this week in dance

KYLE ABRAHAM AT THE ARMORY: RUNNING IN CIRCLES TO COMBAT FEAR AND ANXIETY

Kyle Abraham leads a large ensemble in Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful (photo by Alex Sargent / courtesy Park Ave. Armory)

DEAR LORD, MAKE ME BEAUTIFUL
Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
December 3-14, $75-$170
www.armoryonpark.org
www.aimbykyleabraham.com

As audience members enter Park Ave. Armory’s massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall to experience Kyle Abraham’s Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful, they are greeted by Cao Yuxi’s (aka JAMES) stunning set, a large backdrop that spills out over the floor, approaching the seating; projected on it is a pixelated image of Abraham’s head and shoulders, immersed in a naturalistic environment that evokes leaves, flowers, grass, and trees. It’s like a living version of a Kehinde Wiley portrait, except instead of celebrating the subject, in this case he eventually disappears. It’s a poignant evolution that is made even starker when Abraham, who has not danced with an ensemble in nine years, emerges onto the stage, running around in a circle again and again, at first fast but then slowing down until he has to stop and catch his breath.

In the program for the awe-inspiring armory commission, the forty-seven-year-old Pittsburgh-born dancer and choreographer explains, “I’m saddened by delayed positive progressive change in this world and frightened by the chaos of pandemic debris. I’ve never felt so deeply inclined to make something so attached to how I feel in the present. . . . I move through this world full of fear and a newfound fragility. . . . I dance in remembrance of the innocence of my younger self. And I dance in the present day, with sadness and fear of an unknown future, and a fading hope and prayer for imaginable change.”

Abraham is soon joined by a talented troupe of dancers that he has worked with in the past and present — Jamaal Bowman, Amari Frazier, Mykiah Goree, Tamisha Guy, Alysia Johnson, Catherine Kirk, Faith Mondesire, Riley O’Flynn, William Okajima, Morgan Olschewsche, Jai Perez, Donovan Reed, Keturah Stephen, Stephanie Terasaki, Gianna Theodore, and Olivia Wang — who break out into solos, duets, trios, and quartets, lifting, jumping, and interacting to a powerful live commissioned score by yMusic, a chamber ensemble featuring Alex Sopp on flutes and voice, Mark Dover on clarinets, CJ Camerieri on trumpet and French horn, Rob Moose on violin and guitar, Nadia Sirota on viola, and Gabriel Cabezas on cello. Sound, image, and movement come together in exquisite ways as the abstract shapes and colors continue almost microscopically morphing on the screen, providing an alternative to the muted earth palette of Karen Young’s costumes. The immersive sound is by Sam Crawford, with lighting by Dan Scully.

In the sixty-five-minute piece, Abraham, who choreographs for his own company, A.I.M. (Abraham in Motion), as well as New York City Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Paul Taylor American Modern Dance, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, the Royal Ballet, and the National Ballet of Cuba, wears his emotions on his sleeve as he explores aging, fear and anxiety, and loneliness. He was inspired in part by Richard Powers’s 2018 novel, The Overstory, which deals with Americans’ connection to the natural world, especially trees; the book’s narrative is divided into four chapters: “Roots,” “Trunk,” “Crown,” and “Seeds.” The circles Abraham runs could be like the rings of a tree, but in his case he thinks he is running out of time. In addition, he was affected by his father’s early onset dementia at an age only a few years older than Abraham is now.

Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful is exhilarating and propulsive as well as meditative, with only touches of foreboding. It’s also the kind of work that could only happen at the armory.

In the program note, Abraham asks, “Where will the world be in 5 years?”

It’s a loaded question that is impossible to answer, given the number of wars going on, the growing dangers of climate change, and the rash of international political extremism, but with more works like Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful, it will be a better place regardless.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

FREE RETURNS FROM MONICA BILL BARNES AT PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZONS

Monica Bill Barnes and Robbie Saenz de Viteri bring Many Happy Returns to Playwrights Horizons next month (photo by Paula Lobo)

Who: Monica Bill Barnes & Company
What: Hybrid scripted and improvised work
Where: Playwrights Horizons, Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 416 West Forty-Second St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
When: January 9-18, free with advance registration
Why: On its website, Monica Bill Barnes & Company announces, “Bringing dance where it doesn’t belong.” In the summer of 2021, the troupe, founded in New York City in 1997, staged Many Happy Returns, a dance-theater work that was devised as a one-time-only event commissioned by WP Theater to celebrate the return of in-person shows, reuniting performer and audience in the same space. From January 9 to 18, they will be happily presenting an expanded version of the show at Playwrights Horizons, a venue not usually associated with dance. Admission to all ten performances is free with advance registration.

In the show, which deals with memory and solace, co-artistic directors Monica Bill Barnes and Robbie Saenz de Viteri portray Barnes as a middle-age woman, with Barnes as the body and Saenz de Viteri the voice. Many Happy Returns combines scripted material with improvisation, as Saenz de Viteri types out new moments on the spot, inspired by the audience.

“So much is changing about what it means to be making live work now. That ever-shifting ground is pretty unsettling for a lot of us, in a lot of ways,” Barnes said in a statement. “Robbie and I felt like, ‘You know what? We want to make our own ever-shifting landscape to live in.’ It’s this joyful thing that’s also terrifying as a classically trained dancer; it’s an actor’s nightmare that I keep saying, enthusiastically, yes to.”

Saenz de Viteri noted, “Monica and I have no similarity in terms of training, but we laugh at the same things, and we get upset about a lot of the same things. In a crowded place, we find ourselves noticing a lot of the same things. Those overlaps became the grounds, many years ago, for starting to make things together. In Many Happy Returns, we’re taking all the pieces that make up a ‘character’ onstage — a story, a background, a specific way of moving, a specific way of talking — and breaking them all apart from each other. This fragmentary character of ‘Monica’ has allowed us both to channel some really vulnerable aspects of ourselves and share them in a different way than we ever have in our work — to ask how we make ourselves, out in the world, on a day to day basis.”

The piece is choreographed by Barnes, written by Saenz de Viteri, and performed by them along with Flannery Gregg, Mykel Marai Nairne, and Indah Mariana or Hsiao-Jou Tang; the directing consultant is three-time Obie winner Anne Kauffman (The Thugs, Mary Jane), with lighting and set design by Barbara Samuels and costumes by Kaye Voyce.

“Live performance feels like it needs a revolution right now, and not a revolution that involved burning everything down — but rather picking up the pieces and making new forms,” Kauffman said. “As a director, I love it — Monica and Robbie are stretching their brains and trying to conceive something that feels like it doesn’t exist yet. Playwrights Horizons and [artistic director] Adam Greenfield are always thinking in that way; in the rubble of theater postpandemic, he’s been putting words to actions in his programming. As a theater artist of over thirty-five years, watching Monica and Robbie and knowing Playwrights is the next presenter of Many Happy Returns, I feel so excited, like something new is bubbling up.”

Greenfield added, “Historically, Playwrights Horizons’ programming has excluded playwrights who create new work via interdisciplinary, non-literary methods (e.g., ensemble-devised work, improvisation, physical theater), and — in continuation of this theater’s longtime dedication to advancing playwrights — I want to think expansively about what that word means. From the moment I was first introduced to Many Happy Returns last year, I became eager to include these artists in our programming, not only because it affirms experimentation in the field of new plays, but because — in its very conception — this play embodies powerfully the inclusive, galvanizing potential of theater, as an art form and as a civic act.”

Act fast to get your free tickets — and be ready for the lack of a price to be incorporated into the relationship between performer, audience, and their respective expectations in Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theater.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

HONORING MOM AND MARTHA: LLOYD KNIGHT AT GRAHAM STUDIO AND THE GUGGENHEIM

Lloyd Knight’s solo work, The Drama, will have a sneak peak December 13-14 before premiering January 13 (photo courtesy DANCECleveland)

Who: Lloyd Knight
What: The Drama
Where: Martha Graham Studio Theater, 55 Bethune St., eleventh floor; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Peter B. Lewis Theater, 1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
When: Friday, December 13, $20-$30, 7:00, and Saturday, December 14, $20-$30, 6:00; Monday, January 13, $25-$65, 7:00
Why: “Dance is humbling in the way that it always brings you down to earth with what you can do, cannot do, and have the potential to do. Nothing for me is better than knowing that I can escape into a realm and take someone watching to somewhere else,” Lloyd Knight wrote in Dance magazine in March 2017. Knight will take dance fans to another realm with his latest work, The Drama, an hourlong solo created for his twentieth anniversary with the Martha Graham Dance Company and inspired by Graham — who he never met — and his mother, focusing on his life in dance. The multimedia piece is choreographed by Knight with the phenomenal Jack Ferver and features video design by Jeremy Jacob and text by Knight, who joined Graham in 2005 and has performed major roles in such productions as Appalachian Spring, Embattled Garden, and Night Journey.

A sneak preview of The Drama, which was commissioned by Works & Process and DANCECleveland, will be presented December 13 and 14 at the Martha Graham Studio Theater as part of the company’s Studio Series; its official premiere takes place January 13 at Works & Process at the Guggenheim in conjunction with the Underground Uptown Dance Festival, teamed with BalletCollective’s The Night Falls and followed by a Rotunda Dance Party with Princess Lockerooo, the Queen of Waacking.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

OUR RIGHTS, OUR FUTURE, RIGHT NOW: IHRAF 2024

INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS ART FESTIVAL
The Tank
312 West Thirty-Sixth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
December 9-15, $25
humanrightsartmovement.org
thetanknyc.org

On December 10, 1948, the United Nations released the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which announces, “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world . . . The General Assembly proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.” The theme of Human Rights Day 2024 is “Our Rights, Our Future, Right Now.”

In 2017, in celebration of the UDHR, playwright, author, and visual artist Tom Block started the International Human Rights Art Festival; the inaugural event was scheduled to be held at St. Mary’s Church but was censored by Archbishop Cardinal Timothy Dolan and had to quickly search for a new venue. “I feel fortunate in that I am not beholden to a spiritual structure that tells me who is worthy of a voice and protection and who is not. We believe that all people share this right,” Block said at the time. “We will not pick and choose among our acts or our issues, allowing some while rejecting others.”

That statement of purpose has remained a driving force as the festival has expanded over the years, having presented more than two thousand artists from more than one hundred countries. The sixth annual iteration takes place December 9-15 at the Tank with twelve thematic programs exploring climate change, LGBTQIA+ rights, immigration, and other basic human rights through dance, music, and theater, consisting of sixty new shows from nearly two dozen countries; all tickets are $25. Below is the full schedule.

Monday, December 9
Ten Minute Play Festival: Kelly Burr’s Passed Tents, Abhisek Bhattacharya’s Catastrophe, Robert Galinsky’s Requiem for the Wretched, Monte D. Monteleagre’s You Can Untie Them the Guards Can’t Stop You, Zareh Artinian Jr.’s Today’s América, Equity Library Theater of New York’s Across the Lake, and Rhys Collins’s Angelic Virtues, 7:00

Tuesday, December 10
Pride Residency and Performance by WADE Dance: Gesture Theater’s WAITING / POINTING, John Trunfio’s Pools, Donald Lee’s Fragility Cycle, and Noel Olson’s Do You Still Believe?, 7:00

Wednesday, December 11
Celebration of Immigration: excerpts from Natie’s “HOME”: Oceans — Ter La, Taiwo Aloba’s A Very Nigerian Dream, Kenneth Keng’s Through, Al Evangelista’s echoes, and Between Us Theatre Co’s Access Denied, 7:00

Wednesday, December 11
Celebration of LGBTQIA+: Jill Ohayon & Ryan O’Dea’s Turbulence, Maddie Moayedi’s Infractions, Farm Arts Collective’s Lucy Joseph, and Justin Anthony Long’s BIG ASS SECRET, 8:30

Thursday, December 12
Celebration of Women: Zizi Majid and Logan Reed’s Will, Groove with Me’s Her, Catherine Cabeen’s . . . yet again, Addison Vaughn’s Non-Advice to a Boat, and Miranda Stück’s I AM, 7:00

Thursday, December 12
Climate Change Action: Sarah Congress & Emma Denson’s Melting, Madeleine Yu-Phelps’s Ǝverything Okay, JCWK Dance Lab’s Eroded, and Lee Harrison Daniel’s sylvia, beginning to end and onward, 8:30

Friday, December 13
Human beings are members of a whole: Melis Yesiller’s Ünzile, Cecilia Whalen’s Two solos and a duet, Tina Bararian’s Built on Kindness, and Valentina Bache’s “It boils the water within,” dance event curated by Tina Bararian, 7:00

Friday, December 13
IHRAF TRANSforms — Celebration of Trans Artists: Ryan Hung and Charlie Meyers’s Now Boarding, Boundless Theatre Company’s Translucent, and Rush Johnston/Kaleid Dance Collective’s Until It Gets Dark, 8:30

Saturday, December 14
Celebration of Human Rights I: Rachael Sage’s Under My Canopy, Alex Manaa & Vaheed Talebian’s Another Cousin’s Wedding, the Invitation Arts Collective’s MOTHER EARTH, LET ME BLOOM, WaveLab’s Wave: A Hydrofeminist Performance, Joshua Piper’s Pas de Deux, and Inara Arts’s We Rise, 3:00

Celebration of Human Rights II: Carolyn Dorfman Dance’s CRIES OF THE CHILDREN, Steph Prizhitomsky’s Divine Hotline, BodyStories: Teresa Fellion Dance’s p u r p l e f l a m e, Steve Kronovet’s Waterslides in the Middle East, and Lindsey Wilson’s The Blackbird Trilogy, 7:00

Sunday, December 15
What to do? An evening of dance curated by Charly Santagado, featuring Lucienne Parker’s The Wetting of 12pm, Nathan Forster & Michelle Lukac’s Maybe We’re Trash, Lavy and Christian Warner’s pussys beat, I say to you, Amen O Lord, and excerpts from IMGE Dance’s (heart)beat, 3:00

Ten Minute Performance Festival: Pritha Mukherji’s Musings of an International Student, Tova Hopemark’s Heirloom, Little Shadow Productions’s You Have Arrived, Saidharshana Dhantu’s Behind Closed Doors, Jaymie Bellous’s Moonlight Becomes You, and sarAika movement collective’s Skin Deep, 7:00

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

A DYSTOPIC LAND OF WONDER AT THE JOYCE

GALLIM returns to the Joyce with New York premiere of evening-length Wonderland (photo by Dan Chen)

GALLIM: WONDERLAND
The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at Nineteenth St.
November 13-17, $62-$82
www.joyce.org
www.gallim.org

Brooklyn-based GALLIM explores the us vs. them mentality so prevalent in contemporary American society — and at the center of the recent presidential election — in the New York premiere of Wonderland, running November 13-17 at the Joyce. GALLIM presented a thirty-minute iteration of the work in its 2010 Joyce debut, but two years later founding artistic director Andrea Miller expanded it to an hourlong evening-length piece that takes place in an antitotalitarian dystopia.

The cast features Gothenburg Ballet’s Arika Yamada as Megalomatrix, Vivian Pakkanen as the Fool, Georgia Usborne as the Guilty, Donterreo Culp as the Beloved, guest artist Billy Barry as the Jester, Bryan Testa as the Dog, India Hobbs as the Seer, and Nouhoum Koita as the Everyone, with the Pack consisting of Jasmine Alisca, Victoria Chassé Dominguez, Briana Del Mundo, Waverly Fredericks, and Thomas Hogan. (Barry and Yamada originated their roles in 2010.)

“We are witnessing an extreme departure from one another’s physical and emotional individuality, from the foundations of human dignity, and from the very elements that make us free,” Miller said in a statement. “On social media, millions join virtual armies, charging against each other like packs of vicious wolves — same species, unseen enemies — driven by forces of real terror that we fail to fully comprehend. Wonderland navigates these dark pathways of daily alienation, inducement, and mutual aggression.”

Among Miller’s inspirations for the show is Cai Guo-Qiang’s Head On, an installation of ninety-nine life-size stuffed wolves charging toward a glass wall, part of his 2008 “I Want to Believe” exhibition at the Guggenheim. The score ranges from Chopin, Joanna Newsom, and the Chordettes to William Basinsky, Black Dice, and Jeannie Robertson, with atmospheric sound design by Miller and Jakub Kiupinski and Cristina Spinei of Blind Ear Music. The set is by Jon Bausor, lighting by Vincent Vigilante, and costumes by Jose Solís.

Wonderland pits the individual against dangerous groupthink with animalistic movement in a world threatening to go off the rails. Miller added, “Can we imagine — or perhaps remember — the destructive outcomes on the other side of totalitarian promises and societies? Maybe art, maybe dance, through their creative freedom, can remind us of the way back to empathy and shared humanity.” There will be a curtain chat at the November 14 show to provide further illumination.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

ALVIN AILEY: ON THE CUTTING EDGE

Carmen de Lavallade performs with Alvin Ailey at Jacob’s Pillow in 1961 (photo by John Lindquist)

EDGES OF AILEY
Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort St.
Wednesday – Tuesday through February 9, $24-$30 (eighteen and under free; Friday nights and second Sundays free)
212-570-3600
whitney.org

“I’m trying to hold up a mirror to our society so they can see how beautiful they are, Black people, you know?” Alvin Ailey once said.

When I was in junior high, we were visited by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. I had never seen anything like it, certainly not in my all-white class on Long Island. It opened my eyes to a world of possibilities, now highlighted at the end of every year when I go see AAADT in their annual season at City Center. I was even pulled onstage once by Ailey dancer Belén Pereyra to join her and others for an audience participation section of Ohad Naharin’s Minus 16.

The continuing legacy of Alvin Ailey himself and his company is celebrated in the exhilarating exhibition “Edges of Ailey,” on view at the Whitney through February 9. The dazzling multimedia show features painting, sculpture, drawings, photography, postcards and letters, video, notebooks, posters, and more, along with a multichannel loop of rare archival footage of the troupe’s remarkable history, circling around the top of the gallery in an awe-inspiring video installation. The artworks are divided into such categories as “Blackness in Dance,” “Black Spirituality,” “Black Liberation,” “Ailey’s Collaborators/Nightlife,” and “After Ailey,” arranged in sections that encourage fluid but random movement; you can wander through at your own pace, following your own path.

The exhibit is supplemented by several vitrines filled with wonderful ephemera, from family photos, programs, and research notes to epistolary exchanges with Dudley Williams, Langston Hughes, and Ailey’s mother, Lula Cooper. The notebooks are utterly fascinating, with exciting and revealing notations, early drafts, intricately detailed schedules, and such quotes as “One must discover what the music is about + visualize it if possible.” and “Very important: The choreographer as storyteller / story inventor.”

Exhibit includes notebooks filled with intimate and intricate details of Alvin Ailey’s life and career (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

A handful of the pieces were created specifically for the show, while others date back to the 1860s. Among the artists represented are Carrie Mae Weems, Jacob Lawrence, Lorna Simpson, James Van Der Zee, Alma Thomas, Kevin Beasley, Elizabeth Catlett, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Driskell, Purvis Young, Horace Pippin, Theaster Gates, and Lyle Ashton Harris. A poem by Nikki Giovanni, “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars),” hangs on a long, narrow vertical panel. Three stark 1970 woodcuts by Aaron Douglas are titled Bravado, Flight, and Surrender.

In the center of the space is a daring untitled sculpture by David Hammons made of human hair, wire, metallic mylar, a sledge hammer, plastic beads, string, a metal food tin, panty hose, leather, tea bags, and feathers. Faith Ringgold’s United States of Attica map is in the red, black, and green colors of the Pan-African flag. One of the most poignant sections is “Black Women,” a gathering of such works as Emma Amos’s 1985 Judith Jamison as Josephine Baker, Elizabeth Catlett’s 1947 I Am the Negro Woman, Beauford Delaney’s 1965 Marian Anderson, Geoffrey Holder’s 1976 Portrait of Carmen de Lavallade, Kara Walker’s 1998 African/American, Mickalene Thomas’s 2024 Katherine Dunham: Revelation, and Karon Davis’s 2024 Dear Mama, paying tribute to Black women artists and performers — and, particularly, longtime Ailey dancer and artistic director Judith Jamison, on whom Ailey choreographed the 1971 solo Cry, a birthday present for his mother that he dedicated “to all Black women everywhere — especially our mothers.”

Ailey collaborator Romare Bearden’s “Bayou Fever” series is a colorful depiction of joy and movement. Choreographer and visual artist Ralph Lemon’s Untitled (On Black Music) consists of forty-one ink and watercolor on paper drawings, leaving one slot empty at the lower right. Video stations show performances by Jack Cole, the Katherine Dunham Company, Martha Graham, Duke Ellington, Lester Horton, Pearl Primus, and Ailey himself, including in the three-minute black-and-white A Study in Choreography for Camera, directed by Maya Deren and Talley Beatty.

Ailey was born in Texas in 1931 and died from an AIDS-related illness in New York City in 1989, at the age of fifty-four. He left behind a thrilling legacy of movement and music honoring the African American experience and supporting civil rights and social justice. It’s evident not only in the exhibition itself but in the accompanying program of live performances, which has already featured Ronald K. Brown and Matthew Rushing and continues November 7-9 with Yusha-Marie Sorzano’s This World Anew, November 16 with Bill T. Jones’s Memory Piece: Mr. Ailey, Alvin… the un-Ailey?, December 13-15 with Will Rawls’s Parable of the Guest, January 17-19 with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s Solo Voyages, January 24-26 with Excerpts from New Works, February 6-8 with Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born’s let slip, hold sway, and Ailey II: Harmonic Echo November 20-24, December 21-22, and January 22-26.

Hope Boykin’s Finding Free makes its debut at Ailey season at City Center (photo by Paul Kolnik)

ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER
New York City Center
131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
December 4 – January 5, $42-$172
www.alvinailey.org
www.nycitycenter.org

Before or after visiting “Edges of Ailey,” you must see the real thing, taking in a a show or two at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s five-week season, its sixty-sixth, at New York City Center, running December 4 through January 5. As always, it’s a combination of world and company premieres, classic favorites by Ailey and other choreographers, and presentations with live music; many programs conclude with the AAADT’s masterpiece, the thirty-six-minute multipart Revelations.

“This season we celebrate the lineage and legacy of Mr. Ailey, highlighting his acclaimed works as well as new ballets by choreographers for whom he paved the way,” interim artistic director Matthew Rushing said in a statement. “As I look at the repertory for our season, I am reminded that dance is both a reflection of our past and a guide to our future. We are excited to welcome audiences this holiday season to be inspired by Ailey’s extraordinary artistry and rich story, as it continues to be written.”

“All New” evenings feature former Ailey dancer Jamar Roberts’s Al-Andalus Blues, set to music by Roberta Flack and Miles Davis; former company member Hope Boykin’s Finding Free, with an original jazz and gospel score by pianist Matthew Whitaker that he will perform live at several shows; Lar Lubovitch’s Ailey debut, Many Angels, which explores St. Thomas Aquinas’s question “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?,” set to Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5; and Rushing’s Sacred Songs, built around music from the original 1960 version of Revelations that was eventually edited out because of length.

There will also be new productions of Elisa Monte’s twelve-minute duet, Treading, and Ronald K. Brown’s spectacular Grace, which premiered at City Center twenty-five years ago. The opening night gala honors dance educator Jody Gottfried Arnhold with presentations of Grace with Leslie Odom Jr. and Revelations with a live choir.

Other highlights are Dancing Spirit, Brown’s tribute to Jamison; Roberts’s 2019 Ode; Elizabeth Roxas-Dobrish’s Me, Myself and You; Amy Hall Garner’s CENTURY; Hans van Manen’s Solo; Alonzo King’s Following the Subtle Current Upstream; and Kyle Abraham’s Are You in Your Feelings? Among the Ailey classics on the schedule are Memoria, A Song for You, Cry, and Night Creature. Saturday matinees are followed by Q&As with the dancers, which this year welcome newcomers Leonardo Brito, Jesse Obremski, Kali Marie Oliver, and Dandara Veiga and the return of Jessica Amber Pinkett; closing night will celebrate what would have been Alvin Ailey’s ninety-third birthday.

And to keep your Ailey fix rolling, you can stream the eight-part Ailey PBS documentary Portrait of Ailey here.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

GRAFFITI MEETS DANCE IN BELLA ABZUG PARK

Imani Gaudin and Jakob Vitale will premiere site-specific work October 3 in Bella Abzug Park

jakob & imani
Bella Abzug Park, Hudson Yards
Enter between West Thirty-Fourth & Thirty-Fifth Sts. along Hudson Blvd. East
Thursday, October 3, free, noon-3:00 and 4:00-7:00
646-731-3200
baryshnikovarts.org

Baryshnikov Arts takes it outside with the world premiere of jakob & imani, a site-specific piece conceived by choreographer Imani Gaudin and visual artist Jakob Vitale for Bella Abzug Park at Hudson Yards. Commissioned with the Hudson Yards Hell’s Kitchen Alliance, the durational work explores the symbiotic relationship between graffiti and dance. It will be performed by Gaudin, Vitale, and Marcus Sarjeant, with a set by Gaudin, Vitale, and Louis James Woodworks and photography by Sinematic Studios; Gaudin and Vitale, both graduates of Purchase, also created the sound score and the costumes.

Gaudin, who was born and raised in New Orleans and is artistic director of the Brooklyn-based Gaudanse Inc., seeks “to create a collaborative space for all artists alike while exploring what it means to delve deep into how movement languages bring forth new ideas and translates into what we call dance.” The company has presented such previous pieces as nanibu, 二時二分（2:02), and mamihlapinatapai. The Bronx-born Vitale, who is based in New York and Los Angeles, states that “art can reach in any direction, but in its most basic form it can either steer an observer into fantastical distractions or it can build off of life and evoke a thought/reaction to the prevalence of the real. . . . It comes down to the viewer to determine the significance of the art and evoking its effectiveness towards making the world fair and peaceful.”

Admission to jakob & imani, which takes place October 3 from noon to seven with a one-hour break at three, is free. Baryshnikov Arts’ fall season continues with such other programs as Oliver Tompkins Ray’s Woolgathering, featuring Patti Smith, with choreography by John Heginbotham; PRISMA’s Origins, with ARKAI and SPIDERHORSE; and the Charles Overton Group in a salon-style concert.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]