National politics loom larger than usual in the dance world this fall. There are strange holes in the calendar, formerly filled by programming at the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. Visa issues have precluded at least one international company’s visit. And as government arts funding continues to contract, everything feels a little smaller, a little shorter.
That upheaval seems to have set dance artists dreaming. Some are shaping stage worlds set in utopian or dystopian futures. Others are musing on the past, excavating ancient traditions or their own memories. They are imagining, and dancing, a way through.
September
WORKS & PROCESS This celebrated series at the Guggenheim ventures outdoors with social dance parties at Manhattan West Plaza (Sept. 9, 16, 23, 30). Later, it heads uptown to the nonprofit restaurant Refettorio Harlem for performances by MasterZ at Work Dance Family following sit-down dinners (Oct. 2, 7, 16, 21). Back at the museum, programming includes behind-the-scenes looks at dance creations by Pam Tanowitz and Sarah Crowner for Paul Taylor Dance Company (Sept. 14) and by Patricia Delgado for Miami City Ballet (Oct. 4).
BILL T. JONES/ARNIE ZANE COMPANY On Sept. 11, 2001, the choreographer Bill T. Jones was preparing a work that was to premiere the next day on the plaza between the twin towers. Twenty-five years later, Jones and his company return to that frozen moment and that much-altered place with the new piece “Curriculum IV: Spin and Spin! Turn! Turn! Turn!” (Sept. 10, 12,13, Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park)
THE JOYCE THEATER Headlining this Chelsea dance hub’s fall season is the American premiere of “The Surge,” the choreographer Sonya Tayeh’s impassioned tribute to the music and life of Sinead O’Connor (Sept. 16-27). Other highlights: programs from ballet companies including Sarasota Ballet (Sept. 29-Oct. 4) and London City Ballet (Oct. 27-Nov. 1); and anniversary performances by the modern dance stalwart Limón Dance Company (Oct. 6-11) and the many-faceted Garth Fagan Dance (Nov. 4-8).
PAGEANT This artist-run Brooklyn space offers a characteristically eclectic slate this fall that includes a new work by Julia Antinozzi about the intersections of postmodern dance and ballet (Sept. 17-18); “Memorial for Uncle Bread,” by Millie Kapp and Matt Shalzi, which uses sculptural set pieces to explore death and childbirth (Nov. 5-6); and Blaze Ferrer’s gleeful and subversively bizarre “No Service” (Nov. 19-20).
CROSSING THE LINE This year, this annual festival by L’Alliance New York features performances across the city and beyond with Lenio Kaklea’s “The Birds” at PS21 in Chatham, N.Y. (Sept. 18-19), and excerpts from Léo Lérus’s “Traces of Gounouj” on Governors Island (Oct. 3). There’s also dance programming in the organization’s Manhattan aerie, Le Skyroom: “Ad Libitum,” in which the dancer Simon Le Borgne and the musician Ulysse Zangs probe the desire for growth and change (Oct. 7-9), and “Mirlitons,” a showdown between the choreographer François Chaignaud and the beatboxer Aymeric Hainaux (Nov. 4-6).
DOMINIC MOORE-DUNSON In “Black by Nature,” this choreographer guides audiences on a hike through the Cascade Valley Metro Park in Akron, Ohio, stopping along the way to dance vignettes that examine his relationship to the outdoors as a Black man. (Sept. 19 and 26)
ERASING BORDERS DANCE FESTIVAL An eminent group of classical Indian dance artists — including the Bharatanatyam dancer Radhe Jaggi, the Kathak group Shila Mehta and the Odissi trio Arushi Mudgal — assemble in the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College for two nights of performances. (Sept. 19-20)
92NY HARKNESS DANCE CENTER The center’s season considers how artists can carry the idea of home across space and time — and how they can’t. Visa barriers have prevented the Cuba-based Malpaso Dance Company from traveling to the United States to appear in person on the season’s opening program. Instead, a film about the troupe will be paired with a live performance by Ballet Hispánico New York (Sept. 19). Other shows include Johnnie Cruise Mercer’s “The Good News Suite” (Oct. 16-17) and the premiere of Christopher Williams’s queer reimagining of the Ballets Russes classic “Le Spectre de la Rose” (Oct. 29-30).
“RHYTHM BATH” This immersive dance installation by the choreographer Susan Marshall and the set designer Mimi Lien anchors the Common Senses Festival in Omaha, Neb., which aims to foster disability acceptance. Part dance show and part sculpture garden, it will include American Sign Language description and audio interpretation. (Sept. 19-27, Holland Performing Arts Center, Omaha, Neb.)
FALL FOR DANCE FESTIVAL Another year, another eclectic smorgasbord at Fall for Dance, whose perpetually hot tickets are $30 apiece. The five programs feature dance from around the country and the world, and include two premieres: one by the Broadway and ballet star Robbie Fairchild, and one from the playfully disruptive Australian collective Pony Cam. (Sept. 22-Oct. 3, New York City Center)
NEW YORK CITY BALLET Three premieres, one revival and one goodbye highlight the company’s fall season. Its glittery annual fashion gala (Oct. 1) features new works by Jennifer Archibald, Alysa Pires and the resident choreographer Justin Peck, costumed by Robert Wun (Archibald), Viktor&Rolf (Pires) and Simone Rocha (Peck). The former superstar Suzanne Farrell stages George Balanchine’s “Pithoprakta,” which was created on her in 1968; City Ballet has not performed it since 1969. The longtime principal dancer Adrian Danchig-Waring’s farewell show closes the season (Oct. 18), featuring a pièce d’occasion by Pam Tanowitz.
THE AUSTRALIAN BALLET Now led by the former American Ballet Theater star David Hallberg, the company tours Christopher Wheeldon’s “Oscar” — based on the life, writings and loves of Oscar Wilde — to California and New York this fall. (Sept. 25-27, Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, Calif.; Oct. 8-11, New York City Center)
NEW YORK THEATER BALLET To help introduce its new artistic director, Antonia Franceschi, the company will dance one of her works — “Lee and Jackson / Uncaged,” inspired by the artist Lee Krasner and her marriage to Jackson Pollock — alongside pieces by Antony Tudor, Melissa Toogood, Annie-B Parson and Mark Baldwin. (Sept. 25-26, Danspace Project)
DANCES FOR A VARIABLE POPULATION For 20 years, this multigenerational company has been a haven for older dance artists. It observes that anniversary with a series of free outdoor workshops and performances featuring 70 senior dancers. (Sept. 27, Washington Square Park; Oct. 7, New York Botanical Garden)
October
N.Y.U. SKIRBALL Skirball’s two dance presentations this fall sit at opposite ends of a spectrum — one intimate, one epic. “This resting, patience” seats a small audience onstage to observe the choreographer Ewa Dziarnowska’s cyclical duet with Leah Marojević at close range (Oct. 1-2). “Totem,” performed by the all-male Butoh company Sankai Juku, builds a dramatic world around its towering titular set piece (Nov. 5-7).
DANSPACE PROJECT Coming to Danspace’s sanctuary in St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery this fall: Anh Vo’s “A sign, a signal, a delivery, a deliverance,” which draws on a Vietnamese sung poetry tradition (Oct. 8-10); Kyle Marshall’s “Bound,” which responds to the United States’ semiquincentennial by recalling Black American liberation efforts (Nov. 5-7); and DonChristian Jones’s semi-autobiographical “I’ve Been Waiting for This Moment the Rest of My Life” (Nov. 19-21).
NEW YORK LIVE ARTS Fall programming starts with the premiere of Benjamin Akio Kimitch’s “Allegra,” a Japanese American court dance fantasia with wide-ranging inspirations (Oct. 8-10). In “Toi, moi, Tituba…,” the Rwandan artist Dorothée Munyaneza gives danced voice to Tituba, an enslaved Black woman accused of witchcraft during the Salem trials (Oct. 23-24). And Joanna Kotze premieres “This is the beginning, this is the end,” which examines how and why history repeats itself (Nov. 6-7, 11-14).
EMILY JOHNSON / CATALYST Like many works by Johnson, a Yup’ik artist and activist, “Overflow Radio” spills out of multiple containers. Its four six-hour segments include dance performances, radio broadcasts by Indigenous and First Nations writers, an exhibition of quilts and presentations from community organizers on protecting the natural world. Over time, the project’s leaders will also plant 1,000 trees. (Oct. 9-12, Northrop, University of Minnesota)
ANANYA DANCE THEATER Known for melding dance and social justice, this Minneapolis-based company contemplates a crisis close to home in “PREM | Love: An Occupation,” which responds to the influx of federal immigration agents to the Twin Cities earlier this year. (Oct. 10-11, 15-17, The Southern Theater, Minneapolis)
THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY At this ever-experimental Long Island City theater, Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard consider both genuine and A.I.-generated memories in “This Is Unreal” (Oct. 15-17); the collective Aunts stages a haunted house on Halloween; and the subtle, slippery choreographer Neil Greenberg ponders the nature of performance in “Next Dance” (Nov. 12-21)
JACOB’S PILLOW This year, this Massachusetts dance haven, which is already renowned for its summer festival, hosts its second ever fall season. There’s a showcase of premieres by young ballet choreographers (Oct. 16-18) and a program marking the 40th anniversary of the contemporary company Doug Varone and Dancers (Oct. 23-25).
LINCOLN CENTER Thanks to the center’s new Pasculano Collaborative for Contemporary Dance, its fall programming leans less classical than usual this year. Sekou McMiller’s “Urban Love Suite” celebrates the connections between Afro-Latin, Afro-Caribbean and African American dance and music (Oct. 16, Alice Tully Hall); the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire shapes a new work by the contemporary choreographer Aszure Barton in real time (Oct. 28-30, Rose Theater); and the collective ALBA Musik presents a modern reimagining of flamenco music and dance (Nov. 6, David Rubenstein Atrium).
AMERICAN BALLET THEATER After the big story ballets of the summer Met season, the company’s fall run at the David H. Koch Theater tends to offer more contemporary — and, sometimes, more interesting — fare. This year’s three repertory programs include a new work by the company dancer Brady Farrar set to Rachmaninoff, the company premiere of Helen Pickett’s “Petal” and the return of Kyle Abraham’s expressively complex 2024 work “Mercurial Son.” (Oct. 21-31)
OONA DOHERTY Doherty’s “Specky Clark” evocatively muddles biography and fiction: While its point of departure may be the working-class life of her great-grandfather in Belfast, the piece quickly ventures into fantastical — and darkly funny — territory. (A talking pig carcass is involved.) (Oct. 25-Nov. 15, Irish Arts Center)
DANIEL GWIRTZMAN DANCE COMPANY In the new work “Friction,” Gwirtzman explores the discomforts and the sparks that occur when artificial intelligence butts against human creativity, as well as the frictions within his own aging dancing body. (Oct. 29-31, Ailey Citigroup Theater)
November
PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY In addition to the classic Taylor repertoire that remains its anchor and measuring stick, the troupe offers a lot of “new” this fall: premieres by its resident choreographers, Lauren Lovette and Robert Battle; the New York City debut of Pam Tanowitz’s second work for the company, “Messengers, Maidens and the End of Something Else”; and the company premiere of Alwin Nikolais’s geometric “Tensile Involvement.” (Nov. 4-22, David H. Koch Theater)
NEXT WAVE 2026 This year’s festival at BAM features winding, introspective journeys through time. Cynthia Oliver’s “Turn. Turning. Turnt.” is a trilogy of dances created before, during and after 2020 pandemic shutdowns (Nov. 4-7, BAM Fisher). Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born’s “adaku, part 2” — a sequel to a work the duo premiered at Next Wave in 2023 — imagines a woman in the near future who suddenly begins receiving memories of her ancestral past (Nov. 11-15, BAM Fisher).
“THE AGE IS YOURS, MY LIEGE! A TALE OF PROTO-JAPAN” Reisa Shimojima — a rising choreographic provocateur — and her Tokyo company Kedagoro bring to the Japan Society this madcap yet sharp-edged look at Japanese imperial myth. (Nov. 6-7)
BARYSHNIKOV ARTS The center’s characteristically rich fall dance lineup includes multiple premieres. Gianna Burright’s “As if everything was perfect” uses brooms as partners (and metaphors) to explore the pressures women face (Nov. 12-13). “New RainForest(s)” asks the dance artists Claude Johnson, Chalvar Monteiro and Chaery Moon to both perform and reinterpret Merce Cunningham’s seminal work “RainForest.” They will be accompanied by a new video design by the filmmaker Alex Munro (Nov. 19-21).
CHERRIE YU Postmodern dance meets table tennis (there’s more overlap than you might imagine) in Yu’s premiere “Daily Diversions,” created collaboratively with table tennis players from Chinatown in Manhattan. (Nov. 12-14, Abrons Arts Center)
KINETIC LIGHT This disability arts ensemble begins its 10th season with the premiere of “Eternal City,” its first work to incorporate performers who are not disabled. Created with the Resident Island Dance Theater of Taiwan and the musician Onikho, the project envisages a future metropolis with different ways of sensing and being. (Nov. 27-28, Weiwuying National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, Taiwan)
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