It’s been a busy post-lockdown year in Atlanta’s dance world, with local and touring companies offering a wide variety of thrilling dance, but the pandemic didn’t completely bypass us.
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company canceled, at the last minute, its much-anticipated performance of “What Problem?” at the Ferst Center for the Arts in January, and Atlanta’s ALA Dance postponed its July concert because several dancers got COVID-19. The company will perform instead in February 2023, a year we hope will see no more COVID-19 cancellations.
Credit: Kim Kenney
Credit: Kim Kenney
As usual, there were comings and goings — a few dancers left Atlanta Ballet, including the ebullient Jacob Bush, and seven joined, including dancers from Russia, Houston Ballet, Boston Ballet and Atlanta Ballet 2. They are joining a company that was in fine form this year. In March, Ukrainian principal Denys Nedak’s family flew in to see his limpid performance as Albrecht in “Giselle” but was unable to return home to Ukraine because of the war. Former Atlanta Ballet dancer Keith Reeves was snapped up by Dwight Rhoden’s Complexions Contemporary Ballet and made his debut at New York’s Joyce Theater in November.
In June, Ballethnic Dance Company made its debut at Washington’s Kennedy Center in the groundbreaking “Changing the Narrative” celebration of Black ballet dancers and companies.
Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre moved to a new space and continued to demonstrate its professionalism in every way — high caliber technique, innovative choreography that moves the heart, bubbles with humor and shapes new young dancers for the next generation of contemporary ballet in Atlanta. Company co-founder Heath Gill retired from dancing this year, but thankfully he is still choreographing for Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre, the company he co-founded in 2017.
Dance Canvas added a thoughtful dance-on-film night to its annual showcase of works by emerging choreographers. The Fall for Fall Dance Festival in October was uneven but has potential; organizer Catherine Messina deserves credit for delivering three nights of dance on a miniscule budget.
Lauri Stallings’ glo launched “Free Bird Being” in November in Serenbe’s Deer Hollow. The project will continue with site-based works in communities in the Deep South.
glo and T. Lang were among the arts organizations that vacated the Goat Farm Arts Center this year to make way for a $250 million renovation. Let’s hope the venue, known for its gritty industrial buildings where dance and visual arts have flourished, will continue to be a thriving arts hub when the rebuild is complete.
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre was back at the Fox Theatre in February. The repertoire included Rennie Harris’ “Lazarus,” a searing example of the company’s compelling, social justice ethos. Misty Copeland made a fleeting visit to Atlanta to promote her book “The Wind at My Back” and inspired a hall full of fans and starstruck young dancers of color.
Credit: DREW GURIAN
Credit: DREW GURIAN
Following are performance highlights from ArtsATL senior editor Gillian Anne Renault (GAR), editor-at-large Cynthia Bond Perry (CP), and dance writers Robin Wharton (RW) and Kathleen Wessel (KW).
MARCH
Kudos to Core Dance for producing TRY, a fearlessly executed, improvisational “queer fantasy”. Conceived by two-time Bessie award winning choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones and performed by a multi-generational cast of artists who identify across a gender spectrum, the work explored themes of queer solidarity, land acknowledgement and the hope for better, unimagined futures. Set designers Monica Canilao and Kendra Azul~írís transformed the industrial space into a whimsical wonderland decked out with colorful, shimmering textiles. Inside the resplendent playground, the five performers — including the 70-year-old Houston-Jones — enacted rituals of trust, support, experimentation and risk. They scaled steel beams, spun from ropes suspended from the ceiling, played with a cloud of soapy bubbles, and screamed “Survived!” into a microphone, co-creating a world that transcended time and place, fully alive and present. — KW
One of the hallmarks of classical ballet is the corps de ballet. At their best, these often-unheralded dancers create breathtaking, moving-as-one frameworks for the featured soloists and principals in ballets like “Swan Lake” and “Giselle.” In Atlanta Ballet’s “Giselle,” in March, the company’s first performance at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre since the lockdown, the corps in Act II was stellar. Kudos to repetiteur Rory Hohenstein for his coaching and to the dancers themselves for creating a gorgeous, ethereal display that enhanced the ballet’s romantic and tragic narrative. Their work was evident too in Balanchine’s neoclassical “Serenade” on the September’s exciting mixed bill — testament to the continuing evolution and technical finesse of Atlanta Ballet under artistic director Gennadi Nedvigin — GAR
MAY
Eight years ago, Kyle Abraham’s company, A.I.M. (Abraham in Motion) brought to town “Pavement” — a hard-hitting look at gang violence and police brutality. Abraham has since had a near-meteoric career, and his recent full-length work, “An Untitled Love,” seen at the Rialto Center for the Arts, took a joyful, sensual and convivial turn. Celebrating Black love, the work proved to be one of the most luminous dance productions seen on Atlanta stages this year. Set in a literal and metaphorical living room, dancers explored facets of love relationships as they moved to D’Angelo’s R&B songs. With startling clarity, dancers’ pedestrian gestures flowed freely into twisting-turning level changes. Their hip impulses swung limbs into ecstatic suspended arcs, and they accented cool polyrhythms by casually thrusting their limbs through silken lines. Barely perceptible contrasts between slow motion and frictionless speed made these beautiful characters at once intimately approachable and larger than life. — CP
Leo Briggs, currently an Emory Arts and Social Justice Fellow and one of ArtsATL’s six Atlanta artists to watch this year, premiered their first evening-length work “Search History.” An “an ode to the expansiveness of our queer past, the rich complexity of our queer present, and the necessity of our queer future,” the piece emerged from Briggs’ exploration of how queer and transgender young adults find and build community via Google’s search bar. “Search History” featured a technically polished ensemble and balanced, acrobatically gorgeous floor and contact work with moments in which small, ordinary gestures and Gregory Catellier’s beautiful lighting design created an atmosphere of sincere intimacy. Set to Orville Peck’s soaring vocals, the choreography conjured settings from near-empty dance halls to open frontiers, claiming them all for queer storytelling — RW
Credit: Photo by Orfeas Skutelis
Credit: Photo by Orfeas Skutelis
AUGUST
Sean Nguyen-Hilton premiered his powerful solo “This Room Is a Body” at Windmill Arts Center. It was a multi-faceted tour de force: His smart and thoughtful narration was steeped in philosophy but peppered with humor and self-revelation. It drove the movement and informed both the sound and the closing original film, which brought to mind Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal.” That iconic film is about death; in this work Nguyen-Hilton took us through an intimate journey from the death of his ballet body to a moving, expressive rebirth of inner and outer self. The post-show conversation gave us more insight into his process, as did the piece he wrote for ArtsATL after the performance. — GAR
The second iteration of Kennesaw State University’s Eleo Pomare-Glenn Connor Summer Choreographic Residency, “Double Exposure,” featured world premieres by internationally emerging choreographers Tsai Hsi Hung and Chuck Wilt. Wilt’s “Resurface” was created via an intensely emotional, intellectually challenging choreographic process in which Wilt asked the dancers to explore the idea of authenticity and how individuals craft their social personae. The work built richly textured imaginary environments on a foundation of character portraits beautifully realized in movement. Hung’s driving, thrilling “Wu,” in contrast, resembled a kinetic engine in which razor-sharp angles and lightning-quick sequences inspired by martial arts flowed like an optical illusion into graceful curves and mesmerizing spirals. Initiated by a generous gift in 2019, the Pomare/Connor residency will continue to bring two nationally emerging or mid-career artists to Kennesaw State each summer. — RW
SEPTEMBER
Kit Modus opened its 2022-23 season with two world premieres and a showing of artistic director Jillian Mitchell’s work-in-progress, “Scion.” Mitchell’s efforts before and during the pandemic to attract choreographers from outside Atlanta to create works for her company have paid off and drawn the attention of leading dance makers. This program featured pieces by internationally renowned choreographer Yoshito Sakuraba and Christian Denice, 2016 winner of the Joffrey Academy’s Winning Works Choreographic Competition, and it showcased the company’s technical versatility and artistic depth.
The ensemble brought clean athleticism and well-coordinated group contact work to Denice’s “Elapse,” and delivered impeccable comedic timing and nuanced characterizations to bring the subtle of humor of Sakuraba’s “A Murder Party” to life. The lyrical phrase work in the excerpt from Mitchell’s “Scion” resonated with emotional complexity. — RW
Seville-born flamenco artist Isaac Tovar captivated with his fiery presence and debonair pleasure at the Atlanta Flamenco Festival. Over crackling foot rhythms, his serpentine upper body motions were by turns calmly seductive and lightning-fast. It was part of a two-week flamenco festival, the second after the first in 2019, produced by A Través, an organization formed by Julie Baggenstoss to connect Atlanta youth and aficionados with high-caliber flamenco artists from the art form’s native Spain. Alongside a residency, the festival featured two distinct and intimate productions at the Emory Performing Arts Studio and the Red Light Café. Singers, guitarists and dancers steeped in flamenco culture, plus some locals, riffed off its rhythms and songs with a sense of playful risk and barely contained explosiveness, embodying the spirit of flamenco as an art form and a way of life. — CP
The Emory Dance and Movement Studies program presented meta/physical, an exciting program with work from Emory professor Julio Medina and guest artist Nadya Zeitlin. Three works were connected by a thematic interest in the uncertain boundary between movement and dance. Medina’s restaging of the 2021 duet “Ridge,” choreographed in collaboration with Jasmine Jawato, contrasted the abstract, sinuous movement and graceful lines of the opening movement with stilted, halting gestures and frank display of the dancers’ exhaustion in the second half where the choreography was less pretty but so much more expressive.
In his new work, “desahogo:undrown,” Medina harnessed the cathartic potential of martial arts to create a singular audience experience combining elements of musical theater, disco party, ultimate fighting match and social justice protest. Zeitlin’s clever, playful duet “Arches & Textures DWTN” experimented with perspective to uncover how individual self-consciousness and audience observation catalyze the evolution of movement into dance. — RW
NOVEMBER
With his innovative evening-length work “Tile,” Nathan Griswold, choreographer and co-founding member of the collective Fly on a Wall, mused on memory, story and the disembodiment that results when screens replace human interaction. “Tile” premiered at the Windmill Arts Center and featured six stunning local performers including fellow Fly on a Wall team members Nicholas Goodly and Christina Massad. Goodly appeared mostly as a digitized head and torso on a 1990s-era television placed on a movable cart.
Leo Briggs performed a slick and angular solo in silence then spoke to TV Goodly about the physical pleasure of moving: “My body gets energized just thinking about it.” Goodly/not Goodly replied, “I don’t have a body.” But still the five 3D performers danced with the 2D one, moved it across the stage, partnered with it, sat on the floor and gazed up at it in reverence. Floating above was a huge box of white light that framed the stories told, through both movement and text, below. The ending — when the light box descended to stand vertically, and Massad sat patiently looking into the void — left many delicious questions unanswered. — KW
Heath Gill retired from dancing this year, but thankfully he is still choreographing for Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre, the company he co-founded in 2017. His full-evening work “LORE,” first performed in 2019, emerged with a revamped cast at Serenbe’s Wildflower Meadow. The gorgeously structured work took audiences on a heartfelt journey of familial love, youthful joy, mature tenderness, grief, loss and the healing power of community — potent themes for today’s fractured world. The company dug deep technically and emotionally; Bret Coppa, formerly with Atlanta Ballet, gave an outstanding performance as the son. — GAR
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
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