Finals of the 2015 BBC Young Dancer competition. Soon after, she was invited to work with a range of well-known companies and choreographers, such as Richard Alston and Gary Clarke. 

This October, she premiered Don’t Mind Me at Sadler’s Wells, using the children’s board game Snakes and Ladders—which originated in India—as a frame to explore themes of trauma and healing, luck and chance, power and society. It was her final piece as a Young Associate, and only whetted appetites to see how her work will develop. —Emily May

Ashton Edwards

A soaring jump, whirligig turns, refined pointe work, lines for days—Ashton Edwards has them all. But what makes the 20-year-old Pacific Northwest Ballet corps member an unforgettable performer isn’t their meticulous technique, musicality and apparently effortless physicality—it’s joy, pure and simple. Onstage, Edwards (whose pronouns are they/them) radiates a love for ballet that started at age 3, when they saw Brandye Lee dance the Sugar Plum Fairy. “I just wanted to be everything she embodied,” says Edwards. They started training a year later, and ballet quickly took on a deep personal resonance. “Growing up queer in the Black community, and also in a low-income community, it was this escape from reality,” they say.

Fast-forward 16 years and Edwards has garnered featured roles in Justin Peck’s The Times Are Racing and Dwight Rhoden’s Catching Feelings at PNB, and in Mango, adapted from Andrea Miller’s sky to hold, in Taylor Stanley’s Dichotomous Being program at Jacob’s Pillow. They’ve also had an impact as a nonbinary ballet dancer of color. “Ashton is so much more than their talent,” says PNB artistic director Peter Boal. “They are a thoughtful advocate for change within the company and in the world of dance.” Yet for Edwards, everything still comes down to The Nutcracker, and that magical feeling of ballet bliss. “Getting to perform the corps of Snow—my heart flutters every time!” —Claudia Bauer

Quinn Starner

Professional ballet isn’t where most comp kids—the contemporary-competition dynamos who dominate “So You Think You Can Dance” rosters—end up. But when they do turn their distinctive powers toward ballet, magic often happens.

Quinn Starner, an alum of the competition circuit, now cuts fearlessly through choreography of all styles at New York City Ballet. When she was a young teenager, her fantastically vivid solos earned accolades at both contemporary and ballet contests. In 2018, she changed tacks, enrolling at the School of American Ballet; last year, she joined NYCB’s corps. Professional ballet life has polished down some of her harder edges, but that has only enhanced her sparkle. As an original cast member in both Silas Farley’s Architects of Time last spring and Kyle Abraham’s Love Letter (on shuffle) last fall, she showed a new refinement in her épaulement and port de bras.

Starner seems more than ready for ballet’s technical challenges, and invigorated by its artistic ones—much like fellow comp-kid-turned-ballet-pro unicorns Tiler Peck, James Whiteside and Catherine Hurlin. That’s a good list to be on. —Margaret Fuhrer

Elijah Richardson

With quirky charisma and an infectious smile, Elijah Richardson burst onto Chicago’s dance scene in 2018. But it was last year that he made an indelible mark, delivering a masterful performance in South Chicago Dance Theatre’s smash hit, five-year anniversary concert at the Harris Theater—just two years and a pandemic after he worked there as an usher. The San Jose, California, native has long been insatiable, training in everything from figure skating to musical theater, ballet to Gaga. He booked a ticket to the Windy City the moment he graduated from Chapman University with a dance degree. Three seasons with DanceWorks Chicago solidified Richardson’s command of physical theater, but this dancer is as multifaceted as his interests: He pulls off impassioned lyricism and pinpoint precision as easily as slapstick comedy. Others outside Chicago have taken notice too: He recently guested with Memphis’ Collage Dance Collective and has had his work selected four times for the 92Y Mobile Dance Film Festival. —Lauren Warnecke

Dominic Moore-Dunson

“Urban Midwest storytelling” is how dancer and choreographer Dominic Moore-Dunson describes his approach to his works. The 33-year-old’s visceral, cross-disciplinary dance projects, themed around Blackness and social justice, pull from his personal experiences living and working in Akron, Ohio. Trained at Akron’s performing arts schools, Moore-Dunson performed with Cleveland’s Inlet Dance Theatre for 10 years. His 2018 The “Black Card” Project, billed as a “live-action dance-theater cartoon,” was developed during his time at Inlet; a solo work, CAUTION, was commissioned by Akron Art Museum that same year. A 2019 Jacob’s Pillow Ann and Weston Hicks Choreography Fellowship and 2019 Cleveland Arts Prize Emerging Artist Award for Theatre and Dance soon followed.

His current project, inCOPnegro, is a two-pronged exploration of the concept of “safety” and police relations in Black communities throughout America. “It’s me trying to understand what to say to my kids about police as Black people,” says Moore-Dunson, who has been wrongfully stopped some 45 times by police. The podcast inCOPnegro: Black and Blue, launched in April 2022, features the dance artist in conversation with individuals on both sides of the “blue line” as he tries to find answers to that question. The evening-length dance theater production, developed in part at the National Center for Choreography at The University of Akron, is set to debut in June. —Steve Sucato

Becca Robinson

When given the chance to perform on national television, most dancers flaunt their most impressive tricks. But as a contestant on NBC’s “Dancing with Myself,” Becca Robinson chose instead to make people laugh, sniffing her armpit and dropping into a sudden split. That’s not to say Robinson lacks real moves: Her eye-catching versatility has earned her impressive credits, including assisting choreographer Bo Park in creating a Virgin Voyages dance show, as well as dancing in the movies In the Heights and Isn’t It Romantic, Taylor Swift’s performance at the 2019 MTV Video Music Awards, and a flash mob at the premiere of Jennifer Lopez’s documentary Halftime.

No matter the job, the San Diego–born, New York City–based Robinson lets her sense of humor shine through. In a hypercompetitive dance world, her unapologetic quirkiness is refreshing. “If there’s not some sort of comedic element in my improv, the dance or my facials, then I didn’t do my job of being authentic,” she says. “It’s okay to be different. There’s room on the dance floor for everyone.” —Kristi Yeung

Tendayi Kuumba

The Lady in Brown in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf is the choreo-poem’s emotional center, bookending the show with her utterances of the famous lines that give the groundbreaking work its title. But in Tendayi Kuumba’s interpretation of the role, it wasn’t just her monologues that both catalyzed and grounded last year’s much-lauded Broadway revival, directed and choreographed by Camille A. Brown. It was her dancing—electric, free, fearless—that established her as the show’s driving force and the standout in a cast full of standouts.

Kuumba’s Chita Rivera Award–winning performance was just the most recent example of the 34-year-old’s striking ability to bring her full self to all the vastly varying stages she dances on, from David Byrne’s American Utopia—her Broadway debut—to her time with Urban Bush Women. The work she creates with partner Greg Purnell as UFly Mothership is as multi-hyphenated as she is, combining music, movement and technology to create expansive sensory universes. (Their most recent work, The Adventures of Mr. Left Brain and Ms. Right, for the Stephen Petronio Company, premiered last month.)

Next up for Kuumba: choreographing one-third of a shared program with Annie-B Parson and Donna Uchizono that will premiere later this year in New York City and tour in summer 2024. —Lauren Wingenroth

Mikaela Santos

It’s her imaginative spark—along with pristine technique and bright musicality—that makes Mikaela Santos one of Atlanta Ballet’s most captivating dancers. Last March, Santos breathed startling freshness into Giselle’s peasant pas de deux, catching the music’s quickening pulse with fleet footwork while her upper body revealed buoyant flourishes with warmth and spontaneity. In May, Santos enchanted in Sergio Masero’s Schubertiada. She tripped along Schubert’s rolling rhythms with swift attack—each change of focus revealed new facets and feelings as she caught her partner’s eye and drew out the music’s playful sensuality.

Born in the Philippines, Santos credits her teacher, Effie Nañas, for preparing her to study and compete at the international level, where Santos developed an “inner presence” and the confidence to show her individuality, and with nurturing her natural expressivity. Santos often imagines she’s dancing in wind or underwater. “Once you finish a step, it breaks the moment,” she says. “I want people to feel that it’s not going to stop.” After her recent tour de force performance in Justin Peck’s In Creases, with more opportunities ahead, it doesn’t seem she’ll have to. —Cynthia Bond Perry

Simone Acri

Houston Ballet artistic director Stanton Welch has found a new muse in Simone Acri. In a jaw-dropping solo in Welch’s Sparrow, set to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Baby Driver,” Acri weaved through the driving beat, revealing the song’s bittersweet undercurrent. In Brigade, he nailed Welch’s tongue-in-cheek humor while dazzling with his freewheeling style. And it’s not just his artistic director’s work in which the newly minted soloist excels: He launched this season with a robust performance of Trey McIntyre’s Peter Pan, giving the hellion of a wild child ample charisma along with soaring flying skills. With an ability to both move with total abandon and mine the in-between places, Acri sources his spectacular technique to shape a choreographer’s vision. He’s like a fully charged battery—high-energy but precise, and solid with his bravado turns and jumps. But it’s how he does those things, with such nuance, joy and connection to the audience, that has him turning the heads of spectators and artistic staff alike. —Nancy Wozny

Elwince Magbitang

It’s not every day that American Ballet Theatre casts an apprentice in a soloist role. And yet, as Elwince Magbitang soared through barrel turns, 540s, tours and other feats in the second act of Don Quixote last June, it was clear that the company was introducing its audiences to a virtuoso talent. 

Powerful, musical and charismatic, the 21-year-old Magbitang has been creating buzz since he arrived in 2018 from his native Philippines to train at ABT’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School. As a student he was chosen to dance a small part in the premiere of Alexei Ratmansky’s The Seasons. Shortly afterward, in 2019, he joined ABT’s Studio Company, where he impressed in bravura roles like the folk-inspired Gopak variation. This fall, as a newly promoted corps member, he made his debut as Puck in Sir Frederick Ashton’s The Dream.

“Elwince’s dancing shows strength and panache,” says former ABT principal Stella Abrera, a close mentor. She spotted Magbitang, then a student at Manila’s Steps Dance Studio, in 2018 when he performed in a fundraising gala she organized in the Philippines. Impressed, she and her husband, Studio Company artistic director Sascha Radetsky, arranged his audition for the JKO School. “It’s been such a thrill witnessing his journey,” Abrera says. “He’s an inspiration to his hometown and beyond.” —Amy Brandt

Erin Casale

A compact powerhouse as much at home in leotard roles as she is in tutu-and-tiara ballets, Erin Casale is every bit a 21st-century dance artist. In an excerpt from Marius Petipa’s Le Talisman while she was a student at Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School, her buoyant steps, turns and extensions evoked visions of an ebullient Disney heroine. As a featured soloist in Nacho Duato’s Duende, she contorted her body into shapes resembling symbols from some ancient civilization. “Erin is very daring and dynamic when she moves,” says former Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre artistic director Susan Jaffe. “When I needed someone with presence and power to dance the lead in my Bolero, Erin was the perfect fit.”

A Johnstown, Pennsylvania, native, Casale trained at Virginia’s Academy of Russian Ballet and Johnstown Concert Ballet prior to going to PBT’s school, where she rose through its levels to be handpicked in 2019 by then–artistic director Terrence S. Orr to join the company. Now in her fourth season with PBT, the 23-year-old says her career goal is “to experience everything.” —Steve Sucato

Gianna “Gigi” Todisco

Gianna “Gigi” Todisco’s resumé is the picture of versatility. In the six years since she graduated from Loyola Marymount University, she’s served as movement director for Post Malone, ZHU, Islands and NIKI; performed in a series of operas choreographed by Jacob Jonas and No)one. Art House’s Chris Emile; appeared in music videos and commercials for the likes of Tinashe, Vans, OnStar and Hennessy; and made waves in the concert dance scene with Micaela Taylor’s The TL Collective. She recently wrapped up a run as choreographer and performer with opening act Kali Uchis as part of Tyler, the Creator’s world tour. Through it all, Todisco leaves her unique stamp on everything she does, imbuing each project with her gritty, avant-garde, effortlessly cool sensibilities—whatever corner of the industry she finds herself in. —Sophie Bress

Jordan Demetrius Lloyd

On a balmy evening early last June, a public school playground deep in Brooklyn became New York City’s hottest proverbial club: Droves of people—an equal mix of experimental-dance who’s whos and Bedford-Stuyvesant residents—flocked to a free performance of Jordan Demetrius Lloyd’s Jerome, an enchanting, elegant work that seemed to both capture and converse with the particular magic of golden hour in the neighborhood. 

Lloyd—whom New York audiences may also know as a performer in the works of David Dorfman, Beth Gill, Tere O’Connor and others—was as surprised as anyone by the massive turnout. But in retrospect, underestimating Lloyd’s skill as a community-gatherer, a self-producer or an artist is a mistake. The 28-year-old, who’s been receiving growing support for his work over the past several years (a New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks residency, a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, commissions from Issue Project Room and Danspace Project), leaves little to chance, crafting dreamy, highly detailed works full of unexpected gesture and pedestrian virtuosity.

Inspired by postmodernism, Lloyd positions his work at the intersection of that canon and other contemporary performance aesthetics. But don’t try to put his work in any kind of box, or category: “I feel a deep aversion to branding myself as the artist that does a thing,” he says. “A unidirectional career does not feel like the one I’m after.” We may not know where Lloyd is going next, but the masses are sure to follow. —Lauren Wingenroth

Musa Motha

Musa Motha came into his own in the September premiere of Rambert’s Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby. Equally at home in flamboyant jazz club scenes as in opium-riddled dream sequences and fast-paced fight choreography, Motha seamlessly switches between cheeky, staccato, hip-hop–inspired solos and intimate duets in the role of Barney.

Motha dances with crutches; his left leg was amputated when he was 11 after he was diagnosed with bone cancer. While such a surgery could have been seen as career-ending for anyone in a physical profession, it propelled Motha into the world of movement. After starting off as a commercial street dancer—most notably featuring in Drake’s “One Dance” music video—Motha, originally from South Africa, first transitioned into contemporary concert dance when he joined the Johannesburg-based Vuyani Dance Theatre in 2018, before debuting with Rambert last May. While the UK is home to pioneering organizations like Candoco, which hires a mixture of disabled and non-disabled performers, the former rarely secure positions with mainstream companies like Rambert. Now, as a member of Britain’s oldest contemporary-dance company, Motha is helping to shift perceptions in the country’s dance scene, and is perfectly placed to continue growing as an artist in his own right. —Emily May

Madeline Maxine Gorman

Madeline Maxine Gorman doesn’t just live her values, she choreographs and dances them. Navigating the dance world as a queer, disabled and neurodivergent creative, she incorporates material from her intersectional identities into her intellectually probing, politically minded and personally revelatory works. Between Myself, a developing solo show, draws from her childhood diary musings, memories of terrible first dates and her ongoing experiences with hearing loss. Bitten Tongue, created when she was studying dance and communications at Towson University, probes the inner psyche of a working woman rebelling against holding her tongue in a male-dominated corporate world. Filled with flings and forceful tumbles, its androgynous choreographic language leans in. New this year, her Tooth and Claw will examine “tall poppy syndrome” (when successful people are criticized for succeeding), pointedly blasting American exceptionalism to an original score riffing on ABBA’s “Money, Money, Money.”

Gorman, who was selected for Dance Place’s Dance and Disability Residency, created GRIDLOCK Dance to reflect her values as an artist and person. Foremost, that means paying dancers for rehearsals and performances, and deep collaborative work. She strives for what she calls “concinnity,” a concept akin to harmony. In practice, that includes planning around dancers’ schedules and valuing other parts of their lives. “Real life comes first,” she says. “Not a part-time gig.” —Lisa Traiger

STL Rhythm Collaborative

The professional tap scene in St. Louis fizzled when Robert Reed, founder of the St. Louis Tap Festival and lead ambassador for the form in the Gateway City, died in 2015. But Maria Majors took up the mantle in 2021, forming the STL Rhythm Collaborative by combining her pickup troupe, moSTLy TAP, with companion group moSTLy JAZZ to reconnect tap dancers with their jazz music roots. Its first full-length show, which premiered in October 2021, pulled apart music by the Dave Brubeck Quartet and strung it back together with indulgently satisfying taps layered on top. That same year, the company launched the STL Rhythm Fest, modeled after Reed’s illustrious festival and reinvigorating the local scene. This summer’s edition brought heavy hitters like Chicagoans Nico Rubio, George Patterson III and Martin “Tre” Dumas III back to the city to shore up professional-level training, but the company itself has some serious chops—proving that St. Louis’ ongoing legacy as a city for tap is secure. —Lauren Warnecke

Header photo credits, left to right, top to bottom: Alexander Iziliaev, courtesy Miami City Ballet; Mike Esperanza, courtesy Castro; Rosalie O’Connor, courtesy Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre; Michelle Reid, courtesy South Chicago Dance Theatre; Farruk Mandujano, courtesy Mandujano; Olivia Moon Photography, courtesy Moore-Dunson; Amy Gardner, courtesy Todisco; Paul Court, courtesy Richard Kornberg and Associates; Laurence Elizabeth Knox, courtesy Houston Ballet; Agathe Poupeney, courtesy Paris Opéra Ballet; Paula Lobo, courtesy Ballet Hispánico; Liv Battista, courtesy Robinson; Camilla Greenwell, courtesy Rambert; Whitney Browne, courtesy Lloyd; Rosalie O’Connor, courtesy American Ballet Theatre; Clarence Alford, courtesy STL Rhythm Collaborative; xmbphotography, courtesy The Washington Ballet; Bill Gorman, courtesy Madeline Maxine Gorman; Erin Baiano, courtesy New York City Ballet; Allina Yang, courtesy Whim W’Him; Kim Kenney, courtesy Atlanta Ballet; Spelman College, courtesy Kuumba; Angela Sterling, courtesy Pacific Northwest Ballet; Camilla Greenwell, courtesy Patel; Amitava Sarkar, courtesy Ishida.

The post Introducing Our 2023 “25 to Watch” appeared first on Dance Magazine.

VIPs in the Valley

VAIL, CO
Vail Dance Festival returns, headlined by a comfortingly familiar cast of characters. As the festival’s artist in residence, American Ballet Theatre principal Calvin Royal III will dance in new works created for him by Tiler Peck and Jamar Roberts. Other premieres on the docket include choreography by Michelle Dorrance, Lil Buck with Lauren Lovette, Justin Peck (for Tiler Peck and Herman Cornejo), Cleo Parker Robinson (danced by her eponymous company, which recently concluded its 50th season) and James Whiteside. BalletX performs as company in residence, while New York City Ballet MOVES makes its first Vail appearance since the touring company’s debut there in 2011, opening the festival with Jerome Robbins’ Dances at a Gathering. July 30–Aug. 9. vaildance.org.

Outdoor Opera

LOS ANGELES
Danielle Agami directs and choreographs Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, a dreamy operatic melodrama written to be sung by a single female soloist. Singer Kiera Duffy will be joined by the dancers of Agami’s Ate9 for the work on a double bill presented by Long Beach Opera at The Ford. Aug. 14–15. theford.com.

Chicago Comes Together

CHICAGO
Dance for Life, Chicago Dancers United’s annual fundraiser for The Dancers’ Fund, plans to make its return to live, in-person performance at Millennium Park with, for the first time in its history, free admission. The 30th-anniversary performance will feature DanceWorks Chicago, Giordano Dance Chicago, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, The Joffrey Ballet, Movement Revolution Dance Crew, PARA.MAR Dance Theatre, South Chicago Dance Theatre, Trinity Irish Dance Company and Visceral Dance Chicago, plus a film by Winifred Haun and a special finale choreographed by Randy Duncan. Aug. 26. chicagodancersunited.org.

Empire State of Mind

New York City closes out the summer with a spate of outdoor performances.

Open Air

Open Air, a summer performance series from four/four presents pairing choreographers and composers, continues at the Bushwick Playground Basketball Courts in Brooklyn. Dancer-choreographer Kayla Farrish and experimental-jazz musician Melanie Charles will debut a site-specific collaborative work after a 30-minute set from Charles and a 15-minute excerpt of Farrish’s choreography. The performance is free to attend (though ticket reservation is required) and will be livestreamed on Instagram. Aug. 8. fourfourpresents.com.

Update: This performance has been postponed to Sept. 12.

Picnic Performances

Picnic Performances is back in midtown Manhattan’s Bryant Park. The dance programming includes double bills pairing Limón Dance Company with Leonardo Sandoval and Gregory Richardson’s Music from the Sole; Paul Taylor Dance Company with EMERGE125 (formerly Elisa Monte Dance); and Ballet Hispánico with Jamel Gaines Creative Outlet. Events are free to attend, though advance registration may be required; livestreams of most performances will also be available online. Aug. 16, 20, 27. bryantpark.org.

BAAND Together Dance Festival

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, Ballet Hispánico, Dance Theatre of Harlem and New York City Ballet will team up for the first time for the BAAND Together Dance Festival. Held on Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts’ transformed outdoor campus as part of the Restart Stages initiative, a different mixed bill, collaboratively curated by the companies’ directors, will be presented nightly Aug. 17–21. Performances are free, but tickets raffled through the TodayTix Lottery will be required for entry. lincolncenter.org.

Beach Sessions

After pivoting to TikTok last summer, the annual Beach Sessions Dance Series plans to return to Queens’ Rockaway Beach with Moriah Evans’ REPOSE. Twenty dancers will travel along 1.4 miles of beach in the course of a six-hour performance, drawing attention to the behaviors typical of beachgoing while being influenced by chance encounters. Aug. 29. beachsessionsdanceseries.com.

The post 7 Outdoor Shows to Close Out the Summer appeared first on Dance Magazine.