NEW YORK, NY.- A Year Overflowing With Dance and Great Dancers

The fall season has felt like a year — New York City Ballet kicked off its 75th anniversary celebrations and Dance Reflections, a festival sponsored by Van Cleef & Arpels, landed in New York. Fall also saw the opening of Intima, a new arts space in Ridgewood, Queens. When I couldn’t fit shows into my schedule, I settled for dress rehearsals, including “No Furniture: Suite for a Loft Apartment,” by Lavinia Eloise Bruce. Formal and ferocious and held in a secret location — a South Street Seaport loft — “No Furniture” deserves another run.

But, really, all of 2023 has been overflowing with dance and with great dancers, who can be found anywhere. This year they included the extraordinary cast of “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” and Ja’Bowen, a tap dancer from Chicago who performs with rhythmic dexterity and detail on a subway platform. The talent show gala at Pageant was blisteringly funny. (Choreographer Isa Spector took the top prize.) But 2023 was dark too, and one dancer should not be forgotten: O’Shae Sibley, who lost his young life while voguing in the parking lot of a Brooklyn gas station after a day at the beach.

What follows is a list, in no particular order, of some of the year’s most memorable moments in dance. — GIA KOURLAS

Cullberg

Deborah Hay’s hypnotic “Horse, the Solos,” performed at the Joyce Theater by the Swedish company Cullberg, cast an indelible spell in just an hour. Hay, a founding member of Judson Dance Theater, the 1960s experimental collective, was an associate artist at Cullberg for three years. “Horse,” both subtle and dramatic, reflects that time and trust.

Madeline Hollander

This choreographer and visual artist uncovers hidden systems and turns them into dance. Hollander learned that beneath the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the Old Croton Aqueduct; her response in “Hydro Parade” was to mirror its path with 15 dancers who flowed from one gallery to the next in movement sequences inspired by water. As this secret parade took over the museum, the dancers became the art.

Rachid Ouramdane

What happens when a modern tightrope walker, a climber and a group of acrobats fill the same stage? In the transfixing “Corps Extrêmes,” Rachid Ouramdane, a French Algerian choreographer, created a work in which movement, both robust and serene, sent bodies floating through the air. Set to a guitar score by Jean-Baptiste Julien, the work was gentle and luminous. It was also a dance that finally looked right on the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s opera house stage.

Beach Sessions Dance Series

A plane flew across the water with a message streaming behind it: “Dear Merce Cunningham — You Busy RN?” As part of Beach Sessions at Rockaway Beach, Sarah Michelson created a sprawling, probing response to Cunningham’s “Beach Birds” (1991), performed in abbreviated form. “Beach Birds” on the sand was pretty enough, but Michelson, with raw fervor, paid homage to the time in which the dance was made, raising questions about what happens to choreography and legacy after a dance artist dies.

New York City Ballet

When hundreds of dancers converged onstage for a collective bow in honor of the opening night of City Ballet’s 75th anniversary season, it might not have been choreographed with the care that, say, George Balanchine would have given it — the scene was a touch chaotic — but it was astonishing to see so many of the bodies that have paved the way for a new ballet, for an American ballet. The company’s fall season was dominated by Balanchine classics. “Symphony in C” remains its own special life force. How could one choreographer produce so much radiance?

Trajal Harrell

A choreographer who spends much of his time in Europe — he is the director of the Schauspielhaus Zürich Dance Ensemble — Harrell returned to New York with “The Köln Concert” (2021). Performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it paired Keith Jarrett’s bestselling 1975 recorded performance with Joni Mitchell songs; here, Harrell’s signature runway movement, lush and stark, had a new maturity, resulting in a dance that possessed the clarity of a jewel.

The Ken Dance

The warm afterglow of the Ken Dance — unofficially known as the dream ballet in Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie”— lives on. This all-male number, choreographed by Jennifer White, comes out of nowhere in the film, trading a pink beach for a shimmering bright soundstage. Led by Ryan Gosling’s Ken, the number soars as dancers leap and glide into diamond formations. The crime is that there are no Oscars for best choreography.




(La)Horde

When the horde that is (La)Horde, the French collective formed in 2013 by Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer and Arthur Harel, made its New York City debut as part of Dance Reflections at NYU Skirball, it felt like a shot of adrenaline. With the Ballet National de Marseille, which it directs, (La)Horde presented two programs: the evening-length “Room With a View” and a mixed bill of work. Both showed off the collective’s view of experimental dance: abrasive and loud, soft and light, generous and healing in unassuming ways.

Jake Roxander

At American Ballet Theater this was the year of the dancer. Or, really, one dancer: Jake Roxander, whose astonishing virtuosity and sparkling stage presence give the repertory a much-needed jolt of electricity. Over the past year, Roxander — who comes from a ballet family — has triumphed as Mercutio in “Romeo and Juliet,” Puck in “The Dream” and in basically any role he touches, small or large.

Ann Liv Young

This hilarious, brutally direct dance artist is back with “Marie Antoinette” at her apartment in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. Young directs the excellent pair of Alex Sabina (Marie Antoinette) and Tom Ruth (Louis XVI) as they slip back and forth between history and the present day — exploring any number of topics, including mental health and artistic intention. All the while, music and dance fill the air, including a wild solo for Sabina, who shakes everything she has and a bit more. Shows are announced on Young’s Instagram.

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The New Normal Included a French Invasion

Where dance in 2022 was still showing the aftereffects of the pandemic, dance in 2023 seemed mostly back to normal. Or to a new normal in which the fall season in New York was largely subsidized by a jewelry company. Van Cleef & Arpels’ Dance Reflections festival staged something of a French Invasion, with hits and misses, but there were happy surprises elsewhere, too. Here, in no particular order, are a few that stuck with me. — BRIAN SEIBERT

New York City Ballet

It was a good year for New York City Ballet, even before the company’s 75th anniversary season began in the fall. The highlight of the spring was a revival of “Brandenburg,” Jerome Robbins’ final work. Made in 1997, a year before his death, it’s still bubbling with life. The fall was a Balanchine fest, appropriately, with many of the classics in fine shape. Looking freshest was another revival, “Bourrée Fantasque,” from 1949. After an absence of nearly 30 years, it returned with its wit and frothy fun, and its knockout finale gave the anniversary a Champagne-cork-popping energy.

Rachid Ouramdane

The extreme aspects of this French Algerian choreographer’s “Corps Extrêmes” included film of athletes walking on wires over chasms and climbing sheer cliff faces, death-defying feats replicated in domesticated form onstage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But these were the least of it. I loved the acrobats, who made towers of their bodies and launched one another with calm recklessness, landing with incredibly soft precision. The tone was meditative, but their offhand grace, invention and flow had me laughing with joy.

Olivier Tarpaga

A dance theater work about refugees fleeing jihadi rebels in Africa might have easily been heavy going and heavy-handed. But what the Burkina Faso-born choreographer and composer Olivier Tarpaga delivered at the Joyce Theater in “Once the dust settles, the flowers bloom” was amazingly light and subtle — and more affecting because of its poetic mystery. The live music was West African blues, spare and artfully spaced with silence. The choreography was sophisticated and unpredictable, its images suggestive and open in meaning.

Memphis Jookin’: The Show

Lil Buck is so far the only major star to have emerged out of the Memphis street dance and music scene called jookin. This touring show uses his celebrity and virtuoso charm to reflect some light on other practitioners and the culture that formed them. It’s an earnest and frankly educational production with a conventional story line and dialogue, but it’s put together with skill and packed with talent and heart.

‘The Night Falls’

Successful narrative dance productions with entirely new stories are exceedingly rare. This one, which BalletCollective premiered at Peak Performances at Montclair State University in New Jersey, benefited from the participation of a master storyteller: novelist Karen Russell. The idea could have come from one of her books: a present-day fable about sirens in a seedy Florida theme park and the sufferers they lure, who escape by telling one another stories. Choreographer-director Troy Schumacher and, especially, composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone found a language to express split selves and the power of empathy, embodied and vocalized by a talented multigenerational cast.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.