In 2023, the biggest name in New York dance was that of a French jeweller, Van Cleef & Arpels. The company’s Dance Reflections festival sprawled across the city’s theatres for months, evidence of a level of sponsorship and sparkle rarely seen in the field. If there were reasons to be wary of the dance scene being dominated by the taste of one curator backed by one foreign luxury brand, there were more reasons to be grateful. Historically, the institutions of American dance have envied their European counterparts for the comparatively lavish state funding they receive, but here was a European corporation footing the bill to import high-grade dance performances to New York.
Now the festival returns, even larger than before, with sixteen mostly European productions, from Feb. 19 through March 21. Among the first offerings is L.A. Dance Project, at Perelman Performing Arts Center, with a triptych of works by its founder, Benjamin Millepied, each vaguely inspired by a precious stone. More grandly, Millepied’s company will camp out in the vastness of the Park Avenue Armory for most of March with his “Romeo & Juliet Suite,” an update on the classic work featuring handheld cameras and rotating gender pairings for the star-crossed lovers.
Before then, over at City Center, Lyon Opera Ballet brings “BIPED,” Merce Cunningham’s masterly 1999 encounter with computers and motion capture, along with “Mycelium,” a slowly evolving communal vibration by the rising choreographer Christos Papadopoulos. And, at BAM, the Ballet National de Marseille embodies “Age of Content,” an extremely online evocation of the blurring of real and virtual life, by the collective (La)Horde.
A few days later at BAM, the Trisha Brown Dance Company celebrates the brilliant stage designs of Robert Rauschenberg with a program that pairs “Set and Reset,” the canonical collaboration between Rauschenberg and Brown, with “Travelogue,” a rarely seen Cunningham work with imaginative Rauschenberg costumes and “Combine”-like set pieces that resemble Rauschenberg’s famous series incorporating painting and found objects. And those are only the February selections. The festival’s bounty is an extravagant gift.—Brian Seibert
About Town
The works of Simone Fattal seem to have emerged from the alluvial matter of primordial life. Or perhaps they are still emerging: their inchoate, sketchy bodies suggest the mystery of something struggling toward a final manifestation. In a joint presentation of the artist’s work, at Greene Naftali (through Feb. 28) and Kaufmann Repetto (through Feb. 21), Fattal’s clay and bronze sculptures, drawings, and collages reach for mythologies, metaphysics, and motifs that spring from Sumerian culture and from Sufi mystic traditions: among the works, we find allusions to the Epic of Gilgamesh and to figures from classical Arabic poetry. But a prelinguistic intuition also simmers, for example, in a set of illegible, calligraphic drawings that suggest something just preceding the nascence of writing. The forms in the galleries rise from prehistory, yet are still being born.—Zoë Hopkins
In Joe White’s “Blackout Songs,” a two-hander about an on-again, off-again couple who meet at an A.A. session, the only thing more elusive than sobriety is certainty. Scenes emerge as memories, and, like memories—especially when addled by heavy drinking—they’re partial and unreliable. Did he bring her a stolen bouquet of dying flowers, or did she bring it to him? And which one detonated their relationship early on by labelling them “drinking buddies”? Most important, could they love each other without alcohol? White’s dialogue is unsentimental but rife with anguish; Owen Teague and a seductive, destructive Abbey Lee give the pain its due. Rory McGregor’s direction supplies viewers with just the right, slight degree of disorientation.—Dan Stahl (Robert W. Wilson MCC Theatre Space; through Feb. 28.)
Minimalism characterizes all the singer-songwriter Emily Sprague’s music, but the indie folk of her band Florist is distinguished from ambient recordings that she makes solo by a sense of texture. Voice is certainly the primary factor, but there is also a full-bodied, zoomed-in quality to the band’s songs, which add pattering drums, gentle keys, and light brushes of synth to an acoustic-driven soundscape. This difference can also be heard in the distance between Florist’s 2019 album, “Emily Alone,” which strips the band’s sound to the studs—Sprague and her guitar—and the two that have followed, a self-titled 2022 album and “Jellywish” (2025). Though the configuration of the players may change from one record to the next, interplay with other musicians animates Florist’s naturalistic sound, making even the subtlest little details glow.—Sheldon Pearce (Le Poisson Rouge; Feb. 21.)
In what feels like a vestige from a more collaborative era, the Cuban contemporary-dance troupe Malpaso Dance Company is the product of a joint venture between an American institution—the Joyce Theatre Foundation—and an exceptional group of Cuban dancers and choreographers based in Havana. Malpaso’s repertory combines works by local dancemakers with international commissions, all performed with great musicality and finesse (proof that Cuban dance training, despite many challenges, is still topnotch). For its yearly run at the Joyce, Malpaso brings “Dark Meadow Suite,” its first dip into the world of Martha Graham. The suite, shorn of its set pieces by Noguchi, from 1946, is less packed with symbolism than the original, but it retains Graham’s powerful movement vocabulary, a mix of urgency and lyricism, made visible by the contrast of tension and release. Malpaso also presents a new work, by the former Kyle Abraham dancer Keerati Jinakunwiphat.—Marina Harss (Joyce Theatre; Feb. 10-15.)
Amid all the constant wondering of when things will get better, the slow drip of time may feel like a curse. But the composer Huang Ruo knows that this slowness can also offer opportunity for pause, reflection, and escape. This month, the National Sawdust Ensemble, with the mezzo-soprano Kelly Clarke and the pianist Joanne Kang, perform the New York première of Ruo’s piece “A Dust in Time,” a sixty-minute string passacaglia inspired by the sand mandalas of Tibetan Buddhists. The melodies came to Ruo as he was falling asleep, weaving and layering like textile threads. The work both meditates and blooms, reminding us to keep breathing as we move on through—a helpful, if temporary, antidote to our noxious moment.—Jane Bua (National Sawdust; Feb. 18.)
Alison Rossiter works with a wide variety of expired and antique photographic papers, but she doesn’t use them to make photographs. Instead, she arranges them like children’s building blocks in a frame, where the aging but undeveloped papers, in subtle shadings of brown, tan, and white, become architectural studies. Several of these groupings were inspired by Man Ray’s “Tapestry,” a patchwork-quilt-like fabric piece with a similar range of earthy colors, from 1911. In Rossiter’s show “Semblance,” all the pieces have a minimalist elegance, but perhaps the most sublime is a series of what look like off-white plinths supporting small metal blocks: tiny, ruined late-nineteenth-century daguerreotype plates that might be portals into deep space.—Vince Aletti (Yossi Milo; through March 14.)
“Send Help,” Sam Raimi’s new thriller on an old theme—a mismatched pair on a desert island—exists only for its clever twists. Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams), a brilliant but socially awkward analyst at a financial-consulting firm, is passed over for a promised promotion by its heir-head new president, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), who nonetheless takes her on a business trip to Bangkok. When the plane crashes en route, Linda and Bradley are stranded together. Despite her mousiness, Linda (who auditioned for “Survivor”) has the skills that the injured and dependent Bradley lacks, and she makes the most of her power. Both characters have exactly the traits, however incongruous, that the plot requires, and the story is built for jump scares and gross-outs, with little concern for practicalities; its mild pleasures are hollowed out by incuriosity.—Richard Brody (In wide release.)
Alfred Jensen was a contemporary of New York School artists like Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, but his work was so radically different from theirs that he may as well have come from another time and place. And partly, he did: before studying art in Europe and then settling in New York, Jensen was born in Guatemala. His roots offer some clues to understanding his esotericism. Inspired by both pre-Columbian cultures and modern scientific theories, Jensen made energetic diagrams of shapes, symbols, and numbers in loud complementary colors, using thick globs of paint; the results generate a fascinating friction. The paintings seem to invite decoding but ultimately remain inscrutable—or, as the subtitle of this show puts it, “diagrammatic mysteries.”—Jillian Steinhauer (125 Newbury; through Feb. 28.)
The 2012 album “Kaleidoscope Dream” announced the L.A.-based singer Miguel as one of contemporary R. & B.’s torchbearers by pulling pop, rock, and soul into a singular psychedelic orbit. Hits like “Adorn” and “How Many Drinks?” have since been added to the lover-boy canon. The records that followed, “Wildheart” (2015) and “War & Leisure” (2017), displayed an even deeper experimental nature, their rapturous, pleasure-oriented tracks treating neo-soul and funk like supplemental texts of the Kama Sutra. In October, Miguel returned from an eight-year absence with “Caos,” yet another reinvention. Its existential songs consider transformation and personal evolution, mining the singer’s Afro-Mexican ancestry for searching, bilingual music that is as sprawling and genre-fluid as it is regenerative.—S.P. (Radio City Music Hall; Feb. 24.)
P.S. Good stuff on the internet:
- Advice for Gen Beta, from Nan Goldin and Hasan Piker
- Like you’re not still thinking about it, too
- Halle Berry on menopause
An earlier version of this article inaccurately identified a dance work that appears in a photograph.
