My presentation to Deborah Jowitt on the occasion of her receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2016 Martha Hill Awards Gala, held on November 21, 2016.

One quality that is harder and harder to come by in our world is trust. And this is what I find in Deborah Jowitt. I felt it when I was a dancer in her choreography. I felt it when I took the workshop in dance writing from her and Marcia Siegel. And I feel it every time I read her writing—or have a conversation with her.

When I read most dance critics, I either agree or I disagree. But with Deborah Jowitt, I learn something. She notices things—little things, big things— that had escaped me. She enlarges it, she makes it more relevant. She ties each detail to an image that helps you picture it.

From left: Vernon Scott, president of the board; Deborah Jowitt; me. Photos by Tony Powell.

Deborah has been a beacon of light for dancers like me, who wanted to write. But she has also been a beacon to the whole field. Her current blog a ArtsJournal.com; her two collections of reviews; her decades of writing for the Village Voice that many of us grew up on, her book Time and the Dancing Image, which is like no other book because it tracks changing ideals over time; and her comprehensive biography of Jerome Robbins, are written from love and from curiosity. That’s why she is essential to our field. She has grace, courage, experience, and wisdom. I wish some of the other critics would listen to her words in the introduction to Dance in Mind, one of her collections of reviews: “Long ago I decided that it was pointless to use heavy artillery on small targets.”

Her writing style is conversational, yet also poetic. About Kate Weare’s Marksman, she wrote: “Julian De Leon shapes his body around her, against her, intersecting with her, as if trying—in a dreamy yet probing way— to sense what she’s like.”

Deborah lets you know how perceptions of something onstage change during a performance. Reviewing John Jasperse’s Remains at BAM, she sets up the mood with a lone figure in dimness and then says: “Now in the silence, we see a small miracle. In the muted beam of light, the figure onstage—lying on its side, one leg crossed over the other, its face hidden—begins to glitter with tiny, erratic points of light. What had seemed like a discarded object becomes a treasure.”

Deborah doesn’t announce her opinions. She doesn’t say, “This is bad gender politics.” But the way she writes it, you catch her drift. About Danish Dance Theatre performing Tim Rushton’s Black Diamond, she wrote: “There’s a scene in which Alessandro Sousa Pereira and Stefanos Bizas get Lucia Pasquini between them and start pulling her around—lifting her, swinging her, dragging her. A couple more men arrive to help. There’s a puzzle built into this kind of a scene. The men are nominally in charge, but the woman—while looking desperate and unhappy—actually has to run to them so they can maul her some more.”

She can write about strong emotions with exquisite detail. Here she talks about the dawning of jealousy and revenge in Christopher Wheeldon’s A Winter’s Tale, with the National Ballet of Canada: This is about the dancer portraying Leontes: “When he beats one foot against his other ankle in ballet’s frappé, the move is almost sinister. He crouches and slithers… His fingers creep up his body like spiders ready to infiltrate his brain.”

And she lets the real world in. This is from a very recent posting: “Being at the Joyce the day after the election was an unsettling experience. There were more empty seats than you’d expect at an opening night. I hope Kate Weare understands that many were out protesting or at home mourning, and that those of us in the audience felt our spirits lift a little.”

Deborah’s knowledge of dance is so vast that she can easily link a dance artist to the past, giving us a sense of continuity. Whom or what period does this hark back to? For that reason, and all of the above, she is beloved by choreographers. When Ohad Naharin accepted the Dance Magazine Award in 2013, he wrote an off-the-cuff “Advice to critics” list. Included is this piece of advice: “Make sure you have lunch with Deborah Jowitt at least once in your lifetime.”

I was lucky to inherit Deborah’s Graduate Seminar at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She has built this course to last. The assigned readings and actions—in a variety of different modes —stimulate the students to be critical thinkers. I always keep in mind, the goal, as she stated it to me: to have the students see deeply into dance.

I will end by quoting from Deborah’s landmark essay “Beyond Description: Writing beneath the Surface.” This essay suggests that you don’t have to superimpose ideas on top of description, that description itself can contain ideas. She writes: “Analogy is rooted in observation—as fluid as the transactions between pond water and fish. In such an ecosystem, everything nourishes everything else. And ideas spring like water lilies.”

Thank you Deborah.

Awardees and presenters at Martha Hill Fund gala. Standing: Jowitt, Terese Capucilli, Reed Hansen, Jacqueline Z. Davis, Ann Hutchinson Guest, Tina Curran, Matthew Rushing. Kneeling: Me, Fredrick Earl Mosley, Eric Parra.

On the occasion of get dancing being nominated for a Bessie, I wanted to say why this evening, by Catherine Galasso and Andy de Groat, prompted thoughts and reveries. Well, now it turns out that it won’t actually win a Bessie (the revivals category winner has already been announced, pre-event). So I will just thank the Bessie committee for the nudge and go ahead with these thoughts anyway.

Andy de Groat in Rope Dance Translations, late 1970s, photo © Lois Greenfield

The evening, a combination of reconstructions of Andy de Groat’s work and a new work by Catherine Galssso, captured something elusive about the ’70s. The only way I can describe it is that things at that time were unforced. There was a sense that people were finding ways to let choreography happen rather than willing it to happen. This was reflected in all parts of her program last December at Danspace Project, St. Mark’s Church. Catherine’s new piece, notes on de groat, was in tune with that spirit but with an added dose of athletic energy. The experience was like following a string back through time and finding some sort of treasure. What she found wasn’t flashy or transgressive, but an enchanted meeting of movement and music, so different from the high-concept or technology-laden performances I sometimes see today.

Catherine Galasso, photo by Jacob Burckhardt

Catherine Galasso’s father, Michael Galasso, was a composer of such intriguing, beautiful music that I’m surprised it hasn’t been used by more choreographers. He died in 2009, and get dancing is his daughter’s collaboration with de Groat, the choreographer most associated with his music. They worked together in the ’70s, at first under the direction of Robert Wilson. This was before the days of the Joyce and BAM’s Next Wave Festival, when downtown choreographers weren’t thinking in terms of proscenium. Andy was a regular at Danspace, where lighting genius Carol Mullins was in residence even back then. Luckily, Mullins, who toured with de Groat before coming to Danspace in 1982, was on hand to light Galasso’s evening too.

The rebuilding of de Groat’s work brought a fresh breeze into Danspace. Simplicity, visual beauty, and the spirituality of minimalism were all there to be savored. The performers ranged from Charles Dennis and Frank Conversano, two heroes of “pedestrian dance” who were in the original works, to current freelance dancers Meg Weeks, Madeline Wilcox, Chris deVita, and Kristopher K.Q. Pourzal.

This project grew from Catherine’s love, curiosity, and a wish for continuity. In a posting on the Danspace website, she says about these works, “I felt that if I didn’t bring them…de Groat’s history with this city might disappear. This is archiving through re-performance. It’s my way of passing this choreographer’s work on to a new generation.”

Film and Reconstruction
The 1979 black-and-white film of Rope Dance Translations, with Michael Galasso’s spiraling violin music, set the tone. Each of the five spinning dancers had a three-strand rope that whipped outward or looped overhead depending on their arm and torso movement. To my eye, they had an affinity with Simone Forti’s 1961 “dance constructions,” wherein the movement and visual objects were inextricably bound. Watching these sculpture-dancers in John Meaney and Andrew Horn’s film, spinning with slight variations in how the rope extended the body, gave a focus to our senses and our thoughts. The union of motion, object, and sound was hypnotic. Toward the end, the two-dimensional film expanded into three dimensions when four dancers stepped into the space for a live rope dance. We had just seen three of them on screen, 36 years younger: Ritty Ann Burchfield, Frank Conversano, and Charles Dennis.

Fan Dance—Good for Mental Health
Michael Galasso’s music for fan dance (1978) is hauntingly beautiful—celestial really. De Groat paired it with purposeful walking and simple gestures, fans in hands. According to Weeks, he had counted the music in an odd way.

“That music is counted in a traditional 4/4 timing, but Andy came up with this really different time signature for it, which was two 4s, two 5s, two 6s, two 7s, two 11s, two 4s, and two 11s. It’s that set repeated four times. The music is this sort of sweeping grandiose music for strings and it’s uplifting. At first the counting sequence was difficult to learn…but after a while I didn’t have to count anymore. It just kind of worked…That dance is really special, I feel like everyone should do it for their mental health.”

fan dance, all current photos by Victoria Sendra

That night in December, I felt my own mental health infused with peace, just watching and listening to it.

get wreck
Another piece, get wreck (1978) had an intergenerational cast. Older dancers like Kathryn Ray, Burchfield, and Conversano, who were part of the original cast, commingled with younger dancers. They all possessed the unmannered, gently energized demeanor necessary for negotiating the complex patterns. At that time, downtown people were challenging the virtuosity of concert dance with pedestrian movements, just as Andy Warhol challenged the ideal of artistic beauty by presenting everyday soup cans as art. The aesthetic of the ordinary permeated much of downtown.

Part of the inspiration for get wreck sprang from artist and wordsmith Christopher Knowles. Sometimes considered autistic in his early years, he started working with Robert Wilson when he was 13. (For a New Yorker article on Knowles click here.) De Groat also worked with Knowles and took the title get wreck from a poem of his that was set to music.

a section of get wreck poem by Christopher Knowles, courtesy Carol Mullins

For Knowles, repetition was about rhythm and pattern. It seemed like he’d get lost in the words and find his way through. Viewers had to pay close attention to perceive each small change—not unlike Trisha Brown’s accumulation series. Knowles figured out his own way of accumulating words.

Bridging Past and Present
Catherine’s new piece is specifically about the process of reconstructing. I usually don’t like dances that explain themselves, but her notes on de groat was done with such clarity, love, and sly wit that it won me over. You felt a tug from the past, but more than that, an exchange with the past.

While Catherine speaks at a microphone, Weeks, deVita, and Pourzal pass through a limited vocabulary of spins, jogs, and crouches with their own personal flair. Reciting her text, the narrator (now switched to Pourzal), says, “This process, while partly about re-creation, is also about how the dancers and I find our own voices within Andy’s aesthetic in an attempt to bridge past and present.”

Pourzal, Weeks, and deVita in notes on de groat

The text, which you can hear in its entirety in this Vimeo, includes passages from her correspondence with de Groat. For instance, she let him know that she didn’t like his idea of starting the evening with the film. “Your proposal for program order is making less and less sense to me,” she wrote. She thought that starting with a long and uninflected film might put people to sleep. She was torn between honoring his wishes and her own theatrical instincts. But in the spirit of cooperation, she told him, “I’m ready to get behind it and will embrace it as an experiment.”

“Catherine,” he wrote back, “life is an experiment….If I was doing what I do for people who zap [change the TV channels quickly], are in a hurry, don’t have time, I would’ve stopped a long time ago…Looking for what is considered success is so totally smoky and subjective as to be dangerous.”

This is kind of a key to that unforced thing. De Groat had a clear progression in mind and refused to force it into a format that might be more convenient for the audiences.

There’s a point, after Andy is quoted saying “Explications can be misleading,” when Galasso’s music surges into circular riffs (a bit like Philip Glass, but the two were contemporaries, not one following the other) that carry the dancers into their next, more rambunctious section. Together the music and dance seem to be saying that they don’t need any explanations.

Repetition Then and Now
In my memory, the use of repetition by New York choreographers during the 70s—de Groat, Laura Dean, Barbara Dilley, Meredith Monk, Trisha Brown, Harry Sheppard (who danced in the original get wreck)—invited viewers into a meditative state of mind.

These days the repetition I see is more like a display of endurance. The energy is often pushed. I admire the stamina of the dancers and the boldness of the choreographic mind behind it, but it makes me wonder, When did the tone of repetition change? Maybe Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker was a transitional figure. Influenced by Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs, her dancers also have to count a lot, but there’s more force in her repetitions. With her intricate gestures and fierce physicality, she gave repetition a certain drama. And now I’m seeing a trend that’s even more hard-edged—generating drama from sheer stamina.

I am indebted to two dancers from Galasso’s evening for shedding light on this trend. In my phone conversation with Weeks, who also danced with Donna Uchizono, she compared today’s attitude with that of de Groat:

“I feel like an interest in duration today has to do with exhaustion and rendering physical exertion legible to an audience…It’s maybe redefining virtuosity, independent from a ballet context, where virtuosity is defined by the ability to do tricks, obviously stylized and in context. Maybe some of the contemporary interest in examining virtuosity is from a more pedestrian angle.”

Weeks and Pourzal in Fan Dance

Madeline Wilcox performed in the final reconstruction of the get dancing evening. It was an excerpt of de Groat’s Swan Lac, which was the last show de Groat produced in New York before moving to France. The dancers’ aerobic phrases reminded me that by 1982 Andy was speeding up his pacing (the music is the Talking Heads). Wilcox said the cardio workout was the most challenging part of performing it. But she said that, naturally, she has a more complex engagement when she is part of the making process. When talking about her work with current choreographers like Sarah Michelson and Jillian Peña, Wilcox said this:

“It’s more about research of each movement, asking questions inside that movement so that it is fresh every time, even though to the outside eye it might just look like repetition… looking at the complication inside the task of what we’re doing so that it is no longer the old repetition. You work on it for a year and you form an attachment to it.”

The emotional aspect of repetition, for both the dancer and the viewer, can range anywhere from meditation to obsession. I think the tone of it, the timbre, the state of mind it induces, changes according to the heartbeat of the choreographer—and of the times. And the feeling of today’s arts and media is definitely more bombarded, almost under siege, and therefore more forceful in its counterattack. Maybe that’s why the Galasso/de Groat/Galasso evening was such an oasis.

Michael O’Rourke and de Groat in the first Swan Lac, Aix-en-Provence, early 1980s, photo by Christiane Robin

Spinning… in between
In notes on de groat, Catherine describes seeing an archival film of Andy spinning in Iran in 1972, “nonstop, light on his feet, as if floating in the air.” She continues: “Spinning seems strangely transporting, both virtuosic and pedestrian, spiritual without being religious. It so perfectly encapsulates that era…”

And then Catherine quotes Andy: “Spinning and all dance concerns the mind state between waking and sleeping, life and dreams, the conscious and the unconscious. With spinning, all movement is generated from a basic walk around in place, like taking a walk with nowhere to go.”

There is something about that in-between place that means to me an acceptance of where you are. It’s about giving yourself the time to dwell on one thing. And I would translate “nowhere to go” closer to, having nothing to prove.

For Catherine, this project began as a way to enter de Groat’s work and to find a balance between her voice and his. In following her personal quest, she revealed a whole different aesthetic, an aesthetic of task lifted by beautiful music, of circles of the mind, of patience and poetry.

Every time she started choreographing, Trisha Brown tried to come up with a new vocabulary. But I want to talk about something that stayed the same: Trisha’s love for the body horizontal. Whether it was lying on the ground or being thrust flat out into space (I call it Trisha’s magic carpet), it’s a way to undercut expectations as well as to honor a certain kind of sensuality.

As you can see in this video from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, I enjoy recalling this image that recurred over the years. Back in 1960 on Anna Halprin’s deck, she whisked a broom handle out so suddenly and forcefully that her body followed it, flying parallel to the deck for an instant. In Walking on the Wall (1971), we got a visceral jolt from seeing bodies, with the aid of harnesses, walking perpendicular to the wall. That image was reprised in the beginning of Set and Reset (1983), when one dancer was held aloft by four others so that she could walk on the vertical surfaces surrounding the stage. Elsewhere in Set and Reset, which slyly camouflaged choreographic preparation, there were startling moments of sudden horizontality.

Trisha Brown and Stephen Petronio in “Set and Reset” © estate of Jack Mitchell

But when we taped this interview at Pew last fall, I wasn’t remembering all the examples of her use of the horizontal. And now they are coming back to me, starting with O zlozony / O composite, a trio originally commissioned by Paris Opera Ballet in 2004 that was performed by Pennsylvania Ballet June 9–12.

The piece begins and ends with a strong image: The two men find different ways of keeping the woman (in this case Lillian DiPiazza) aloft, and yet it is nothing like a standard ballet lift. As you can see from this rehearsal clip, they work together to maneuver her into an orbiting motion in the air, parallel to the ground. Associate artistic director Carolyn Lucas told me that they call it the rotisserie. But to me, it’s like DiPiazza is dreaming her airborne dream. She could be a slow-motion Superwoman, with cape flying behind her. It’s especially evocative because during this section Laurie Anderson’s sound score has a mesmerizing sensuousness, with a woman’s soft, wistful voice reciting a poem in Polish.

Lillian DiPIazza with Ian Hussey and Aaron Anker of PAB in “O zlozony/O composite,” photo by Alexander Iziliaev

There was the time in Lateral Pass (1985) when Randy Warshaw was harnessed to hover over the other dancers, among them but horizontal in midair. Almost like a Chagall figure in the sky twisting his head around to see people on land.

During that performance at the Whitney in 1971, Trisha brought Skymap (1969). In this performer-free piece, the whole audience lay down while listening to her voice speaking on tape. Like stargazers at night, we looked up to the ceiling in the darkened gallery and let our imaginations respond to Trisha’s fanciful riff. With her richly multi-timbered voice, she gave words personalities and we “saw” the word h-o-r-s-e gallop across the “map” on the ceiling. We were participating in Trisha’s wittily imagined cross-country trek where words and names had personalities.

“Group Primary Accumulation” on Loring Pond in Minneapolis, photo by Boyd Hagen

Two other examples of being horizontal on the ground—or on water—are further examples of her synergy between rigor and sensuality. In Group Primary Accumulation (1973), four women on their backs accumulate simple gestures for arms, legs, and head. In Minneapolis, she sent those dancers out on rafts in a pond. In her opera L’Orfeo (1998), baritone Simon Keenlyside sang an aria from a prone position. I doubt if any opera singer before has done that before. But, psychically and poetically, Trisha loved the relaxation of the body that let the mind wander.

Addendum:
I recently was struck by similarities between the way Trisha challenged us to see the body from unusual angles and the exhibit of the Hungarian Bauhaus photographer/painter/etc now at the Guggenheim. In the photo on the left, taken on a ship in 1928, he looks up through the feet to the rest of the body, similar to the kind of angle I’ve seen in O composite, Newark (1987), and other Brown works.

Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, 1928

Trisha Brown, 1982, photographed by Guy Delahaye

Another Moholy-Nagy photo, where we see a woman lying prone where you wouldn’t expect it, reminds me of Trisha’s ability to place a magic carpet in an otherwise formalist context.

Moholy-Nagy, 1928

How could an evening devoted to grief be so uplifting? That was true of “Precarious: Guest Solos 1,” a collection of invited solos at Danspace Project on the Lower East Side. But it was also true of the entire month-long Platform 2016: A Body in Places, which included performances, workshops, photograph exhibits, talks and other wanderings from February 17 to March 23.

The answer is Eiko Otake, recently redefined as a solo dance artist. When you’re in the presence of her dancing, her aura fills time and space. You lose track of what century or country you’re in. She seems to transform the very air she occupies. You tap into a whole world of grief that, like a beautiful poem, makes you want to be near it.

Eiko at local shop, photo by Ian Douglas

As a duo, Eiko and Koma could change the way you looked at the world. When you watched them inch along with their archetypal slowness, whether in a theater, a pool of water, or a museum, you might get the eerie feeling that a Japanese painting from a previous century was coming to life. Maybe you felt you were witnessing a primordial world that has no beginning or end.

During the Platform, Eiko’s stature grew from large to huge. It’s not only that Eiko herself expanded as an artist, but that her ideas and presence radiated like moonbeams, connecting to the luminous darkness in other artists and issues. It’s like the long and deep connection she had with Koma imploded, then exploded into a scintillas flying in different directions.

The Platform provided an Eiko-a-day infusion of spirit somewhere on the Lower East Side. I attended 3 of the 25 or so events and participated in one “Bearing Witness” talk session. Eiko brought her dancing, like a breeze of sorrow, into different sites. She might lurk in the shadows and then appear on the balcony, threatening to drop her kimono over the edge; she might whip her carefully collected reeds against a wall. Just when you thought she would fade away and die, she erupted with a burst of anger, rage, or subhuman moaning as though suddenly remembering all her children were dead. She included audience members by offering a stalk, or beckoning us to follow her.

Eiko, connecting with the audience, photo by Ian Douglas

A new element since her barefoot days with Koma was a pair of wooden sandals. She clomped around in them, teetered, and almost fell out of them. You were sure she would twist an ankle. (She didn’t, but she did sprain a wrist the first week and performed the rest of the Platform with a bandaged hand.)

A typical beginning of one of her solos: Nestled close to the ground, she doesn’t budge for minutes. We see the swirling designs of her kimono move before we see her shift underneath. Her fingers and the soles of her feet look so fragile. Brian Seibert in his New York Times review of March 2, described the startling sight:

“At 9 a.m. on Monday, if you had peeked through the storefront window of Dashwood Books on Bond Street in Manhattan, you would have seen a body on the floor, sleeping or possibly dead. Slowly, out of tattered Japanese robes emerged whitened feet, gnarled and aged and terribly exposed.”

Seibert also wrote about the powerful effect of looking into her eyes:

“When her gaze briefly meets yours, it’s still unclear whether she sees you, but the possibility is enough to be harrowing. It’s a look you might have seen on a homeless person or a refugee, a piercing look that reminds you of your sins and makes you count your blessings.”

I too received that piercing look and was transfixed by it. I had actually seen her just before the show started, when she happily confessed that she was nervous. Minutes later, she became a completely different creature.

Talking Duets with David Brick and John Kelly (curator Lydia Bell is at left), photo by Ian Douglas

But in some ways her work partnering other dancers was even more startling. As Siobhan Burke pointed out in The New York Times, during “Talking Duets I” many got a whiff of Eiko’s sense of humor for the first time. Instead of an ancient goddess in whiteface, she became a downtown denizen with delightful witticisms of body and voice. She danced with Emmanuelle Huynh, leading off a series of duets. To give some shape to these chance encounters, Danspace director Judy Hussie-Taylor posed questions from a table. I remember David Brick carrying John Kelly and, in answer to a question, Kelly was singing a lovely Irish ditty.

Eiko’s playful timing and natural warmth seemed to be contagious. I’d never seen Bebe Miller be so funny.

Koma, in his solo on the porch, photo by Ian Douglas

But to return to the grief evening, or rather the invited solos inspired by grief (Judy Hussie-Taylor had given each artist a quote from Judith Butler), the diversity of interpretations was  part of what was uplifting. Koma chose to perform his solo, “Dancing with My Painting and Lion,” outside in the cold, lurching from dirt ground to stone lion statue while tango music played. Beth Gill, inspired by Eiko and Koma’s Husk (1987), oozed along the carpeted risers in the Sanctuary during almost the whole three hours. And Donna Uchizono quietly interviewed audience members in the Parish Hall about a remembered loved one before improvising with that information. After being deep in conversation with audience member Ralph Lemon, she immersed herself in a remarkably evocative improvisation.

Donna Uchizono with Ralph Lemon, in prelude to her solo improvisation, photo by me

Part of the inspiration for the Platform can be traced back to Eiko’s harrowing project with photographer William Johnston, A Body Fukushima (2014). Together they traveled to irradiated areas in and around the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors. These images of Eiko, even more “terribly exposed,” yet fitting in harmoniously to those godforsaken landscapes, are uncannily beautiful.

Near Fukushima, 2014, photo by William Johnston

After one of the solos in the neighborhood, I was overwhelmed. I visited Eiko “backstage.” I said to her, “Your body carries all the sadness of the world.” Her immediate response was, “Don’t we all?”

I participated in a “Bearing Witness” event as a commemoration of five years since the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. Prompted by the idea of the artist as wanderer, scholars and performers spoke about various ramifications of Eiko’s work. Yoshiko Chuma, fresh from a work period with dancers in Palestine, talked about the dangers facing people there. Both Yoshiko and Eiko are fearless wanderers who enter dangerous territories without a second thought.

Eiko expressed her worry that the Body in Fukushima images were merely beautiful and did not prompt action. But I expressed my thought that the photos go beyond beauty and reach into the observer’s feelings. They create a connection with the unfortunate people from Fukushima who are living in exile, and by extension, with all refugees.

This Platform provided a long, lingering look at a monumental artist, one who is willing to embody the sorrows of life on this earth. With Eiko’s generous spirit, the Platform shed light on other artists’ experience as well. Kudos to Danspace, to Hussie-Taylor, and to Platform curator Lydia Bell for choosing and shaping this deeply moving and thought-provoking experience.

Although the Platform ended in March, you can still see some of Eiko’s solos in this video collage.

Although I cut down a bit on my dance addiction this year, I still saw many terrific performances—and a few clunkers. I tried to stick to world premieres or company premieres but other things snuck into this list.

BEST CHOREOGRAPHY (in order of how strongly it hit me)

• Polaris, by Crystal Pite with 6 Kidd Pivot dancers and 60 NYU Tisch Dance students. Massive. Inventive. Shocking in its brutal beauty, masterful in its craft, it was part of “Thomas Adès: Concentric Paths—Movements in Music,” commissioned by Sadler’s Wells in 2014, brought to NYC by Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival in coordination with NY City Center.

“Polaris” by Crystal Pite, photo by Kevin Yatarola

• Andrea Miller’s Whale at the Joyce with her company Gallim. Almost unbearable cravings alternating with giddy flesh contact. Howling, dragging, hurtling through the air. A celebration of awkwardness. Yes, Miller is obviously influenced by Ohad Naharin, but she’s got her own unstoppable zing.

Andrea Miller’s “Whale,” photo by Yi-Chun Wu

• Birdgang Dance Company, an urban dance group from the U.K. in its U.S. debut, at the Breakin Convention at the Apollo (produced by Sadler’s Wells). Dancer/choreographer/actor Ukweli Roach created and starred in Vice, a searing depiction of addiction. The power and precision blew me away.

Sara Mearns and Adrian Danchig-Waring in Kim Brandstrup’s “Jeux.” Photo by Paul Kolnik

• Kim Brandstrup’s Jeux, for New York City Ballet, takes you from a cocktail party to film-noir creepiness. Haunting use of Debussy’s music and Jean Kalman’s eclipse-like lights.

• Michelle Dorrance on two occasions: First, The Blues Project, with Toshi Reagon and BIGLovely at the Joyce in April, with fellow tap stars Derick K. Grant and Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards. Delving into what the blues means individually, culturally and musically. And then, only months later, Myelination, a commission from Fall for Dance. Knockout rhythm and shape, spiced with weird and wonderful (partly improvised) solos and poignant duets. Dorrance has taken tap from being just “numbers” to being real choreography.

Alexander Ekman in “Thoughts at the Bolshoi,” photo by Jack Devant

• Another choreographer who impressed me twice was Alexander Ekman. His cheeky, large-cast Tulle, mounted on the Joffrey Ballet, placed tutu-wearing dancers in everyday situations to hilarious effect, at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago. In Moscow at the Benois de la danse, he dashed around the vast Bolshoi stage, charming the crowd with his witty words (translated into Russion on tape) and actions in Thoughts at the Bolshoi. Irreverent and reverent at the same time, this Swedish choreographer has the ability to see things from a fresh angle.

• David Neumann’s Noh-influenced dance/play I Understand Everything Better, at Abrons Arts. To see Neumann play the role of a delirious older man is to see him become more vulnerable as well as philosophical. Influenced by his work with Big Dance Theater, he created a dreamlike environment in which objects have their own choreography.

Louise Lecavalier in her “So Blue”

• Louise Lecavalier’s keenly focused So Blue, at New York Live Arts. Her famous fearlessness from the 1980s (when she was the star of La La La Human Steps) found a counterpart in her uncanny momentum as an older performer—one who happens to look like David Bowie. A beautifully shaped (mostly) solo concert, depending only on her singularity as a mover.

• Time It Was/116, an utterly delightful encounter between the scintillating New York City Ballet ballerina Tiler Peck and master clown Bill Irwin (who also happens to be one of New York’s greatest dancers). The performers co-choreographed this brilliant romp with Damian Woetzel, who commissioned it for Vail Dance Festival; the NY premiere was at Fall for Dance.

• Justin Peck’s Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes, for NYCB. The kinetic thrill of people running at top speed across the expanse of the stage of David Koch Theater matched Peck’s brazenness at appropriating Aaron Copland’s famous music for Agnes de Mille’s famous ballet. In section after section, Peck’s inventiveness tumbled forth, with the merest hint of the original source.

• Dream’d in a Dream by Seán Curran Company at Brooklyn Academy of Music. A beautiful reimagining of Central Asia carried on the currents of the Ustatshakirt Plus, a traditional Kyrgyz music ensemble. Gently transporting, veering away from folk dances and folk tunes in a good-natured glow of camaraderie. No aggression to show or prove anything, just an immersion in a faraway world.

• William Forsythe’s Duo2015 is an exhilarating example of his crazy wild idea of counterpoint. Two guys (Brigel Gjoka and Riley Watts), enthusiastically caught in a spider’s web of repetition and distortion, as part of Sylvie Guillem’s farewell performance at NY City Center, produced by Sadler’s Wells. I’d love to see it right after the original two-women Duo of 1996.

• Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Boris Charmatz’s Partita 2 at Sadler’s Wells in London. Postmodern in the best sense: dance that creates structure and relationship from nothing but movement and squeaky sneakers. Energizing.

(photo by Anne Van Aerschot)

BEST REVIVALS

• The Snow Falls in the Winter, first made by Annie-B Parson on the short-lived Other Shore company, now set on the Martha Graham Dance Company at the Joyce. Co-directed by Paul Lazar, this piece uses lines from Ionesco’s absurdist play The Lesson to frame the piece. Parson and Lazar have elicited a new, ironic edge from these hard-working, virtuosic dancers.

• Rainforest performed by Stephen Petronio Company at the Joyce as the first in his “Bloodlines” series. The dancers got the quietly feral force of this 1968 gem of Merce Cunningham’s. Warhol’s silver pillows caused a lovely chaos onstage and in the house, where viewers either batted them back to the stage or held them down.

• The musical Spring Awakening, this time produced by Deaf West Theatre, most of whose members are hearing impaired. With American Sign Language crucial for communication, choreographer Spencer Liff found a dynamic way to express the urgency, defiance and sorrows of these young people of 19th-century Germany—and he expertly incorporated Broadway’s first wheelchair performer.

LOOKING BACK—WITH GUSTO

• Dancenoise: Don’t Look Back. Annie Iobst and Lucy Sexton brought back their wacky, anarchic duo with the full complement of fake blood and real nudity, dildoes and cowboy hats, now with the added “relevance” of appearing in a museum (the new Whitney building). We guffawed in mock shock, and tapped into that old feeling of madcap liberation.

• “get dancing,” a tribute to Andy De Groat organized by Catherine Galasso at Danspace (an earlier version at Fridays at Noon), revealing the richness and spirituality of “minimalist” dance of the 70s to a younger generation. Plus, it was heavenly to hear Michael Galasso’s music again.

• ABT’s 75th -anniversary gala, with glimpses from 23 ballets including Billy the Kid, Fancy Free, Push Comes to Shove, Rodeo and The Bright Stream. Spectacular dancing from Herman Cornejo, Marcelo Gomes, Maria Kochetkova, Xiomara Reyes, Daniil Simkin, Diana Vishneva, James Whiteside and others. We felt the weight and glory of ABT’s trajectory.

• Event, directed by Robert Swinston, former associate director of Cunningham’s company and current director of Compagnie CNDC (Le Centre National de Danse Contemporaine) in Angers, France. Presented at the Joyce with an intriguing set of flowy strips of art by French artist Jackie Matisse (yes—the granddaughter of Henri). Swinston was inspired in his choice of excerpts of Cunningham works from 1965 to 1990, and the French group danced it with verve, at the Joyce.

MIXING IT UP

• “Platform: Dancers, Buildings, People in the Streets,” dreamed up by Claudia La Rocco, at Danspace. A multi-week series that threw together ballet and postmodern, Balanchine and Judson Dance Theater, through the lens of legendary dance writer and poet Edwin Denby. Much food for thought.

• “The Hidden Erotic Body of Soviet Ballet: A Tribute to Leonid Yacobson” combined a talk with Yacobson scholar Janice Ross (see my book list here) with reconstructions of Russia’s radical choreographer who is little known in the West. His entwining Rodin duets were sensual and seamless and triggered debate. Fridays at Noon at the 92nd Street Y, Harkness Dance Center.

• Also at Danspace: National treasure Meredith Monk, whose music and dancing light up the soul, teamed up with poetry goddess Anne Waldman. From gutsy rhythms of suffering to giddy ghosts to transcendent vocals, they made us feel lucky to live in their times.

BEST PERFORMERS (roughly in the order I saw them)

• Xiaochuan Xie of the Graham company in The Snow Falls in the Winter, also as Eliza in The King and I at Lincoln Center. A piquant sort of vibrancy.

• Lloyd Knight in the Graham company: Physical strength, dramatic impact, and a sense of the human being underneath the dancer.

• Megumi Eda in On the Nature of Things by Karole Armitage at the Museum of Natural History. With her crystalline quality she embodies the sacredness of the music by Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass and others.

• Davalois Fearon in Stephen Petronio’s  Locomotor/NonLocomotor, mainly the second half when she engaged in brash, tough-love partnering with three guys, at the Joyce. A woman warrior in a bright turquoise leotard.

• Ballet West’s gemlike Arolyn Williams in Presto by Nicolo Fonte, at the Joyce.

• Natalia Osipova in Ashton’s The Dream, The Royal Ballet, at Lincoln Center, presented by the Joyce. Star wattage both before and after she fell on her behind.

“Trois Gnociennes” with Lopatkina and Yermakov. photo by Mikhail Logvinov

• At the Benois de la danse, Moscow: The Mariinsky’s Uliana Lopatkina, transcendent in Dying Swan and dreamy yet precise in Trois Gnossiennes by Hans Van Manen.

• Alessandra Ferri in Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works for The Royal Ballet, playing the roles of an author and her protagonist with dramatic focus, making you care what’s going on in her character’s mind. Royal Opera House, London.

Diana Vishneva in Ratmansky’s Cinderella for the Mariinsky Ballet

• During the Mariinsky Ballet’s season at BAM, outstanding performances were given by Vishneva in Ratmansky’s Cinderella, Kondaurova in Robbins’ In the Night, Xander Parish as Siegfried in Swan Lake, and Kristina Shapran in Without by Benjamin Millepied.

• Olsi Gjeci of Vicky Shick Dance in Pathétique, Miniatures in Detail, 92Y Harkness Dance Festival. Springs up like a cat, dances like he has a secret up his sleeve.

• Marie-Agnès Gillot in Wayne McGregor’s Tree of Codes at the Park Avenue Armory. A creature-woman extending her legs like tentacles. Kinda scary but fitting what I imagine Tree of Codes to be about.

• Soledad Barrio in Antigona, a Noche Flamenca production directed by Martín Santangelo with choreography by Barrio. Her gradually building heat culminates in wrapping her anger around her while heels clatter amazing rhythms into the floor. At West Park Presbyterian Church, last summer and again now until Jan. 23.

• Okwui Okpokwasili, coolly provocative in her delivery of Kathy Acker’s sometimes porno script, in Scaffold Room, a performance piece by Ralph Lemon at The Kitchen.

• Daniel Staaf of Gallim Dance in Andrea Miller’s Whale. In a cast of individuals who allow themselves to be painfully exposed, he was the most extreme: desperate in expressing need, a rock in accepting those who need him. It must have been emotionally exhausting.

• Meg Weeks in Andy de Groat & Catherine Galasso’s “get dancing” evening. Specifically in get wreck (1978), fan dance (1978) and notes on de groat, the new work by Catherine Galasso. Athletic freshness and buoyancy.

• Jennie Somogyi in Liebeslieder Walzer in her farewell performance with NYCB. This is how it’s done: melding emotion with strength and fluidity. We’ll miss you, Jennie.

• Rika Okamoto in Tharp’s Preludes and Fugues: a delicious sense of style. But even better in Yowzie, where she reveled in the crazy fun of it, morphing from a drunk to a pothead to a gorilla to the Iron Lady too heavy to lift. Astonishing go-for-broke performance.

• Edivaldo Ernesto in Sasha Waltz and Guests’ Continu at BAM’s Next Wave Festival. Sharp, puppet-like, dense, riveting.

• Tendayi Kuumba in Walking with ’Trane, by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Urban Bush Women at BAM, incorporating crazy sick vocal scatting into dance improv.

• Jamar Roberts in the Ailey company, magnificent in works by Robert Battle, Paul Taylor and Ron Brown and more. (photo of Roberts in Aszure Barton’s LIFT, by Paul Kolnik)

THE YEAR OF MISTY COPELAND

She shone in works from the Graham company gala to Ivy in On the Town, from Tharp’s Brahms-Haydn Variations to Swan Lake. In this last, she took her time to feel surrender and to let the anguish of Odette be expressed through her exquisite lines. She showed grace and humility in every public appearance. And she brought public attention to the dearth of female African-American ballet dancers.

A SLEW OF OTHER ABT DANCERS

Other breathtaking performances: Stella Abrera in Ashton’s Cinderella, Kim Kimin as Solor in La Bayadere, Maria Kochetkova and Sarah Lane in The Brahms-Haydn Variations,  Jeffrey Cirio in AfterEffect by Marcelo Gomes, Evgenia Obraztsova as Juliet.

PERFORMERS IN MUSICALS

• Tommy Tune: long, lanky and loving in the Gershwin musical Lady Be Good, NY City Center’s Encores! series

• Leanne Cope in An American in Paris. Gorgeous, breathy dancing, an open expressive face, and a voice that makes her a true triple threat.

• Alex Brightman in School of Rock: whether fidgeting, bouncing to his own music, or exploding, he’s a buoyant hurricane of energy.

• Making the most of a small cast: the six players of Dames at Sea all act, tap dance, and sing terrifically. The show is as much fun as some of the bigger, flashier musicals. Choreography by Randy Skinner.

BEST TRENDS

Wendy Whelan in David Michalek’s “Hagoromo,” photo by Julieta Cervantes

• Great dancers continuing to perform into “advanced” age: Wendy Whelan, Eiko, Ana Laguna, Carmen de Lavallade, and, as mentioned, Louise Lecavalier and Alessandra Ferri, are deepening their artistry every year. Audiences want to see them because they know they will see not only a great performance, but maybe they will learn something about life.

• Broadway Musicals Take on the Immigrant Debate: Not only the blockbuster Hamilton, but also the dance-crazy On Your Feet and the moving Allegiance tell complicated stories of racism and resistance. Hamilton highlights how international and multi-cultural the founding of the United States was. On Your Feet tells how brazen Gloria and Emilio Estefan were to bring the Cuban beat to American pop music. And Allegiance lays bare the disgraceful treatment of Asians during World War II. Of course, Fiddler on the Roof, which premiered in 1964 and has just opened as a revival, may have been the first to dramatize the painful trek from the Old World to the New. [And a friend just reminded me, duh, of West Side Story from 1964!]

MOST DISAPPOINTING

• ABT’s remake of The Sleeping Beauty with choreography by Alexei Ratmansky based on the original versions. Fascinating to ballet historians, it looked to me like everything got smaller: dancers taking up less space, being coy rather than daring, and our multi-cultural world shrinking back to the precious courts of Europe. Only the budget was large—six million dollars.

• Mark Morris’ After You at ABT. Pedestrian in the most banal sense. Morris’ usual wit and sense of form eluded him, not to mention his intuitive understanding of ballet line.

• The Age of Anxiety by Liam Scarlett, danced by The Royal Ballet, presented by the Joyce at Lincoln Center. Sturm and Drang overlaid on a plot that looked like Fancy Free and even had music by Leonard Bernstein. Dreadful portrayals of four supposedly typical New Yorkers, all of them belligerent.

• Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor by Doris Humphrey, presented by Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance. A great classic of the modern dance canon, it felt lost and faraway in the Koch Theater. The Limón Dance Company performed it well, but the organ sound was thin and the narrative felt incomplete.

But let’s not end on that note. Scroll back up to the things I was excited about, or click here to browse through my list of books published this year.