In Akram Khan’s version of the classical story ballet for English National Ballet, rather than being a peasant, “Giselle is one of a community of migrant garment factory workers (the Outcasts),” according to the program notes. The noblemen have been replaced by Landlords who see the factory workers “as little more than exotic entertainment” and are content to ignore the Outcasts’ needs to promote their own personal gain.

Kyle Abraham’s piece, An Untitled Love, made its New York debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Strong Harvey Theater on February 23. The cast of 10 dancers honors Black History Month by embodying black excellence and the aesthetic of the cool. A dancer casually entering the space marks the beginning of the show, and a couch, plant, lamp and rug establish a living room setting. We are offered an intimate glimpse into a community brimming with utopian energy. From sultry duets to spicy trios, groups of people coalesce and expand like elementary particles or pass through abruptly like cross-currents. Soulful step touches and suave low ball changes are characterized by an effortless groove that pervades the entirety of the piece. The energy is clean but not stale, flirty but not vulgar, celebratory and laid back in a way that makes the audience feel comfortable. At home. From flashy technical elements like suspended turns and explosive leaps to pedestrian gestures like hand holding, chip snacking, juicebox sucking and conversing in tight clumps, classical “dancey” moments are seamlessly folded into the vernacular of the everyday. Black diasporic dance forms as well as contemporary floorwork also have a home in Abraham’s choreographic vocabulary, and facial expressions are unrestrained, filled with joy, feigned disgust and many emotions in between. We get the feeling that the dancers are dancing for and showing off to each other with subtle winks at the audience during certain, well-timed moments.

Armitage Gone! Dance’s A Pandemic Notebook is a series of short works that brings together screendance and live performance in an evening characterized by experimental costuming, a great deal of silence and leg flicks, and lots of green light. Nothing in the evening feels improvised besides the speech given by Karole Armitage about her prolific artistic history when the film projector tragically breaks down mid-show. Dancer Sierra French stands out for her impeccable technique and near flawless execution.

In her solo performance, When Delicacy Unfolds Strength, Mareike Jung “explores dynamics and effects of power in the eye of the storm.” Surrounded by a dense fog, the performer enters a ring of 12 identical fans facing outward. She turns them on methodically, clockwise, one by one, expelling the fog from the center and then turning the fans inward. The only text in the piece is delivered via voiceover (German with English subtitles) as she walks the circular path within the fans. While the substance of the text is somewhat cryptic, its matter of fact delivery and clear placement at the beginning of the piece demand to be made much of. In a mysterious ancestral realm governed by recursive cycles, “mother of… mother of… mother of…” evolves to “daughter of… daughter of… daughter of…” until the cycle terminates in “a child,” a gender neutral entity that has perhaps finally been freed. “Unbreak the circle. Give me a break,” the calm voice requests. Rather than connoting comfort, the phrase “you are not alone” feels stifling, crowded within a dense generational weave which must be somehow dissipated, much like the fog the piece began with. “That heaviness that isn’t mine.”

Kyle Abraham’s piece, An Untitled Love, made its New York debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Strong Harvey Theater on February 23. The cast of 10 dancers honors Black History Month by embodying black excellence and the aesthetic of the cool. A dancer casually entering the space marks the beginning of the show, and a couch, plant, lamp and rug establish a living room setting. We are offered an intimate glimpse into a community brimming with utopian energy. From sultry duets to spicy trios, groups of people coalesce and expand like elementary particles or pass through abruptly like cross-currents. Soulful step touches and suave low ball changes are characterized by an effortless groove that pervades the entirety of the piece. The energy is clean but not stale, flirty but not vulgar, celebratory and laid back in a way that makes the audience feel comfortable. At home. From flashy technical elements like suspended turns and explosive leaps to pedestrian gestures like hand holding, chip snacking, juicebox sucking and conversing in tight clumps, classical “dancey” moments are seamlessly folded into the vernacular of the everyday. Black diasporic dance forms as well as contemporary floorwork also have a home in Abraham’s choreographic vocabulary, and facial expressions are unrestrained, filled with joy, feigned disgust and many emotions in between. We get the feeling that the dancers are dancing for and showing off to each other with subtle winks at the audience during certain, well-timed moments.

For all its colorful chit-chat, The Mood Room presents a remarkably one-dimensional, insular world organized by a sense of privilege so vast that life itself is zapped of any substantive meaning. Big Dance Theater’s latest production created by Annie-B Parson may be based off a play written by Guy de Cointet in the 1980s as a critical response to the Reagan-era “Me” generation, but its ability to turn the deep shallow, to see-nothing-hear-nothing-do-nothing without ever ceasing to move or talk, to extinguish human emotions like grief and desire with distraction and luxury feels uncomfortably contemporary.

Under the guidance of Director/House Choreographer Paul Lightfoot and Artistic Advisor/House Choreographer Sol León, Nederlands Dans Theater celebrated its 60th anniversary as a company from March 4-7, at New York City Center, performing for a packed house. The program ran nearly three hours with two intermissions and consisted of the U.S. premieres of three relatively long pieces: The Missing Door (2013), choreographed by Gabriela Carrizo; Walk the Demon (2018), choreographed by Marco Goecke; and Shut Eye (2016), choreographed by León and Lightfoot.

Peeping Tom’s 32 rue Vandenbranden ran from November 20-23, at the Harvey Theater as part of Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. The hour-and-20-minute work was conceived and directed by Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier and premiered in 2009.