This week enjoy attending several dance performances and a dance-film discussion and note a singular performance seen last week.
It Ends Like This, the final four performances of The Stephen Petronio Company, founded in 1984, take place at Jacob’s Pillow Thursday through Sunday. Petronio crafts dances with composers, visual artists, and designers, and on this program, he traces the arc of his creativity from MiddleSexGorge (1990) to the widely praised American Landscapes (2019) to Another Kind of Steve (2024), a solo danced by Petronio. Jim Jarmusch, Rufus Wainwright, and Robert Longo are a few of the represented and celebrated collaborators. Petronio, the first male dancer in choreographer Trisha Brown’s company, created a lineage of hard-charging dances with moments of raw and emotional tenderness. This is a last chance to experience a defining voice in American dance.
BalletCollective, founded by visionary director, choreographer, and New York City Ballet soloist Troy Schumacher, wraps their 2025 Millbrook (NY) School residency this weekend at the Holbrook Arts Center, Millbrook School. Noted guest choreographers Alysa Pires and Chloe Crenshaw offer new in-process works titled Oracle and The Magnitude of Verticality, danced by New York City Ballet dancers on Friday and Saturday nights. BalletCollective commissions are sparked by visual art, after which selected choreographers partner with composers. Since 2010, the result is a roster of over 25 dances and 340 Collective artists including writers, visual artists, architects, and designers.
The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY screens films on the life of Martha Graham, the trailblazing and hugely influential modern choreographer, in Becoming Martha Graham: A Special Evening of Film and Conversation. Janet Eilber, artistic director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, and Peggy Lyman Hayes, a distinguished company soloist, lead the evening on Saturday night. Eilber and Lyman Hayes, who worked closely with Graham dancing many of her iconic solos, share their personal memories and insights.
In NYC, Mark Morris continues his two-week run at The Joyce Theater. The physical limitations of the Joyce (no orchestra pit, flyway or crossover) required Morris to program small-scale dances that deliver outsized impact. Audiences are thrilled to view rarely or never-seen early works and two premieres. This week, the music of Pulitzer-winning composer John Luther Adams, played live, accompanies Northwest, a new work inspired by Morris’ place of origin and the music and dances of the Yu’pik and Athabascan indigenous peoples.
Kyle Marshall Choreography unveiled Femenine on July 11-12, with live music by BlackBox Ensemble, centered on music composed or inspired by experimentalist Julius Eastman, at PS21: Performance Space of the 21st Century. Eastman, who explored his gay and Black identity, was the first male vocalist in Meredith Monk’s The House. He accompanied the dances of several leading choreographers and in recent years has been rediscovered. Kudos to Marshall for delving into Eastman’s Femenine, a series of scenes contrasting casual stepping and swinging movement with the full-strut of the catwalk in high-heeled red boots and diaphanous flowing garments blown by three fans.
Catherine Tharin danced with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company touring nationally and internationally. She teaches dance studies and technique, is an independent dance and performance curator, choreographs, writes about dance for Side of Culture and Interlocutor, and is a reviewer for The Dance Enthusiast. She also writes for The Boston Globe. Catherine lives in Pine Plains, New York and New York City.
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