Siobhan Burke

NEW YORK — One day about 10 years ago, dancer Jermone Donte Beacham received a message from a stranger on YouTube. He ignored it, but the stranger kept trying to contact him. Finally he decided to write back.

The stranger (now friend) was choreographer Jumatatu M. Poe, who had come across videos of Beacham performing J-Sette, an exacting, exuberant dance form that emerged in the early 1980s among majorette teams at historically black colleges. Originally danced only by women, the form took on a parallel life among queer black men, practiced in competitive squads at gay clubs and pride parades, where gender binaries could more safely be broken.

In the decade since their YouTube meeting, Poe and Beacham have been developing “Let ’im Move You,” a prodigious, joyous, sensual and deeply considered exploration of J-Sette, made up of multiple parts: some for theaters and galleries, some for nightclubs and city streets. Over nine days this month, the series moved through the Bronx and the Lower East Side, in and around BAAD! (Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance) and Abrons Arts Center, at times stopping traffic.

The story of how the two met, as told by Beacham, appears in a companion publication to “This Is a Formation,” the latest part of the project, which had its New York City premiere at Abrons on Thursday. “I am scared, even as I am courageous, to share something that I have nurtured with such precious attention for years,” Poe writes in its opening pages.

While this attention can be felt throughout all parts of “Let ’im Move You,” the work itself is not exceedingly precious. In a form that prizes precision and unison, the artists experiment with ceding control, making room for spontaneity, imperfection, the freedom to fall apart. They pose weighty questions with a light touch: How do you translate a practice developed in stadiums and nightclubs into a black box theater or a public park? What does it mean to present a queer black form before contemporary dance audiences, who tend to be mostly white?

The first two parts of the series — “This Is a Success” and “A Study,” which were presented at Abrons in 2018 and returned to BAAD! on Oct. 4 — address that second question head-on. “We brought a whole lot of black people with us,” Poe said in his warm introduction, as a constellation of digital viewers popped up on the wall behind him. “In case you’re wondering if something is funny,” he added. “Or if you’re just in need of a black friend and yours isn’t here.”

Whose space is this? Who is this work for? Those questions arose again in “Intervention,” a procession through the Lower East Side on Wednesday. Wherever “Let ’im Move You” goes, it brings this free outdoor component, a kind of roving rejoinder to the insularity of the theater.

Like “Success,” “Study” and “Formation,” “Intervention” plays with the call-and-response structure of J-Sette, in which a leader demonstrates phrases for others to follow. In bright pink knee-high socks paired with wintry layers, seven dancers (later joined by a small cohort of local high school students), staked out entire blocks, signaling to one another with swiping arms, arching backs and winding hips, then suddenly sprinting to a new location. They seemed to be tossing and catching complex rhythmic messages, at once cryptic (to an outsider) and absorbing.

A small audience followed the procession, but this was just as much a work for the unsuspecting city: for whoever happened to be sitting in a cafe window or riding by on the M14 bus. The city, in return, supplied the soundtrack: “Dancing Queen” blasting from a car window; a chorus of rush-hour horns.

While “Intervention” began unannounced, “Formation” opened with an abundance of introductions, as performers escorted small groups of audience members into the Experimental Theater at Abrons. Dancer William Robinson thanked my group for being there and reminded us that we were creating the work together, then introduced us to each collaborator.

We would, after all, be intimately sharing space over the next two hours, free to roam around the black-box stage — and dance if we wanted — as the performers called and responded to DJ Zen Jefferson’s infectious mix of Beyoncé, Rihanna, Mariah Carey and more. Motifs from previous installments resurfaced: couples slowly, tenderly enmeshing between hard-hitting, exhilarating group sections; dancers filming themselves on their phones. (Audience members, at select “selfie moments,” could do the same.)

And as in other parts of the series, more performers emerged from the audience as the show progressed; Poe and Beacham recruit local dancers wherever they tour, bolstering their core ensemble. (Next year will take them to Austin, Texas; Cincinnati; Washington; Chicago; and Portland, Oregon.) By the time “Formation” broke out of the theater and onto the steps outside Abrons, the cast had just about doubled in size. In this way, the work seems to ripple out beyond its originators, with no limits to what it can contain.

This article originally appeared in

Tossing and Catching Rhythms on Stages and City Streets

(Critic’s Notebook)

NEW YORK — In her early 20s, Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker created two dances that remain among her most distinguished: “Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich” (1981), for two women; and “Rosas Danst Rosas” (1983), for four. The last time she brought these minimalist masterpieces to New York, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival in 2014, De Keersmaeker, then 54, was among the performers onstage, joining dancers in their 30s and 40s.

Age matters here, because what stands out about the latest revival of these works, presented in a two-week engagement at New York Live Arts, is the sense that De Keersmaeker has handed them off to an eager, energetic new generation. The dancers who have inherited them — Laura Bachman, Yuika Hashimoto, Laura Maria Poletti and Soa Ratsifandrihana — all joined her company, Rosas, in 2016. The youngest is 25; the oldest, 28.

As if having accepted a mission, or a gift, they instill both “Fase” (performed last week) and “Rosas Danst Rosas” (which opened Tuesday) with youthful pride and attack. At their finest, they shed diligence for abandon, losing themselves in the material and making it their own.

De Keersmaeker, who is now busy choreographing the coming Broadway production of “West Side Story,” has said that with these early works, she was trying to find, quite simply, “movements that I liked.” That search led her deep into repetition, a defining feature of “Fase” and “Rosas.” In a video about the creation “Fase,” she recalls appreciating Steve Reich’s music for his use of “a minimum of material in a maximum way.”

She took a similar approach to movement: wringing possibilities from a narrow set of steps; building rigid structures from which, somehow, emotion could blossom, like flowers from cracks in the sidewalk. While calling to mind the work of Lucinda Childs, her style of repetition was less coolly austere, more sumptuous and brazen.

On the opening night of “Fase,” Bachman and Ratsifandrihana (the first of two casts) seemed to relish the tension between restraint and release, as well as each other’s presence. Structured in four parts — two duets, a solo, another duet — the work requires an almost telepathic connection between partners, and these two had it. (Playing with images of doubling, the gorgeous lighting design, by Remon Fromont, at times casts four shadows on the wall behind them.)

In the first part, “Piano Phase,” the motion of pivoting with a swinging arm carries the dancers in and out of sync; echoing the music, one accelerates until they fall back into unison, a reliably satisfying moment and perhaps the work’s signature move. Pulled along horizontal corridors of light, they occasionally slip into a perpendicular plane, advancing toward the audience. With each advance, their breathing grows more audible, sharp inhales and exhales matching the bladelike swipes of their arms: breath as a mode of expression and a means of keeping time.

Between the more ominous second duet (“Come Out”) and the buoyant finale (“Clapping Music”), Ratsifandrihana offered a ravishing rendition of “Violin Phase,” which traverses the circumference, radiuses and diameters of a circle, while also exploring circles and spirals in the body. Here the dancer partners with the music and space alone; Ratsifandrihana achieved a lush oneness with both.

Created two years after “Fase,” “Rosas Danst Rosas,” to music by Thierry De Mey and Peter Vermeersch, expands on elements of the earlier work. “Come Out,” for instance, performed seated on stools with action concentrated in the torso, looks like a precursor to the second, mostly chair-bound section of “Rosas.”

De Keersmaeker sometimes translates “Rosas Danst Rosas” as “we dance ourselves,” a reflection of the work’s bold, conspiratorial spirit. On Tuesday, the dancers did not seem like themselves right away, more mechanical than assertive, as if beholden to an idea of what the dance should be.

But about halfway through, they came into their own both as a group and individuals, their personalities surfacing: Bachman’s sultriness, Hashimoto’s vigilance, Poletti’s playfulness, Ratsifandrihana’s defiance. The fourth and final section — in which pounding piano and horns thrust them into an exhausting, ecstatic cycle — settled any question of whose dance this was.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's Youthful Dances Get a Youthful Jolt

(Critic's Notebook)

“All of the materials are stored in the second floor,” she said, pointing to a door on the warehouse’s upper level, as if in on a secret.

She was referring to materials that make up a vital but generally hidden facet of the Whitney’s architecture: its flood mitigation wall, a steel and aluminum barrier that she will partially erect and dismantle, with a team of 12 dancers and museum staff members, in a four-hour performance Thursday evening.

Part of the Whitney Biennial, the ambitious work, “Ouroboros Gs,” brings attention to the museum’s vulnerable location at the edge of the Hudson River in an age of climate crisis. As extreme weather becomes more common, Hollander, 33, is interested in the rituals that evolve to prepare for it. In “Ouroboros,” for which she has devised simple repeating steps with names like “zigzag waltz” and “procession pivots,” she entertains the notion of flood preparation as a social dance: something that draws people together for regular, unhurried practice.

Hollander is not making light of climate change but rather acknowledging its presence in our lives. Bracing for superstorms “has to become more of a pedestrian routine and less of an emergency procedure,” she said, noting the growing frequency of so-called 500-year floods. “It’s already our reality, and we may as well get really good at it.” In that spirit, she envisions “Ouroboros” as a poetic and pragmatic demonstration, not as a high-stress drill.

The Whitney’s flood mitigation system, including the wall (or mobile barrier system), was developed after Hurricane Sandy, about a year into construction on the new building. The storm filled the recently excavated basement with 30 feet of water, revealing the need for stronger flood protection.

“It’s a really beautiful system in itself,” Hollander said of the wall, which, when fully assembled, wraps around the front of the museum. Eager to take it out of hiding, she installed one portion for the duration of the biennial, on the western corner of the front steps — the building’s first point of contact with water in the event of a flood.

“Ouroboros” arrives during a busy year for Hollander, in which she is both branching out and returning to her roots: as a ballet dancer on the proscenium stage. Having worked mostly at the intersection of dance and visual art, she recently made her first foray into Hollywood, bringing her eye for expressive gesture to the set of Jordan Peele’s “Us.” Hired to choreograph an ominous ballet scene inspired by “The Nutcracker,” she stayed on as a movement consultant, developing signature physical vocabularies for the characters’ dueling selves.

Already at work on Peele’s next film, a reboot of “Candyman” (1992), she is also creating a piece for L.A. Dance Project — her first proscenium work — which is to have its premiere in Paris in October. (It then heads to the company’s home theater in California, Nov. 14-24.)

Hollander has long been fascinated by the behavior of anything that moves, whether humans, machines or weather patterns. Growing up in Los Angeles, she trained with Yvonne Mounsey, a muse of choreographer George Balanchine. But she saw herself as something of a misfit in that world, she said, more enchanted by its infrastructure than by the pursuit of perfection.

“The coordination of the lights with the backdrop with the scrim with the fog — all of these large moving systems were always the point of interest for me, and less so whether or not I did the fouettés correctly,” she said. Taking ballet class, she added, “always felt like I was studying physics. It didn’t really feel like I was pursuing a profession.”

As a student at Barnard College, Hollander balanced off-campus ballet classes with her interest in cultural anthropology. For her senior thesis, on the relationship between the body and technology, she filmed her friends talking and created short video portraits of their body language. She still consults this repository, which she calls a Gesture Archive, for choreographic ideas.

After college, Hollander joined the corps of Corella Ballet, a small company in Spain, for two years. Returning from a tour of “Swan Lake” with a broken foot, she shifted her focus to her own work. She sees her direction as an artist since then, her gravitation toward galleries and outdoor spaces, as a reaction to her immersion in ballet: the many years, she said, of “being absorbed in that world and feeling like it was very magical but also isolating.”

Her own artistic practice has been anything but isolating, placing the body in conversation with systems of large and small scale: molecular, mechanical, meteorological. In “365” (2017), which commented on the depletion of sand and water as natural resources, a dancer walked atop a cement mixing truck, on a street in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for 365 rotations of its barrel. In “New Max” (2018), performers followed instructions that involved raising the temperature of a gallery with their body heat. Hollander has found inspiration in evacuation drills, athletic events and the motion of beach rake trucks, one of which starred in her 2017 “Arena” at Rockaway Beach.

She said that when invited to create a work for the biennial, she first thought of the Hudson, imagining “a choreography between two tugboats” to be viewed from both sides of the river. Her research into the site soon led her to the Whitney’s flood mitigation system.

Jane Panetta, a curator of the biennial, said in a telephone interview that Hollander’s proposal “was somewhat unexpected for all of us.”

“When we had the flood mitigation system designed and fabricated,” she added, “we didn’t imagine that an artist would necessarily propose taking it out and doing a performance with part of it.”

On a blustery evening last week, Hollander — a wrench in one hand, her phone in the other — gathered with her dancers on the plaza outside the Whitney. They had limited rehearsal time with the wall materials and Whitney staff members (three from the operations department and three art handlers). But there were other matters to attend to, like inventing ways to unscrew metal caps and bolts in the ground, one phase of the wall installment. Step-touching along the pavement in pairs, they repeatedly paused and pivoted, loosening the caps with their feet.

“The choreography is always task first,” dancer Marielis Garcia said later. “How do I best approach the task using this movement?”

Unlike the ballets she danced growing up, Hollander’s movement tends toward the everyday. But Benjamin Millepied, artistic director of LA Dance Project and a former New York City Ballet principal, said he sees the influence of her Balanchine training.

“There’s a clear understanding of classical craft when it comes to the architecture of her dances,” he said in a telephone interview. “If you watch enough Balanchine, and you pay attention, that sort of spatial understanding is something you can assimilate.”

And even as Hollander’s horizons have expanded, ballet class remains essential to her process, a place where her mind fills up with ideas and solutions to creative problems.

“In pliés, there’s always a moment when I remember my dreams from the night before, and whenever we start jumping, things get solved,” she said. “Or I’ll come up with the thing I hadn’t thought of that’s going to be the next piece.”

Tracing the Artistic Arc of Flood Preparation

NEW YORK — When choreographer Madeline Hollander makes a site-specific work, she gets to know the site inside and out. On a recent afternoon, she stood at the base of a warehouse on 10th Avenue, around the corner from the gleaming glass entrance of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Without hesitation, row after row of dancers surged across the floor, immersed in a process of trial and error. It was a typical encounter with the Merce Cunningham technique, which routinely confronts its practitioners with riddles, contradictions and near-impossible tasks.

In this Cunningham centennial year, appreciations of his life and art have rolled out on a grand, global scale. Opportunities abound to see his mind-expanding, still-radical work, and to reflect on the ruptures he introduced into modern dance: his break from narrative structures, his democratic vision of space, his untethering of dance from music, his use of chance as a choreographic device.

But with more high-profile events on deck for the fall and winter, one of Cunningham’s greatest contributions lives on in a less visible forum: the ritual of daily class. On weekdays at City Center, under the auspices of the Merce Cunningham Trust, dancers can study the no-frills modern dance technique he developed, regardless of whether they intend to perform his work.

For a week in July, as my own centennial experiment, I took this class every day, dancing for the first part and observing during the (more athletic) second half. I wasn’t a total novice; in 2010 and 2011, I took beginner-level classes at the Cunningham Studio, on the light-filled top floor of Westbeth Artists Housing in the West Village. Those 90-minute lessons — advancing from a warm-up of the back and feet to more complex coordinations of the torso and legs to jumping sequences that flew across the room — were always a struggle. Yet I grew to love, even crave, the difficulty. I looked forward to coming back and trying again.

The studio at Westbeth was filled with history, as the epicenter of Cunningham’s company and school from 1970 to 2012. But the history of the technique dates back further. It emerged in concert with Cunningham’s early work, as a training system for his dances: a means of preparing the body for the singular demands of his choreography. In a 1951 essay, he offered a definition of technique: “the disciplining of one’s energies through physical action in order to free that energy at any desired instant in its highest possible physical and spiritual form.”

While drawing from the precise legwork of ballet and the spinal articulations of the Martha Graham technique (he danced in Graham’s company before founding his own), Cunningham stripped away the affectations of both, arriving at something more uncluttered, physically and emotionally. As dancer Carolyn Brown, a pillar of his troupe for its first two decades, wrote in her memoir “Chance and Circumstance,” the technique trained “the whole body so that it could be ready to move in the many ways possible to it, without adhering to any one rigid style.”

When Cunningham died in 2009, his company announced it would close at the end of 2011; the school would close soon after. Just as the Cunningham Trust, in the company’s absence, now oversees the preservation of his dances — in part through licensing them to other institutions and offering repertory workshops — it is also a steward of the technique, the scaffolding that upholds the choreography.

But Cunningham class serves a purpose beyond sustaining his work, imparting a solid, streamlined foundation for dancing of all kinds. At its best, it can build strength, agility, musicality, spatial awareness and — as Toogood’s students showed — an affinity for problem-solving and risk-taking. Dancers can take that anywhere.

“It’s a training for the body and the mind,” said Jennifer Goggans, the program coordinator for the trust. (She also teaches and, like all of the trust’s instructors, is a former member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.) “The goal ultimately is to get you to push your physical boundaries, and to go to a place that you didn’t think that you could go.”

In my own experience, Brown’s image of “the many ways possible” is a good summation of a Cunningham class. The opening series of back exercises, which begin from a simple parallel stance, draws out the torso’s range of motion, through actions of curving, twisting, arching and tilting the spine. “We’re working to isolate the movement of the torso against the pelvis,” Goggans said, “so that later on, we’re free to have our legs doing one thing and our torso moving in any possible direction against that.”

The layering of the torso and legs grows trickier as the class progresses, often resulting in unpredictable, awkward permutations of the upper and lower body, coupled with extremes of speed. Even for the kind of lifelong dancer who seems capable of anything, this isn’t easy.

“In ballet I know what’s going to happen next — I get it — and here, I don’t get it,” said choreographer Netta Yerushalmy, who began taking Cunningham classes in 2016, after decades of training in ballet and contemporary techniques. “It’s mentally perplexing, I find.”

While physically and cognitively taxing, Cunningham class can be just as pleasurable, even therapeutic. Pareena Lim, a devotee of the technique for more than 10 years, finds that at this point, she needs the class just to feel normal. “It makes my body feel really good — there’s something about how all the joints are used,” she said. “When I don’t do it, my joints feel kind of cranky.”

And though the technique can certainly cause injuries, it has been known to help with rehabilitation. New York City Ballet dancer Gretchen Smith began taking classes last year while recovering from a severe back and hip injury. The technique’s unadorned nature — with no barre to hold onto, no shoes binding the feet and no embellishments to the carriage of the arms, neck and head — exposed imbalances between the sides of her body, allowing her to correct them.

“I found that there’s no faking it in Cunningham technique,” she said. “I immediately could see where my weaknesses were and why I had hit this block in dancing ballet.”

Not everyone takes to the technique right away, or ever. Rashaun Mitchell, a former member of the Cunningham company (and a current Cunningham trustee), said that when he began teaching at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, he felt some resistance from his students.

“I think the Cunningham was kind of austere and technical in their minds — archaic and old-fashioned,” he said. “And also, it was just hard. The difficulty definitely turns people off, people who are not immediately always interested in challenge.”

To make it more accessible, Mitchell has integrated other movement approaches into his class, building in moments of rest and release. He is all for letting the technique evolve. “There are new ideas, new ways of thinking about the body, from anatomical and physical therapy perspectives,” he said. “What other movement practices might actually augment the Cunningham technique?”

Like Cunningham’s dances — many of which are documented in “dance capsules,” or digital aids for reconstruction — the technique won’t survive or stay relevant on its own. Ken Tabachnick, the Cunningham Trust’s director, said that the organization has begun discussing plans for a teacher training program, to ensure that well into the future, there will be qualified instructors of the technique.

And while Cunningham-based classes are currently taught at universities and other institutions around the world, Goggans said the trust is working to develop curriculum for schools, “not just for university level, but for younger kids as well.”

For students of any age, one of the technique’s most valuable lessons is that it’s fine, even necessary, to fail. Longtime teacher Janet Charleston, who taught at Westbeth, recalled that Cunningham would stress this to his faculty: “Merce would say, ‘Give something that nobody can do.’”

On Saturday mornings this summer, Charleston has been teaching a more under-the-radar Cunningham class at the SoHo loft 100 Grand (filling in for veteran instructor June Finch). After five classes in five days, I was, to my own surprise, up for a sixth, and headed to SoHo. Buoyed by the week behind me, I pushed myself to dance the whole time. Even as I faltered or fell out of balances, Charleston reminded me that this, too, is part of the technique.

“Some of the beauty,” she said after class, “is a human being grappling with the task of the movement. Even if you’re struggling, or you’re not on your leg and you’re trying to be, it’s so beautiful, just a person grappling with that.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/16/arts/dance/merce-cunningham-technique.html" id="41a647cc-1aa6-36cd-ae3f-d25da67e1a02">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — On a recent afternoon, in a big studio at New York City Center, dancer Melissa Toogood presented her class with a puzzle. With the clear, direct energy of someone walking down the street, she performed a darting series of steps that folded back on itself, ending where it started. The challenge, beyond pairing sudden swerves of the torso with the down-up-up rhythm of the feet, was to somehow travel forward in space, even as the movement resisted that pathway.

Lessons in Merce Cunningham

NEW YORK — There may not have been a more idyllic place in New York City on Saturday night than Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where the choreographer Kim Brandt gave people a reason to hang out for a while. As the sun lowered behind the graveyard, an audience gathered around the expansive Cedar Dell, the cemetery’s oldest section and the site of Brandt’s fleeting “Untitled (Green-Wood).” Some came prepared with picnic blankets; others reclined against gravestones and trees. The hot day was cooling off. A breeze stirred up a soundscore of rustling leaves.

The very act of congregating was as vital as the work itself. Presented with Pioneer Works, the performance was part of a series, Graveyard Shift, that recalls the 19th-century lives of American burial grounds. As a program note pointed out, cemeteries were once hubs of social activity outside of mourning, but their function has narrowed. One of Green-Wood’s many public programs, Graveyard Shift seeks to open up new (or dormant) ways of engaging with the space.

In a place that inspires reflection on time’s passage, and on the body’s transience, Brandt’s sensibility fits right in. “Untitled (Green-Wood)” is one of two short works she has shown in New York this month. The first, “Corners,” part of the Open Call series at the Shed — a universe away from the peacefulness of Green-Wood — offered another look at her patient, spare and stealthy approach to mobilizing ensembles of people.

Both works slip into existence almost imperceptibly. At Cedar Dell, a circular site with tombstones arranged in concentric rings, the first sign of a “performance” (from my vantage point) was a lone performer (Leslie Cuyjet) traversing a distant slope. She appeared among the trees like any other person wandering toward the show, but with a heightened sense of purpose. She knew where she was going, as did the other 11 dancers who filtered in along similar routes, completing a long spiral that delivered them inside the inner circle of tombstones.

Brandt’s movement palette tends to be minimal, and here she limited it to one action, or two: walking and standing still. The simplicity counterbalanced the flood of associations that the setting, on its own, could bring up. And as it turned out, just walking, in this context, was enough to produce a melancholic effect. Breaking from orderly lines of four onto individual pathways, the dancers arrived in a tight-knit group at the circle’s center. They stood there for a while, then spiraled together back into the distance, dispersing and disappearing. They were here, then they were gone.

“Corners,” earlier this month (it also repeats on Saturday), explored similar ideas in much a different environment: a sleek gallery, among the artworks of a cluttered group show. But Brandt knows how to adapt to a space, and “Corners” smartly staked out its territory.

The 30-minute work, like “Untitled (Green-Wood),” rests on just a few actions and positions: chiefly, the torso folded over the legs, draping toward the floor. (“Is this yoga?” asked one confused viewer.) The nine dancers, materializing one by one — often as if out of nowhere — assume that pose, grazing the floor with their knuckles or palms. Incremental shifts of the feet carry them toward one another, isolation giving way to collectivity; the formation of a social movement came to mind. Then the constellation loosens, and one by one again, they stand and walk away.

This may sound like work in which not much happens, but Brandt deceptively packs a lot in. There is a fortitude in these new pieces, and a fragility, balancing as if to remind us: One is meaningless without its opposite.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/arts/dance/kim-brandt-green-wood-shed.html" id="f0496119-bc86-3867-af89-0fc96fcefe55">The New York Times</a>.

A Choreographer's Reflections on Transience

NEW YORK — If you saw Mariana Valencia’s “Yugoslavia,” one of her recent solos, you’ll recognize the illuminated painting that hangs on the wall in “Bouquet,” her new work at the Chocolate Factory Theater in Queens. It depicts the title: flowers on a table, in a vase.

“My dad made this painting,” she informs us matter-of-factly. “He was a Sunday painter.”

She is no less dry or direct when reporting, a little later, “My dad is dead.”

That fact is one of many, about her life and her art, that Valencia relays in this unassuming, deceptively touching, less-than-an-hourlong show, which opened Thursday. Originally planned as a duet with the dancer Lydia Okrent, the piece turns out to be a solo. Or is it? Valencia is the only person onstage, but one idea she imparts is that we are never alone: We are the product of our communities and histories, our parents and friends, songs we’ve heard and dances we’ve learned.

Or as she puts it, “a self isn’t just itself.” A self is part of an ensemble, one stem in a bouquet.

Valencia, who is in her mid-30s, has been working for the past few years in an autobiographical mode, striking a tone that can be both funny and mournful. Like “Yugoslavia” (2017) and “Album” (2018), “Bouquet” is a multidimensional monologue, as physical and musical as it is verbal. Thirty-something, she proves, is not too early for a retrospective, which is, after all, just a way of taking stock of where you are. In parts of “Bouquet,” she recycles excerpts from her past work, including dances created with Okrent, her close friend, from 2010 to 2014.

As she enters the space — wearing khakis, a blue unitard and voluminous curls — a bundle of objects, like a traveler’s satchel, rests onstage. Untying it, she distributes its contents around the room and names them, directing an amusingly long metal pointer at each: a pitcher, a bandanna, a blowup globe (“the earth”) and more.

Whether rhythmically rearranging items or jerkily ambulating, Valencia moves with a vivid efficiency: solid, assured. Her dancing seems almost as tangible as the objects around her, as if it, too, could be bundled up and carried.

Her collection of steps expands as she quotes Trisha Brown’s “Spanish Dance,” Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations” and angular Lester Horton exercises (the technique underlying Ailey’s dances). Intercutting gestures from the stories she tells — about smoking in high school or dancing cumbia in Mexico — she whips up a speedy montage, corralling decades of dance history and personal history into the span of a few minutes.

Recognizing all the selves that constitute her own, and the wider systems she’s a part of, Valencia ends with a chanting of “shout outs,” inviting the audience to join. These, and the work’s other texts, can be found in an accompanying book, which I enjoyed reading on the train ride home. While a dance, like a life, must end, it’s nice, when it’s over, to have something to hold in your hands.

Through April 27 at the Chocolate Factory Theater, Queens; chocolatefactorytheater.org

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/arts/mariana-valencia-bouquet-review.html" id="67e6e653-17c5-37d8-a1ec-c5d8312414be">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Pick)

You'll Never Dance Alone (a Solo)

She would need that limber spine in a few hours, when she took the stage at the U.S. Pole Dance Championship, whipping herself around a steel apparatus to “Cornflake Girl” by Tori Amos. (To keep her professional life separate, she preferred to use only her first name.)

“It’s a great way for me to de-stress, add some creativity, and all those types of things,” she said, explaining why, five years ago, she got hooked on pole dancing.

The other competitors at this two-day event — 115 in all — had also, clearly, caught the pole bug. Some, like Cristi, work full time in other fields, practicing and teaching pole dance on the side; others make their living in the growing pole dance industry, as teachers and studio owners. Some have backgrounds in gymnastics or ballet; others never danced before attending their first pole class.

But all had been drawn, in one way or another, into the curious hybrid of art, sport, exotic dance and fitness craze that pole dancing has become. Having largely shed its strip-club-only reputation — though as one competitor said, “it’s still a little naughty” — the form has developed a wide following in the past 15 to 20 years, among everyone from people seeking a fun workout to athletes lobbying for its status as an Olympic sport.

And while a handful of dancers would leave the championship with coveted prizes — including a trip to Miss Pole Dance Australia and the titles of Miss Sexy and Miss Trixter — the energy in the theater, as they warmed up and tested the equipment onstage, was more communal than cutthroat.

“Even if it’s competitive, these are some of the nicest competitors — they’re helpful to each other,” said Kellye Janel, an actor, model and makeup artist who would perform that night in the doubles category with her dance partner, Christopher Kyle. Like many of the solo routines, theirs involved feats of propelling and contorting the body around the pole, with the added thrill of one dancer, say, holding the other by the ankles upside down.

Kyle, 27, would also be competing in the men’s division, one of just five contestants in that category. While pole dancing attracts mostly women — many of whom describe it as empowering and addictive — its popularity has been growing among men.

“I know straight men that pole dance now, and that’s awesome,” said Blaine Petrovia, 27, also a competitor in the men’s division. “It feels extremely mainstream.”

Creating a supportive, inviting environment has always been important to Wendy Traskos, the competition’s founder, who established the U.S. Pole Dance Federation (USPDF) in 2008. (The U.S. Pole Dance Championship, first held in 2009 at the now-shuttered Bleecker Street Theater, is the federation’s signature event.) A former gymnast and go-go dancer, Traskos, 47, turned her focus to pole dancing after four years as a fitness competitor with the National Physique Committee, the largest amateur bodybuilding organization in the country.

Her experience in that world was “not super awesome,” she said, “only because people were real competitive and not real friendly, so the day of the show wasn’t much fun.”

“In the fitness industry, nobody would help you put Bikini Bite on or anything like that,” she recalled, referring to a brand of body glue. “Everybody’s sitting sneering at you eating their oatmeal or chicken across the room.”

For her own competition — the first of its kind in this country — she wanted to offer a more positive experience, where participants could enjoy the culmination of their hard work while the audience enjoyed a good show.

Since starting her own studio, New York Pole Dancing, in 2005, Traskos has had to contend with the misconception of dancing on a pole as synonymous with stripping — though “if that’s what you do for money, no judgment,” she said.

“If you see pole dancing in a strip club versus a pole performance, they’re two completely different things,” she noted. Still, while some organizations — like the American Pole League, part of the International Pole Sports Federation — align with a sportier image, Traskos doesn’t want to suppress the sensual side of the art form.

“There’s no G-strings, no nudity, nothing like that in our competitions,” she said, “but women have the freedom to express themselves in a sensual, sexy manner if they want.”

Even at its most risqué — or especially, given the challenge of wielding platform heels, as many performers do — pole dancing requires great strength, especially in the core and upper body. A tolerance for the pain of skin gripping metal also helps.

“Pole dancers are masochists,” Kyle said, holding out his callused palms.

“You just keep doing it, and the nerve endings will die,” Petrovia added, pointing out a rough patch on the back of his knee.

But excelling on the pole takes more than brute strength and a high pain threshold. At the U.S. Pole Dance Championship, soloists are judged in five areas: performance; flexibility and extension; difficulty of tricks; smooth and unique transitions; and technique.

At the highest levels, amateur and pro, dancers must integrate several compulsory moves into their routines, making use of two poles, one static and one spinning. (The novice level has fewer requirements.) This year’s mandatory tricks included the twisted sister — a vertiginous inverted split — and the inside knee hang cocoon, a backbend with one leg held overhead and the other clasping the pole.

By the U.S. Pole Dance Federation’s rules, dancers can earn their pro status, a selective honor, only through competing in the amateur division. Jena Clough, 32, a studio owner and mother of two from Cape Cod, was among the seven amateurs anointed pro this year, placing third. The accolade, she said, would boost her résumé, helping her land more teaching and performance gigs.

While Clough’s routine was on the sultrier side, performances across all levels ranged in style and mood, from punk-rock defiance to flowing lyricism. “Pole names” like Candy, Magnetic, Apocalyssa and Serpentia reflected the array of personas. Some competitors built characters and stories with props and costumes — a sparkly lollipop, foil confetti, a long satin skirt and a leather whip all made appearances — while others took a more abstract approach.

Backstage before the two-round pro competition, Joscelyn Perez, from Miami, explained that for her, musicality was paramount. “I want to focus on interpreting the music through my body, evoking the mood of the song,” she said. Sara Joel, from Long Island, said she would be “trying to communicate something, an emotion, and to do really cool tricks.”

Perez, 35, came to pole dancing from ballet and Joel, 48, from modern dance and circus arts. But dance training is not a prerequisite for pole beginners, and neither is the extreme youth that other competitive dance forms tend to value. Svetlana Semenishchevka, who placed first in the pro division, started seven years ago in Miami, at 25, with no major dance or athletic experience. Keith Taylor of Chicago, 26, began at 22; Jill Anne, from New York, started at 40, and is going strong at 50.

While open to older novices, pole sports have begun to skew younger in the United States, as they have in other countries, in part because of the International Pole Sports Federation’s bid for Olympic recognition. At the American Pole League nationals, children as young as 6 can compete in some divisions. Pro competitor Ziva Lynn, 38, who founded a pole dance team outside of Detroit, sees a future there. “I want to teach baby Olympians some day,” she said.

But for others, the pole remains more an expressive than a competitive space. As Taylor said: “What I like about pole is you can do whatever you want with it. One day it can be a sexy release, one day you might be more acrobatic, one day you might just want to dance.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/arts/dance/pole-dancing-championship.html" id="ed6fbedd-9b57-3c2d-aae3-7637dfe900d5">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — On most weekdays, Cristi, 33, works in marketing for a fashion company, a regular 9-to-5 job. But on a recent Friday afternoon, she could be found at Symphony Space doing a split in the theater aisle as a friend pulled back her arms, assisting her in a deep stretch.

'It's Still a Little Naughty'

Pole Dancing Without Nudity or G-Strings. Just Express Yourself.

That is, at least, the theme proposed by Eduardo Vilaro, the troupe’s artistic director, in a program note introducing new and restaged dances by Taiwanese-American choreographer Edwaard Liang, Belgian-Colombian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and Filipino-American choreographer Bennyroyce Royon. In practice, any such connecting thread is harder to trace.

Liang’s “El Viaje,” a premiere, reads like a placeless meditation on an outsider’s relationship to a group. While inspired by Chinese mass emigration from the 19th to mid-20th centuries, as well as the Chinese-Cuban diaspora, the work for 11 dancers lacks specificity; though elegantly constructed, it could be anyone’s, anywhere. To the surging “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis,” by Ralph Vaughan Williams, a soloist in red (the striking Melissa Verdecia) gradually merges with an ensemble dressed in more muted tones. As the collective engulfs her in its beautifully spiraling embrace, what may have been intended as a universal story feels instead generic.

A stronger sense of location — or of migrating between locations — came through in the other new work, Royon’s boisterous “Homebound/Alaala.” Stacks of multicolored moving boxes, continually rearranged by the cast of 11, suggest a long journey in progress. Royon and Amanda Gladu designed the attractive scenery; Gladu also designed the costumes, using material from Anthill Fabric Gallery, a company that works to sustainably preserve Filipino weaving traditions.

To an upbeat playlist of music by Filipino artists, the dancers hurtle through fast, fluid phrases, at one point breaking into song and bickering, like a big family. Raúl Contreras and Omar Rivéra find a moment of privacy, enmeshing in a duet that, when others barge in from the wings, feels like a secret; they abruptly part ways. But if there are any fractures in the group, they seem to be healed by the end, when everyone joins together in a finale that puts pairs of flip-flops to percussive use.

“Homebound” is a lively, if not entirely coherent, addition to the Ballet Hispánico repertory. But the program’s high point was an older work made new: Lopez Ochoa’s “Sombrerísimo,” originally for six men, restaged with six women. While doing tricks with bowler hats, Tuesday’s cast shattered the idea, too pervasive even in contemporary ballet, that women should be lifted, not do the lifting. Nailing the work’s athletic partnering, they rivaled the strength and swagger of their predecessors.

Ballet Hispánico

Performances continue through Sunday at the Joyce Theater; joyce.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/arts/review-ballet-hispanico.html" id="5f4e169e-9822-3eca-a62b-72bb7d269534">The New York Times</a>.

Review: Ballet Hispánico's Expanded, Expanding Map

NEW YORK — Nearly 50 years old, Ballet Hispánico has long been a home for explorations of Spanish and Latin American identities. With its latest season at the Joyce Theater, which opened on Tuesday, the company turns its focus to a particular cultural crossroads: where Hispanic and Asian diasporas meet.

Mofsie was hosting his company’s 44th annual concert, a vibrantly costumed showcase of Native American dances, at the Theater for the New City in the East Village. While new events led by indigenous artists have recently taken root in New York — including the expansive First Nations Dialogues and, at the Park Avenue Armory last fall, the First United Lenape Nations Pow Wow — the Thunderbirds, as they are known, have been dancing in the city for more than 50 years.

Mofsie, 82, was born to parents from the Hopi and Winnebago tribes in downtown Brooklyn, the same area that was home to a community of Mohawk ironworkers. He founded the Thunderbirds in 1963 with neighborhood friends who shared an interest in preserving their traditional dances.

An all-volunteer troupe — the oldest of its kind in New York — the company also set out to raise scholarship funds for Native American students, a focus that continues today. Mofsie said that back when the group first came together, “if you didn’t come from a reservation, you could not get any federal help to go to college.”

The company’s repertoire has grown to encompass dances from across the United States and parts of Canada. Friday’s program featured a Deer Dance from the Yaqui tribes of southern Arizona and New Mexico; Jingle Dress and Grass Dances from the Northern Plains people; a Hoop Dance performed by Maria Poncé, a dancer of Cherokee and Taino descent; and many others.

Mofsie prefaced each with a few words on its origins or significance. The Eagle Dance, from the Hopi in Arizona, was formerly a sacred dance asking for rain. The Robin Dance, from the Iroquois, celebrated early signs of spring. The Fancy Dance, from the Oklahoma tribes, is popular in competition at powwows, where dancers are judged on their rhythm and regalia.

After the show, Mofsie sat down to talk about the history and mission of the Thunderbirds, whose performances continue through Feb. 3. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: When you introduced the Eagle Dance tonight, you mentioned the difference between sacred and social dances.

A: The dances we do are not ceremonial or sacred. They’re social dances, and that’s because today on many of the reservations, they still practice their own Native religions. And as part of that religious practice those dances and songs are closed to outsiders, so of course we wouldn’t do them.

The social dances have a reason, but it isn’t necessarily religious. I might wear something because I like the color, and I like the way it looks. Somebody might say, “Why do you carry a fan?” and I say, “Well, if you get hot, you have something to fan yourself with!” [Laughs.] That’s all there is to it.

Q: How did the Thunderbirds begin?

A: Myself and some other founders of the group are what I often call the first generation off the reservation. Our parents all came from reservations, but we were born here in the city.

As kids our families taught us dances from our own tribes, but we were very interested in learning other dances, particularly from the Mohawk people in our neighborhood. So we said, why don’t we start a little dance group? We’ll teach each other our dances, then we’ll go to the Mohawk people and learn some of their dances.

Q: When did you become a full-fledged company?

A: We all went off to college, and when we came back we reorganized and called ourselves the Thunderbird dancers, after the clan my mother belonged to in the Winnebago tribe. As we got older, we started traveling to learn dances from around the country.

I think some of the dances we do now are no longer done on the reservations where they come from, and I’m so happy that we had an opportunity to learn them and keep them alive. That’s primarily what the group is for, to preserve the dances.

Q: There’s also an educational purpose, it seems.

A: We wanted to perform for non-Native audiences, so they could have a better understanding of what these dances are all about — that they have an origin, a story, a purpose. We don’t just get out there and move around like you see in the movies.

Q: How are the dances passed down?

A: For us, we travel to the reservations where they’re doing the dances. For instance, we’ve been up to the Iroquois people, to many of the reservations where they live in upstate New York, and we’ve been invited to come into the longhouse and dance with them. So that’s how we learn, by going there and participating in the dance.

It’s also about growing up with it, the people you meet. I started dancing when I was about 5 or 6. I always tell people there isn’t a school where you can go to learn how to do Native American dancing. It has to come through family.

Q: Is there often a difference between roles for women and men?

A: There is. A lot of the Iroquois dances are done by men. But one thing I find interesting is that in the Robin Dance, you notice that all the dancers turn around to face the outside, then turn to face the inside.

Q: As they’re going around in the circle, turning one by one?

A: Yes, and I was curious when we learned the dance: Why is it that they turn around? And they said that’s to represent and recognize the duality and the opposites in life. As they dance, they’re mindful of the fact that there’s always one side, then the other side, so they always turn.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/arts/dance/thunderbird-pow-wow-louis-mofsie.html" id="4888e3ab-6f99-3d9c-a0ef-4cb6bfb3e2ba">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — The Round Dance, a Native American dance of friendship, happens at powwows and other gatherings of indigenous people all over the country. But as Louis Mofsie, director of the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, noted on Friday night, “We have some of the best round dancing right here on First Avenue in New York.”

Indigenous Artists Sway First Avenue

Final preparations were underway for the 13th annual Dance Parade, which sends about 10,000 dancers spinning, leaping, stomping, roller-skating, stilt walking, cartwheeling and otherwise grooving past Union Square and through the East Village each spring.

Dance Parade Inc., founded in 2007, is a nonprofit that brings educational programs to schools and senior centers year-round. But its largest event by far is this parade, which culminates in an afternoon of performances at Tompkins Square Park.

According to the organization’s website, this year’s procession, under the theme “Movement of the People,” included 165 groups performing more than 100 styles of dance. Hip-hop dancers followed Scottish Highland dancers, who followed classical Indian, Chinese folk and Brazilian samba dancers along the sun-drenched streets.

“This year we’re looking at immigrant rights and countering a lot of negativity about walls and immigration and closing the border,” Greg Miller, Dance Parade’s executive director, said. The event opened with a Native American circle dance presided over by Louis Mofsie, leader of the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers and one of four grand marshals (along with DJ Dara, Baayork Lee and Bill T. Jones). A banner on the float carrying Mofsie, at the front of the parade, stated: “When we honor Native American dance, we acknowledge that we are all immigrants.”

Promoting cross-cultural unity has long been a focus of the parade, which began in response to New York’s antiquated Cabaret Law. (The selectively enforced law, which had placed restrictions on social dancing since 1926, was repealed in 2017, in part because of Dance Parade’s advocacy.) In a 2006 case that challenged the law, the state Supreme Court ruled, as Miller said, that “basically social dancing wasn’t expressive enough to be protected by the First Amendment.” The parade’s founders wanted to refute that idea by displaying style after style of unequivocally expressive dance.

From about 30 dance forms that first year, the array has expanded, with many troupes returning as newcomers join. Mariela Jimenez, visiting from Virginia with a branch of Bolivian group Tinkus San Simón, said she has participated since 2011 as a way to share her culture with a wider audience.

Referring to the Carnaval de Oruro in Bolivia, she said: “Not everybody has a chance to go over there to experience the energy and the folklore. So we bring that here.”

Tamara Bejar, who leads Pacific islands dance troupe Lei Pasifika, sees the parade as an opportunity for her students to show off their hip-swiveling moves, “a goal at the end of the semester,” she said — and it happens to fall during Asian Pacific Heritage Month.

While some groups perform intermittently along the parade route, others make a point of dancing as much as possible.

“My dancers are probably like, ‘I wish she wouldn’t be so hard on us,’ ” said Andrea Beeman, founder of the Dancing Rubies, whose members belly danced through Astor Place to the rhythm of their own finger cymbals. “But people are there to see us dance, not walk in pants, so we try to dance for them.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="23051f82-eb4d-376a-a933-dbe1f24942bc" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/arts/dance/dance-parade-nyc.html">The New York Times</a>.

Dance Parade: Where 100 Styles Fit Into 20 City Blocks

NEW YORK — If you happened to be walking down Broadway near 21st Street in Manhattan on Saturday, you might have noticed some colorful pedestrians: a man in a floral top hat; a woman in a billowing green robe; friends in bright dresses braiding one another’s hair.

Dance parade: Where 100 styles fit into 20 city blocks

This is not an unusual type of twist in the work of Gillian Walsh, who scrutinizes what we take for granted in dance, beginning with the fundamental question: Why would you do it?

There are, of course, plenty of reasons to dance. But in her latest creation, “Fame Notions,” which had its premiere Friday at Performance Space New York, Walsh is concerned specifically with why anyone — herself included — would pursue a career in such an economically precarious field. (She has described the job market for people with college dance degrees as “a void.”) What are dancers seeking?

The three-hour “Fame Notions,” for five women, offers no direct answers. But in its uncompromising use of stillness, slowness and repetition, it distills the endlessness of the dancer’s quest, which may, after all, be inexplicable to the public, known only to the dancer herself.

Walsh has deployed these tools before (she calls stillness her “one true love”), often to the frustration of audiences. But compared with her previous works, and to its advantage, “Fame Notions” gives the viewer more breathing room. Unfolding from 4 to 7 p.m., it felt continuous with the sound and changing light outside the theater’s open windows, which look out over East Village rooftops and, Friday, allowed a breeze to waft in. Audience members can come and go at any point, though staying to the end, I found, was rewarded.

In this swath of time, the dancers — isolated from one another, each at the center of her own meditative sphere — cycle through poses that read like snapshots of ballet class or cheerleading practice or high-school dance recitals. Each has an inventory of moves, some of them shared. Kiersten Foster, from a backbend on her forearms, kicks into a back walkover, suspending the action midway. Brianna Lux contracts on the floor with the cupped hands of the Martha Graham technique. Emma Cohen uses the wall as a barre, pulling one leg to her head with her free hand.

Up close, we can see the trembling effort of stretching and balancing — the dancer’s asymptotic relationship to perfection. It can always be better; do it again. Yet Walsh also integrates images of rest, or exhaustion: a body hunched over, hands on thighs, or reclining with an elbow propped on a knee.

Observed for long enough — against a sonic backdrop of warbling birds and New Agey chanting, designed by Michael Hernandez and Walsh — the work takes on a mystical dimension. Is the drive to dance, at its core, a spiritual one?

In dealing with the sacrifice demanded of dancing, and with archetypes of the American dancer, “Fame Notions” echoes the work of Sarah Michelson, in particular her “Devotion” series. Yet Walsh seems less interested in the theme of a director’s control. The dancers put themselves through their own paces; even if wildly impractical, to be there is their choice.

This article originally appeared in <a id="9223747e-f9a9-37f0-a799-3249ddf01e59" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/arts/dance/gillian-walsh-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

Review: Why Dance? 'Fame Notions' Suggests It's a Private Matter

NEW YORK — An hour and 45 minutes had passed when the dancer pirouetted — a fast blur cutting through slow motion, like a fish through a stagnant pond. A familiar turn, a basic unit of so much choreography, felt suddenly momentous, as if it had never happened before.

Review: Why dance? 'Fame Notions' suggests it's a private matter

As friends, they collaborated on “Arrowed,” a project initiated by Smith in which they sit face to face and interrogate each other. The two left Batsheva not far apart, Smith in 2014, Pitts in 2016, to make work on their own.

Their paths continue to align. Last weekend, Pitts, who has been touring the world, returned to his native Brooklyn with “Black Velvet: Architectures and Archetypes,” a haunting duet with Brazilian dancer Mirelle Martins, performed at BAM Fisher. And on Thursday, Smith, who earned a devoted following as the enigmatic subject of the 2017 documentary “Bobbi Jene,” unveiled “Lost Mountain,” an impressive work of dance-theater presented by the La MaMa Moves! festival.

With a shared history in Batsheva comes a shared challenge: to uncover a distinctive, personal voice. This is a test for any dancer who has worked extensively with one choreographer, but perhaps even more so when that choreographer is Ohad Naharin, Batsheva’s artistic leader, whose influence runs deep in those who perform his work and contribute to its creation. Yet while bearing the imprint of his unmistakable style — gooey and guttural, rooted in his signature movement system known as Gaga — Pitts and Smith have swerved into their own lanes.

In “Black Velvet,” the second part of a trilogy, Pitts explores a partnership with Martins, whom he met while teaching Gaga in 2013. She had left a marketing job to study dance, a novice at 28; her work with Pitts introduced her to the stage.

You would never guess this from her softly commanding presence in “Black Velvet,” which opens with the striking image of her perched on a tall pedestal, in a long black skirt that drapes to the floor. With her bare, bronzed torso and ghostly, mechanical gestures, she resembles a statue brought to life, especially as she begins, startlingly, to glide backward. (Pitts, we soon discover, is pushing her.)

(Critic’s notebook): NEW YORK — Fifteen years ago, choreographers Bobbi Jene Smith and Shamel Pitts were classmates at Juilliard. Smith left before graduating to join the Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv, Israel; Pitts arrived at the same company four years later.

Siobhan Burke

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