The Joyce Theater, open to audiences again, has been transformed. I don’t mean by the new seats, which look like brighter, cleaner versions of the frumpy old ones. I mean by the presence of Ragamala Dance Company, the Minneapolis-based troupe that is inaugurating the theater’s in-person fall season.
The oldest of American dance troupes, the Martha Graham Dance Company weathered the early phases of the pandemic better than most. Its virtual offerings drew treasures from the company’s great archive and experimented with various reframings, effectively making the case for the continued relevance of Graham’s work in these times.
It’s enough to make any modern dance fan jump for joy. In the wake of the waning lockdown, famed and influential dance company Pilobolus is celebrating its 50th year with the Big Five-Oh! tour, a jaunt that brings the troupe to the Egg this month.
In the Pilobolus work “Up! Umbrella Project,” created in partnership with MIT, hundreds of people gather in an open field, each holding a light-up umbrella. Guided by instructors and working as a group, often alongside people they’ve never met, they click buttons to change their umbrella’s colors. A camera records the bird’s-eye view and projects the shifting formations — a beating heart, a happy face, a waterfall — onto a giant screen in real time.
Dancers in the STREB Extreme Action Company like to look fear in the face. They are not the stuff of ballet and they redefine modern dance.
A colossal undertaking, in both its subject matter and the scope of the production, “Deep Blue Sea” takes inspiration from two texts written more than 100 years apart: Melville’s “Moby-Dick” (1851) and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech (1963). In a hand-scrawled program note thanking both authors, Jones writes to Melville, “Thank you for the ocean just now pretending to be a stage.”
The radical choreographer Elizabeth Streb has grown weary of meeting people who tell her, “Oh, you’re the one who ransacks the body and runs into walls.” Streb calls her company the Streb Extreme Action Company, after her method. She calls its headquarters, in Brooklyn, the Streb Lab for Action Mechanics, and she calls her dancers action heroes. She admires various classical and modern dancers and choreographers and works, but her own dancers enact a brash and pitiless system of movement that disdains and subverts politer forms.
My first encounter with Elizabeth Streb was when a friend brought me to a performance at the Joyce Theater in New York and those of us sitting up close were asked to don helmets and goggles as Streb or one of the dancers in her group dove through a pane of glass, shattering it into our laps.
Although she constantly pushes the level of risk in her work, Streb Extreme Action Company artistic director Elizabeth Streb surprisingly looks for more than just a passion for physicality when recruiting dancers action heroes. We went to S.L.A.M (Streb Lab for Action Mechanics) to get an inside look at a rehearsal, and quickly learned that though she may have an addiction to danger, Streb isn't quite as tough as she seems.
Though it has been 37 years since Moses Pendleton, co-founder of Pilobolus Dance Theater, created MOMIX, the company of self-described dancer-illusionists, they continue to be in a league of their own in terms of true dance innovation, as proven in their recent performance of “Opus Cactus” at the Wharton Center in Lansing.
