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COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND LYLES & KING, NEW YORK; PHOTOGRAPH BY CHARLES BENTONILLUSTRATION BY SEBASTIAN CURI
Made to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the seminal album “Sgt. Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band,” Mark Morris’s “Pepperland,” which premièred
in 2017 and gets its New York début, with the Mark Morris Dance Group,
at BAM (May 8-11), isn’t a sing-along kind of Beatles tribute. The music has
been thoroughly reimagined, by Ethan Iverson, to emphasize the eclecticism
of the original, isolating and expanding details and defamiliarizing it with
slightly off-kilter instrumentation (guitars, no; theremin, yes). It’s a sort of
fantasia on themes in “Sgt. Pepper,” and so is Morris’s choreography, which
touches on romance, hippie spirituality, and loneliness. His ever-appealing
dancers, in mod outfits, fold in both dances of the period and those already
antiquated by the sixties, echoing the album’s music-hall nostalgia. There’s
some cheeky Morris-style illustration of text, too, but in this case not all the
words need to be sung, since everyone knows them anyway.—Brian SeibertMODERNDANCE
1
DANCE
New York City Ballet
David H. Koch
Jerome Robbins’s “Dances at a Gathering” re-
turns this week (the evening of May 11) for the
first of four performances. This work, from 1969,
set to Chopin piano pieces, is one of Robbins’s
most poetic. Here, the stage becomes a dream
space, in which memories, past loves, friend-
ships, sorrow, and youthful games pass before
our eyes. Another Robbins ballet, the male solo
“A Suite of Dances,” set to Bach’s suites for un-
accompanied cello, reveals the choreographer’s
ability to craft movement that seems to emerge
almost spontaneously from the music.—Marina
Harss (Through June 2.)American Ballet Theatre
Metropolitan Opera House
The city enters peak ballet season this week,
with its two major companies facing off across
the plaza at Lincoln Center. A.B.T. begins eight
weeks at the Metropolitan Opera House with
a kind of Alexei Ratmansky retrospective—the
choreographer has been at the company for a
decade. It begins with his charming rendition of
Marius Petipa’s 1900 commedia-dell’arte ballet
“Harlequinade” (May 13-18). After that comes
a trio of shorter Ratmansky works, including a
new ballet set to Alexander Glazunov’s rich and
danceable suite “The Seasons.” A Twyla Tharp
program, two weeks later (May 30-June 3), in-
cludes an exciting company première, “Deuce
Coupe,” from 1973, a playful, all-American romp
to music by the Beach Boys, originally made
for the Joffrey. For those who like their ballet
with a heavy dose of drama, there is another
company première, “Jane Eyre,” by the British
choreographer Cathy Marston. The work, which
is set to a selection of nineteenth-century music,
premièred at Northern Ballet, in 2016, to good
reviews.—M.H. (Through July 6.)Live Ideas 2019
New York Live Arts
This year’s festival has artificial intelligence
on the brain. The main event, “discrete figures
2019,” is an augmented-reality piece that brings
together the media-art firm Rhizomatiks Re-
search and the all-female dance troupe Eleven-
play, both from Japan, and the American coding
artist Kyle McDonald. Amid the avatars and
the state-of-the-art interplay between virtual
and physical, the choreography, by Mikiko, is
like the walking and posing in a fashion show:
functional, designed to show off the merchan-
dise. Hovering drones, rather than graphics,
seem to offer the brightest possibilities for new
beauty.—Brian Seibert (May 8-11.)Australian Ballet
Joyce Theatre
Making its Joyce début as the closer for the two-
week Australia Festival, the company shows
off its resident choreographers. From Stephen
Baynes, a veteran who signed on in 1995, comes
“Unspoken Dialogues,” a love-on-the-rocks duet.
Tim Harbor, on the job since 2014, unveils aworld première, set to John Adams’s “Chairman
Dances.” But the news is Alice Topp, a dancer
in the troupe who was given a resident-choreog-
rapher post last year. “Aurum,” her gold-toned
work about seeing the beauty in cracks and fis-
sures, shows why.—B.S. (May 9-12.)“Black Velvet”
BAM Fisher
In dim light, with their shaved heads and bare
torsos sheathed in metallic paint, Shamel Pitts
and Mirelle Martins could be mistaken for twins.
There are differences, of course: gender, height,
background. Martins is a Brazilian performance
artist who had no dance training before she at-
tended a Gaga class taught by Pitts, a Brook-
lyn-born alum of the Batsheva Dance Company.
But this work, “Black Velvet: Architectures and
Archetypes”—sometimes imagistic, like a fash-
ion shoot, sometimes repetitively physical, like
a ritual—is more about similarities and symbi-
osis.—B.S. (May 9-12.)Elisa Monte Dance
Flea
This company has been slowly shifting shape
since Tiffany Rea-Fisher became the artisticdirector, in 2016. One work on the current
program is by the troupe’s founder, Monte’s
“Dreamtime,” from 1986, inspired by Austra-
lian Aboriginal culture. The rest is by Rea-
Fisher: “And Then They Were,” a meditative
première that novelly incorporates point work;
an excerpt of “The Best Self-Project,” set to
text by the artist Anohni; and a preview of
“H.E.R.,” a work celebrating women of the
Harlem Renaissance.—B.S. (May 9-12.)Alvin Ailey
New Jersey Performing Arts Center
Across the Hudson, Alvin Ailey American
Dance Theatre performs three shows. The
first two nights include “Lazarus,” Rennie
Harris’s compelling two-part work inspired
by the legacy of Ailey and how it was con-
nected to the civil-rights movement. Many
of the piece’s images are dark, but it eventu-
ally resolves into an exhilarating celebration
of life, dance, and the body in motion. It
is followed by—you guessed it—“Revela-
tions.” The program on the third night is a
compendium of excerpts from various Alvin
Ailey works, from the 1958 “Blues Suite” to
“Pas de Duke” and “Opus McShann,” cre-
ated just three years before Ailey’s death, in
1989.—M.H. (May 10-12.)”
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