Things to do in New York this Saturday

Stathas, who returned to dance in 2016 after an absence of more than 30 years, presents a program that includes works both old and new, including 1985's Five Studies for a Waiter and a Business Woman, the more recent Assuage and Conundrum, and the premiere of a solo piece called In the Garden.

Theater review by Naveen Kumar  A gunshot rings out in the first moments of Stew, Zora Howard’s subtly haunting new domestic drama. Mama Tucker (a fierce and tremendous Portia) insists it was just a blown tire as generations of other Tucker women, startled awake by the sound, scramble into her weathered but well-ordered kitchen. There’s too much riding on the day’s cooking to get bogged down with distractions. It’s a good thing everyone’s up early to chip in. Chores and everyday squabbles occupy the women, their hair wrapped in satin scarves, as they trim, chop, wash and assemble ingredients for a meal meant to serve Mama’s whole congregation. Her younger daughter (Toni Lachelle Pollitt) is 17 and enamored of a guy she insists on calling her “man” (because boyfriends are temporary, and this one is forever). The eldest (Nikkole Salter), born when Mama was a teenager, is visiting with a daughter of her own, whom they call Lil’ Mama (Kristin Dodson). The absence of men in the Tucker family kitchen—the fly-on-the-wall scenic design is by Lawrence E. Moten III—seems incidental at first, but grows to feel ominous. Lil’ Mama has a brother who’s out at a friend’s; no one’s quite sure whether her dad will join them at church later that day. But she wishes he were there to help prepare her audition for a comically age-inappropriate school production of Shakespeare’s Richard III. The scene, which Mama coaches her to deliver to a sweet potato, finds Queens Elizabeth and Margaret mourn

French-Algerian choreographer Koubi and his troupe of North African street dancers return to the Joyce with a piece that looks at the history of cultures around the Mediterranean and the richness of traditions once dismissed as barbarian. Expect an eclectic mix of martial arts, hip-hop and contemporary dance.

The outrageous Dutch choreographer Florentina Holzinger gleefully vandalizes classical ideals of narrative and female beauty in a comic feminist critique inspired very loosely (even promiscuously) by George Balanchine's Apollo. Nudity, of course, is involved.