AUG 14-19

Following the success of its 2016 Joyce engagement, The Sarasota Ballet returns with a special program comprised of selections from its vast repertoire by world-renowned choreographers like Sir Frederick Ashton, George Balanchine, Dame Ninette de Valois, Twyla Tharp, Sir David Bintley, Christopher Wheeldon, and Sir Matthew Bourne. Audiences are certain to delight in this marvelous company’s “meticulous, juicy performance” (The New York Times) of ballet classics.

SEP 24–28

John Jasperse, described by The New York Times as both “dryly sophisticated and cerebral” and “deeply silly and moving and smart,” returns to The Joyce to present Hinterland. A varied group of dancers, including Jasperse, comes together with a commissioned score by Hahn Rowe, to build a micro-community, where dance is both celebration and a refuge from the wreckage of culture and history. 

SEP 29–OCT 1

Kyle Abraham’s A.I.M is back with the intimate and evocative Dearest Home. Exploring themes of love, longing, and loss, the work features a lush collection of solos and duets performed by Abraham’s raw and powerful dancers. Dearest Home is a love letter to relationships and a meditation on memories.

OCT 2–6

“Inquisitive” and “rivetingly strange” (The Village Voice), contemporary dance makers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener—who met while performing in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company—work with structured improvisations to create dance that is both formal and radical. In a world premiere for The Joyce’s expanded stage, the company searches for new paths to a utopia that is constantly making and unmaking itself.

OCT 4–7

One of the most arresting choreographic talents to emerge in recent years, Beth Gill makes her Joyce debut with a world premiere. The piece utilizes symbolism and storytelling to weave surreal landscapes and rogue characters in a dreamlike space that reaches for the past and future simultaneously. Strongly influenced by the fields of psychology and visual design, Gill creates works of dark beauty toned with the themes of alienation, objectification, female sexuality, rage, and obsession.

OCT 10–13

Recognized for her vivid imagery and wit laced with unexpected beauty, Donna Uchizono makes a long-awaited return to The Joyce with a world premiere. Featuring six dancers, the work acknowledges the NY Quadrille's four-perspective stage, and explores what seeps through the cracks of confinement. 

Photo by Julieta Cervantes

OCT 17–21

Showcasing powerful Afro-Colombian and Afro-contemporary dance with live drumming and singing, Colombian dance troupe SANKOFA DANZAFRO presents The City of Others. This episodic work about urban struggle and resilience is “judicious in form, resonant with meaning, and delivered in dance languages that run the gamut from diasporic African to Latinised hip hop” (The Financial Times).

OCT 23–25

Choreographer for leading international dance companies, filmmaker, and artistic director of Danish Dance Theatre, Pontus Lidberg returns to The Joyce with the U.S. premiere of SIREN. Taking inspiration from Ulysses’ encounter with the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey, the dance investigates desire and isolation in a social media driven world.

OCT 27–28

Jonah Bokaer Choreography kicks off its 15th Anniversary with a long-awaited Joyce debut. Eight international dancers present visually striking works rarely seen in the United States, including the world premiere of Late Nights On Air, which features live music by Nico Muhly interpreted by renowned violin duo Angela & Jennifer Chun. Master Architect Charles Renfro designs the evening with a "total environment" that integrates design, space, and light.

OCT 30–NOV 4

A true New York treasure, internationally acclaimed Garth Fagan Dance returns with technique that marries the gravity of modern dance, the precision of ballet, and the power of Afro-Caribbean styles. This engagement includes dynamic world premieres by Garth Fagan and Norwood Pennewell, as well as stirring revivals from the company’s vibrant archive.

Award-winning choreographer and director Arthur Pita—who also created The Metamorphosis, performed at The Joyce in 2013—joins forces with sensational American Ballet Theatre principal James Whiteside to present The Tenant. Based on the novel by surrealist Roland Topor and set in Paris in the near future, this dance play, which also features ABT soloist Cassandra Trenary, chronicles a harrowing and fascinating descent into madness brought to life by acclaimed ballet stars.

The Joyce presents one of this century’s most acclaimed artists, Twyla Tharp, in a program focused on her early dances. In Minimalism and Me, Tharp recollects the creation of her seminal early works and their relationship to the minimalist period in visual art.

DEC 11–30

Celebrate the holiday season with another round of brilliant pointe work and hilarious parodying of ballet classics by your favorite men in tights. Program A features the always delightful Act II of Swan Lake and Petipa’s The Little Humpbacked Horse, a perfect vehicle for the Trocks’ zany interpretation.

JAN 3&7

Stephen Petronio Company returns to The Joyce with bold dancing marked by “fearless attack and whip-quick control” (The New Yorker). The program includes the 2018 work Hardness 10, with music by Nico Muhly and costumes by Patricia Field, and Steve Paxton’s virtuosic and sinewy Excerpt from Goldberg Variations, from 1986.

JAN 4&6

BalletX, Philadelphia’s premier contemporary ballet, has been recognized by The New York Times for “three-dimensional dancing that you feel as you watch.” The company is set to perform Trey McIntyre’s Soul Train-inspired The Boogeyman, featuring music by Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Gilbert O’Sullivan, and Earth, Wind & Fire, plus a surprise premiere.

JAN 5&6

Bessie-award winning choreographer Ephrat Asherie collaborates with renowned jazz pianist Ehud Asherie on Riff this, Riff that. Exploring the jazz dance roots of breaking, hip hop, and house, this brother and sister duo is joined by an all-star cast of performers who take on the choreographer’s rapid-fire movement, which features “compact bursts of choreography” that “bubble up and dissipate, quickly paving the way for something new” (The New York Times). 

JAN 9–13

Malpaso Dance Company comes back to The Joyce with its dazzling, classically trained dancers in Tabula Rasa, a hard-driving work by choreographer Ohad Naharin, who recently traveled to Cuba to restage this rarely performed dance. Additional works from the company’s growing repertory—which includes pieces by internationally recognized choreographers and promising Cuban talent—will round out the program.

One of Cuba’s most daring contemporary dance makers, George Céspedes makes his U.S. debut with The Last Resource. With a musical collage that extends from heavy metal to electronica to the work of Cuban singer-songwriters, the dance deals with the alienation of the human spirit, and reflects upon uncertainty and change.

JAN 18–20

Praised as “intense” and “exacting” by The New York Times, with a vivacious ensemble that “has succeeded in positioning itself among the best of the Spanish genre in Cuba” (Granma, Cuba), Irene Rodriguez follows up her wildly successful 2016 Joyce debut with an exhilarating program of short works, Mas Que Flamenco.

JAN 23–27

Sharon Eyal’s Love Chapter 2 is a spellbinding and provocative dance that stares unflinchingly at isolation and loneliness. Blending striking imagery with intoxicatingly powerful movement, the work explores what we are left with when our connection to each other breaks down. Driven forward by the pulsating techno beats of DJ Ori Lichtik, the dance is an uninhibited and exhilarating look at the inexplicable nature of love.

JAN 29–FEB 3

Experience BalletBoyz’ ground-breaking stage show and award-winning film, Young Men, brought together to tell a story of love, friendship, loss, and survival. Live performance is beautifully interwoven with moving image to chronicle the journeys of those sent to fight in the First World War. BalletBoyz dancers burst from screen onto stage, performing to an evocative and mesmeric score composed by cult singer/songwriter Keaton Henson, and recorded by the BBC Concert Orchestra.

FEB 5–10

Propelled by the live rhythms and sounds of traditional African and handmade instruments, Camille A. Brown’s ink celebrates the rituals, gestures, and traditions of the African diaspora. Highlighting themes of brotherhood, community and resilience, the work seeks to reclaim African American narratives, and is the final installment of Brown’s dance theater trilogy about identity.

FEB 12–17

The boldly inventive choreographer and artistic director of Gallim, Andrea Miller, returns to The Joyce after a year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as its first choreographic Artist-in-Residence to present the world premiere of To Create a World. The piece is a culmination of research that began at the ancient Temple of Dendur and resulted in a unique movement language that takes audiences from a pre-human past to a post-human future.