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      In Paris, Using Dance to Uncover Hidden History

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      Benjamin Millepied, an organizer of La Ville Dansée — a daylong event in Paris and its environs — wants “to tell the invisible stories of the city.”Benjamin Millepied thinks big.La Ville Dansée, a free festival of outdoor dance on Saturday, is the first large-scale initiative from Millepied’s Paris Dance Project. Starting at 11 in the morning and ending after midnight, it involves 12 choreographers and seven commissions; 10 neighborhoods in Paris and its outlying suburbs; podcasts, screenings and live streams. The Paris Dance Project, which Millepied formed last year with Solenne du Haÿs Mascré, is not a dance company, but an organization that creates educational programs and accessible performances. La Ville Dansée (“the dancing city”), part of the Cultural Olympiad — a program of arts events around the Olympics — is its biggest splash yet, intended to show Paris and its environs not just as gorgeous settings for performance, but as places with hidden or forgotten histories.Millepied returned to live in Paris last year after a decade spent mostly in Los Angeles. His last Parisian sojourn, 2014-2016, included a brief, contentious, term as the director of the Paris Opera Ballet, which he said provided some seeds for the idea of La Ville Dansée.“I was running the best-funded institution in France, but only a fraction of society felt invited,” Millepied said in an interview in Paris in May. “It made me think about how much segregation there is, how people can have a very different experience in the same place. I decided we would commission works to tell the invisible stories of the city to gather people together who would never go to the theater, to build empathy and community.”Millepied and du Haÿs Mascré gathered a small core team that included, unusually, a political theorist, Françoise Vergès, and a sociologist, Fabien Truong, as well as the dramaturg Christian Longchamp. Over months of weekly meetings, they discussed and identified sites for dance — some famous, like the Eiffel Tower and the Jardin du Luxembourg; others little known, like an abandoned supermarket in the town of Grigny and Saint-Bernard de la Chapelle, a church that was the site of a notable police raid on migrants in 1996.Millepied researched and chose the diverse group of choreographers. Then came the logistics of raising money, getting permissions and coordinating technical teams across the city.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mira Nadon, a Once-in-a-Generation Dancer at City Ballet

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      Mira Nadon, the rising New York City Ballet principal, is coming off her best season yet. And it’s only the beginning.Mira Nadon was 5 when she took her first ballet class. It was pre-ballet, which meant running around the studio, maybe getting a shot at fluttering like a butterfly. This was not for her.When she found out that students began proper training at 6, Nadon laid it on the line: “I told my mom, ‘This isn’t serious,’” she said. “‘I’m just going to wait till I’m 6.’”Even then Nadon was levelheaded and unflappable. Now, at just 23, she is a principal dancer with New York City Ballet, approaching the close of a momentous season at Lincoln Center, where her versatility, artistry and jaw-dropping abandon have made her seem like a ballerina superhero. This week, she returns to the role of Helena, the rejected young woman determined to win her lover back in George Balanchine’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” An affinity for drama is in her bones, but something else makes Nadon a rarity: humor.Nadon, the first Asian American female principal dancer at City Ballet, is a special, once-in-a-generation kind of dancer. Nadon can flip among many sides of herself — secretive, seductive, funny, serene. And she lives on the edge, with rapid shifts from romantic elegance to ferocious force. A principal since 2023, Nadon still has raw moments, but so much is starting to click: Her feet are more precise, her partnering more secure.Nadon in Pam Tanowitz’s “Gustave Le Gray No. 1.” “She doesn’t dance at you, she draws the audience in, and that’s her power,” Tanowitz said. “It’s almost like she’s letting us in on this intimate part of herself.”Erin Baiano“To watch her grow — and it’s not been very long — has been tremendous,” Wendy Whelan, the company’s associate artistic director, said. “It’s fast and big and just blossoming.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At DanceAfrica, the Enduring Power of Love

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      A couple with deep ties to the popular Brooklyn festival and its founder and longtime artistic director, Chuck Davis, recall when their wedding was part of the show.Not every love story has a third character, but in the case of N’Goma and Normadien Woolbright, there was one, and he was a force of nature: Chuck Davis, who brought African dance traditions to the United States and founded the DanceAfrica festival. It was his idea that the couple — his friends and colleagues — would marry on the stage of the Brooklyn Academy of Music at the annual festival in 1983.“Life is love,” Davis says in a video shot at the wedding, crossing his arms across his chest before reaching them broadly to either side. “Love is all.”The wedding was a lavish occasion, but it was more than a theatrical staging of a ritual. DanceAfrica, the vibrant festival now in its 47th year, is as much about building and honoring a community as it is about showcasing artistic forms. Personal moments like the Woolbrights’ marriage ceremony are part of its texture.Davis brought the couple — N’Goma, 80, is a drummer and Normadien, 71, a dancer — together by bringing them into his world. They have been involved with the festival since its inaugural presentation, first as performers and now as fixtures behind the scenes. At DanceAfrica, N’Goma is a stage manager; Normadien is assistant stage manager.N’Goma first met Davis while working for the New York Transit Authority. Davis’s musical director worked there too, N’Goma said, and he “wanted me to come down to a dance class with him because I told him I played the drums. I went down to play and Chuck said, ‘Welcome aboard.’”A DanceAfrica wedding: In 1983, N’Goma, middle, and Normadien, right, got married onstage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.BAM Hamm ArchivesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Master of ‘Subtle Dazzle’ and a Quiet Force in Downtown Dance

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      Carol Mullins, who has been lighting boundary-pushing shows at Danspace Project since the 1970s, will be honored at its 50th anniversary.Carol Mullins knows the secrets of St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. She knows that it’s strangely colder by the crypt of Peter Stuyvesant, who had the first chapel built on the site, now in the East Village, in 1660. She knows which architectural features predate the fire that destroyed much of the late-18th-century building in 1978. She knows the location of the hidden trapdoor that leads to the rafters of the arch above the nave.“It’s a wonderland of wood,” she said recently. “It looks like an upturned boat in there.”Mullins, 85, knows all this because just before that fire, she started designing lighting for Danspace Project, which has been presenting performances in the church since 1974. In 1982, she became the resident lighting designer, a position she still holds.At Danspace’s 50th anniversary gala on Tuesday, Mullins will be among the honorees. It’s an acknowledgment of one of the under-sung troopers essential to dance in New York, especially the underfunded, boundary-pushing “downtown” kind that Danspace has fostered.When people ask her why she has stayed there so long, she replies that she’s still learning, “and there’s a new set of problems every couple weeks.”After so many years, St. Mark’s Church is a palimpsest of memories for Mullins. An early one involves the choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones, whose work “Relatives” Mullins lit in 1982. For the end of the dance, during which Houston-Jones jumped as the lights faded, he told her to keep the lights up “as long as you like it.”“I thought it looked fabulous,” Mullins recalled. “So he’s dying out there, jumping and jumping. Since then, he occasionally jokes about my sense of timing.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘So Far From Ukraine’: A Princely Dancer Finds a Home in Miami

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      Stanislav Olshanskyi has had to battle homesickness and adjust to Miami City Ballet’s style: quick, light, constantly in motion. He’s also the prince in “Swan Lake.”“Imagine you’ve been rushing through the forest for hours,” the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky called out to Stanislav Olshanskyi as he ran across an airy ballet studio in Miami Beach. Olshanskyi, playing a prince, was searching for the woman he has been duped into betraying. “You are just now realizing the consequences of what you’ve done,” Ratmansky said. “How does it feel?”Outside, visible through large windows, people passed by, dressed for the beach. Inside, the willowy, delicate-featured Olshanskyi — a prince out of a fairy tale — gathered his thoughts and tried his entrance again, this time conveying the requisite urgency, verging on panic.It was a week before the opening of Miami City Ballet’s “Swan Lake,” which the company performs in a critically acclaimed production by Ratmansky that draws on historical sources, and is rich in choreographic and dramatic detail. Ratmansky, artist in residence at New York City Ballet, was in town overseeing rehearsals for the ballet, which runs through May 12.Olshanskyi, who grew up in Kremenets, in western Ukraine and trained in Kyiv, is just one of many artists displaced by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The idea of ending up in Miami, where he joined the company in 2022, would never have crossed his mind had it not been for the war. So much so that when Lourdes Lopez, the director of Miami City Ballet, reached out to him, eager to help a Ukrainian dancer at loose ends, he hesitated. “I was not sure,” he said. “Miami is so far from Ukraine, from Europe.”Olshanskyi and Dawn Atkins of Miami City Ballet in Alexei Ratmansky’s production of “Swan Lake.”Alexander IziliaevBut even so far from home, thoughts of war are never distant. “The war is always present,” Olshanskyi said after rehearsal. “When you’re not thinking about it, suddenly something will remind you.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Saddling Up and Feeling Spry at Martha Graham

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      Under the banner “American Legacies,” the Martha Graham Dance Company dusted off a classic, “Rodeo,” premiered a companion piece and welcomed FKA twigs for a guest solo at City Center.The Martha Graham Dance Company won’t turn 100 until 2026, but evidently it’s not too early to start celebrating. The company is commemorating the milestone with not one, but three New York seasons, the first of which opened on Wednesday at New York City Center.“We couldn’t fit it into one year,” Janet Eilber, the company’s artistic director, said in a curtain speech, adding, “We’re feeling pretty spry for our age.”Under the title “American Legacies,” the season includes a new production of Agnes de Mille’s “Rodeo,” her 1942 ballet set on a ranch in the American Southwest; the New York premiere of “We the People,” choreographed by Jamar Roberts to music by Rhiannon Giddens; and Graham’s “The Rite of Spring” (1984), among other works.Some of this feels more dated or dutiful than spry, but one part of the gala program on Thursday really had the theater buzzing: a guest appearance by the British singer-songwriter FKA twigs. The company connected with her on Instagram last year after FKA twigs, who grew up training in a number of dance styles, including the Graham technique, shared one of its posts.In her interpretation of Graham’s brief comic solo “Satyric Festival Song” (1932), she held nothing back, imbuing its springy jumps, quizzical glances and whole-body shudders with both carefree self-assurance and reverent focus. She may not have the chiseled contractions of a lifelong Graham dancer, but she knows how to hold an audience’s attention. Introducing her, the longtime company dancer Lloyd Knight called FKA twigs “the newest member of the Martha Graham Dance Company family.”In her interpretation of Graham’s brief comic solo “Satyric Festival Song,” FKA twigs held nothing back.Rachel Papo for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      FKA twigs Dances Martha Graham: ‘This Is Art in Its Truest Form’

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      Once a young bunhead, the acclaimed musical artist is taking the stage with the Martha Graham Dance Company. For her, this is holy grail territory.The rebellious spirit of Martha Graham has found a rebellious soul mate in another creative powerhouse. A classically trained dancer, she’s known in the world as an acclaimed recording artist. She moves like water. Her pole dancing is pretty astounding, too. This is FKA twigs.On Thursday, she will make her debut as a dancer with the Graham company in the solo “Satyric Festival Song” (1932). “To me, this is, honestly, like winning a Grammy,” she said. “I feel like I’m winning a Grammy.”At the company’s gala performance, FKA twigs will slip into her costume, a bold and graphic striped dress designed by Graham. She will pop into the air as if the floor were on fire. She will twist and bend her body into jagged edges. And she will tease the audience with tilts of the head and dancing, expressive eyes. This is a solo inspired by rituals that Graham observed in the pueblos of the American Southwest, specifically, the kachina figures that served as comic relief at religious ceremonies. Graham was also poking fun at her serious, dramatic self.“To me, this is, honestly, like winning a Grammy,” FKA twigs said of dancing with the Graham company. Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesAn artist of vast imagination whose music defies genre, FKA twigs is adventurous in all of her pursuits. Her shimmering, fluent physicality, displayed over the years in videos and performances, is equally fearless and lissome. “My values of success and achievement are maybe slightly different to other people’s,” FKA twigs said in an interview from London. Many of her colleagues will be at Coachella over the next two weeks, “which is obviously such an honor,” she said. “But I’ve spent the whole of my life in the dance studio. I studied Martha Graham’s technique at dance school. I took the class many times when I was a younger dancer.”The Graham company, though, didn’t know she had studied the technique. So how did this solo happen? Through that unofficial dance network known as Instagram.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Look at Washington State’s ‘Strippers’ Bill of Rights’

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      Signed into law by Gov. Jay Inslee, the legislation provides wide-ranging protections for adult dancers.Washington State recently enacted a law that includes wide-ranging workplace protections for adult dancers, who have long fought for such measures across the country.The law, known as the Strippers’ Bill of Rights, was signed by Gov. Jay Inslee on March 25. It includes anti-discrimination provisions and mandatory club employee training.Supporters of the law say that it includes incentives for establishments to comply, as it carves a path for them to obtain liquor licenses. The state traditionally has prohibited venues that allow sexual performances to sell alcohol.“It is crucial that we confront the stigma surrounding adult entertainment and recognize the humanity of those involved in the industry,” State Senator Rebecca Saldaña of Seattle, a Democrat who sponsored the legislation, said in a statement.“Strippers are workers,” she said, “and they should be given the same rights and protections as any other labor force.”Madison Zack-Wu, the campaign manager for Strippers Are Workers, a dancer-led organization that supported the bill, said in an interview that “the most important part of this policy is that it was created by dancers, for ourselves in our own working conditions.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More