Activism and dancing in the streets

It's been a powerful last few months: The dancing that spilled out onto the streets during protests against racial injustice and after the election let the body scream and sing. And with the precarious situation that the pandemic has thrown the dance world into, artists are responding eager to fight for equality, to give dancers a voice and to look at how the culture of the art form can be reinvented. The exciting part is how it is a group effort: Dance artists are joining forces to affect change.

Can't see dance live? Turn on the TV

It doesn't have to be a show about dance. Dance is everywhere on TV. The Crown, Derry Girls,The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Giri/Haji. (Though the Giria choreography was jaw-dropping in all the worst ways.) A recent random sighting: the Season 2 finale of Pen15, in which during the performance of a high school play the cast suddenly breaks out in a choreographed labyrinth of simple gestures. The final shot ends with a gesture, too; in that second, the shape of an arm says more than a word.
 

My last great rehearsal

On March 8, I spent the afternoon at Dance Theater of Harlem watching a run-through of Higher Ground, a new ballet set to socially minded songs by Stevie Wonder. The work, by the company's resident choreographer, Robert Garland, was vital in that moment but feels prescient after the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests that took over cities this summer. The combination of Mr. Garland's rich movement vocabulary, which mines and melds ballet with modern dance and street forms, and Mr. Wonder's music was intoxicating a promise for the future.

Brian Seibert

Best Retrospectives

Among the silver linings of 2020: forced retrospection. Though I witnessed some live dance before March (and even some since), and I watched many videos created as choreographers tried to learn to be filmmakers, what most stands out in my mind are the recordings of older works that became available online this year.

Some were very old, like the rare films of Martha Graham works from the 1930s and '40s that her company streamed in its Martha Matinees series. Seeing Graham herself blazing in Letter to the World collapsed the distancing of time and rote acclaim. The thrill wasn't gone. It sparked through the screen.

That's how I felt about the early Mark Morris pieces from the 1980s that the company released in its Dance On! Video Vault. Grainy footage confirmed greatness I had only read about. And the experience was similar with the 1987 film of Creole Gisellea that Dance Theater of Harlem pulled from the shelf for its DTH on Demand series. It was even more beautiful than advertised.
 

The gifts didn't have be decades old. The Joyce Theater, through its resourceful JoyceStream programming, cast a light on wonderful recent work that I had missed, like Deeply Rooted Dance Theater's searing 2017 production of Indumba.

And other streamed work was still fresh in my memory: Pam Tanowitz's sublime Four Quartets filmed at Bard College in 2018 or the live-music performance of Ronald K. Brown's s Grace filmed there last year or Dormeshia's And Still You Must Swing at the Joyce in the final month of 2019.

Those were dances I had seen and loved live in the theater. But seeing them again, at home in 2020, I loved them more for themselves, and for preserving what I love most about dance, keeping that spark alive, at least digitally, in these extraordinarily challenging times.
 

Siobhan Burke

Best of the Street

On a Saturday afternoon in July, I looked out my living room window and saw what had become a rare sight: a live dance performance. On a stoop across the street, for a small audience that had gathered on the sidewalk, a lone dancer was swaying, crouching and reaching to the sky, her energy coiling inward and rebounding out. Within the limited square footage of her stage, she seemed to keep uncovering new pathways, new possibilities.