7 Must-See Performance Picks Hitting Stages This Month
A long-awaited world premiere, a festival filled with experiments, two New York City mainstays and a trio of new works tackling environmental issues head-on—there are a lot of performances to be excited about this month, and our top picks are just the tip of the iceberg.
A Change in the Weather
NEW YORK CITY In Faye Driscoll’s latest, a cast of 10—dancers, singers, crew—create an ever-morphing sculpture from bodies, sounds and scents, slowly shifting as a raft-like stage, too small to contain them and embanked by the audience, moves beneath them. Weathering, named for the process by which weather conditions cause the physical disintegration of features on the earth’s surface over time, draws attention to the subtleties of touch while investigating the ways events larger than ourselves impact and move through us. Commissioned through New York Live Arts’ Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist program, the work’s debut runs April 6–8 and 13–15. newyorklivearts.org. —Courtney Escoyne
Movers and Shakers
NEW YORK CITY This year’s delightfully busy edition of La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival offers disparate visions of what contemporary dance can be. Norwegian choreographer Kari Hoaas premieres Shadowland, a response to the instability of the world after the start of the pandemic. Nela H. Kornetová’s Forced Beauty, which explores power structures and violent aesthetics, gets its U.S. premiere, while Bobbi Jene Smith’s Broken Theater, developed at La MaMa and featuring a cast of a dozen contemporary dance who’s whos probing the lines between who they are as performers and as people, makes its New York debut. Also on the docket: a shared evening of three Arab American choreographers (Nora Alami, Jadd Tank and Leyya Mona Tawil), Dance Magazine editor at large Wendy Perron’s recent collaboration with Morgan Griffin (Wendy Perron: The Daily Mirror; 1976/2022), and works by Kayla Farrish and Baye & Asa. April 6–30. lamama.org. —CE
Caves, Comedians and Commissions
NEW YORK CITY Martha Graham Dance Company returns to The Joyce Theater with a slate of programming mixing the old with the new. Premieres by hard-hitting dance theater duo Baye & Asa and Gaga-influenced dancemaker Annie Rigney rub elbows with Graham classics—Cave of the Heart, Embattled Garden, Dark Meadow Suite, Every Soul Is a Circus—and more recent endeavors, like last year’s eight-choreographer reimagining of Canticle for Innocent Comedians (led by Sonya Tayeh) and Hofesh Shechter’s nightlife-inspired CAVE. April 18–30. joyce.org. —CE
Harlem Heads to Midtown
NEW YORK CITY Dance Theatre of Harlem brings a pair of major new works home for their New York debuts: Tiffany Rea-Fisher’s Sounds of Hazel, a celebration of jazz icon Hazel Scott that premiered in Washington, DC, in October, and William Forsythe’s latest entry in his Barre Project, Blake Works IV, which debuted in January at Penn Live Arts. Joining those ballets for the New York City Center engagement are a revival of Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante and Christopher Wheeldon’s This Bitter Earth, while a second program offers existing repertory by Helen Pickett, Stanton Welch, Nacho Duato and artistic director designate Robert Garland. April 19–23. nycitycenter.org. —CE
Think Green
Choreographers turn their attention to urgent environmental concerns.
The Future Is Now
SALT LAKE CITY Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company artistic director Daniel Charon collaborates with theater director Alexandra Harbold for a new evening-length work. To See Beyond Our Time takes climate change and humanity’s necessary reckoning with the clear and present danger it presents as its subject, inspired by the impact of diminishing water levels in the Great Salt Lake on the area’s ecosystem. April 13–15. ririewoodbury.com. —CE
Nor Any Drop to Drink
PITTSBURGH Corningworks artistic director Beth Corning concocts masterful dance-theater explorations that draw from the conundrums of human existence. She provokes us with questions, but says, “I don’t have the answers.” The fisherman, the butterfly, eve & her lover – a parable, created for her award-winning Glue Factory Projects series, which features artists over age 45, boasts a cast of four savvy performers alongside water, turf and 7.5 tons of sand. With her latest evening-length opus, Corning dives into the global climate crisis and takes the 50-member audience with her to ponder “How much do our little personal efforts really matter?” April 15–23. corningworks.org. —Karen Dacko
Naming the Lost
LONDON Nederlands Dans Theater tours to Sadler’s Wells, bringing the UK premiere of Crystal Pite’s latest creation for the company, Figures in Extinction [1.0]. The work, which touches on melting polar ice caps and extinct animal species as it questions whether humanity can truly name all that is being lost in this age of extinction, debuted last year and is the first of a planned trio of premieres created in collaboration with theater director Simon McBurney. Rounding out the triple bill are Jiří Kylián’s “unfinished” 100th work, Gods and Dogs, and Gabriela Carrizo’s disconcertingly dreamlike La Ruta. April 19–22. sadlerswells.com. —CE
