GIA KOURLAS
Dance Was Everywhere
Where have I seen dance in 2019? Basically, everywhere: from Broadway to bar basements to parks to proscenium stages, and in films and on television. That has been overwhelming in the best sense. Here, in no particular order, is a selection of what stood out.
Ayodele Casel + Arturo O’Farrill
The effervescent Ms. Casel has been honing her expertise in tap dance since the 1990s. Her collaboration with the pianist and composer Mr. O’Farrill at the Joyce Theater was too long in coming — she should have been commissioned years earlier — but it was a spectacular display of technique and heart. Ms. Casel danced with the skill and spirit she is known for, but she also paid homage to the female tap dancers who came before her. She’s extraordinary.
Mira Nadon
With her feline beauty, and the undulating flow and power of her dancing, this self-assured young member of New York City Ballet is just starting out. This fall, she made her debut as the tall girl in George Balanchine’s “Rubies,” and it was a spectacular performance, though hardly a surprise to those who saw her dance in “Scotch Symphony” at the School of American Ballet Workshop performances in 2017. At City Ballet, Ms. Nadon is not alone in talent, but she’s an important part of the company’s future.
Tharp Trio
In Twyla Tharp’s magnificent triple bill at American Ballet Theater last spring, the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House shook off its cobwebs. Along with “The Brahms-Haydn Variations” — it’s hard to forget Stephanie Williams’s gorgeous arms — and the rousing closer, “In the Upper Room,” the program featured the revival of “Deuce Coupe.” That 1973 work by Ms. Tharp, whose mix of classical and modern dance has led it to be considered the first crossover ballet, was resurrected for the current generation, who danced it with daring and aplomb, making it a hit all over again.
Sarah Michelson
A choreographer who shuns press and curtain calls, Ms. Michelson — a 2019 MacArthur Fellow — is a different kind of dance artist, whose intellect, imagination and visual sense have been copied over the years but never replicated. As she considers the labor of the art form, from its physicality to its spirituality, her mind doesn’t quit; her excavation of contemporary dance has created a profound body of work examining both its history and its future. In her recent piece for the River to River Festival, “june2019/\” — raw and abrasive yet not without humor — Ms. Michelson used her body as a canvas.
Sara Mearns
This New York City Ballet principal runs on adrenaline, or so it would seem. This year, especially, she pushed herself beyond the classical form to explore the larger world of dance, from musical comedy (she can be funny) to modern dance (where she is beyond daring). A highlight was her spectacular performance in “Night of 100 Solos: A Centennial Event” in honor of the modern master Merce Cunningham. Fiery and focused, she gave it her all — showing how searingly alive Cunningham’s repertory can be even when he is no longer around to see it.
Pam Tanowitz
New York City Ballet, the Royal Ballet, the Paul Taylor and Martha Graham companies — where has Ms. Tanowitz not made a dance this year? So far, she’s had nine and counting. (Bits and pieces are still going up here and there.) Her playful mining of steps and dance history enriched her works for Graham and Taylor, just as her percussive musicality challenged City Ballet’s dancers and audience — in good ways — with “Bartok Ballet.” But one of her most haunting works took place outdoors: As part of the River to River Festival, she transformed a waterfront park into a mystical field that was brimming with graceful bodies cutting through the fog.
Bruno Beltrão/Grupo de Rua
With its evening-length “Inoah,” choreographed by Mr. Beltrão, this contemporary Brazilian hip-hop company presented a spellbinding, fully realized theatrical world in which 10 male dancers, enveloped in near darkness and shadows, melted into the floor, sprang up again and skirted the edge between turbulence and stillness. It was dark for all of the right reasons. It was penetrating. And on a Friday night after a hectic week, it calmed me right down.
Joaquin Phoenix
In the film “Joker,” the actor tells the story of how Arthur Fleck — abused and mentally ill — becomes a villain through a sinewy, supple, dancing body. When you give yourself over to a physical experience so fully, words aren’t necessary to impart emotion, and that’s what Mr. Phoenix proved in his Oscar-worthy performance.
Camille A. Brown
Over the past year, this choreographer’s influence has been felt on dance, theater and opera stages: She has said that she almost sees her “dancers as actors,” and she most likely also sees actors as dancers. From her finely wrought “ink,” the final dance in a trilogy exploring African-American identity, to her work on the Metropolitan Opera’s “Porgy and Bess,” the Public Theater’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” and “Choir Boy” on Broadway — for which she was robbed of a Tony — Ms. Brown is one of the most expressive, genuine and deeply felt choreographers working today.
Michael Novak
Paul Taylor knew what he was doing when he left his modern dance organization in the capable, creative hands of Mr. Novak, a dancer who retired from the company this season. The group’s Lincoln Center season, the first led by Mr. Novak as artistic director, had a freshness to it, from the dancing onstage to the performers’ headshots. That matters. Everything needed an overhaul, and Mr. Novak, who has taste, knew that. He not only cares about modern dance, but he also knows how to keep the memory of Taylor — the strange parts, just as much as the joyful — fully alive.
SIOBHAN BURKE
New Bodies Feed and Revive Old Works
The ephemeral nature of dance can cause a lot of anxiety: how to maintain the integrity of a live artwork over time? Do new performances measure up to the original? While the fear is that dances will diminish with age, sometimes they get better or just change in illuminating ways. In a few of this year’s most memorable moments, older works bristled with the fresh energy and ideas of new dancers and collaborators.
Martha Graham’s 1936 “Chronicle” is a staple of the Graham company’s repertory. A stark response to the rise of fascism in Europe, it embodies an antiwar message that has remained resonant. But when Leslie Andrea Williams made her New York debut in the heroic central role in April, she imbued it with newfound authority, sincerity and drive. And as the first black woman to dance this part, she expanded the work’s meanings and the possibilities of who might see themselves reflected in her power.
It was also refreshing to see a more heterogeneous cast in the early works of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, who recently passed on her celebrated solo “Violin Phase,” a section of her 1982 “Fase,” to two women of color, Yuika Hashimoto and Soa Ratsifandrihana. (For most of its history, only De Keersmaeker, a white woman, danced the solo.) At New York Live Arts in September, Ms. Ratsifandrihana was especially riveting, navigating the work’s geometries with revelatory tenderness and concentration.
I didn’t see Yvonne Rainer’s long-dormant “Parts of Some Sextets” in 1965, so I can’t compare its vivid reconstruction, presented by Performa, with any previous iteration. But what she assembled with the dancer Emily Coates, who oversaw the reinvention of this dance for 11 people and 12 mattresses, deftly superimposed the present and past, while inviting us to contemplate the timeless themes embedded in a mattress: in Ms. Rainer’s words, “sex, death, illness, sleep and dreams.” It all was there.
BRIAN SEIBERT
A Breakout Year for Tap
This year, the great American art of tap dance enjoyed a sea change.
At the start of this century, it often appeared that in the eyes of presenters, only one tap dancer existed: Savion Glover. After the success of his 1996 Broadway show, “Bring in da Noise/Bring in da Funk,” his young genius was hard to ignore. Most of the few concert-dance slots allotted to tap went to him.
Then came Michelle Dorrance. After she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2013, she became the one. Rightly recognized as a charismatic performer and an imaginative choreographer, she was invited to just about every dance festival and even onto late-night TV. A little younger than Mr. Glover and inspired by him, she, in turn, immediately inspired and emboldened younger dancers, including Caleb Teicher.
Mr. Teicher, whose career is now taking off, might seem in line to take over. But Ms. Dorrance’s example has helped to change attitudes, and her penchant for spreading attention to others seems to be opening up more room. Both her company and Mr. Teicher’s appeared at City Center this year, separately, each delivering a performance that was crowd-pleasing in the best sense. More remarkably, dancers a bit older than Ms. Dorrance, 40, also got their day.
In September, Ayodele Casel, 44, led her first show at the Joyce Theater: a knockout joyfest. And just this past week, the hoofers Jason Samuels Smith, Derick K. Grant and Dormeshia, all veterans of “Bring in da Noise,” brought their extraordinary “And Still You Must Swing” to the same theater. When Ms. Dorrance returns there this month, it won’t just be a precedent-breaking number of tap acts in one season at a bellwether theater for the dance mainstream. It will be a sign that a truth long buried can finally be seen on New York stages: The top of tap is broader than any single dancer.
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