The best dance shows in NYC this month

In this Crossing the Line festival offering, performed by a cast of four, choreographer Rawls takes a look at surveillance, especially as it relates to the experience of being black in America. Originally commissioned by Live Arts Bard, the piece is a collaboration with poet Claudia Rankine and documentary filmmaker John Lucas.

The 16th annual DUMBO Dance Festival crams hundreds of artists into its hectic programming, which runs the gamut from emerging artists to full-fledged dance stars. 70 dance troupes perform, including host group White Wave Young Soon Kim Dance Company and local heroes Buglisi Dance Theatre. 

The unconventional French choreographer explores the variety and ephemerality of dance in a piece set to Mozart's Requiem and performed by 20 dancers, each of whom executes hundreds of movements a single time each, without repeating any of them. This "choreographic storm" is presented under the umbrella of the French Institute Alliance Française's Crossing the Line festival.

Dance Now's 23rd season offers a massive festival of short works by 40 dance makers of every stripe, all challenged to mount five-minute pieces on the teeny stage at Joe's Pub. The best of the fest, as chosen by the producers, return for a special encore performance on Sept 27; they include festival winner Brendan Drake as well as Chelsea Ainsworth + Doron Perk, Tsiambwom M. Akuchu, binbinFactory /Satoshi Haga & Rie Fukuzawa, Jamal Jackson Dance Company, Loni Landon Dance Project, Claire Porter/PORTABLES, Subject: Matter, Kate Weare Company and Nicole Wolcott.

It is always one of the events of the season when De Keersmaeker and her Belgium-based company come to town. This time they perform an evening-length modern-dance piece inspired by Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, which are performed live by the baroque ensemble B’Rock. 

The minimalist Algerian-French choreographer visits the Crossing the Line Festival with her 2016 work Sur le Fil, which examines questions of submission and abandon. On October 6, the piece is performed alongside two other dances, La Nuit (2012) and La Traversée (2014). 

The choreographer and dancer, currently based in New York City, explores her Zimbabwean roots in a trio of works performed on successive nights as part of the French Institute Alliance Française's Crossing the Line Festival. 

Peter Boal and dancers from his company, Pacific Northwest Ballet, analyze and perform male solos by Jerome Robbins as part of the Guggenheim's Works & Process series. Offerings include a reconstruction of a "lost" work created by Robbins for Boal.

In this world premiere, Bessie Award winner Spradlin choreographs eight dancers in a piece that uses repetition to explore questions of what bodies can do and how we can express ourselves through them.

The company soldiers on after the 2017 death of its founder. Its program in this Next Wave Festival offering comprises three late works by the postmodern dance innovator: Working Title (1984), featuring music by Peter Zummo; the duet Pamplona Stones (1974), which incorporates a variety of quotidian props; and the solo piece Ballet (1968), a rope-walking piece reconstructed from photo and video records of its sole performance 50 years ago.

Bessie Award winners and longtime duet partners Nugent and Matteson perform the NYC premiere of their latest piece, which examines "a history of fractured togetherness." 

Eight dancers perform the New York premiere of O'Connor's 2017 work, for which he composed his own musical score. The piece explores tensions between formality and emotion.

The Danish dancer-choreographer behind the orgiastic 7 Pleasures returns to NYC with another piece devoted to sexuality and society. In this solo piece, presented under the aegis of the Crossing the Line Festival, she explores the influence of pornography beyond its most obvious and explicit forms.

Having already offered opulently designed, adults-only burlesque takes on Snow White, Cinderella and The Nutcracker, director-choreographer Austin McCormick and his fancy-naughty troupe turn to Munro Leaf's 1936 children's book, The Story of Ferdinand, the tale of a strong young bovine who prefers fields of flowers to the matador's ring. An all-male ensemble performs what is sure to be a lavish cock-and-bull story.

City Center's super-affordable festival is a smorgasbord for dance lovers. Each evening features a sampling of international superstars and local favorites: 20 companies and artists take part in five different programs, each performed just twice. The 2018 lineup includes commissioned world premieres by Gemma Bond, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, Justin Peck, Sonya Tayeh, Caleb Teicher and Jennifer Weber; participating artists include Paul Taylor Dance Company, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, Sara Mearns, Boston Ballet, Cie Hervé Koubi and Ballet Hispánico. (Note: Tickets go on sale September 9 at 11am, and they tend to go fast.)

The bulk of NYCB's fall season at Lincoln Center is devoted to programs of works by two of the great ballet choreographers of the 20th century: company cofounders George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. Also on the lineup are Peter Martins's staging of August Bournonville's La Sylphide and the world premieres of pieces by Kyle Abraham, Matthew Neenan and Gianna Reisen.

Inspired by a rectangular form of 18th-century dance, conceiver-curator Lar Lubovitch invites five choreographers and/or companies—John Jasperse Projects (Sept 24–28), A.I.M (Sept 29–Oct 1), Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener (Oct 2–6), Beth Gill (Oct 4–7) and Donna Uchizono Company (Oct 10–13)–to create modern variations on the form, presented in rep over three weeks. A specially constructed stage at the Joyce allows the works to be viewed from all four sides.

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