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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Ayodele Casel and Arturo O’Farrill

“It’s frightening and glorifying at the same time.”

To hear tap dancer and choreographer Ayodele Casel and jazz musician Arturo O’Farrill talk about their artistic partnership is a lot like watching them improvise together onstage: You sense their joy, gratitude, faith, and, perhaps most importantly, Zen-like connection. “The thing that’s boggled my mind the most and also settled me right away in working with Arturo is that feeling of familiarity and home and trust and play,” says Casel.

That rush of seemingly contradictory feelings is something O’Farrill experiences during performance, too. “When I get in front of Ayodele and next to a piano and throw down, it’s frightening and glorifying at the same time,” he says. “It’s like playing in a cosmic sandbox.”

When Casel was filming Chasing Magic, a 2021 virtual performance at The Joyce Theater with O’Farrill (and several other collaborators), she was confident enough in their improvisatory mind-meld to not meticulously plan what their contribution to the concert might be. “I said, ‘Arturo, do you want to come to The Joyce in, like, 10 minutes?’ ” she remembers. “He came onto the stage, we had a brief conversation, and then we jumped right in. Fourteen minutes later, [director] Torya [Beard] was like, ‘Okay!’ ”

Casel cites an ability to deeply, meditatively listen to each other as necessary for that kind of extraordinary encounter. O’Farrill likens it to a letting go of expectation and orchestration. “When you first meet somebody, you think, Let’s fill in every dot,” he says. “You have to get past the ‘Oh my god, what are we doing?’ Now, we know that we don’t know what we’re doing. But as you get older you’re like, ‘Wow, this is exactly what art is supposed to be.’ ”

David Roussève and cari ann shim sham*

“We’re wielding our swords together.”

Choreographer, writer, and director David Roussève and multidisciplinary artist cari ann shim sham* have a nearly 25-year artistic relationship that could perhaps best be described as fluid. They met when shim sham* was a student of Roussève’s at the University of California, Los Angeles. Since then, shim sham* has been, at different times, his cinematographer, his film editor, and even a one-time performer in Roussève’s choreography. But she’s also been his teacher, as when Roussève first forayed into dance film and needed help finding his “sea legs,” as he puts it, as well as his creative collaborator in more recent projects, like 2018’s Halfway to Dawn, with choreography and text by Roussève and video by shim sham*.

“What I appreciate about cari ann is that she’ll say, ‘I don’t know if this is going to work. Let’s just try it,’ ” says Roussève. That kind of experimental ideation fuels their partnership in a way Roussève had never experienced previously. “I used to think, I need a collaborator who can execute my vision,” he says. “Over time, you realize a good collaborator is going to have better ideas than you.”

Shim sham* credits their chemistry to the ways in which they balance each other. “David is a wordsmith,” she says. “I’m not strong with words, but I’m very strong with visuals and imagery. David is so good at setting up metaphors that I can then visualize through imagery.”

At the root of their ease and trust is a shared belief in art’s ability to provoke. Roussève describes their aesthetic as “socially interested” and “askew.” “We both have really strong activist standpoints in our work,” agrees shim sham*. “We’re wielding our swords together.”

Cynthia Oliver and Jason Finkelman

“It’s magic. It is sleight of hand.”

Unlike most artistic collaborators, choreographer Cynthia Oliver and composer Jason Finkelman don’t get the downtime that comes from being able to say goodbye at the end of a long day. That’s because Oliver and Finkelman, who have been working together for almost as long as they’ve known each other, are married.

That relationship can sometimes lead to, say, freer discussion than what might take place between two artists still learning each other’s sensitivities. “There’s the moment in rehearsal when I tell the dancers that Jason is coming in, and we’re going to have little conversations in the corner,” says Oliver. “I tell them there’s going to be tension—we might even fight a little bit—but don’t be alarmed. This is what we do.”

Their process has taken many shapes over their decades together­, but Finkelman always demands that the score be in service to Oliver’s space-devouring, nuanced movement. “I’m always looking for what the choreography is calling for,” he says. “Something to drive the dance? To underscore the text? To propel or emphasize the silence?”

Despite its longevity, their partnership shows no sign of stagnation or fatigue. “It’s magic. It is sleight of hand,” says Oliver. “We don’t even know how it manifests, but ultimately something comes out of the fairy dust of these conversations—a commitment to making something together.”

Raja Feather Kelly and Michael R. Jackson

“It feels like we were always together.”

Months before they started working together on the musical A Strange Loop in 2018, choreographer Raja Feather Kelly and playwright-composer-lyricist Michael R. Jackson kept hearing from mutual colleagues that they needed to collaborate. They chalk this up partly to their similarities as people and artists—“We’re both Black gay men, both queer artists who have a similar iconoclastic, experimental, counterculture point of view,” says Jackson—but also to their immediate, uncanny connection. “I can’t recall a time before our collaboration or friendship began, or what it was like in the early parts of it, because it feels like we were always together,” says Jackson. “Raja just came in, and he was magical.”

That magic helped them communicate easily despite their admittedly­ different artistic disciplines. “We both really love popular culture,” says Kelly, as an example. “In the moments where it might be difficult to find a common language, we’ll find analogies for each other: ‘This is a Kanye-Kardashian/OJ Simpson kind of thing’ versus ‘This is Mean Girls meets Heathers meets [Beetlejuice’s] Lydia Deetz kind of thing.’ ”

They stretch each other, too, which leads to an occasionally challenging but ultimately deeper collaborative practice. “On A Strange Loop, I had come late in the process with an entirely rewritten opening number,” says Jackson. “Raja was like, ‘I need a dance break,’ which I had not planned for—I’d never written a dance break. But his provocation to me was that that was important, so he sent me home and I worked on it. And then we had a dance break in the opening number.”

The end result is always something neither could have conceived of without the other. As Kelly says, they are “artists who are influencing one another because of our desire to understand art better.”

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