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By Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
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Published on January 19, 2026
Jo Warren's "All Mouth" (world premiere) Photo: Steven Pisano*
Featuring Isa Spector & Derek Smith, Anonymous Ensemble, Kashia Kancey,Suzanne Ponomarenko,Dominica Greene,Sugar Vendil,Alexa Grae, and Jo Warren
*Dancers in header photo: Sofia Franklin, Cullan Powers, Maddie Hopfield, Paris Cullen, Meg Herzfeld
Suzzanne Ponomarenko's Selections From: Tapestries (world premiere) with Piper Makenzie Dye, Dalton Young and Illustration: Emmy Castellani ; Photo: Steven Pisano
Every January, the New York dance scene revives from its holiday sugarplum glut for an avalanche of festivals that thunder out in tandem with annual performing arts presenters conferences. In addition to these curated offerings and regularly-scheduled programming at city venues, independently-produced performances and in-process showings are happening nearly every day in studios and theaters around town. For all dance enthusiasts, the wealth is uncontainable (and the schedule is mind-boggling), so even if I can’t make it to everything, I certainly do my best. And from what I’m seeing and hearing from artists, the city’s performance community is as rebellious and resilient as ever.
Pioneers Go East Collective’s Out-FRONT! Festival, Judson Memorial Church
January 3: On the festival’s opening night, Suzzanne Ponomarenko’s excerpts from “Tapestries” bring technical rigor and dramatic flair to queered folk tales; the choreographer is at their best in rare moments of subtlety, and the dancers rise to her challenges with alacrity. In Dominica Greene’s “Openings,” the clear-eyed and lushly restless artist tumbles and spirals through solo musings and participatory experiments on the subject of support—physical, emotional, and communal—centered on the question, “What does love look like?” Closing with a Prince-fueled dance party is always a good idea, and Greene is quickly becoming an artist to follow.
January 7: A showcase for composers blended live and recorded music with movement to yield two distinct worlds of introspection and expansion. Multi-hyphenate artist Sugar Vendil calls upon textures of memory in “Antonym: the opposite of nostalgia” with senses of shape, tone, rhythm, and light at once raw and refined; images course through bodies and space driven by undercurrents of voice and instruments articulated as organic appendages. Alexa Grae’s operatic-electro-psychedelic “Tone Pillar” floats and whirls through a cosmic ritual of desire and survival; the work’s muddled grandeur would benefit from a more focused intimacy to foreground the sensitivity of the artist’s prodigious voice.
Sugar Vendil in Antonym: the opposite of nostalgia (world premiere); Photo by Steven Pisano
January 8: Two very different quintets reveal the range of methods and techniques at play among the latest generation of experimental dancemakers. Owen Prum’s punk-inflected “Extremely Chemical” pushes at edges of abrasive darkness, sinewy nonchalance, and sly humor, with passages of casually precise, equanimous dancing delivered from the bones with unassuming elegance. Jo Warren evokes potent emotional-physical imagery in “All Mouth,” a series of extended vignettes with heightened kinetic sensibilities that border on cinematic. The virtuosic trust of contact improvisation is on full display as bodies launch through space to punctuate expressive slow-motion morphings and potent gestural tableaus.
Owen Prum in Extremely Chemical (world premiere);Photo by Steven Pisano
Jo Warren's All Mouth (world premiere with Maddie Hopfield, Meg Herzfeld, Paris Cullen, Cullan Powers, Sofia Franklin; Photo: Steven Pisano
January 9: Isa Spector & Derek Smith | The Exponential Festival, The Brick
Dance lent dimension to experiments in theatre at The Brick, a small-scale space where artists can imagine at deceptively large scales. Isa Spector’s extended duet, “Real Estate,” stages messy entanglements to explore memory, loneliness, and connection. The work simmers with awkwardness; its choppy dialogue and persistent physicality—erotic, estranged, cartoonish, and suddenly honest—strike at sensations that hide beneath the surface of all-too-familiar encounters. In “Letters from Tyra,” the irrepressible Derek Smith barrels through an absurd assortment of vignettes with barefaced honesty and sensitivity. From vaudevillian ridiculousness and side-splitting physical comedy to an earnest rendition of a Red Hot Chili Peppers greatest hits medley, Smith is unafraid to poke fun at himself and his work while pointing to deeper concerns in love, aging, and the place of art in life.
January 10: Anonymous Ensemble, Under the Radar, Pregones/PRTT
One of my favorite things about festival season is when I come across an opportunity to discover not only an artist who’s new to me, but also an unfamiliar venue. This was the case at Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, a warm and welcoming space nestled on a quiet street just off Grand Concourse in the South Bronx. Pregones hosts Anonymous Ensemble in “Llontop,” an interactive, multi-dimensional installation, conversation, and performance grounded in the song-poems of Quechua poet Irma Alvarez-Ccoscco. The program celebrates Andean culture through choreographies of objects, images, words, sounds, and textures that conjure memory through a deep-rooted fusion of human, ecological, and spiritual elements. Supported by a trio of musicians who color an atmosphere on percussion, violin, and vocals, Alvarez-Ccoscco’s poetic invocations unfurl with flowing gestures that shape multisensory images of tenderness, reverence, and resistance.
January 11: Kashia Kancey | New York Live Arts’ Live Artery, Triskelion Arts
The Closties Variety Hour by Kashia Kancey, co-presented by Live Artery | New York Live Arts and Triskelion Arts, with Channce Williams, Morgan Gregory, Khandis Meritt, Kashia Kancey: Photo : Jenna Maslechko
Kashia Kancey, a 2024-25 Fresh Tracks cohort member recently named in Dance Magazine’s 2026 25 to Watch, reprised her smart and hilarious “The Closties Variety Hour” at Triskelion Arts. “Closties” delights with its inexhaustible parade of absurdist scenes—outrageous, cheeky, ominous, hallucinatory, cinematic, and sincere—that poured out with full-bodied, full-voiced, copiously-sequined fearlessness from Kancey and her exceptional ensemble. Chock full of pop culture sendups that span decades, genres, and sensibilities, each cast member transforms continually through a dizzying array of costumes, characters, and settings (horror movie! hula hoops! divas! audience karaoke! church! a bunny serving cake!).
Chaos? Maybe, but the edges remain sharp; Kancey’s deft dramatic modulations and keen sense timing maintain an underlying cohesion amid the mayhem and meltdowns. Connor Sale’s masterful lighting sculpts each vignette’s dimension and emotion with vividly imaginative use of color, shape, texture, and depth—indeed, Trisk’s lighting grid emerges as a dynamic character in its own right. Kancey more than lives up to her latest honors, and all signs point to a bright and varied future for this artist of extraordinary wit and intelligence.
Whew, I’m exhausted in the best way. Ready for more? I am! Stay tuned for “Winter in Brief, Part 2,” featuring even more from the January festival season. Happy dancegoing, everyone!
