GIA KOURLAS
Virtuosos, Veterans and Hopes for the Future
If this year has shown me anything, it’s that I am pulled toward dance that is raw and cathartic, brave and complex. There might be beauty, but that’s not the draw — even with a dancer as astonishing as Mira Nadon of New York City Ballet. Her willingness to go for it is what matters, her fearlessness. As is the depth of feeling of Chloe Misseldine of American Ballet Theater. Twyla Tharp’s blend of the soulful interior with the virtuosic exterior. Ralph Lemon’s range and rage. Bill T. Jones’s bravery in exposing his vulnerability. And, particularly now, the imagination and commitment of a new generation. It’s dance that takes itself seriously.
Dance is made up of bodies; bodies are people. It is a reflection of the world, and while the world is increasingly dark, dance is a place to find authenticity. You can rest, but you can’t quit. In the words of Tharp, “You dig in, you dig down, you settle in and you don’t stop.”
In no particular order, here of some of the year’s memorable moments in dance.
Ralph Lemon
“I’m shattering inside,” Okwui Okpokwasili sings — or wails, with such feeling that her voice seems to seep into your body — at the start of “Tell it anyway,” a blistering work shown at MoMA PS1 as part of the exhibition “Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon.” Lemon, a choreographer and visual artist, gathered a stellar cast of collaborators (including the electrifying Mariama Noguera-Devers) to create a work, set to to a pulsating score by Kevin Beasley, that is blessedly cathartic in its chaos. (Read our feature about Ralph Lemon.)
Alexei Ratmansky: ‘Solitude’
For his first work as New York City Ballet’s artist in residence, Ratmansky presented a searing dance dedicated to “the children of Ukraine, victims of the war.” Set to Mahler and inspired by a photograph of a father kneeling next to the body of his 13-year-old son, Ratmansky distilled grief into a dance language of bent and broken bodies as well as a heart-wrenching solo — a moving lamentation that embodies the anxiety of our age. (Read our review of “Solitude.”)
Rachid Ouramdane
As part of the Cultural Olympiad, a series of multidisciplinary arts events held in conjunction with the Olympic and Paralympic Games, Ouramdane, a French-Algerian choreographer, presented the transfixing “Mobïus Morphosis” at the Panthéon in Paris. Featuring members of the acrobatic collective Compagnie XY and the Lyon Opera Ballet, the piece turned athletic prowess into art as its performers — flying through the air and swirling across the stage like flocks of birds — brought the outside inside. (Read our feature about Rachid Ouramdane.)
Twyla Tharp
At the Joyce Theater, Tharp presented a wide-ranging program with the premiere of “The Ballet Dancer,” a charming, funny look at the creative process; a new solo, “Brel,” for the American Ballet Theater principal Herman Cornejo; and the return of “Ocean’s Motion” (1975), set to Chuck Berry songs. With its remarkable mix of ballet and social dance, “Ocean’s Motion” was a stunner, as was “Brel.” Performed alternately by Cornejo and Daniel Ulbricht, the solo looks at the subtle grace of the experienced, virtuosic dancer. A hero. (Read our feature about Twyla Tharp’s program.)
Ayodele Casel
The highlight of “Max Roach 100” at the Joyce Theater was a performance by this silky, musical and generous tap dancer. In a daring improvisation — bordering on audacious — Casel danced to a duet Roach recorded with the pianist Cecil Taylor with such intuitive force that the three of them seemed to exist together in real time. She is always remarkable, but here she was a force of wit and wonder. (Watch a tap dance that transcends time.)
Oona Doherty
The work of this Belfast-raised choreographer can sneak up on you. In “Navy Blue,” a dance that makes a case for societal change — not in a bombastic way — Doherty wonders, How can the light enter a dark world? “Navy Blue” has a grim edge; suffering and madness are part of its glue. We are all, as Doherty’s voice floats in space narrating, “a pale blue dot on a pale blue dot.” It ends with a thrashing solo — again, cathartic — like a release into light. (Read our review of “Navy Blue.”)
Bill T. Jones
It was moving to see the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in its affecting revival of “Still/Here” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, but the fall season also featured Jones in his “Memory Piece: Mr. Ailey, Alvin… the un-Ailey?” Presented as part of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s “Edges of Ailey” exhibition, the new solo explored so many things — Jones’s relationship to Ailey, to the white world of postmodern dance, the racism he’s faced — through his voice and in his 72-year-old body. (Read our feature on “Still/Here.”)
Ballerinas on the rise
This year two ballerinas burst into the collective consciousness. Mira Nadon, the New York City Ballet principal, further proved her singular radiance in George Balanchine’s “Errante” and “Mozartiana.” Chloe Misseldine of American Ballet Theater made such an impact in her New York debut of “Swan Lake” that the company’s artistic director, Susan Jaffe, promoted her to principal dancer on the spot. (Read our features on Mira Nadon and Chloe Misseldine.)
Choreographers on the rise
In programs at Pageant in Brooklyn (Sharleen Chidiac) and the SculptureCenter in Queens (Alexa West), two experimental choreographers — both founders of the performance space Pageant — offered vivid new dance experiences. For “Home Entertainment Complex,” Chidiac dug into the creative process with wit and grit. But it was the mysterious, dreamlike dance passages that tied it together. West, in her richly rendered “Open Rehearsal,” created a maze of choreography as viewers followed dancers along the winding curves of the SculptureCenter, using archways and concrete hallways as a canvas. Dances started small and gradually expanded into a larger space to form a stately moving sculpture.
‘Cats: The Jellicle Ball’
One of the best ideas I had this year was to take a theater kid to this marvelous reinvention of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” at the Perelman Performing Arts Center. Her eyes were big, her smile nonstop, her mind pretty much blown. Set in a ballroom for a voguing competition, and featuring wonderful new versions of the music, the show placed queer ballroom culture in its sparkling, rightful spotlight. If only this could have a life on Broadway. Many more young minds need to be blown. (Read our feature on four standout dancers.)
Honorable mentions: Kyle Abraham for “Mercurial Son” at Ballet Theater; Nile Harris for “This House Is Not a Home” at Abrons Arts Center; Niall Jones for “JohnsonJaxxxonJefferson” at Danspace Project; and Tiler Peck for “Concerto for Two Pianos” at City Ballet.
BRIAN SEIBERT
Protest, Elegy and a Jellicle Ball
Not every year can be a banner year. But talent can break through even when the field is fallow. Maybe it was a hangover from the pandemic or problems in the production pipeline, but dance as a whole seemed short on imagination in 2024. That meant, though, that the best stuff stood out all the more. Here, in chronological order, are my top five.
Alexei Ratmansky
Ballet is seldom responsive to world events, but the war in Ukraine has had a remarkable impact on the greatest ballet choreographer of our time, Alexei Ratmansky. He grew up in Ukraine; his parents still live there. The “Wartime Elegy” he made for Pacific Northwest Ballet in 2022 now looks like a rough draft for “Solitude,” the piercing work that New York City Ballet debuted in February. Bringing to life a war photograph of a Ukrainian father kneeling next to his dead son, “Solitude” twists with wrenching grief and explodes like an air raid. (Read our review of “Solitude.”)
Jamar Roberts
The Martha Graham Dance Company’s track record in commissioning works of merit has been erratic to bad. “We the People,” by Jamar Roberts, was an exception to this pattern and to another: Unlike many protest dances, it was art, not agitprop. Working against the grain of an Americana score by Rhiannon Giddens, Roberts, a former Alvin Ailey dancer, drew out the Graham technique in his style and applied it to his own expressive ends, creating an old-fashioned modern dance that felt of the moment. (Read our profile of Jamar Roberts.)
‘Max Roach 100’
The Joyce Theater’s centenary tribute to the jazz drummer Max Roach, who died in 2007, had a stacked-deck lineup. Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence and the Cuban company Malpaso teamed up to honor Roach’s Afro-Cuban side. The hip-hop wizard Rennie Harris adeptly channeled Roach’s voice of protest. But the bravest was the tap dancer Ayodele Casel, improvising to a riotous recording by Roach and the free-jazz pianist Cecil Taylor. She somehow turned the duet into a three-way conversation. The honored dead sometimes seemed to be responding to her. (Read our review of “Max Roach 100.”)
Dianne McIntyre
In the 1970s, the choreographer Dianne McIntyre was a path breaker, responding in movement to the avant-garde jazz of the Black Arts era. Her Harlem-based company, Sounds in Motion, helped start the careers of the poet-playwright Ntozake Shange and the choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the founder of Urban Bush Women. Since McIntyre moved to Cleveland many years ago, her work has not often been shown in New York. The April run of “In the Same Tongue” at the new Apollo Stages at the Victoria Theater, with live music by Deidre Murray, was an overdue visit from an uncommonly fluent speaker in jazz. (Read our interview with Dianne McIntyre.)
‘Cats: The Jellicle Ball’
I wasn’t expecting to like this one. As a musical-theater-loving kid, I grew up with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s bizarro show, and then grew out of it. But this vogue-ballroom adaptation was the most fun of any dance-centric performance this year. The concept and setting transformed the material from kitsch to camp, and the choreography by Arturo Lyons and Omari Wiles, mixing ballroom styles with Broadway and West African ones, left room for each dancer to slay on the catwalk as a distinctly fabulous character. Category: Resurrection. (Read our story about dancers in “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.”)
Roslyn Sulcas
European Ballet Companies Excelled at More Than Just Ballet
I saw good work from contemporary dance choreographers this year: A bow to “The Belt,” by the Korean ensemble Ambiguous Dance Company; Maguy Marin’s “May B”; and a Benjamin Millepied-Nico Muhly triple bill in Paris.
But for me, 2024 was a year of standout programs from major European ballet companies: The Royal Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet, the Berlin Ballet and La Scala all showed superb dancers who fully embraced the challenges of working with the classics of the ballet repertory and with demanding, stylistically specific contemporary choreography.
Sae Eun Park in “Giselle”
Park, from Korea, became the Paris Opera Ballet’s first Asian-born étoile (the discretionary rank above principal) in 2021, but I hadn’t seen her perform a major classical role until I chanced upon her “Giselle.” A revelation. She was Giselle, the innocent peasant girl in every fiber of her being; each action, gesture and step a heart-rending, inevitable progression toward the betrayal by her aristocratic lover Albrecht (Guillaume Diop) that leads to her death. In Act 2, Giselle is a Wili, one of the vengeful spirits of jilted women, but Park’s gossamer lightness and aerial delicacy were imbued with love for Albrecht. Every moment felt spontaneous, alive; technique dissolved in intention.
Ashton Festival — Royal Ballet
The Royal Ballet’s style was largely molded by the choreographer Frederick Ashton (1904-1988), whose pliant lyricism and intricate footwork are imbued with wit, subtlety and charm. Top marks to the Royal’s “Ashton Celebrated” mini-festival in June, which put together both well known and little seen works in two programs. (Smaller-scale repertory was offered by the Sarasota Ballet in the Royal’s Linbury Theater.) It was particularly thrilling to see the rarely performed “Les Rendezvous” (1933), a gorgeous evocation of a bygone world of fleeting, flirtatious encounters, danced with unobtrusive virtuosity and generosity by several casts. (Read our Critic’s Notebook about the Ashton festival.)
William Forsythe’s “Rearray”
William Forsythe’s recent reworking of “Rearray,” from a duet choreographed in 2011 for the French stars Sylvie Guillem and Nicolas Le Riche, to a trio for a younger generation at the Paris Opera Ballet, is a masterly display of craft that has been honed for decades. The 18-minute trio, superbly performed by Roxane Stojanov, Takeru Coste and Loup Marcault-Derouard, is a breathtaking display of architectural clarity, delicacy and authority. The essential purity of every movement, the shifting dynamics of speed and stillness, the ever-surprising play with time and space, offer a vision of what ballet can be.
Pam Tanowitz’s “Or Forevermore”
At the start of “Or Forevermore,” created in October for the Royal Ballet, a dancer appears before the red-and-gold velvet curtain, dressed in a matching red-and-gold tracksuit. It’s an idiosyncratic, witty opening to a fabulous piece, built on “Dispatch Duet,” which Tanowitz created for Anna Rose O’Sullivan and William Bracewell in 2022. Those two dancers are the central figures “Or Forevermore,” set to a bracing score by Ted Hearne. They are surrounded by an ensemble of 12, combining balletic virtuosity with an unpredictable vocabulary of the everyday: running, skipping, jumping, nodding, falling. The dynamics are ever-changing, the speed and stylish wit of Tanowitz’s configurations invigorating and thrilling. A joy.
Wayne McGregor’s “Deepstaria”
Wayne McGregor’s hyperkinetic, hyperextended choreography can sometimes feel overwrought, but in “Deepstaria,” which had its premiere at the Montpellier Danse Festival in June, McGregor brought a balletic clarity to his company’s wheeling, morphing passage through different worlds — a depthless black cosmos, a watery landscape, and a more human terrain. Here, the human body, so frail and small, yet so strong, offered a message of resilience and hope. (Read our Critic’s Notebook about the Montpellier festival and “Deepstaria.”)
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