(Read our article about Black Dance Stories. Now Warren continues with a new round of programming, the Young Professionals’ Experience, which focuses on emerging Black artists. It’s a dance history class for all - with warmth, truth and heart. This series, produced and hosted by Charmaine Warren, got its start in June of 2020, but throughout the past year it has become a lively and indispensable archive of the stories of Black dance artists. The mesmerizing result transformed these five distinct dancers - moving with silken speed or as slow-motion sculptures - into a vibrant union of musicality, tenderness and power. Racing across a playground on balmy September night, Mikaila Ware, Kerime Konur, Gabrielle Loren and Anya Clarke-Verdery joined Farrish in a sweeping and robust work braiding music and spoken word with choreography that encompassed vivid, technical dance and the grace and power of athletic drills. ”)Īs part of four/four presents, a platform commissioning collaborations among artists, the dancer and choreographer Kayla Farrish teamed up with the musician Melanie Charles in Maria Hernandez Park in Brooklyn. (“Pergolesi,” for Sara Mearns and Robbie Fairchild, was spellbinding.) But earlier this year - when we were still trapped indoors - there was another way to bask in her work: the excellent “ American Masters: Twyla Moves.” What was American Ballet Theater thinking opening its Lincoln Center season with “Giselle” instead of Tharp’s “In the Upper Room”? It’s a dance about courage, and given the time we’re in, nothing would have been more appropriate. With “ Twyla Now,” Tharp created a moving, transcendent program that reimagined her past with four works demonstrating her crystalline command of structure, steps, musicality and partnering. What follows are my Top 10 dance events, in no particular order. In order to see dance clearly, you need to feel its urgency their performances put me on the right path. They were all important, all transporting. But then came the fierce and fun Brooklynettes at Barclays Center the Kitchen’s experimental Dance and Process program, “This Is No Substitute for a Dance” that included Leslie Cuyjet and Kennis Hawkins at Queenslab in Ridgewood and Jodi Melnick’s delicate, unsentimental “This duet (infinite loneliness)” for Taylor Stanley and Ned Sturgis at the Little Island Dance Festival.

Virtual dance was pretty much all we had. Almost.īefore the fall season, dance was re-emerging from its pandemic cocoon. Except for masks, vaccine checks and, in certain instances, no intermissions - please keep that option whenever possible going forward? - it has been like any other fall. When fall happened, it was as if a switch had turned the dance world back on.

This has been a strange year for dance: A quiet, dark winter followed by outdoor performances - a trickle in the spring and a flood in the summer. Gia kourlas Turning the Dance World Back On

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