Premieres, anniversaries, international tours, movies, and more—buckle up for a jam-packed season.
To the Moon and Back
Ballet national de Marseille in Oona Doherty’s Lazarus. Photo by Amaury Cornu/Hans Lucas, courtesy Southbank Centre.
British company Rambert and French collective (LA)HORDE join forces for the UK premiere of We Should Have Never Walked On The Moon, an immersive performance experience originally conceived by (LA)HORDE. Taking over the entire Royal Festival Hall building and wider Southbank Centre site, the work invites audiences to roam through spaces familiar and unusual, encountering a cast of around 50 live performers in various pieces, alongside digital works. The title is a phrase Gene Kelly reportedly said to Buzz Aldrin; the curated selection of dance works explores the broad theme of the body in an age of information saturation while nodding to the pervasiveness of mainstream American culture. Dancers from Rambert and Ballet national de Marseille (currently co-directed by (LA)HORDE), as well as from Rambert’s school and community classes, perform pieces by choreographers including Rambert artistic director Benoit Swan Pouffer, Lucinda Childs, Cécilia Bengolea and François Chaignaud, and the increasingly stratospheric Oona Doherty. Sept. 3–6. southbankcentre.co.uk.
—Róisín O’Brien
City Center Goes Big
Dutch National Ballet in Hans van Manen’s Frank Bridge Variations. Photo by Marc Haegeman, courtesy New York City Center.
New York City Center’s superstarring and supersizing of its dance season, when many presenters seemed to be cutting back, was partly coincidence. “We’ve been talking to all of these companies for years,” Stanford Makishi, vice president and artistic director of dance, says. “But it all did come together magically.”
The feast begins in September with the annual Fall for Dance festival, featuring its most international lineup since before the pandemic. The legendary Paris Opéra Ballet, after a stop in Berkeley, follows for a rare visit, bringing a recently commissioned, intense contemporary work by Hofesh Shechter. In November, Dutch National Ballet features two mixed-bill programs, including a U.S. premiere by Alexei Ratmansky, and Lyon Opera Ballet offers Merce Cunningham’s BIPED in February.
The local folks haven’t been ignored. Tiler Peck brings a star-studded group in October, and beloved regulars Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Dance Theatre of Harlem (with a major revival of Geoffrey Holder’s Firebird), Martha Graham Dance Company (ringing in its 100th year), and Ballet Hispánico return for their usual engagements. Plus, City Center’s Flamenco Festival celebrates its silver anniversary. It’s “the most ambitious dance season we’ve taken on,” Makishi proudly admits. nycitycenter.org.
—Leigh Witchel
Marking a Century of Graham With a New Hope
Hope Boykin leading a master class, with Michelle Di Muccio. Photo by Jared Lazarus/Duke University, courtesy Hope Boykin.
The Martha Graham Dance Company launches into the third and final year of its GRAHAM100 centennial celebration with a new commission from Hope Boykin. The score features an innovative musical arrangement by Christopher Rountree, expanding upon a short, never-before-heard composition Leonard Bernstein wrote in the 1980s for Graham. It will have its world premiere on Oct. 4 at The Soraya in Northridge, California, where Rountree’s Los Angeles–based ensemble, Wild Up, will perform live with the company for both Boykin’s commission and Graham’s 1947 work Night Journey. Jamar Roberts’ 2024 We the People rounds out the program. The company then tours extensively with this program and others, leading up to the company’s official 100th birthday and New York City Center season in April. marthagraham.org.
—Jen Peters
Elementary, My Dear Watson
Grand Rapids Ballet’s Nigel Tau in Penny Saunders’ Sherlock. Photo by Rachel Noel Studios, courtesy Grand Rapids Ballet.
Literature’s most famous detective is the subject of choreographer Penny Saunders’ new ballet, Sherlock. A co-production of Ballet Idaho, Grand Rapids Ballet, and Nashville Ballet, the one-act work is performed to classical music intermixed with audio from 1940s radio broadcasts of The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Mysteries contained in those recordings featuring Holmes, sidekick Dr. John Watson and his wife Mary Watson, mastermind criminals Professor Moriarty and Irene Adler, and a host of other beloved characters from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes tales are brought to life again with humor and suspense. “A society needs its heroes, however flawed they are,” Saunders says. “They help us figure out our own human nature.” Sherlock will be performed by Ballet Idaho Oct. 10–12, Grand Rapids Ballet Oct. 24–26, and Nashville Ballet, May 1–3. balletidaho.org, grballet.com, and nashvilleballet.com.
—Steve Sucato
Midlife Musings
Award-winning dancer-choreographer Netta Yerushalmy is known for her inventiveness. She produces creations of demanding physicality that display engaging innovation and sharp visual contrasts. For the upcoming premiere of nothing personal, just everything, an interdisciplinary live performance and choreographed installation, she is joined onstage by five “badass” women—filmmaker Alla Kovgan, composer Paula Matthusen, dramaturg and writer Katherine Profeta, graphic artist Mieke Ulfig, and lighting and space designer Tuçe Yasak—whom she’d worked with during a production residency for a previous project.
“It was an experience I had never had,” Yerushalmy says of that residency. “All over-40, all female, and nobody was ‘in charge.’ ” That “matriarchal for a moment” environment spun into a layered installation, delivered from a “womanist,” midlife, art-making perspective, premiering at New York City’s Chocolate Factory Theater. Yerushalmy hopes the mix will be both intellectually and visually stimulating. “It’s not a dancy dance,” she says. “It’s more about the experience.” Oct. 30–Nov. 1. nettay.com.
—Karen Dacko
Netta Yerushalmy developing nothing personal, just everything. Photo by Mieke Ulfig, courtesy Yerushalmy.
Bobbi Jene and Or Take Over the World
Or Schraiber and Bobbi Jene Smith in their Lost Mountain. Photo by Carlos Cardona, courtesy Smith and Schraiber.
Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber have guts. Their choreography, probing and urgent, is courageous enough to engage with the ugly and uncomfortable in pursuit of the transcendent. Its visceral tangles and grapplings seem to turn dancers inside out.
Which makes them an excellent fit for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s horror/sci-fi film The Bride!, out March 6. A radical retelling of the Frankenstein story, it promises plenty of guts—and dance. Smith and Schraiber are choreographing alongside tap legend Michelle Dorrance; the star-studded cast includes ballroom celebrity Julianne Hough. Peter Sarsgaard, who also has a role in the film, described it as full of “big dance numbers.”
The Bride! is part of an especially prolific year for the perpetually-in-motion Smith and Schraiber. This fall their Procession, a full-length work considering the ways we use and revere orderly linear movement, premieres at the National Ballet of Canada (Nov. 1–8). And next spring, they’ll direct and choreograph the Philip Glass opera Satyagraha at the Paris Opéra, starring the dance-curious countertenor Anthony Roth Costanza (April 10–May 3). warnerbros.com, national.ballet.ca, and operadeparis.fr.
—Margaret Fuhrer
Performance as Social Experiment
Leslie Cuyjet in her For All Your Life. Photo by Maria Baranova, courtesy BAM.
Historical research and dark comedy bring depth and edge to the incisive social commentary in Leslie Cuyjet’s solo performance For All Your Life. In the work, the artist delivers a treatise on the life-insurance industry’s entanglements with the Atlantic slave trade, told through original film, archival media, and a seminar-style character study. Absurdity and vulnerability weigh in as the work confronts much larger questions: What is the value of Black life? Of Black death? Cuyjet peels back layer after layer through scathing words and resonant, gestural dancing to fearlessly reveal the fury, pain, and care in these existential questions and the complexities of their concrete implications. Spanning years of development and iterative presentations, including an intimate premiere at The Chocolate Factory Theater in 2024, For All Your Life will be presented Dec. 3–7 at BAM Fisher as part of Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave 2025. bam.org.
—Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
True Crime in the Deep South
The Goodman Theatre’s production of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Photo by Liz Lauren, courtesy Goodman Theatre.
In 1981 in Savannah, Georgia, Danny Hansford was shot dead in his employer’s home. The crime and the four sensational trials that followed became the basis for John Berendt’s Southern Gothic bestseller, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Now, the tale moves to Broadway, sure to attract a cross-section of true-crime buffs, bookworms, and fans of the movie of the same name. Dripping in Southern-charm-turned-sour, the musical mystery’s 2024 Chicago tryout left some clues for potential Broadway casting. We’re hoping Tony-winning best actor J. Harrison Ghee—also a phenomenal dancer—reprises their role of real-life trans nightclub performer The Lady Chablis. In a promo video for its world premiere, choreographer Tanya Birl-Torres describes how Savannah’s soil, which holds the city’s secrets, served as the inspiration for the movement. What happens when that dirt gets kicked up? Midnight, directed by Broadway vet Rob Ashford, arrives in New York City this season. midnightbroadway.com.
—Madeline Schrock
Women Lifting Women
Northern Ballet’s Gemma Coutts and Alessandra Bramante in Gentleman Jack. Photo by Guy Farrow, courtesy Northern Ballet.
Annabelle Lopez Ochoa tackles another complex protagonist with Gentleman Jack. The world premiere for Northern Ballet follows Anne Lister (1791–1840), a then-rare English businesswoman and landowner who dressed as she pleased and courted aristocratic women. Her relationships, chronicled in diary entries decoded after her death, inspired her now common moniker, Gentleman Jack (which also served as the title for the hit BBC One and HBO show based on her life).
“She’s a complicated woman,” says Lopez Ochoa. “She’s not that kind. But there’s a side of her story that resonates with me—living in a man’s world, doing business, and trying to be taken seriously. Her intellect is her motor.” A co-production with Finnish National Ballet, the ballet will feature same-sex classical partnering developed with Lopez Ochoa’s assistant Jemima Brown, and a new score by Claire Cowan. Gentleman Jack will run March 7–14 at the Leeds Grand Theatre before touring across the UK through September 2026. It will debut in Helsinki in April 2028. northernballet.com.
—Kyra Laubacher
A Controversial Ballet Arrives in Germany
Rudolf Nureyev, in 1992, in The Sleeping Beauty at Deutsche Oper in Berlin, where Nureyev will be performed. Photo by Christine Gruchot, courtesy Staatsballett Berlin.
In March, Staatsballett Berlin will present Nureyev—a collaboration between theater director Kirill Serebrennikov and choreographer Yuri Possokhov—marking its first performance outside Russia. The ballet originally premiered in 2017 at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater five months after its scheduled debut, which was postponed in what many outside Russia interpreted as politically motivated censorship of its director. Nureyev traces key moments in the legendary dancer’s life, from his Soviet career and dramatic defection to the West to his unapologetic embrace of his homosexuality. Due to its portrayal of the latter, the production was removed from the Bolshoi’s repertoire in 2023, following the tightening of anti-LGBTQ+ laws in Russia.
Beyond this context, this season’s Berlin performances offer a rare chance to experience a production acclaimed for its emotional depth and striking visuals—it won multiple awards at the 2018 Prix Benois de la Danse—as well as its nuanced portrayal of a complex figure. “Nureyev…was a brilliant artist, but today we’d probably call him toxic,” Serebrennikov said in conversation with Staatsballett Berlin director Christian Spuck. Often, the flawed characters make the most compelling subjects. March 21–April 26. staatsballett-berlin.de.
—Emily May
Literary Dances at the Library
Adam Castañeda’s Lazarus in the Promised Land. Photo by Lynn Lane, courtesy Adam Castañeda.
Carnegie Summer is a new four-part series of site-specific performances by choreographer Adam Castañeda at the Carnegie Neighborhood Library, a beloved summer sanctuary within the Latinx neighborhood of Houston’s Northside. One of these performances begins with dancers emerging from the library’s stacks. Set to music by longtime collaborator Sonia Flores, it features characters from novels like Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima; Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club; and Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, books that are celebrated for breaking new ground in their representation of characters from diverse backgrounds, and for exploring the complex relationships of first-generation children to their cultural lineage.
Passionate about literature’s power to cultivate greater understanding between people, Castañeda was inspired by a vision of these characters coming together to explore their common ground in an accessible and treasured environment for learning. The four performances of Carnegie Summer will take place between March and June. pilotdanceproject.org.
—Michele Brangwen
Spotlight on Belly Dance
Suhaila Salimpour. Photo by Darryl Kelly, courtesy World Arts West.
Bay Area artist Suhaila Salimpour is one of the most important voices worldwide for both the preservation and innovation of belly dance, continuing the legacy of her mother, Jamila Salimpour. Al Zaman—which means “the time” or “the era” in Arabic—brings her together with musician Fadi Islambouli for an intimate duet planned for the iconic Yoshi’s club in Oakland, California, in April. Now indeed is the time, referenced by the work’s title, to amplify the traditions of belly dance and Arabic music in order to sustain a dying tradition. “It’s about telling the story of the Arab immigrant journey,” Salimpour says, “through the spaces where people would gather to feel a sense of belonging.” suhaila.com.
—Jill Randall
A Sci-Fi Spoof Returns
Sam Pinkleton accepting his 2025 Tony Award. Photo courtesy CBS.
Broadway royalty and Tony-winning director Sam Pinkleton is at it again. Following the runaway hit Oh, Mary!, the choreographer-turned-director shifts their attention from the 1860s to the 1970s for a revival of The Rocky Horror Show—talk about a time warp. Richard O’Brien’s cult classic, which started on London’s West End before becoming the favorite movie of theater kids for decades to come in 1975, follows innocent young couple Brad and Janet after they get a flat tire, in a rainstorm, and must seek help at (you guessed it) a creepy mansion. Tropes abound in this sci-fi spoof, animated by a cast of colorful characters and a celebration of sexuality. Although a choreographer has not been announced as of press time, with Pinkleton in play, it’s bound to be a savvy, quirky pairing. Opens this spring at Studio 54. roundabouttheatre.org.
—Madeline Schrock
Here She Comes Again
Mandy Moore. Photo by Lee Cherry, courtesy Bloc Agency.
Following 2009’s 9 to 5, country music queen Dolly Parton brings her second show to Broadway with Dolly: A True Original Musical, a biomusical depicting her (larger than) life from the hills of Tennessee to the Grand Ole Opry, Hollywood, and beyond. The production will feature a trio of actresses portraying Dolly throughout her life as they sing her hits, plus new songs written exclusively for the show. And the creative team—including director Bartlett Sher, who’s made a name for himself reviving splashy classics, and choreographer Mandy Moore, who’s lending her pop sensibilities (Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, La La Land) to Broadway for the very first time—is a sure bet. After wrapping its extended-run premiere in Nashville in August, Dolly is preparing for a 2026 Broadway transfer, hopefully this spring. dollymusical.com.
—Madeline Schrock
Patricia Delgado Gets Her Flowers
Patricia Delgado. Photo by Rachel Papo.
Since the end of her brilliant career as a dancer with Miami City Ballet, Patricia Delgado has largely kept out of—or, rather, deflected—the spotlight. She’s been a teacher, a stager, a coach, the kind of generous artist who is essential wherever she goes, but quietly so.
Now, to the delight of her many admirers, she’s rediscovering her star power—as a choreographer. This spring, alongside her husband and frequent collaborator Justin Peck, Delgado won both a Chita Rivera Award and a Tony Award for Broadway’s Buena Vista Social Club, a show that melds her Cuban and dance identities. And next year, she’ll be the sole choreographer for the world-premiere musical Basura, at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre. The show is inspired by the true story of an ensemble of young Paraguayan musicians who play instruments made of recycled scraps (the “basura,” or garbage, of the title). With songs by Gloria Estefan and Emily Estefan, it sounds like an exciting home for Delgado’s singular choreographic gifts. May 30–July 12. alliancetheatre.org.
—Margaret Fuhrer
A Half-Century of Ensemble Español
Ensemble Español Spanish Dance Theater in Antonio Najarro’s Viejos Aires. Photo by Joel Maisonet, courtesy Ensemble Español Spanish Dance Theater.
This season, Chicago’s Ensemble Español Spanish Dance Theater celebrates a milestone 50 years. Established before the National Ballet of Spain and home to the oldest flamenco and Spanish dance festival in the U.S., the company presents flamenco, folklore, Escuela Bolera, classical, and contemporary dance, with a repertory of more than 150 works, many (unusually for a Spanish dance company) by American-born choreographers. Ensemble Español’s anniversary year is packed with events, reaching the pinnacle in June with convenings bringing together local and international experts in Spanish dance, music, and research at the American Spanish Dance and Music Festival. It kicks off with Flamenco Passion 2026, which runs June 12–14, followed by the Ethnic Dance & Music Symposium, June 15–17, and classes, workshops, and seminars with genre-defining flamenco artists Carmela Greco, La Lupi, Isaac Tovar, guitarist Curro de María, and more, June 15–20. ensembleespanol.org.
—Bridgit Lujan
A Punk Rock Nutcracker
Birklie Meyer as Clara and Antonia Franceschi as Aunt Drosselmeier in GRRRL Nutcracker. Photo by Karole Armitage, courtesy Armitage Gone! Dance.
For her next IAmADancer film, the superbly creative Karole Armitage envisions a new 90-minute retelling of The Nutcracker. Imagine an energetic, hip Aunt Drosselmeier—the stunning Antonia Franceschi dancing Armitage’s unique contemporary style—encouraging Clara to be her own person. Enter a mysterious young student of bharatanatyam dance, portrayed by Shashwat Chaurasia, who introduces Clara to the richness of her rural Kansas community through world dances from Africa, Asia, and the Americas performed by local ensembles. Top it off with Eunhye Marcel dancing a Sugar Plum variation like no other when Bikini Kill’s punk anthem “Rebel Girl” interrupts Tchaikovsky’s sumptuous score for a little in-your-face female agency. New York City dancers join with artists from Kansas City and the rural Wabaunsee County to form the multigenerational cast of GRRRL Nutcracker, filming this fall for release in December 2026. armitagegonedance.org.
—Michele Brangwen
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