Making Moves

Dance

Here are spring's must-see dance shows

By Cathryn Haight March 9, 2018

Spring in Your Step

What to look for at five must-see performances that will keep you on your toes this spring.

Photo Credit: Rosalie O’Connor

The Boston Ballet performs John Cranko’s rendition of Romeo and Juliet from March 15 to April 8, bringing sword fights and passionate pas de deuxs to the Boston Opera House stage. Set to Sergei Prokofiev’s score, Shakespeare’s tale features new set pieces and costumes, including more than 189 outfits purchased from the Joffrey Ballet and refurbished by the company’s costume shop.

Photo Credit: Olivia Blaisdell

Kelley Donovan & Dancers seek to emulate the emotions of those experiencing transition in their three contemporary works presented in Transitional State, coming to the Dance Complex on March 16-17. The show includes guest artist teXtmoVes’ performance of Don’t Break the Circle, a piece set to a spoken-word poem about Russian soldier Yevgenia Lazerevna in which the heroine reminds other female camp prisoners to stay united when captured by the Nazis in World War II.

Photo Credit: Steve Wollkind

ANIKAYA Dance Theater created Conference of the Birds from movement workshops and narratives collected from local Muslim, immigrant and refugee communities. Showing at the BCA’s Calderwood Pavilion on April 5-8, the world premiere includes 29-year-old Warsan Shire’s poem Home and a World War II-era text from Edith Wharton to give the audience a sense of immigrants’ reality both past and present.

Photo Credit: Gary Sloan

The final concert of Jose Mateo’s 32-year-tenure as director will feature the most-requested ballet from his repertoire of 80-plus works. Set to Franz Schubert’s Quintet in C, Mateo’s Schubert Adagio culminates in an intimate pas de deux, where the two dancers’ bodies interact to form sculptural shapes. The piece will be accompanied by 1993 work House of Ballet and a world premiere when it’s performed as part of Moving Violations at Cambridge’s Sanctuary Theatre on April 6-29.

Photo Credit: Ravi Deepres

For a Celebrity Series appearance, acclaimed British choreographer Wayne McGregor presents Atomos, his tech-forward collaboration with London’s Studio XO, at the Boch Shubert Theatre on May 4-5. The dancers will don an electronic skin that maps their biometrics and creates a visualization of their inner feelings.

50 Years that have passed since Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater first performed in Boston on Jan. 27, 1968, at John Hancock Hall, commissioned then—and now—by the Celebrity Series. Highlights of the company’s 2018 run include Ailey’s 1960 masterpiece Revelations along with three new company pieces making their Boston premiere at the Boch Wang Theater on March 22-25.

By Cathryn Haight

Q&A with Ryan McNamara

Photo Credit: Ryan McNamara

Part of the ICA’s Art in the Age of the Internet exhibition, MEM 4 Boston: A Story Ballet About the Internet is a high-energy, immersive performance inspired by internet-sourced choreography selected by the dancers, featuring moves from Trisha Brown and Janet Jackson alike. With digitally printed costumes and a soundtrack of current hits, Brooklyn-based visual artist Ryan McNamara premiered MEM in 2013, but he evolves the piece each time it’s performed. We connected with McNamara before MEM’s showing at the ICA on May 18-19.

What is the inspiration behind MEM? I was thinking about my interest in the live experience, which is really important to me. There’s something amazing about the arts. It’s a field that believes in people coming together to be in the same space. Also, being alive now and spending nearly half my day on the internet, and thinking about how those two worlds operated together in their similarities and their differences and what it would be to experience live performance in the same way.

How would you describe your choreographic style? I love watching a body do something that I can’t do, but at the same time, I’m working with these dancers who are much more than what they can do. … There’s something about being able to have technique be important, but take a backseat to personality. I want the audience to basically get a crush on all the dancers.

Despite the piece’s 2013 creation, the internet-based subject matter is still relevant. Why do you think that is? What I find so interesting about it is that obviously this was an insane revolution in our culture, but I feel like we never took the time to really dissect what that means. It’s not even questioned, and I think that’s why shows like this are important because it affects so many aspects of our life. … What is the thing that we’re even talking about when we talk about the internet? Because it’s not just the wires connecting the server. There are so many things involved in that cultural shift.

What do you hope the audience will take away from the performance? A shift in perspective. As an audience member, that’s what I want from a performance or any visual art show. It’s showing me a different perspective—and not that I have to keep that shift—but it’s sort of seeing something in a different way than when you entered. I think that’s a pretty magical thing.