Year in Review: Atlanta’s dance scene dazzled with drama and diversity

On February 3, 2023, the Martha Graham Dance Company performed in Atlanta for the first time in 84 years, reminding us what inspired choreography, brilliant technique and beautiful dancers can look like. Atlanta’s dance scene had its own strengths in 2023, as new, relatively new and re-invigorated local companies presented concerts in venues from Marietta to Midtown and from East Point to Duluth.

In June, Dance/USA, the national dance organization, held its annual conference in Atlanta and gave well-deserved awards to Douglas Scott, founder and artistic director of Full Radius Dance, and Nena Gilreath and Waverly T. Lucas, co-founders and co-artistic directors of Ballethnic Dance Company.

Atlanta Ballet looked terrific this year, technically strong and cohesive. Kudos to Artistic Director Gennadi Nedvigin and his team. Emily Carrico’s Sylph in Johan Kobborg’s La Sylphide was a tender delight. Jessica Assef left suddenly in September, but the company made important hiring choices this year. Five Black dancers joined Atlanta Ballet 2. This is a big step toward fulfilling the company’s commitment to diversity and representation.

Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre moved to a new home and created a white box theater there. They said goodbye to two company members and two protégés and hired two new company members and an intern. Their fall mixed bill was a joy to watch, with Darian Kane demonstrating her growth as a choreographer.

Meanwhile, the city’s multitude of talented, independent contemporary dancers flowed from one company’s concert to the next, mastering a wide variety of choreographic visions.

Fly on a Wall left Windmill Arts Center; ImmerseATL went on hiatus.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Artistic Director Robert Battle’s pre-performance speeches during the company’s annual visit to the Fox Theatre are legendary. But he won’t be here for the company’s January 2024 visit — he resigned from the company in November for health reasons, stunning the dance world.

Listed below are ArtsATL’s dance highlights of the year, from dance writers Cynthia Bond Perry and Robin Wharton and Senior Editor Gillian Anne Renault.

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Boca Tuya, Amor

In an interview with ArtsATL, Omar Román de Jesús, artistic director and choreographer of New York-based Boca Tuya, promised that Amor, the company’s Atlanta debut and first ever solo-billed show, would delight audiences with mayhem, humor and surrealist dreamscapes. At Kennesaw State University Dance Theater in January, the company delivered, combining gorgeous technical skill with a virtuosic expressive range. The three works on the bill, Sombreristas, Like Those Playground Kids at Midnight and Los Perros del Barrio Colosal, displayed the playful inventiveness and distinctive aesthetic for which Román de Jesús, a 2023 Dance Magazine Harkness Promise Award recipient, has quickly become known. Each piece was like a world in miniature, captivating in every nuanced gesture and quirky detail. — RW

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Martha Graham Dance Company, Errand Into The Maze

It wasn’t the only Graham work presented in this one-afternoon-only visit by the legendary company, but this 1947 duet epitomizes the searing, psychological power of Graham’s groundbreaking choreography. Hundreds of dance fans witnessed it at the Rialto Center for the Arts in February, along with the lyrical beauty of Diversion of Angels and a new production of Canticle for Innocent Comedians. Neither of the group works had the spine-tingling impact of Errand, but the concert overall illustrated the strength of this 97-year-old ensemble. The pre-performance conversation between Artistic Director Janet Eilber and Atlanta’s own George Staib was a delight. — GAR

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Atlanta Ballet, Snowblind

Atlanta Ballet’s first mixed bill of 2023, at Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre in February, included choreographer Cathy Marston’s dance drama Snowblind, based on an Edith Wharton novella. It is an emotionally complex, contemporary trio for three characters: a farmer (Patric Palkens), his wife Zeena (Sujin Han) and her young helper, Mattie (Mikaela Santos). Han was a revelation as Zeena. ArtsATL’s Robin Wharton wrote that she “embodied [her] nagging insecurity and desperate hypochondria with tragic pathos. She transformed herself into a shambling wreck of a woman” but never reverted to melodrama. Santos transfixed the viewer as she she grew from a young girl in love to a tormented figure caught in a dark domestic tragedy. All three dancers in this cast expressed the story’s charged emotions with heart-wrenching eloquence. — GAR

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Dorrance Dance

Michelle Dorrance is an award-winning, 21st-century tap choreographer who has helped shape tap into an exciting, sometimes quirky 21st century art form. That was in evidence when her New York-based company, Dorrance Dance, visited the Rialto Center for the Arts in April. A leggy, eccentric dancer, Dorrance and her ensemble of unique individuals revealed stunning control and clarity. Central to the performance was Atlanta native Aaron Marcellus. The composer, musician and vocalist was center stage on keyboards, leading a small trio. He has studied tap and knows how music and movement become one in this art form. His compositions were at times edgy, at other times swinging, contributing to an evening of brilliant invention and fun. — GAR

Dance Canvas

The breadth of dance styles and stories rising from people of Atlanta is deeper and wider than what its largest dance company encompasses. That’s why organizations like Dance Canvas, which nurture individual choreographers, are vital to the city’s dance ecosystem. Presented at the Ferst Center for the Arts in March, Dance Canvas’ 15th annual Performance Series connected Atlanta audiences with artistic voices of their own, in styles and genres ranging from contemporary modern and ballet to house music and dancing. A new dance film series kicked off the production run — then eight live works with themes of celebration and family lineage, as well as reflections on what it means to be Black in America, offered a richly varied sense of the city’s true cultural diversity. — CBP

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Atlanta Chinese Dance Company, We Belong Here

Atlanta-based dance artist Kerry Lee has blended Chinese classical dance with contemporary dance aesthetics and a social justice mission raising awareness about discrimination against Asian Americans. Lee’s latest, We Belong Here: Rising Against Asian Hate, which debuted in April at Gas South Theater in Duluth, confronted current and past crimes against Asian Americans — from the Vincent Chin murder and subsequent national protests to the more recent Atlanta spa shootings. Presented alongside 15 pieces from folk and classical Chinese dance repertory and the late choreographer Nai-Ni Chen’s Raindrops, Lee presented a beautiful and empowered ensemble of dancers who created a bold expression of solidarity. — CBP

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Beacon Dance, Moving Bodies/Moving Hearts/Moving Minds

This well-curated, multichoreographer, multigenerational mixed bill — composed by artistic and administrative director of Beacon Dance, D. Patton White, and presented at the B COMPLEX in April — was a diverse, inclusive showcase of some of Atlanta’s strongest emerging and established dance talent. In a thoughtful progression from interior to exterior, from the individual to the collective, the program explored disability, indigeneity, social awareness and the challenges and rewards of finding one’s place as part of a greater community. The well-attended talk-back with the choreographers after the show invited the audience to join that exploration, sharing impressions and questions that emerged from what many participants described as a profoundly moving experience. — RW

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Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre, Long Ago and Only Once

Last May, in the final show of its sixth season, Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre gave a poetic farewell to Jackie Nash Gill and Laura Morton LaRussa and proté​gés​ Anna Owen and Katelyn Sager. In a moment of uncertainty and transition, the company found its groove and, for the first time in live performance, brought to life the resonant archetypes and tantalizing fragmentary narratives of Ana Maria Lucaciu’s Long Ago and Only Once at the Kennesaw State University Dance Theater in Marietta. As individuals, the dancers were grounded and strong, aware of the lines they created, down to toe tips and fingertips. Collectively, each was finely attuned to the others as if they were part of some gorgeous, super-human, collective organism. — RW

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Kit Modus, Scion

On a shoestring budget, with determination, ingenuity and the hard work of a dedicated ensemble of dancers, Jillian Mitchell has built Kit Modus into a company that can attract world-class established and emerging choreographers. In June, with the debut of her own evening-length work Scion at the Emory Performing Arts Center, Mitchell added another impressive entry in the company’s growing repertoire. A kaleidoscopic meditation on grief, cosmology and particle physics, Scion was as mind-bending as it was beautiful. Mitchell’s choreography, costume, sound and stage design made visible the connections among the universe’s fundamental atomic particles, the powerful bonds that knit families together and the vast and wonderful migration of stars and galaxies. — RW

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SOMOS, The Performance

Founder Angelita Itzanami conceived the idea for SOMOS while creating work for the 2022 Fall for Fall Dance Festival. Not quite a year later, with this debut show at Windmill Arts Center in August, that idea became a reality. SOMOS, The Performance was an early and durable highlight of this fall season. The ensemble cohered beautifully, dancing with clean technical precision and projecting a joy in being together onstage that warmed the audience with its glow. Itzanami’s choreography demonstrated a mature awareness of the dancers’ impressive individual strengths in the solos and innovative shared-weight work, while the three-dimensional shapes they made collectively onstage showed her command of athletic, full-ensemble phrase work. — RW

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Ballethnic Dance Company, Images of Life

Ballethnic Dance Company has garnered national attention in recent years, and its production Images of Life showed that the company has risen to the occasion. Presented at the Alliance Theatre in August, the program featured Jazzing: Memoirs in Jazz (produced in partnership with the Breman Museum) and Sanctity, performed in 2022 at Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center. Through both lustrous works, Ballethnic blended ballet with cultural expressions of Africa and the African diaspora in a way that felt seamless, cohesive and authentic. Within a classical ballet language, Jazzing drew out the spirit of jazz, the blues and the Civil Rights era through the lens of photographer Herb Snitzer. In Sanctity, dancers delved into the “why” behind their inner drives to dance, finally rising together in reverent celebration. — CBP

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Staibdance, ARARAT

Choreographer George Staib has previously tackled heavy subjects, but it took some bravado to take on the 1915 Armenian genocide as subject matter for his latest work ARARAT. Any number of challenges could have thrown him off course, but he ultimately produced staibdance’s finest work to date. Presented at the Dance Studio of Emory University’s Schwartz Center for Performing Arts in October, the immersive collaboration explored this long-denied history of mass murder and human displacement with empathy and imagination. Ten fearlessly magnetic dancers unspooled what seemed a nonlinear journey into deep recesses of memory, where compassion and brutality existed in a dreamlike flux that revealed the value of life and human resilience. — CBP

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Flamenco Black

Like a tectonic rumble, the footwork of flamenco artist Yinka Esi Graves embodied the spirit of Flamenco Black at the Emory Performing Arts Studio in November as part of the Atlanta Flamenco Festival. Graves’ Soleá — by turns impassioned, explosive and ecstatic – reaffirmed flamenco’s historic Africanist influences which, until recently, had been all but erased. Festival producer A Través, an Atlanta-based organization that weaves the art of flamenco into the city’s cultural fabric, brought Graves together with members of the Dallas-based Flame Foundation, Atlanta-based Manga African Dance and an ensemble of African and flamenco musicians. Together they offered singularly fresh perspectives on the relationship between flamenco, contemporary dance and the dance culture of Africa and the African diaspora. — CBP