From the best new Broadway shows to groundbreaking downtown experiments, it was a very good year for New York theater.
It's slightly disconcerting when the best dance of the year occurred early on, but that was the case with Jennifer Monson's Live Dancing Archive, which drew on her blessedly long career as one of New York's finest dance artists. New ballets by Justin Peck, Alexei Ratmansky and Robert Garland—Dance Theatre of Harlem's resident choreographer and one of the ballet world's most valuable, if underutilized, choreographers—were in full swing, and Thomas Benjamin Snapp Pryor's Festival TBD: Emergency Glitter placed a well-deserved spotlight on the work of a younger generation. Here are some highlights of 2013.
Those quiet dances that you can't quite forget
It’s true, right? Melanie Maar’s Our Other; Gwen Welliver’s Beasts and Plots; Joanna Kotze’s It Happened It Had Happened It Is Happening It Will Happen; and Fanny de Chaillé’s The Library.
And on the bigger, even bombastic side
Pam Tanowitz’s The Spectators (the first 20 minutes were a miracle), pictured; Pascal Rambert’s A (micro) history of world economics, danced; and Matthew Neenan’s The Last Glass for Ballet X.
FINAL GRADE: B+ Don’t get me wrong—there were terrible shows. But what rises to the surface matters.
