January 18, 2019
After revisiting saved playbills and tickets, past New York Times reviews, and my calendar, I have gathered my list of the best dance of 2018, seen in New York. I found the exercise of revisiting all of the performances I attended in the past year to be a rewarding way to reflect on the most thrilling aspect of living in New York City for me: seeing live dance…all the time!
(This list is in a particular order, with my very favorites at the end.)
Jack Ferver’s Queer Dance Theater Work at NYLA
Jack Ferver, a performance artist who produces an entertaining and addicting podcast titled What’s Going On With Dance and Stuff with longtime friend Reid Bartelme, presented a show in early 2018 with a group of fellow queer male dancers called Everything Is Imaginable. Ferver, with Bartelme, ABT principal James Whiteside, Martha Graham Dance Company principal Lloyd Knight, and Broadway performer Garen Scribner, star in this dance theater work inspired by each performer’s life and multi-faceted identity. The work left me moved and refreshed.
The show was recently revived at NYLA for an additional engagement. Hoorah!
Fall for Dance
The Fall for Dance festival at City Center is generally a highlight each year, as it provides a “sampler” of dance featuring a diverse group of companies, in terms of style, region, size, etc. It is one of the only times a year, I have found, when dance performances are treated similarly to rock concerts—there are packed houses, and lots of cheering.
This year’s two standouts were Pam Tanowitz’s New Work for Goldberg Variations and Caleb Teicher & Company’s Bzzz.
Tanowitz arranged the stage space in a non-traditional way, situating the piano and pianist, Simone Dinnerstein, centerstage. Tanowitz’s inventive, precise, Cunningham-inspired phrases were executed by the dancers around this centerpiece. Teicher’s dazzling tap piece, complete with a sound-score featuring beatboxer extraordinaire Chris Celiz (alongside the foot-tapping of the dancers), was energizing and elicited much head-bobbing from the audience, as well as a rousing, immediate standing ovation.
I will also give honorable mentions to Justin Peck’s Sleep Well Beast, performed with his then-fiancée, now-wife, Patricia Delgado, and Lucinda Childs’s Canto Ostinato, which I had previously seen at The Joyce in 2016. Peck and Delgado performed a pas de deux to popular music by The National. It was sweet and romantic, and a treat to see the pair perform together. Childs’s piece was her typical showing of intricate formalism, and repeated phrases of steps danced in seemingly infinite new directions, ways, and combinations.
Reid & Harriet Design’s Show at Guggenheim’s Works & Process
Guggenheim’s Works & Process series, which predominantly features excerpts of existing or in-development works with a talk-back/conversation element with collaborators, has become one of my favorite performance series in the city.
A highlight from 2018’s offerings was a show curated by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, costume designers based in New York City whose work is mostly for dance. The show featured many of their whimsical designs and dancer and choreographer friends, and even Jung, who does not come from a dance-performance background, joined in the dancing. This show was unique, not only in the people it brought together onstage and in the audience, but because the organizing principle for it was costume design—not an area that is typically the deciding or driving factor in the curatorial process.
Lucinda Childs at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival
I wrote a lengthy post about this work—Childs’s revival of Available Light in the summer of 2018 at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater—as well, and it deserves another mention here. Childs’s masterful structuring of movements and bodies in space is on full display in this work. (As a sidenote, if I had started to write this blog a couple of years ago, I would have chosen Childs’s two-week retrospective season at The Joyce in 2016, which featured works from 1963-2016, including the full-length tour de force DANCE, as the top of my best dance of 2016 list.)
ABT’s Performances of Tharp Masterpiece In the Upper Room
As I gushed in a previous post, I was delighted that American Ballet Theatre chose to program Twyla Tharp’s masterpiece In the Upper Room during their fall Koch season. If you missed it then, ABT’s spring Met season this year features a Tharp triple-bill program with In the Upper Room, along with The Brahms-Haydn Variations and Deuce Coupe. I am curious to see a larger portion of the company tackling Tharp’s work and style.
MoMA’s Celebration of Post-Modern Masters
The Museum of Modern Art provided us with a retrospective exhibit, complete with numerous live performances in the museum, about the era and artists of the post-modern dance movement, centered at the Judson Church in downtown New York. The exhibit, Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done, runs through February 3, so there’s still time to catch it.
I was lucky to see performances of works by Yvonne Rainer and Lucinda Childs, both of whom performed themselves: Rainer in a group work and Childs in a solo. I will forever remember the experience of watching these two legends dance. Both women projected a calmness and serenity in performance, perhaps qualities that can only be developed after so many years of putting one’s work and body in front of audiences and critics.
New York City Ballet
Whenever NYCB is in season, I am happy. Last year, I didn’t keep track of exactly how many NYCB performances I saw, but I plan to keep better records for 2019. I would guess that the number for 2018 is likely around ten.
The musicality, daring, freshness, and vivacity of the company’s dancers and repertory, even despite a year of much public and private turmoil, endures.
This year, I enjoyed, in particular:
- Agon and Symphony in Three Movements, both classics and Balanchine “must sees,” on the well-crafted “Stravinsky and Balanchine” program in the Winter 2018 season;
- The Concert (playful and delightful), Afternoon of a Faun (delicate and contemplative), and The Cage (a new piece for me that was thrilling and memorable), all from the Robbins celebration in the Spring 2018 season;
- and, Justin Peck’s Pulcinella Variations (a true classical pointe-shoe ballet from Peck was fun to see), Kyle Abraham’s fall fashion gala piece The Runaway (the most refreshing ballet piece I’ve seen in awhile, and one of the most important moments in the dance world this year), and Jewels, all from the fairly recent Fall 2018 season.
City Center’s Balanchine Festival
As part of its 75th anniversary season, New York City Center—which was New York City Ballet’s home before the company moved further uptown to the Koch (formerly the State Theater)—put together a Balanchine extravaganza, featuring some of the best ballet companies from around the world dancing Balanchine works. It was a treat to have so many world-class companies and dancers performing together under one roof for a week, and to have the opportunity to compare and contrast the various companies’ interpretations of Balanchine’s distinct style. It was, truly, the talk of the town—and my #1 dance highlight of 2018.
Highlights from the festival (I attended three of the six performances) were: Miami City Ballet doing Serenade (I cried as soon as the music started); City Ballet in Symphony in C and Concerto Barocco (it was abundantly clear why they’re considered the Balanchine masters and authority); and, San Francisco Ballet splendidly performing Divertimento No. 15.
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City Ballet’s winter season opens Tuesday, January 22, on Balanchine’s birthday (I hope there will be cake), so we’re hitting the ground running for another year of dance in 2019!
Dance As I See It 