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DAY IN THE LIFE OF DANCE: In Motion with Jodi Melnick
By Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
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Published on March 25, 2026
Jodi Melnick; Photo: Julie Lemberger
As Melnick, Sara Mearns, and Cast Prepare for "Superbloom (Dancing Into Choreographic Forms)" at the 92NY
Superbloom (Dancing Into Choreographic Forms) runs March 27-28, 2026 at 92NY for Info and Tickets -Click Here.
Every Friday afternoon, Barnard Hall’s light-flooded, third-floor dance studio becomes a laboratory for Jodi Melnick and her students. From the hair piled on top of her head to the well-worn sneakers on her feet, Melnick sets the tone with her open and generously exacting demeanor. Since 2008, her modern dance class has drawn students of varying levels and backgrounds, from curious newcomers and science majors with a love for dance to aspiring ballerinas (pink tights and leotards peeking from under their sweatpants and t-shirts). Even seasoned professionals like me find a chance to discover something new in her class (this is my second time around). Though I’m twice the age of the average student, I don’t feel entirely out of place as I learn to delve deeper—I like moving with Jodi.
I like the way my body feels like a pinball machine, one I’ve built in meticulous stages, honing and testing its bolts and springs and hinges and polishing the shiny ball bearing of my gravity to a mirror finish. Melnick’s choreography, doled out in slippery morsels, maps my strategy without overdetermining my pathways, such that the moment I launch the shiny ball bearing of my gravity, I can trust that my pinball machine has been made sure and sturdy, open to wildly unexpected success, and the kinds of failure that only and always allow me to try again.
“Form over feeling,” she intones, and indeed, Melnick’s cueing—in shape, pattern, rhythm, coordination—serves to open avenues for experimentation through kinetic logic rather than define rigid aesthetics or rote technicality. As my gravity knocks about, I feel uncommonly loose, yet somehow I know where everything is, and after a while I don’t even have to think too hard about it—that would break the spell.
It’s not hard to draw the connection between Melnick’s untameable, yet cogent, physicality and the range of her four-decade career dancing among the giants of modern and postmodern dance: Twyla Tharp, Trisha Brown, Sara Rudner, Susan Rethorst, Vicky Shick, Donna Uchizono, and more. Melnick’s choreography draws tangibly from this lineage in her upcoming Superbloom (Dancing Into Choreographic Forms), an evening-length work developed with New York City Ballet principal dancer Sara Mearns, which will have its premiere later this month at 92NY. The two have worked together for over a decade, and their relationship has deepened with each creative process, allowing them to build trust, take risks, and tread on new territory.
Superbloom is presented as part of 92NY’s 2025-26 Women Move the World season celebrating the work of women choreographers, which inspired Melnick and Mearns to draw from a lineage of women dancemakers for their commission. Mearns will perform two solos by the early 20th century American modern dance pioneer Anna Sokolow. “Her work really caught me for its simplicity and its dramatic intent, and you don’t see a lot of it,” Menick reflects.
These repertory selections offer a point of departure for her own choreography to respond by way of her dancing history. With Rudner’s work in particular, Melnick’s process is intentionally grounded in her experience: “I’m learning it and I’m reimagining it and I’m adapting the material—I’m interested in material, not the content of what she was going for—so I’m just learning things that capture me, things that I’ve felt have gone through my body, detaching little sequences and eliding it into my own work with these ladies.”
These explorations and departures enliven Melnick’s choreographic voice through her understanding of these women’s embodied signatures. Their generosity lives on through her dialogues of transference with Mearns and the Superbloom cast. “This is my physical life,” she says, “This is my information that I’m eliding into a choreographic assemblage of how history has lived in my body and how I’m transmitting it.”
Dancers Tamisha Guy, Catherine Kirk, and Amanda Kmett’Pendry lend their voices, each with their respective lineages, to round out the stellar cast. With designs by sculptor John Monti, original music by composer James Lo, and costumes curated in collaboration with Niall Jones, Melnick is drawing from her wider community of postmodern and experimental artists to lend expansive yet personal dimensions to the work.
As they prepare to inhabit Superbloom’s expansive arc, Melnick relishes the commitment each artist brings, and trusts the thoroughgoing sense of liveness they’ll share together on stage. “I’m making a dance about dance, about dancing… I’m thinking of it as a ‘dance bomb,’” she says with a capacious gesture, “I want to just unwind the yarn, the knot—keep making knots of movement and unwinding and see what happens. I believe in the body. It’s all here.”
