As a native New Yorker, I’m ashamed to admit I’d never been inside the flagship New York Public Library. That changed on a recent weekend, when, as an audience member at Monica Bill Barnes’ Lunch Dances, I ended up donning neon-green headphones and jogging around the iconic landmark with my hands in the air. Lunch […]

Here are the latest promotions, appointments, and departures, as well as notable awards and accomplishments, from April 2025. Plus, a new scholarship opportunity for dance students and educators.

Maybe even more than most industries, the dance field is obsessed with youth. We fawn over prodigies, we love to predict the next big thing. Yes, Dance Magazine itself is 100 percent guilty of this, with features like “25 to Watch” and On the Rise. But just because a performing career can be short doesn’t […]

While “subject to change” is a given these days, here’s what we’re most excited to catch if all goes as planned during the 2021–22 season. Who Was It For? Clarissa Dyas RJ Muna, Courtesy Joe Goode Performance Group Are you ready to revisit the Summer of Love? With Time of Change, the Joe Goode Performance […]

My dad likes to remind me that I was intolerable in junior high. Whenever I hear him talk about his daughter, the dancer, he finds a way to tell this story: “We always knew Peanut”—that’s me—”was going to be a dancer. When she was in seventh grade, she would come home from school and just […]

Monica Bill Barnes has made a name for herself by creating whimsical, heartfelt, humorous shows for her company. Recently, she took a step back from the director’s chair to tackle a very different kind of project: choreographing Greta Gerwig’s new Little Women, due for theatrical release December 25. Louisa May Alcott’s beloved Reconstruction Era novel, […]

Monica Bill Barnes is one of the funniest choreographers working today. And though the style of physical humor she’s crafted with her frequent collaborator Anna Bass could elicit laughs even in dead silence, the pair’s antics are often supplemented with—or juxtaposed against—music choices that feel both unexpected and yet somehow perfectly fitting. It turns out […]

If you’ve been following our “In The Studio” series you know that most of our episodes take place in just that—a studio. But at a dress rehearsal for Monica Bill Barnes & Company’s latest project Happy Hour, I found myself in what looked like an episode of “The Office” on a day of shooting an […]