Category: Dance

As the Trisha Brown Dance Company continues on without Trisha Brown — the great postmodern choreographer who died in 2017 — the group has staged works on and off the proscenium stage, and even relocated her works to a beach.

But a company can only get so far with its founding choreographer’s dances. It has entered the inevitable phase of needing to commission new works, and for its latest season at the Joyce Theater, which began on Tuesday, the group tapped the French choreographer Noé Soulier to create a premiere, its second by someone other than Brown.

Soulier’s “In the Fall” is part of a season dedicated to Steve Paxton, who died last month. In the new work, Soulier presents a finely wrought response to Brown’s vocabulary, deconstructed painstakingly as he places it under a microscope.

“In the Fall,” created with the support of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels and others, features eight dancers in all, wearing separates in blue, yellow or red, designed by Kaye Voyce. The performers periodically show up at the same time, but even when they do, it is still a stage of individuals. The stark lighting, by Victor Burel and Soulier, makes them glimmer like jewels seen from a distance in a cave.

At first, two dancers are highlighted, Ashley Merker and Burr Johnson, each in blue and moving with ample space in between them as they navigate a darkened stage. Their bodies slowly morph and deepen into shapes and balances, and they succumb to gravity. It’s not fast and furious but initiated, seemingly, by a deep internal pull.

The dancers aren’t outwardly showy, yet they are dramatic, with matter-of-fact, glacial clarity. In contrast with the willowy fluidity of Brown’s movement, which brushes and tickles the air with seemingly unrestrained looseness, Soulier organizes bodies carefully, segment by segment. His idea of a fall is one of everlasting motion; it trickles out of the body not as much to collapse as to crumble, leaving behind pools of flesh.

Soulier, who is the director of the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers, France — one of that country’s government-supported choreographic centers — studied Brown’s vocabulary and repertoire as a student at the Performing Arts Research and Training Studios in Brussels. In a program note for the Joyce, he writes that while Brown “reveals the fundamental forces at work in the body,” he explores “inorganic transitions, the gap between intention and gesture, effort and contraction.”

But as “In the Fall” attests, there is an inner and outer force for both. While movement has a way of melting off bodies in Brown’s work, Soulier, in his way of slowing things down, demonstrates an order and logic that echoes the structure binding Brown’s ribbonlike flow.

Set to a score by Florian Hecker, in which environmental sounds wash over the stage evoking sprinklers and distant traffic, Soulier’s dance moves through solos and duets that feel like personal contests of control and dimension. It builds to a place of speed — bodies turn more turbulent as they rise and fall — before settling into its earlier pace, in which Johnson, repeating an image, uses his length to incredible effect as he balances on one foot with the other bent backward. His knees remain close as he folds over with his arms straight behind him until he rounds over so deeply that this torso twists into a fall.

This premiere was joined by two of Brown’s works, the masterpiece “Glacial Decoy” (1979), featuring visual design and costumes by Robert Rauschenberg, and “Working Title” (1985), set to music by Peter Zummo. In that second, playful work, a brighter, more connected foray into solos and duets, Brown used its phrases, which pushed the dancers’ physical limits, as a choreographic resource. (One iteration of the dance features a performer lifted into the air by a harness — Brown was transfixed with the idea of flying — but the Joyce production omits it.)

On Tuesday, “Working Title” was an opportunity to study its dancers, including the alluring Jennifer Payán, who imparts an exciting rag doll precision to all of her parts, and Amanda Kmett’Pendry, a former company member filling in for an ill dancer, whose artistry is imbued with ease.

And here, the elegant Catherine Kirk found more softness in Brown’s movement. In a solo, her long limbs became liquid while still on high alert as she made a mad dash into a back wing. It was glorious, bringing to life Brown’s program note about the dance: “If you’re going fast, you just have to pick where you place your feet.”

In “Glacial Decoy,” Brown’s first collaboration with Rauschenberg and her first proscenium work, four women — a fifth enters later — wear the artist’s long, diaphanous dresses that make them look as if they’re floating. They slide back and forth in choreography that, at first, has them curling in from either side of the stage. It’s sly, purposely trippy: How many dancers are there?

All the while, Rauschenberg’s images of Americana slide by, too. Black-and-white photographs — a tree with a string tied around it, a single lightbulb, a bicycle seat — provide stunning contrast as everyday life, much of it dusty and summertime hot, brushes up against gliding and ghostly female forms. “Glacial Decoy” remains the marvel it always has been.

Trisha Brown Dance Company

Through Sunday at the Joyce Theater, Manhattan; joyce.org.

As the ballet dancers moved through the familiar rituals of their daily class, they tried to ignore the gunshots and explosions outside. It was 1979, and Iran was in the midst of a revolution that would overthrow the ruling Shah and turn the country into an Islamic republic. The dancers were the last few members of the Iranian National Ballet.

Bahareh Sardari was among them. On a recent video call from her home in Herndon, Va., she recalled what happened next: the National Ballet, which had been founded in 1958 and had grown and flourished, ended.

“All of the foreign dancers in the company had already left,” she said. “Then one of the ayatollahs decided that ballet — which he probably knew nothing about — was incompatible with the Islamic Republic.”

What would happen to the art to which Sardari, then 26, had dedicated her life and the company she had helped build? “Finito,” she said. The National Ballet’s sets, costumes and archives were burned. “It killed my heart.”

“They told us to stop doing ballet class,” Sardari continued. “But because we had time left on our contracts with the government, they couldn’t fire us.” So the dancers came in every day and sat, and they were paid at the end of each month. They were offered jobs as actors. “But my voice would not come out,” said Sardari, now 71. “I really tried.”

She arranged a meeting with the new minister of arts and culture. Shaking, she told him, “I’m a ballet dancer. I’ve danced all my life. I’m no use here. Please let me leave the country.” The minister replied contemptuously that ballet dancers were like saffron — the most expensive spice — on hospital food, an extravagance. But he did not give her permission to leave.

After a few years, Sardari did get out. With her husband, she moved to Vienna and then Virginia, where she put her skills to use as a choreographer and teacher, recently with the Washington School of Ballet. And now her story and that of the Iranian National Ballet are among the inspirations for a new dance, “The White Feather,” to be performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday and at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater in New York City on Saturday.

“The White Feather” is the brainchild of the ballerina and choreographer Tara Ghassemieh, who has never been to Iran. Her father, born and raised in the north of Iran, left just before the revolution to attend college in Los Angeles. There he married an American woman, and the couple had three children, Tara Ghassemieh among them.

She grew up as a professional child actor, but ballet was her deepest love. At 15, she was offered a scholarship to train at the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School in New York, but just before moving, she injured her back. Soon, she quit ballet. At 20, she returned to it, retrained and built a career as a freelance guest artist, most recently with Golden State Ballet. Yet, as she explained in a recent call from her home in Irvine, she grew to wonder why she was so dedicated to ballet. What was she dancing for?

Then a friend told her that a clairvoyant had a message for her. The clairvoyant described a vision of Ghassemieh’s Iranian grandmother shaking a finger at her and rows of women in the full-length body cloaks known as chadors pointing at her. That night, Ghassemieh Googled “ballet and Iran” and discovered the Iranian National Ballet.

“My throat seized up and my heart starting beating hard, like a panic attack,” she said. “My place in the ballet world suddenly became clear — I dance for them.” She had her own vision: of women removing their hijabs and burning them. And now she had a mission: to bring ballet back to Iran.

She began researching the National Ballet in preparation for making a film about it. But she also wanted to create a performance, an occasion for former members to take a bow. Her friend Sanaz Soltani told her about how her father, a colonel under the Shah, had been executed by the new regime. Ghassemieh got the idea to incorporate that story into a stage work about the National Ballet. She and her husband, the former San Francisco Ballet principal dancer Vitor Luiz, choreographed it together, with Soltani as producer and a score by the Iranian conductor and composer Shahrdad Rohani.

In the first act of the hourlong “White Feather,” the National Ballet is rehearsing “Swan Lake,” when a ballet-villain dictator makes the women remove their pointe shoes and put on hijabs. A heroic general fights back, but is executed.

“It almost sounds like I just made this up,” Ghassemieh said. “But it was real.”

Before there was a National Ballet, there was a school. In 1956, the National Ballet Academy of Iran was established, part of the Shah’s cultural effort to match the West. It was led by Iranians, Nejad and Haideh Ahmadzadeh, but outside experts were brought in. First to arrive was the American dancer William Dollar. Then, after a visit by Ninette de Valois, the founder of Britain’s Royal Ballet, came many Royal dancers, including Robert De Warren, who would choreograph and stage ballets for the company as well as direct the widely touring Iranian national folk dance troupe. Teachers and choreographers came from the Soviet Union, too.

The ranks of the National Ballet were always supplemented by foreign dancers, and British or Russian guest artists often took the starring roles. The repertory performed at the Roudaki Opera House in Tehran was mostly Western classics like “Giselle” and “Swan Lake.” But the Ahmadzadehs weren’t the only Iranians to shape the company.

Bijan Kalantari, an Iranian dancer who trained at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, returned in 1970 to teach. (One of his students, Afshin Mofid, became a celebrated dancer with New York City Ballet.) Haydeh Changizian, who was born in Iran and studied at the prestigious Vaganova Academy in St. Petersburg, joined the National Ballet in 1972 as its prima ballerina. And homegrown dancers like Sardari blossomed.

In 1976, Ali Pourfarrokh took over the directorship. An early student of the Iranian ballet academy, he had gone on to an international career, most recently as the associate artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Under his leadership, the stature of the company rose.

And then it all ended. The final work, poignantly, was “The Sleeping Beauty,” in which a spell is broken and a royal court and its ballet awakens. Sardari played one of the fairies and the small but cherished role of Bluebird. “I was so proud,” she said.

Since 1979, there has been at least one attempt to revive the company. Nima Kiann, born in Iran in 1970, fell in love with the National Ballet after seeing it on television, but by the time he was old enough to take class, ballet in Iran was over. As a young man, he emigrated to Sweden, trained there and in 2001 founded Les Ballets Persans, which combines classical ballet with Persian music and stories. Among the dozens of dancers it has employed, Kiann is the only one of Iranian heritage, he said in a recent interview.

“The White Feather,” for its part, has a second act. In it, a contemporary woman takes up ballet, trades her hijab for a tiara and inspires other women to remove their hijabs. This is an allusion to recent history, the protests and “woman, life, freedom” movement that flared after the death of Jina Mahsa Amini in the custody of the morality police in 2022.

Ghassemieh said that she has plans to take “The White Feather” on tour to Europe and dreams of a Broadway run, but that’s not the ultimate goal: “We are going to take this stage by stage until we get to Roudaki Hall, until I can take ballet back to Iran.”

If that ever happens, Sardari said, she will be there.

As the ballet dancers moved through the familiar rituals of their daily class, they tried to ignore the gunshots and explosions outside. It was 1979, and Iran was in the midst of a revolution that would overthrow the ruling Shah and turn the country into an Islamic republic. The dancers were the last few members of the Iranian National Ballet.

Bahareh Sardari was among them. On a recent video call from her home in Herndon, Va., she recalled what happened next: the National Ballet, which had been founded in 1958 and had grown and flourished, ended.

“All of the foreign dancers in the company had already left,” she said. “Then one of the ayatollahs decided that ballet — which he probably knew nothing about — was incompatible with the Islamic Republic.”

What would happen to the art to which Sardari, then 26, had dedicated her life and the company she had helped build? “Finito,” she said. The National Ballet’s sets, costumes and archives were burned. “It killed my heart.”

“They told us to stop doing ballet class,” Sardari continued. “But because we had time left on our contracts with the government, they couldn’t fire us.” So the dancers came in every day and sat, and they were paid at the end of each month. They were offered jobs as actors. “But my voice would not come out,” said Sardari, now 71. “I really tried.”

She arranged a meeting with the new minister of arts and culture. Shaking, she told him, “I’m a ballet dancer. I’ve danced all my life. I’m no use here. Please let me leave the country.” The minister replied contemptuously that ballet dancers were like saffron — the most expensive spice — on hospital food, an extravagance. But he did not give her permission to leave.

After a few years, Sardari did get out. With her husband, she moved to Vienna and then Virginia, where she put her skills to use as a choreographer and teacher, recently with the Washington School of Ballet. And now her story and that of the Iranian National Ballet are among the inspirations for a new dance, “The White Feather,” to be performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday and at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater in New York City on Saturday.

“The White Feather” is the brainchild of the ballerina and choreographer Tara Ghassemieh, who has never been to Iran. Her father, born and raised in the north of Iran, left just before the revolution to attend college in Los Angeles. There he married an American woman, and the couple had three children, Tara Ghassemieh among them.

She grew up as a professional child actor, but ballet was her deepest love. At 15, she was offered a scholarship to train at the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School in New York, but just before moving, she injured her back. Soon, she quit ballet. At 20, she returned to it, retrained and built a career as a freelance guest artist, most recently with Golden State Ballet. Yet, as she explained in a recent call from her home in Irvine, she grew to wonder why she was so dedicated to ballet. What was she dancing for?

Then a friend told her that a clairvoyant had a message for her. The clairvoyant described a vision of Ghassemieh’s Iranian grandmother shaking a finger at her and rows of women in the full-length body cloaks known as chadors pointing at her. That night, Ghassemieh Googled “ballet and Iran” and discovered the Iranian National Ballet.

“My throat seized up and my heart starting beating hard, like a panic attack,” she said. “My place in the ballet world suddenly became clear — I dance for them.” She had her own vision: of women removing their hijabs and burning them. And now she had a mission: to bring ballet back to Iran.

She began researching the National Ballet in preparation for making a film about it. But she also wanted to create a performance, an occasion for former members to take a bow. Her friend Sanaz Soltani told her about how her father, a colonel under the Shah, had been executed by the new regime. Ghassemieh got the idea to incorporate that story into a stage work about the National Ballet. She and her husband, the former San Francisco Ballet principal dancer Vitor Luiz, choreographed it together, with Soltani as producer and a score by the Iranian conductor and composer Shahrdad Rohani.

In the first act of the hourlong “White Feather,” the National Ballet is rehearsing “Swan Lake,” when a ballet-villain dictator makes the women remove their pointe shoes and put on hijabs. A heroic general fights back, but is executed.

“It almost sounds like I just made this up,” Ghassemieh said. “But it was real.”

Before there was a National Ballet, there was a school. In 1956, the National Ballet Academy of Iran was established, part of the Shah’s cultural effort to match the West. It was led by Iranians, Nejad and Haideh Ahmadzadeh, but outside experts were brought in. First to arrive was the American dancer William Dollar. Then, after a visit by Ninette de Valois, the founder of Britain’s Royal Ballet, came many Royal dancers, including Robert De Warren, who would choreograph and stage ballets for the company as well as direct the widely touring Iranian national folk dance troupe. Teachers and choreographers came from the Soviet Union, too.

The ranks of the National Ballet were always supplemented by foreign dancers, and British or Russian guest artists often took the starring roles. The repertory performed at the Roudaki Opera House in Tehran was mostly Western classics like “Giselle” and “Swan Lake.” But the Ahmadzadehs weren’t the only Iranians to shape the company.

Bijan Kalantari, an Iranian dancer who trained at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, returned in 1970 to teach. (One of his students, Afshin Mofid, became a celebrated dancer with New York City Ballet.) Haydeh Changizian, who was born in Iran and studied at the prestigious Vaganova Academy in St. Petersburg, joined the National Ballet in 1972 as its prima ballerina. And homegrown dancers like Sardari blossomed.

In 1976, Ali Pourfarrokh took over the directorship. An early student of the Iranian ballet academy, he had gone on to an international career, most recently as the associate artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Under his leadership, the stature of the company rose.

And then it all ended. The final work, poignantly, was “The Sleeping Beauty,” in which a spell is broken and a royal court and its ballet awakens. Sardari played one of the fairies and the small but cherished role of Bluebird. “I was so proud,” she said.

Since 1979, there has been at least one attempt to revive the company. Nima Kiann, born in Iran in 1970, fell in love with the National Ballet after seeing it on television, but by the time he was old enough to take class, ballet in Iran was over. As a young man, he emigrated to Sweden, trained there and in 2001 founded Les Ballets Persans, which combines classical ballet with Persian music and stories. Among the dozens of dancers it has employed, Kiann is the only one of Iranian heritage, he said in a recent interview.

“The White Feather,” for its part, has a second act. In it, a contemporary woman takes up ballet, trades her hijab for a tiara and inspires other women to remove their hijabs. This is an allusion to recent history, the protests and “woman, life, freedom” movement that flared after the death of Jina Mahsa Amini in the custody of the morality police in 2022.

Ghassemieh said that she has plans to take “The White Feather” on tour to Europe and dreams of a Broadway run, but that’s not the ultimate goal: “We are going to take this stage by stage until we get to Roudaki Hall, until I can take ballet back to Iran.”

If that ever happens, Sardari said, she will be there.

One after the other, women in white step out of the wings, reaching forward into space before swaying gently back, arms overhead. Then they take two steps forward and begin the sequence all over again. This rocking motion, forward and back, repeats for several minutes, until the stage is filled with bodies hovering on pointe, as if sustained by a single breath.

The scene is from Marius Petipa’s “La Bayadère,” a ballet that premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1877. “The spectators must have felt that they had died and gone to heaven, which was more or less the case,” the dance critic Joan Acocella wrote in 2019 of the entrance of the Shades, or female spirits, in the second act.

That sequence — inspired by Gustave Doré’s illustration of souls descending from heaven in an edition of Dante’s “Divina Commedia” — is one of the reasons this ballet, set to a mostly unremarkable score by Ludwig Minkus, has survived when so many others have not.

“It’s a simple thing,” the director and choreographer Phil Chan said, “a throwaway step, even.” But the way the scene is structured, he added, “shows you how you can take a single step and give it to an entire group and make it look exciting and interesting.”

Like many operas and ballets from the 19th century, “La Bayadère,” set in an exoticized, ahistoric and sometimes cartoonish India, doesn’t translate well to our times. Some have questioned whether it should be performed at all. And while it continues to be staged around the world, there has been a noticeable reduction in performances, at least in the United States. In 2022, Susan Jaffe, the new artistic director of American Ballet Theater, said in an interview that it was one of the ballets she planned to shelve temporarily, while thinking about how to make changes.

What can be done with a work like “Bayadère”? For Chan and Doug Fullington, a specialist in 19th-century ballet, the solution is to remove it from its exotic context and put it in a setting closer to home, the Hollywood of the 1930s. By setting the ballet in a movie-land far west, and swapping Orientalist clichés for American ones, Chan said, the team was creating “a form of exoticism that is about us, not about ‘them.’”

“The thing is, there’s really nothing Indian about it,” he said of “Bayadère.” “We might as well add a German clog dance or an Argentine tango. It would literally be just as authentic.”

Called “Star on the Rise: La Bayadère … Reimagined!” the new version recasts the “Shades” scene as a dance spectacular à la Busby Berkeley. The staging, produced by Indiana University’s ballet department, will premiere on March 29 in Bloomington, and be livestreamed online as well as at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

When “La Bayadère,” was made, far-off places were much in vogue in stage shows. Bizet’s 1863 opera “The Pearl Fishers” was set in Sri Lanka; Verdi’s 1871 opera “Aida” takes place in ancient Egypt; Spain was a frequent setting for both operas and ballets. In 1875, the Prince of Wales undertook a highly publicized tour of India and Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), both British colonies at the time. Two years later, “La Bayadère” came to the stage.

While in Sri Lanka, the prince had watched a dance performance, a moment that was illustrated in contemporary newspapers. Those illustrations are the likely inspiration for “La Bayadère’s” fast-paced “Danse Infernale,” a fake-tribal number set to a beating drum.

“It’s so problematic, but the music is so fun,” Chan said of “Danse Infernale.” “My idea was that we could take this thing that is so shameful, find the good parts, and make it fun for everybody.” The number, now called “Bronco Busters,” is danced by cowboys who slap their ankles, twirl lassoes and run with their arms behind their backs as if they were about to grab their pistols.

The story of “La Bayadère” hinges on a love triangle among Nikiya, a beautiful temple dancer, or bayadère; a not-so-brave warrior; and a rajah’s haughty daughter. Nikiya is a tragic heroine killed by a venomous snake placed in a basket of flowers by her catty rival.

Chan, born in Hong Kong, is a former dancer who now works to bring cultural awareness to ballet and opera. He has written two books on Orientalism in the performing arts and, with the former New York City Ballet dancer Georgina Pazcoguin, founded Final Bow for Yellowface, an organization that pushes for the elimination of demeaning depictions of Asian characters.

“I don’t think audiences want to see that anymore, this passive, hypersexualized, weak woman who has no agency,” he said about characters like Nikiya and the heroine of the opera “Madama Butterfly.” “Snooze-fest, boring. That’s not who we are anymore.”

Chan recently directed a production of “Madama Butterfly” at Boston Lyric Opera that transposed the story to World War II America; instead of a young geisha, the protagonist is a jazz singer. She doesn’t die at the end.

In “Star on the Rise,” Chan and Fullington’s heroine, a Hollywood starlet, also makes it out alive and takes charge of her destiny. Her rival has a change of heart. This paves the way to a happy ending, celebrated, in true movie musical style, with a big dance number, a Charleston.

Surprisingly, the translation from tragedy to comedy, and from exotic fantasyland to the world of musical theater, wasn’t such a stretch, they said. “I’ve always thought that a lot of the group choreography in ‘La Bayadère’ looked like dance-hall steps,” Fullington, who has co-written a book about Petipa’s ballets, said on a video call.

The plot, which verges on melodrama, easily lent itself to comic treatment. “If you flip these extreme situations in the ballet just a little bit, they become funny,” Fullington said.

The movie “Singin’ in the Rain” pointed to a way to adapt “La Bayadère” for its new Hollywood setting: a backstage story-within-a-story. In “Star on the Rise,” Nikiya becomes Nikki, an aspiring dancer and actress. Her rival, Pamela Zatti, is a longtime star, jealous of the spotlight. Sol is the matinee idol Nikki loves and Zatti wants as her leading man. The rivalry is professional, not romantic.

Chan and Fullington turned the ballet’s suite of colorful ensemble pieces into scenes from a Western fantasy being produced by the cast of the show. Instead of fakirs (ascetics) and dancing girls with parrots affixed to their wrists, the secondary characters have become cowboys, chorus dancers, buckaroos, sheriffs and falconers.

Drawing upon Fullington’s expertise in 19th-century steps and style, the pair decided to use choreography that hewed as closely to the original as possible, as laid out in ballet notations recorded in St. Petersburg when Petipa revived “La Bayadère” in 1900. Fullington is one of just few people in the world who know how to decipher them. (The choreographer Alexei Ratmansky and the Russian stager Sergei Vikharev have both done reconstructions based on these notations.)

The question was, how would these steps, created in Imperial Russia decades before the invention of jazz, let alone movie musicals, fit in with the new setting?

“Looking at the steps in isolation, without any narrative context, I thought they seemed very transferable,” Fullington said. “They weren’t exotic in any way.”

Simple moves like chugging hops on one leg and “paddle steps,” which have an up-down feel like an oompah in music, recur throughout the ballet. “The choreography is deceptively simple,” Chan said, “and it’s used in a way that builds and builds, and passes from one group to another group.”

Fullington and Chan have combined the notated steps with Western-inspired gestures like thumbs tucked in belt loops and tipped cowboy hats. In the studio, Fullington focused on staging the steps, and Chan on clarifying the storytelling and mime. In the passages that were not notated, and for the Charleston at the end, Fullington has created new steps or used steps drawn from other Petipa ballets.

But perhaps the most important element in bridging the two worlds is the ballet’s score, as reimagined by the veteran orchestrator Larry Moore, whose work includes editing a 1989 reconstruction of Gershwin’s “Girl Crazy.” Fullington sent him a piano reduction of the Minkus score and other materials, with the request that he should, as Moore said, “make the score sound more like 1930 than like 1877.”

Moore mostly kept Minkus’s melodies, while “lovingly tarting up the orchestral material,” he said, adding all manner of sounds and countermelodies. The new orchestration includes castanets, maracas, whips, a washboard, a guitar, a celesta and three saxophones. “I’ve got them playing everything but the kitchen sink, ” he said.

His sources of inspiration included the piano pieces of Scott Joplin, the song “Red River Valley” and the sophisticated Hollywood sound of Robert Russell Bennett, who orchestrated classic works like “Girl Crazy” and “Kiss Me Kate.”

To give the music a stronger dance impulse Moore played around with the rhythms, creating, at various points, a tango and a beguine, and adding percussion throughout. It was also his idea to turn the finale into a raucous Charleston. “I wanted a big happy ending, where they’re all happily dancing around,” he said.

Indiana University’s ballet program, part of the Jacobs School of Music, is one of the few that could take on such an ambitious project. The score will be performed by one of the school’s six orchestras. All of the school’s 68 dancers are involved in the show, as are faculty and 20 students from the affiliated Jacobs Academy. The scenic and costume designers (Mark Smith and Camille Deering) are also in-house.

For the student-dancers, it has been an eye-opening experience. Used to more neoclassical, abstract works, they’ve had to adapt to the filigreed classical steps and detailed storytelling and mime of “La Bayadère.” “You can’t just act with your eyes,” Maya Jackson, a sophomore performing the role of Nikki in one of the casts, said in a telephone interview, “you have to use your whole body.”

Stanley Cannon, who is playing a cowboy, is enjoying something he doesn’t often get to do in classical ballets: being part of a male ensemble. But he’s also excited about the larger picture the production represents. “The coolest thing hands down about this has been seeing the future of ballet,” he said.

Or, as Chan put it, “how do we keep these works that are such an important part of our dance heritage alive, but without the parts that no longer serve us?”

Julie Robinson Belafonte, a dancer, actress and, with the singer Harry Belafonte, one half of an interracial power couple who used their high profiles to aid the civil rights movement and the cause of integration in the United States, died on March 9 in Los Angeles. She was 95.

Her death, at an assisted living facility in the Studio City neighborhood, was announced by her family. She had resided there for the last year and a half after living for decades in Manhattan.

Ms. Belafonte, who was white and the second wife of Mr. Belafonte, the Black Caribbean-American entertainer and activist, had an eclectic career in the arts. At various times she was a dancer, a choreographer, a dance teacher, an actress and a documentary film producer.

Ms. Belafonte traveled the nation and the world with her husband and their children during Mr. Belafonte’s sellout concert tours in the late 1950s and ’60s, presenting an image of a close interracial family that was otherwise rarely seen on television or in newspapers and magazines.

She was at Mr. Belafonte’s side when they planned and hosted fund-raisers for civil rights groups, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the more militant Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Mr. Belafonte died last April at 96, and during a memorial service for him on March 1, at Riverside Church in Manhattan, Ms. Belafonte’s efforts were remembered by their son, David Belafonte. “She marched, she endured racial hatred and abuse through the years,” he told the crowd, “when a high-profile relationship between a Black man and a white woman was seriously risky business.”

Julia Mary Robinson was born on Sept. 14, 1928, in Washington Heights in Manhattan to Clara and George Robinson, both of whom had Russian Jewish roots. She was raised in what she called “an interracial environment,” reared by liberal parents and going to school with both Black and white children, she told the magazine Redbook in 1958. She attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts), where she excelled at dance.

Around the age of 16, Ms. Robinson won a scholarship to the newly opened Katherine Dunham School of Dance in Manhattan and dropped out of high school to pursue a dance career. (She later earned her G.E.D. diploma.) She soon worked her way up to student-teacher at the school; among her students were Marlon Brando and Alvin Ailey, who was to gain fame as a dancer, choreographer and director.

When an opening came up at Ms. Dunham’s renowned all-Black dance company in the mid-1940s, Ms. Robinson auditioned in Philadelphia and was hired as its first white member.

“I never thought she’d integrate her company,” she recalled in an interview with the radio station WBAI in 2015, “but I knew I was a good dancer.”

Ms. Robinson, recognizable for her dark eyes, olive skin and black hair, which she wore in a distinctive ponytail or in pigtails that fell nearly to her waist, toured the world with the Dunham dancers, sometimes rooming with her fellow dancer Eartha Kitt, before Ms. Kitt became a celebrated singer and actress.

When the company was barred from hotels because of race, a not infrequent occurrence in the United States and abroad, Ms. Robinson insisted on staying wherever the other dancers stayed. She remained with the company for seven years.

By the early 1950s, her parents had moved to Los Angeles, and Ms. Robinson wound up in Hollywood, helping to choreograph dance sequences in at least one film and later obtaining small parts in a few others, including “Mambo,” a 1954 drama set in Italy and produced by Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti, and “Lust for Life,” the 1956 biopic about Vincent Van Gogh starring Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn. By then she was going by Julie rather than Julia.

She met Mr. Belafonte on the set of “Carmen Jones,” the 1954 movie musical in which he starred opposite Dorothy Dandridge, introduced to him by Mr. Brando, a good friend of Mr. Belafonte’s. She had dated Mr. Brando off and on for several years after appearing with him in a touring production of “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

Ms. Robinson and Mr. Belafonte became lovers, although Mr. Belafonte was still married to Margurite Belafonte, a Black schoolteacher and psychologist. He and Margurite (her given name has also appeared as Marguerite) separated shortly after, though in public they maintained the trappings of a happy marriage for the sake of his skyrocketing career.

Their marriage ended in divorce, in Las Vegas, in February 1957. Eight days later, Mr. Belafonte, about to turn 30, and Ms. Robinson, who was pregnant at 28, married in Mexico, Mr. Belafonte wrote in his 2011 book, “My Song: A Memoir of Art, Race, and Defiance.”

They had sought at first to keep the marriage a secret to protect Mr. Belafonte’s two young daughters, Adrienne and Shari, with his first wife, he wrote. But white gossip columnists and the Black press were hot on their trail, forcing his publicist to announce the marriage.

Interracial marriage was uncommon in America then — half the states still legally barred it — and the fact that Mr. Belafonte had divorced a Black woman and so quickly married a white one carried the whiff of scandal. While the liberal entertainment circles in which the Belafontes traveled largely accepted the union, Mr. Belafonte faced harsh criticism elsewhere, especially in the Black press, where some columnists disparaged him as a rich, successful Black man who was no longer content with a Black wife.

Mr. Belafonte, by then a well-known supporter of civil rights and integration, took to the pages of Ebony, the leading African American magazine, writing an essay to proclaim that race had nothing to do with the marriage. “I believe in integration and work for it with all my heart and soul,” he wrote. “But I did not marry Julie Robinson to further the cause of integration. I married her because I was in love with her and she married me because she was in love with me.”

The commotion eventually died down, and Ms. Belafonte put her career aside to start a family in Manhattan. But racial animus still trailed them. When their first child, David, was born in the fall of 1957, Ms. Belafonte received racist hate letters. “My first child,” she recalled in the WBAI interview. “Can you imagine?”

For months the Belafontes were unable to obtain a larger apartment in Manhattan because landlords and real estate agents refused to rent to an interracial couple, a predicament that made headlines. They eventually found an apartment on West End Avenue, where they lived for decades.

Their daughter, Gina, was born in 1961, and the family was frequently photographed as they arrived at airports during concert tours, took vacations or posed for newspaper and magazine profiles, helping to destigmatize interracial marriage in the United States.

As Mr. Belafonte’s role in the civil rights movement deepened, so did Ms. Belafonte’s. She planned fund-raisers for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, also known as SNCC, hosting events at their home and at hotels for New York’s liberal moneyed class. She co-founded, with the actress Diahann Carroll, SNCC’s “women’s division,” sticking with the organization even after it began to lose favor among many white Americans during the Black Power era.

At the Selma to Montgomery civil rights march in 1965, in which both Belafontes participated, it was Ms. Belafonte who told orange-jacketed private security forces that the ordinary citizens of Selma deserved to be at the front of it, ahead of the celebrities and dignitaries, and that’s where they were placed.

During her 50-year marriage to Mr. Belafonte, she sat in with him on strategy meetings with Dr. King at the couple’s apartment, dined with presidents at the White House and with foreign leaders abroad, including Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro. At a time when Cuba and the United States had no official channels of communication, she even passed messages from the government in Havana to American officials, according to a declassified State Department memo.

Ms. Belafonte pushed her own causes apart from her husband’s, in one case helping to organize, with Coretta Scott King, a women’s march against the Vietnam War in Washington in January 1968. In advance of the event she placed an ad in The New York Times asking women to “Make Womanpower Political Power.”

She occasionally joined Mr. Belafonte’s tours as a dancer and, when their children got older, acted in a few more movies, including “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), in which she appeared with Mr. Belafonte and Sidney Poitier as the wife of an Indian chief, earning critical praise. She had learned a Native American dialect for the role.

The Belafontes divorced in 2007, and Ms. Belafonte kept a lower profile thereafter. In her later years she produced two documentaries, “Ritmo del Fuego” (2006), about African cultural heritage in Cuba and the Caribbean, and “Flags, Feathers and Lies” (2009), about the resilience of the Mardi Gras Indian tradition in New Orleans.

Following Margurite Belafonte Mazique’s death in 1998, Ms. Belafonte assumed the role of family matriarch, not only to her own children but to those from Mr. Belafonte’s first marriage, Adrienne Belafonte Biesemeyer and Shari Belafonte. All of the children survive her, as well as three grandchildren.

“She was a real aggregator of types and created an atmosphere of diversity that was our home growing up,” David Belafonte said in an interview. “She opened the home to just a bouquet of people — it was staggering. And Julie was the social glue that held that stuff together. There was no person too big or too small whom she wouldn’t wrap her arms around and make them feel like they were part of the crew.”

“Illinoise,” a dance-driven, dialogue-free musical adapted from a much-loved 2005 album by Sufjan Stevens, will transfer to Broadway next month.

The show, which is a collaboration between the celebrated choreographer Justin Peck and the Pulitzer-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury, is to open on April 24 at the St. James Theater; the run is to be limited, with a scheduled closing date of Aug. 10.

“Illinoise” depicts a group of young creative people gathered around a campfire to share stories about their lives; it ultimately focuses on the life of a man who is finding his way while confronting grief. “A lot of the show is really about the catharsis of opening up to the community around oneself,” Peck, who is directing and choreographing the show, said in an interview.

“Illinoise” joins a crowded spring season on Broadway, which has a heavy concentration of openings in late April, posing significant economic challenges for producers because costs have risen and audience numbers have fallen since the coronavirus pandemic.

But the creators and backers of “Illinoise” want to capitalize on their show’s momentum: It is just wrapping up a sold-out run at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, and it also had successful runs earlier this year at Chicago Shakespeare Theater and last year at Bard College’s Fisher Center.

The transfer will be unusually fast, with just 29 days between the end of the run at the Armory and the start of the run at the St. James. There will be a brief rehearsal period, but no previews; the first performance will also be the opening, which is uncommon for Broadway.

“We have this kind of lightning in a bottle with this show that is not something that one can create intentionally,” Peck said. “We want to preserve the energy of the show, and the longer we wait between phases of this, the greater we risk losing what that energy is.”

“Illinoise” is performed by a dozen acting dancers and a trio of vocalists, along with a live band.

The show’s use of dance to drive a narrative is not unprecedented: The history of such so-called dansicals includes the Tony-winning “Contact,” which opened in 2000, as well as the 2002 production that most influenced Peck, “Movin’ Out,” which Twyla Tharp choreographed using the songs of Billy Joel.

“The music and the story and the movement combine in your own mind, rather than being combined onstage in front of you,” Drury said in an interview. “And there’s something about that that feels really beautiful and exciting. It just allows the audience to really empathize and connect emotionally with what’s going on onstage.”

The Broadway run is being produced by Orin Wolf, John Styles and David Binder, in association with Seaview.

When a repertory company comes to town with two programs, and one has a Rennie Harris dance on it, choose that. This Philadelphia hip-hop choreographer is a treasure and so are his dances.

“Dear Frankie,” the rousing closer to a program by Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, was such a poetic wonder — in sound, in look, in stillness and in action — that it almost made up for what had come before it. Almost. It was a long night.

Hubbard Street, now in its 46th season, returned to the Joyce Theater on Tuesday for a two-week run. (The program next week features works by Lar Lubovitch, Rena Butler and Aszure Barton.) Now under the artistic direction of Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell — a former company member who went on to be a much admired Alvin Ailey dancer — the group presented the New York premiere of Harris’s “Dear Frankie” along with works by Darrell Grand Moultrie and Thang Dao.

In “Dear Frankie,” Harris pays homage to a pioneer of Chicago’s house culture, the D.J. Frankie Knuckles. Known as the “godfather of house,” he was pivotal in introducing the genre to the world. The dance starts off slowly yet stylishly: James Clotfelter’s lighting immediately transports us to a club where, every so often, bright white beams flood light onto the stage. It’s so stark, so subtle in how it encloses the space, turning it into a haven.

At first dancers cluster at the center of the stage, but gradually they wander off, gliding together in small groups as they tickle the floor with footwork before slipping into other constellations of bodies. In these brief fragments, like tiny chapters building up to a book, the dancers find their bearings as the beat begins to soak into their skin. At one point, Abdiel Figueroa Reyes lets loose, his limbs rippling like spun silk.

Beyond steps, glorious as they are, Harris is passing on Chicago house culture. In a series of voice-overs, he and others describe the importance of the dance club the Warehouse, where people discovered freedom through movement and found their chosen families.

The dancers’ footwork starts out in fits and spurts, becoming more intricate, more full-bodied as Harris weaves slow motion within blissfully fast crossing feet and lanky arms. His deft musicality and visual finesse creates more than a dance. Harris molds the energy of a space as if it’s a spiritual act, transforming a proscenium stage into a club.

It helps that the dancers look like real people in Imani Sade’s separates, a mix of athletic and sensual. The music by Harris and the producer Darrin Ross — including the galvanizing “We Gon Be Alright,” which Ross composed, produced and mixed — carries the dancers to a sweeping, pulsating finale. Then Aaron Choate walks to the center of the stage, ponytail swinging, and arches under a spotlight topped with a strobe flash. In that second, the scene disappears as if Choate has ascended to heaven. This makes sense: House is heaven.

But the night had been a struggle up to that point. Another New York premiere, Thang Dao’s “Nevermore,” is inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” and Eastern folklore. Named after the Raven’s repeated refrain, “Nevermore,” the dance is an uneven weaving together of two stories.

The work, which includes a recitation of the poem as part of James G. Lindsay’s score, layers “The Raven,” in which a man descends into despair after the loss of his love, Lenore, with a folk tale in which a forbidden romance blooms between a weaver girl and a cowherd. The girl and the cowherd are separated by a celestial river, but are able to be together one day a year when a flock of magpies forms a bridge over it.

Elliot Hammans, in billowy white, sits on an armchair made up of dancers — they push him forward and pull back — as he yearns for Lenore (Jacqueline Burnett), in flowing red. They reappear later as the lovers in the folk tale. But this is really about the birds, dancers draped in black with red socks, who angle their arms like wings with flickering fingers and swirl around the stage in fluttering lines. Eventually Burnett is swallowed up by the flock, and Hammans resumes his place in his chair, a vision of, sorry, silly desperation.

The program led with Darrell Grand Moultrie’s well-meaning but seriously overwrought “Dichotomy of a Journey,” a seven-part dance starting with “Vitality” and ending with “Resilience.” In “Connection,” a duet for Burnett and David Schultz, the dancers touched the tips of their elbows with a strange kind of fervor — like a Covid date — before, eventually, writhing on the floor.

“Vision” featured Hammans, in white jeans, contorting and stretching as he reacted viscerally to the positivity and possibility of the lyrics to “In My Dreams” by V. Michael McKay: “I dreamed of a perfect place with but one human race.”

The choreography was more uplifting when all of the dancers converged as one in the final moments of “Resilience” to Donald Lawrence’s “Encourage Yourself (Live).” It was a bit hokey, but in the end, the idea of hope — seen through their shining eyes and expressive bodies — was contagious.

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago

Through March 24 at the Joyce Theater, Manhattan; joyce.org.

American Ballet Theater, one of the largest dance companies in the United States, has faced a series of challenges in recent months. Relations with the dancers have been tense, finances have been strained and the organization has lacked a permanent executive director.

On Thursday, Ballet Theater announced it was bringing in a dance veteran as it tries to move beyond its woes: Barry Hughson, executive director of the National Ballet of Canada, will join the company in that role in July. He succeeds Janet Rollé, who resigned suddenly last summer after 17 months on the job.

Hughson, 56, a former dancer, said in an interview that he was undaunted by Ballet Theater’s troubles.

“A.B.T. has been a company that I’ve loved since I was a 10-year-old ballet student watching Baryshnikov,” he said, referring to the star dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. “It’s such an important institution in American dance, and it’s a challenging time for the arts community right now.”

Ballet Theater’s leaders said they chose Hughson, executive director at the National Ballet of Canada since 2014, because of his extensive experience in the field. He has held top positions at Boston Ballet and Atlanta Ballet, among other organizations. They said he also showed an eagerness to work with Susan Jaffe, Ballet Theater's artistic director, who has served as interim executive director since Rollé’s departure.

“I expect and I hope it’ll be a wonderful, cooperative leadership team,” Andrew F. Barth, chairman of Ballet Theater’s board, said in an interview. “We’re going to have the opportunity to examine how to bring our art, how to bring this beautiful cultural aspect, to more people in more ways that are financially sound.”

Like most performing arts organizations, Ballet Theater, founded in 1939, suffered during the pandemic, which resulted in the cancellation of two seasons and cost the company millions of dollars in anticipated ticket revenue and touring fees.

But while audiences have returned — attendance is averaging about 69 percent of capacity, compared with 63 percent before the pandemic — Ballet Theater has been grappling with other financial challenges.

A major source of revenue for the company — its summer season at the Metropolitan Opera House — has been curtailed since 2022, when the Met extended its performances into June. That decision forced Ballet Theater, with a budget of $51 million, to reduce its season at the Met to five weeks from eight. Overall, the number of performances by Ballet Theater, which tours extensively, has fallen to 83 this season, compared with 114 in 2018-19.

And Ballet Theater’s subscriber base, which has traditionally provided an important source of revenue, has eroded, falling to 2,516 in the most recent season from 6,251 in 2018-19. The company has also seen philanthropic donations decline, though it declined to provide specifics. Laura Miller, a spokeswoman for Ballet Theater, did not give a reason, saying only that detailed fund-raising data was not available.

Relations between Ballet Theater’s administration and dancers have been tense recently because of heated negotiations over a new labor contract. The company reached a deal with dancers last month, agreeing to raises and other benefits.

Hughson said he would work to stabilize Ballet Theater’s finances and to help the company find new audiences. He said he wanted to expand the company’s presence in the New York market, which New York City Ballet has traditionally dominated. And he hopes to re-examine the company’s touring model, long Ballet Theater’s lifeblood, so that tours can be “artistically vibrant but also economically viable.”

“We know the glorious past of A.B.T.,” he said, “but it’s really about what stories are we going to tell, how are we going to support our artists and how are we going to create a sustainable model so that A.B.T. is here in another 80 years?”

The resignation of Rollé, just a week before the start of Ballet Theater’s 2023 summer season, came as a shock to the dance industry. Rollé, who had previously served as general manager of Beyoncé’s entertainment firm, did not offer an explanation, saying only that she would turn her focus to service on corporate and nonprofit boards.

Barth, the board chair, said that the job “wasn’t quite what she was expecting,” but that she had departed on good terms.

“I’m sure she’ll be coming to watch us at the ballet,” he said, “and I’ll greet her with a hug.”

Barth said the company had considered keeping Jaffe, a former star ballerina with the company, in place as both artistic and executive leader, but decided “it’s just too much work” for one person.

Hughson, whose career as a performer began at the Washington Ballet, said he hoped to have a long tenure. “It feels like the right place for me to spend the last 10 years of my career,” he said, “and see if I can make a difference.”