The Latest: In the Works

Dancer Emily Coates. Photo by Peter Gannushkin, Courtesy Danspace.

What happens when you put a postmodern choreographer and a ballet dancer in the studio and let them run free? It’s a concept that has informed dance since the 1970s, admits former New York Times dance critic Claudia La Rocco. Her experiment, Dancers, Building, and People in the Streets at New York City’s Danspace Project, will pair of-the-moment artists from both genres, February 9–March 28. Many of them feel like a natural fit: Cunningham and Balanchine will mesh when Silas Riener collaborates with New York City Ballet’s Adrian Danchig-Waring and Rashaun Mitchell with Sara Mearns. The successes of other duos, with choreographers whose backgrounds are less shape-minded, are more difficult to predict. Jodi Melnick and Sterling Hyltin, Jillian Peña and Troy Schumacher, Yve Laris Cohen and Emily Coates, and Will Rawls and Kaitlyn Gilliland round out the program. At the very least, having ballet and modern stars intersect will entice their devoted audiences, too.