Dance in New York: Critics' picks

Lincoln Center's luminous multidisciplinary fall festival celebrates the spiritual power of dance, music and theater. Terpsichorean offerings in this year's edition include an encore of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's Zen-influenced Sutra (Oct 16–18), a combination of dance and martial arts that was part of the first White Light Festival back in 2010; Company Wang Ramirez's Borderline (Oct 19–20), a fusion of dance forms that reflects the influence of Greek and Korean cultures; Akram Khan's Xenos (Oct 31, Nov 1), an exploration of colonialism through kathak and contemporary dance; Casc Gelabert's Framing Time (Nov 1, 2), set to music by Morton Feldman; and Boy Blue's Blak Whyte Gray (Nov 16, 17), an abstract dance-theater fusion of hip-hop and African traditions.

Shannon, whose childhood bout with Legg–Calvé–Perthes disease permanently affected his body's ability to move, explores disability and the specific ways in which it shapes social and physical patterns. In this New York City premiere, he turns his attention to the question of modern digital representation. His crutch choreography is performed by dancer-acrobat Raphael Botelho Nepomuceno, who did a memorable routine on crutches in Cirque du Soleil's Varekai. 

A collaboration between choreographer John Heginbotham and puppeteer Amy Trompetter, this inventive pageant features giant babies, heroic rats and blue angels, rendered through a mix of live dancers and puppets large and small.

GDC presents two world premieres: Adam Barruch's Imprint Ghosts, about the reverberations of past events in the physical space of the present, and Shamel Pitts's Menagerie, a collaboration with visual artist and director Deville Cohen that has been created especially for the Gibney's six dancers.

James Devine, a world-record holder for speed dancing, and David Geaney, a multiple World Irish Dance Championships winner, are the creative forces behind this celebration of super-quick Celtic step dancing. Geaney is joined onstage by Gabriella Wood and AnneMarie Keaney.

Dance titan Tharp gets small in a retrospective devoted to the influence of minimalism on some of the seminal pieces she created from 1965 to 1971. Among the works excerpted in this new collection are Tank Dive, The History of Up and Down and Eight Jelly Rolls. 

One of the New Yorkiest things about New York is how we all feel like we just missed the best part of it. “When did you get here?” “Oh, bummer! There was this incredible lightning-strike of culture—punk, the Soho loft scene, etc.—right before you arrived.” For performance lovers, one of the holiest of such flashes was the Judson Dance Theater, a flourish of choreography that lasted from 1962 to 1964. In workshops and performances at Greenwich Village’s Judson Memorial Church, visual artists and dance makers, inspired by the chance-based work of avant-garde composer John Cage, created a torrent of art that became the foundation documents of postmodern dance. This avalanche built itself into a mountain—and though you may have heard the echoes of it everywhere, from Broadway to the Whitney, the theater itself has started to sound more like a legend than reality. So thank your lucky stars for the Museum of Modern Art’s performance-heavy exhibition “Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done,” which throws every modern documentary technique at the problem of bringing a 56-year-old movement back to life. The program includes archival materials, poetry, talks, films (including wonderful footage of one of the founders, Trisha Brown) as well as many live dances, all focused on the enduring influence of the Judson choreographers. Here are some of the performance highlights you won’t want to miss. Yvonne Rainer (Sept 16–Sept 22)MoMA has presented Rainer before—and brilliantly so. In