NYC's Upcoming Season is Full of Powerful Women

Maybe it’s just by chance, but it seems like the upcoming lineup in New York City is designed to remind us of the women giants of our field. What a great welcome to the new season!

• Twyla Tharp brings new and old work to the Joyce. She may be the most prolific living choreographer in any genre. Her movement is always bursting with inventiveness, and she challenges her mighty dancers with impossibly complex and non-stop motion.

Tharp’s Raggedy Dances (1982) with Sara Rudner and Rose Marie Wright, PC William Pierce

• Two formative works by Pina Bausch are coming to Brooklyn Academy of Music: The Rite of Spring and Café Müller. Bausch shook the international dance (and theater) world with her brash and brilliant work 30 years ago. Though she died in 2009, her dancers still make complacency impossible at the same time as they satisfy our lust for a rich, provocative imagination onstage.

• Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Vortex Temporum exploded onto the stage of BAM last fall and, in a different version, at the Museum of Modern Art’s atrium a few months later. The power of dance and music pushing each other’s momentum gives us a visceral thrill. She premieres A Love Supreme with music by John Coltrane at New York Live Arts.

• Germaine Acogny, known as “the mother of contemporary African dance,” is a commanding performer in her own right. At the age of 73, she tackles Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at BAM. The solo, titled Mon élue noire (My Black Chosen One): Sacre #2 is choreographed by Olivier Dubois.

• The Trisha Brown Dance Company helps open Fall for Dance at New York City Center with a duet from the 1990s. On the same program is a premiere by a more current giantess—Michelle Dorrance.

Dorrance, center, in her Myelination, PC Julieta Cervantes