If you go to one of Raimund Hoghe's dance performances and just listen, eyes closed, you'll understand much of the story he's trying to tell. Hoghe is a master of the musical collage, shaping playlists of drama and scope, surprise and humor. In Pas de Deux, which he performed last...

She looks directly out at us from the wall, not quite smiling. There's a hopefulness to her expression -- maybe naïveté. She is enclosed in a simple rectangular frame, but there's a second frame within that frame, a shape that could be a quotation mark or a speech bubble. She...

Dance in the round is rich with possibility. Each viewpoint offers a chance to present a different aspect of the moving body, with no one angle being definitively "right" or "best." As someone who's performed Merce Cunningham's landmark in-the-round work Ocean, choreographer Jonah Bokaer knows that firsthand.

The brand-new Fisher...

What is French ballet? Most of the world's various ballet techniques are beginning to melt together. But the Paris Opéra Ballet's visit to New York this month, its first in 16 years, proved that the French style remains distinct and definable. As embodied by the company's dancers, it's the epitome...

If you have a boyfriend who's "not sure about this whole dance thing," you take him to see Pilobolus. He may even know the company already, from their performances at the Oscars and in car commercials. Everybody finds something to like about this eminently...

It's been 13 years since The Australian Ballet was last in New York City. That's enough time, in dance years, for a generation of company dancers to have come and gone.

But they're very polite about re-introducing themselves. Luminous, the collection of pas de deux that opened the repertory...

Putting on a dance show is a Sisyphean task. No matter what heights the dancers reach onstage one night, they begin the next night's performance at the bottom of the hill, doomed to re-create the work from scratch. It's a grueling job. It's also a heroic one. Dancers understand its...

During American Ballet Theatre's Metropolitan Opera House season, it's rare to see a dancer who is still a work in progress perform a leading role. The company can't afford to take risks when it needs to fill the cavernous Met every night. There's no time to test out dancers who...

Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet has a repertoire full of "sock ballets," typified by the thin socks the dancers often wear to help them glide over the floor, but also by a general slipperiness. Fluid and changeable, they flatter dancers: Each beautiful position bleeds into the next one, so that mistakes...

Ballet galas can be disheartening affairs -- miscellaneous collections of orphaned pas de deux, presented with little concern for programming beyond projecting the least interesting, "ta-da" aspects of ballet to the (not actually) cheap seats in the back. But New York City Ballet tends to be more ambitious. At its...

Ivy Baldwin is a collector of steps. I imagine her gathering them the way a wine enthusiast amasses bottles, with an eye for quality and taste, storing them in the cool cellar of her mind to be retrieved and savored later. She finds them in other dances (the flattened, architectural...

A few years ago, photographer David Michalek filmed 43 dancers and choreographers with a high-definition camera. He projected the clips on giant screens at Lincoln Center. Each five-second segment was played in extreme slow motion, stretched out over 10 minutes. Collectively, they glorified the bewitching, bewildering intricacy of the dancing...

To American ballet fans younger than 35 or so, Sylvie Guillem is a mythical creature. We missed her years as the star of first the Paris Opéra Ballet and then the Royal Ballet. Later, when she stepped sideways into contemporary dance, her concerts rarely made it across the Atlantic.

Paul Taylor's greatest gift is shading -- adding a stroke of darkest charcoal to a brilliant moment, a sweep of white to a dusky one. His choreography reaches bright extremes, yet its strongest points are its murkiest ones. In Aureole, a Taylor masterpiece, four dancers skip happily through a brisk,...

"I'm interested in an irrational response to our perceived place in the universe."

So says choreographer David Neumann in his program notes for Restless Eye, which runs through April 1 at New York Live Arts. It sounds like an expression of cool scientific curiosity. But Eye isn't a polite...

The relationship between ballet and modern dance is at best uneasy. You might say they have trust issues. Ballet dancers tend to condescend to modern choreography, polishing the life out of it -- as in American Ballet Theatre's dead-on-arrival performances of Merce Cunningham's Duets last year. And many modern dancers...

Let's begin by acknowledging that Mark Morris is a genius. His best dances -- Gloria, L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato -- tug at us powerfully. He can align steps and music in a way that transports.

Like every great artist, Morris has had his share of flops. But...

New York City's Joyce Theater is a lovely venue, intimate and uncluttered. It's small enough to be a realistic option for touring regional ballet companies. But sometimes it feels as if these modest troupes are coming to the Joyce to audition for New York itself. Will they cut it in...

A chic crowd gathered at the Joyce Theater last Wednesday -- thin women in fat furs, chattering in French. It was the opening night of Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, and some of Monaco's legendary glamor seemed to have made its way across the ocean with the company.

Monaco:...

In 1982, choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones curated a project called Parallels. He asked eight black artists to make dances, hoping to explore whether the terms "black dance" and "post-modern dance" made any sense together.

Thirty years later, Houston-Jones is still exploring. Platform 2012: Parallels, the latest of Danspace Project's Platforms,...