When you first got your driver’s license, did you take your parents’ car out? Perhaps tentatively at first, and then with more confidence each time? And yet, it was always your parents’ car, and always would be, but you got used to it, and maybe they got used to the idea of you in it. [...]

New York regularly plays host to ballet companies from smaller cities. It’s an oft brutal undertaking for the visitors. The old lyric/trope—“if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere”—holds some truth, although many a company manages just fine by avoiding New York City. Tulsa Ballet finally took the plunge after a 25 [...]

Two titans of dance gone within a month. First Pina Bausch, and now Merce Cunningham at the age of 90. The effect of their deaths paralleled the nature of their work. Pina’s was surprising, traumatic, emotionally wrenching. Merce’s was, if not exactly expected, and just as sad, then logical—a final step into a dark pool [...]

Ariane Mnouchkine/Théâtre de Soleil’s Les Éphémères, which closed this last Sunday, July 19th, is one of those productions that elicits from New Yorkers periodic European theater awe. Much of it is from the mise-en-scène, the overall set-up of the working space on and offstage, contained inside the hulking Park Avenue Armory, co-presenters with Lincoln Center [...]

In the shadow of American Ballet Theatre’s season-closing performances of Romeo and Juliet, a few weeks after New York City Ballet ended its spring season, it’s time to take a deep breath. The trope that while NYCB has the rep, ABT has the dancers still holds true to some extent, although it is eroding on [...]

The great German choreographer Pina Bausch passed away on June 29 within a brutally short week of a cancer diagnosis, at 68 years of age. It was a terrible shock to the world of dance and performance—the end of an era and the sudden, cold beginning of another without her. Her pieces, performed by Tanztheater [...]

Pam Tanowitz’s Be In the Gray With Me (at DTW through last Saturday) is a major step for this choreographer whose work has been shown in New York for years, but in primarily smaller venues. Tanowitz has made a piece (video clip after the jump) that speaks not only about dance and its history, but [...]

Keigwin + Company and nicholas leichter dance, two very appealing New York-based companies, take over the Joyce the week of June 23, alternating dates through Sunday the 28th. Both groups, led by accomplished choreographers who are unafraid to experiment, have tremendous popular appeal. Coincidentally, Nicholas Leichter and Larry Keigwin happen to be among the most [...]

Christopher Williams’ latest project that closed last weekend at DTW, entitled The Golden Legend, flies in the face of just about everything conjured up by the phrase “New York contemporary dance.” This cycle of male saints, following Williams’ memorable project for female saints a few years back, comprises solos performed by well-known dancers, plus supporting [...]

It’s kismet that Stephen Petronio’s recent Joyce Theater run, which ended last weekend, coincided with that of Trisha Brown Dance Company’s BAM engagement, but it proved an interesting scheduling twist. Mentor and protégé dancing across the river from one another—in Petronio parlance, recalling his memorable dance City of Twist of a several years back—you might [...]