A trio, a duet, a solo—this year’s live performances showcase a diversity of aesthetics and approaches to contemporary dance. Interspersed between the live performances are dance films that bring new performance perspectives to the big screen.

* Bebe Miller, Angie Hauser and Darrell Jones perform Tether (2022), commissioned by Baryshnikov Arts Center, where it premiered in October 2022. Tether is an improvised dance, sparked by curiosity about choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage’s manner of exchange with each other and their collaborators, and the evidence of the tethers they have left behind. The performers share a 20-plus-year creative scrutiny via dance-making together—Tether welcomes Cunningham as a fourth partner. The work asks: Could Cunningham’s notion of coexisting and predetermined materials serve as a trigger, a tether, for their own artistic interests?

* Aretha Aoki and Ryan MacDonald’s IzumonookunI (in development, premiering 2024) is a dance/punk/ glam-goth/synthwave show weaving together the lost (her)story of Kabuki and its real and imagined influences and offshoots. MacDonald provides a live soundscape of synth loops, beats, and covered and original songs.

* Doron Perk was nominated for a 2022 New York Dance & Performance “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Performer for his Grandfather Visit (2021), a dance solo exploring themes of grief and heritage. Inspired by many visits to his grandfather in the last few years of his life, Perk created this performance to both deal with personal loss as well as his identity as a grandchild of a Holocaust survivor. The dance language ranges from contemporary ballet to free-form improvisation and uses Israeli folk dance to reach emotional climaxes. Through the framing narrative of a visit, Perk dances out embodied memories, using the movements to evoke forgotten sensations.

Dance films include the award winning Suck It Up (2021) by Baye & Asa. Other films to be announced.