20 Years of Press

IN boutique hotels and trendy restaurants, this would be the soft opening. Mikhail Baryshnikov’s new Baryshnikov Arts Center will officially open in November, offering a highly equipped, multipurpose space for all kinds of artists — playwrights, multimedia creators and choreographers, students and stars — to come together to work and collaborate, or simply to hang out, exchanging thoughts and ideas. But Mr. Baryshnikov is not waiting for the grand opening to put his concept into practice. Over the last few months, even as workmen put in floors, mirrors and equipment, the center — the three top floors of a discreetly contemporary new building at 450 West 37th Street in the garment district — has been active. ″We have three or four projects under our belt already,″ Mr. Baryshnikov said, ″and we’ve been speaking to the people involved about the advantages and disadvantages of the space. We have a few things to sort out, but it’s really encouraging that we do seem to have the flexibility we were after.″

Standing in a crowded lobby waiting for a concert to start earlier this evening, my right arm was gently nudged. I turned to see who had brushed past me, turned away — and then turned around again, just to be…

BUENA PARK, CA (October 28, 2005) — More than three decades after his arrival in the United States, dancer, choreographer and artistic visionary Mikhail Baryshnikov remains a vital force. This fall, his latest opus comes to life: not a dance, but an institution, the Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC) in New York.

Dancer and choreographer Mikhail Baryshnikov will be presented with the inaugural Prince Rainier III Award at the Princess Grace Awards on October 26 in New York, the Princess Grace Foundation announced.

Tere O’Connor, Edwin Sanchez, and Benjamin Millepied from The Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC) Will Be Teamed in a Pilot Project With Young Artists from Graduate Programs

Jenny Lerner, Baryshnikov Dance Foundation 212.486.7229

New York University President John Sexton today bestowed an honorary doctorate on the renowned dancer and actor Mikhail Baryshnikov at NYU’s 174th Commencement Exercises in Washington Square Park. Some 19,000 graduates, faculty, staff, and guests attended the morning ceremony.

On Sunday, the violinist Gidon Kremer opened a new season of chamber concerts at the intimate Baryshnikov Arts Center with a dazzling program of short works.

Hartford is the first stop for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s new international dance tour, playing in Hartford June 27 and 28, after its New York premiere. Tickets to “Hell’s Kitchen Danc…

After many visits to Avery Fisher Hall, I’ve decided that the real problem with the New York Philharmonic lies neither with the orchestra nor with the performance space, but with the audience. (There may be a secondary problem involving the conductor, but I won’t go into that here: suffice to say that you would do well to look out for occasions when a guest-conductor is visiting.)

Mikhail Baryshnikov still dancing at 59

Christina Sterner, managing director of the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation and Baryshnikov Productions, will leave her position at the end of the year to marry and pursue independent projects.

Over the years, as Mikhail Baryshnikov repeatedly read and saw the plays, he developed an intense appreciation of what he calls “Beckett’s genius.”

Stanford Makishi has been appointed executive director of the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Mr. Makishi, formerly the director of creative services at Carnegie Hall, succeeds Christina Sterner, who stepped down at the end of 2007 after 20 years.

Happy birthday, Misha. Today Mikhail Baryshnikov celebrates his 60th, a landmark that some of us greet with a sigh of relief, which is

“Come here to the corridor. This is all my photography,” said the legendary ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov the other day at his studio on West 37th Street. Hanging in the hallway were black-and-…

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN classical music listings for June 4–17, 2008.

Mikhail Baryshnikov talks about his new work as a dance photographer.

A generational shift among musicians is giving audiences an entirely new type of concert, one that mixes classical and non-classical music—by which I …

The free Movado Hour concert series at the Baryshnikov Arts Center opened its season with a program of contemporary American works.

Seeing the possibilities, and fun, in Mikhail Baryshnikov’s artistic risks.

On Monday, the Esterhazy Machine, a period-instrument group, played three Haydn baryton trios, and Jennifer Koh, the violinist, played thorny contemporary works.

In this horrible-weather month that New Yorkers have been calling “spring” (but that we Californians would have no hesitation in labeling “winter”), Monday the 20th stood out as a particularly unpleasant night…

At 61 and still in top physical shape, Mikhail Baryshnikov is embracing old age and collaborating on new “material for an adult.”

Now on a two-month world tour, dance icon Mikhail Baryshnikov talks to The Daily Beast about his art, Putin’s Russia—and why he still hasn’t seen the Sex and the City finale.

The Baryshnikov Arts Center’s stylish, laid-back (and popular) series of hour-long concerts continues with a program by the pianist Stephen Prutsman, who will offer Bach’s English Suite in D Minor, BWV 811, before joining the violinist Anna Elashvili and the cellist Edward Arron for Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor. A wine reception precedes the music. (450 W. 37th St. May 27 at 7. To reserve free tickets, which are required, call 212-279-4200.)(Baryshnikov Arts Center; May 27-May 27.)

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The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, operated by The Florida State University in Sarasota, Florida, and New York’s Baryshnikov Arts Center have

Like a benediction on the fall arts season, Baryshnikov’s in town. With a book signing on Tuesday at the MCA and a three-performance-only engagement at the Harris, the Misha will glide through town, breathing excitement for dance—both classical (for which he is legendary) and contemporary—into the air. The thrill is well deserved: “Three Solos and

Mikhail Baryshnikov, who comes to Portland for three shows, Oct. 1-3, has danced a lot of dances with a lot of partners — and at 61 he’s better than ever. So, we wondered what his secret was, and this is what he said.

The dancer, now in his 60s, performs with experience won from the decades. He’ll bring it to Santa Monica this week.

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The Baryshnikov Arts Center will open its new Jerome Robbins Theater on Feb. 16 with a tribute to Robbins.

The great dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov (b. 1948) marked his 62nd birthday last Wednesday. Even more than Nureyev, Baryshnikov entered the popular mind as something more than a matchless ballet dancer.

On Tuesday Mikhail Baryshnikov, just turned 62, will dance again, an evergreen superstar as well as philanthropist. The occasion will be the opening of the Jerome Robbins Theater, his latest project in his Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York.

“The Wooster Group is an experimental-theater company that still experiments, and brilliantly—plain and simple,” says Mikhail Baryshnikov of the legendary troupe that begins its three-year residency at the performer’s newly christened Jerome Robbins Theater at the Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC) this week. The company, known for its progressive, original works and wry deconstructions of classics, will perform in the 238-seat, proscenium-style theater that Baryshnikov says was “largely designed to accommodate artistic director…

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A familiar name partners with some unfamiliar dancing.

Listings and advertisements on Dance.NYC are all user-generated. The inclusion of content by any user does not constitute an endorsement by Dance/NYC of that individual or organization’s views. To learn more about posting…

Live classical concert reviews from around the world posted here

Dancer and actor Mikhail Baryshnikov is selling a Petr Petrovich Vereshchagin work, View of St. Petersburg, to benefit the Baryshnikov Arts Center in Manhattan.

Lindberg, Columbi, Saariaho, Stucky, Neikrug, Tan Dun, Schulhoff : Magnus Lindberg (piano), Jennifer Koh (violin), Anssi Karttunen (cello), The Movado Hour, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Howard Gilman Performance Space, 10.5.2011 (BH)

The Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC) and the Irish Arts Center (IAC) are bringing Colin Dunne’s show “Out of Time”…

Mikhail Baryshnikov has donated a cache of personal recordings, photographs, documents, letters and scrapbooks to the New York Public Library.

Americans for the Arts has announced the recipients of the 2012 National Arts Awards. This year’€™s recipients are:

In Paris / Gerald W. Lynch Theater, NYC / August 1-5, 2012

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Don’t have your tickets yet for next week’s headliners at the 2012 Ringling International Arts Festival? By the time you read this, you may be out of luck. In a previously undisclosed bonus, organi…

Malavika Sarukkai showcased bharatanatyam, a classical Indian dance form, during her performance at the Baryshnikov Arts Center.

Rashaun Mitchell, the acclaimed alumnus of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, is one of the artists who will perform a new work.

MIAMI — The dancer in the photograph isn’t frozen in time. Her body is the source of light on a darkened stage, and with a blur of muscle, she’s dancing straight at the viewer who has stepped into h…

The Russian pianist Alexei Lubimov is playing a program of John Cage and, aided by dancers, Merce Cunningham, at the Baryshnikov Arts Center.

“A French native of Dutch descent, Nelly van Bommel moved to New York City in 2002, and, in 2004, established her company, NØA DANCE. Recently named among Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch,” van Bommel has developed a choreographic language that draws from multiple cultures and dance forms.” — Christine Jowers, New York.

“It is my deepest pleasure to be welcomed into the rehearsals of some of the finest artists in our city. What a treat to meet Stefanie Batten Bland and spend an afternoon with her company of beautiful dancers and her multi-talented (performance artist/visual artist) collaborator Benjamin Heller. As Stefanie reminds me, Graham and Noguchi had a fifty year collaboration, she and Heller are in their second year looking forward to more. Thanks Stefanie and CSBB.” — Christine Jowers, NYC

Baryshnikov, now 64, still moves with style and finesse, but the choreography doesn’t offer any opportunities beyond a pseudo-Spanish cliché.

What one does not see much of, at least at first glance, is nostalgia for the motherland. “I never had nostalgia about anything,” Baryshnikov says.

Well-known performing artist will address Class of 2013

The Pulitzer-winning composer Kevin Puts (“Silent Night”) led the most recent edition of NYFOS Next, presented by the New York Festival of Song.

Ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov is back on stage, acting alongside Willem Dafoe in an avant-garde play by one of the world’s most acclaimed directors.

Zimbabwean, New York-based choreographer and performer Nora Chipaumire has been challenging stereotypes of Africa and the female black body for the past decade—most recently through riot, her powerful re-imagining of Nijinsky’s The Rite of Spring.

The ballet legend comes to Washington with Chekhov adaptation, “Man in a Case.”

Baryshnikov stars in “Man in a Case,” an avant-garde play adapted from two Chekhov pieces.

Mikhail Baryshnikov is opening a fund-raising effort to give artists a space to work in Manhattan, through fellowships named for Merce Cunningham and John Cage.

Mikhail Baryshnikov may be the world’s most famous dancer, but it’s been many decades since he was just a dancer. In 1978, barely four years after defecting from the Kirov Ballet, he was nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actor for his role in “The Turning Point.” Since then he’s starred as Russian artist Aleksandr Petrovsky in “Sex and the City,” taking Carrie Bradshaw to Paris so she could be rescued there by Big. He’s performed in a Broadway adaptation of Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”; he’s done Samuel Beckett with director JoAnne Akalaitis; he’s worked with Robert Wilson.

Ever experimenting, Mikhail Baryshnikov hits the road in another theater project, this one based on Chekhov short stories. As ‘Man in a Case’ heads to the Broad Stage, he exclaims, ‘I’m just fascinated by the theater.’

(Photo by Don Lee, courtesy The Banff Centre)

The dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov tells Liz Hoggard about his past in Riga and Russia, Sex and the City and a new exhibition of his photography

Several of the performances are co-productions with other festivals, including the season opener, “Begin Again,” by the Seattle-based creative team zoe/juniper.

After being asked more than 15 times over the years to play the role of Diaghilev’s provocative virtuoso, the Russian dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov has finally taken a leap of faith. So what persuaded him to do it?

Making art, he says, is “very fragile process. It took me 25 to 30 years to understand what actually it takes.”

You’d think the sign in front of dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov’s arts center would have his name in lights — but actually, you can barely see it. He says what happens inside is way more important.

Manhattan’s Baryshnikov Arts Center, founded by dancer and actor Mikhail Baryshnikov, has received a $3 million gift from the Rudolf Nureyev Dance Foundation. The Center, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, plans to use the funds to create the Rudolf Nureyev Endowment and to name the Rudolf Nureyev Studio.

Mikhail Baryshnikov will perform in “Brodsky /Baryshnikov” at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in March.

Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC) announces the successful completion of its two-year, $1M Cage Cunningham Campaign to establish the Cage Cunningham Fund for artist fellowships, named for legendary artistic partners John Cage and Merce Cunningham. BAC’s Artistic Director Mikhail Baryshnikov announced…

Two dancers and friends of the late choreographer, one thirty-one and the other ninety-two, explore his sensibility in a show.

The season’s lineup includes premieres by the Hungarian theater troupe Bela Pinter and Company and the dancers Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith.

Nakedness was integral to a wholly serious and absorbing piece by Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith. But Akiko Kitamura’s solo piece was overpolished.

In Impressions of: Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith’s Basketball as part of PS122’s COIL Festival at Baryshnikov Arts Center, “Lieber juts her hip out at a dramatic angle and thrusts her chest forward — a vixen who only seconds earlier appeared like a Rodin sculpture.” Trina Mannino, New York.

Our Secrets at Baryshnikov Arts Center

The work of the Rwandan-born choreographer Dorothée Munyaneza addresses rape and genocide: “It’s a question of creating, mending, performing.”

Dance, music and words tell the stories of rape victims of the Rwanda genocide

In IMPRESSIONS: Roy Assaf Dance’s New York Premiere at Baryshnikov Arts Center, “The dancers encircled their fingers as they held hands and pressed together their torsos sending visible vibrations back and forth through their spines.” Stacey Menchel-Kussell, New York.

Mr. Kremer paired Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s preludes with images of life in the Soviet Union.

Mikhail Baryshnikov, one of the greatest dancers of the 20th century, introduces the Baryshnikov Arts Center and its most recent crop of international artists.

Japanese-born, New York–based choreographer Kota Yamazaki returns to his roots as a butoh dancer in

Kota Yamazaki and his wife, the dancer Mina Nishimura, talk about their new work coming to Baryshnikov Arts Center.

Isabella Rossellini discusses the American premiere of her new one-woman show, “Link Link Circus,” now playing at the Baryshnikov Arts Center.

Ms. Rossellini’s latest show explores animals’ thoughts and behaviors using puppets, videos — and, yes, an adorable dog.

The choreographer’s staging of T.S. Eliot’s classic, at Bard College, might be the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century.

Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC) announces that Georgiana Pickett will step down as Executive Director of BAC. Ms. Pickett will remain in her position until April 26, 2019

Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s “Verklärte Nacht,” a barefoot modern dance to Schoenberg’s tempestuous score, leaves an analytic aftertaste.

The Israeli troupe performed an entrancing piece about isolation and togetherness

The Chilean theatremaker, now touring the U.S., works at the intersection of spectacle and philosophy.

They saw, “formalism with flair, and flights of fancy. Quirky, rhythmic, gestural phrases woven into broadly abstract works with exciting choreography. Cute moments that hint at a story.”

In her nearly three decades as president of the New 42nd Street nonprofit organization, Cora Cahan led the charge to restore historic theaters near Times Square and bring new life to the area.

New choreography from Colin Dunne, Dormeshia, Alexei Ratmansky, and others.

Mr. Dunne, an Irish dance artist, performs to the traditional music of Tommie Potts’s classic “The Liffey Banks.”

“TU AMARAS” at BARYSHNIKOV ARTS CENTER REVIEW By Bina Sharif Bonobo, a Theater Ensemble and Baryshnikov Center present “Tu Amaras” W…

This week’s standout livestreams in dance: revisiting “Relations” and early Trisha Brown, and working out with Viva Soudan.

This week’s standout livestreams in dance: revisiting “Relations” and early Trisha Brown, and working out with Viva Soudan.

The initiative aims to encourage dance makers, musicians and other artists to continue working. “We need art right now more than ever,” Mikhail Baryshnikov said.

Highlights this month include the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Nathalie Joachim and Jeremy Denk.

Music by radical U.S. composer Frederic Rzewski, African-American composer Florence Price, and Johann Sebastian Bach is featured in an online concert by the Quodlibet Ensemble with countertenor Reginald Mobley.

New work by Kyle Marshall, Bijayini Satpathy, Justin Hicks and others will debut throughout the spring.

Here’s how you can get your streaming and socially distanced culture fix this month.

For years, Satpathy was the star of the classical Indian dance company Nrityagram, based near Bangalore. Then, in 2019, she struck out on her own, delivering a spellbinding solo performance, in New York, of dances associated with the tradition of Odissi. In a new fifteen-minute solo, recorded in Bangalore (streaming on Baryshnikov Arts Center’s Web site, Feb. 1-15), Satpathy goes further in her exploration of Odissi movement, drawing on a personal style she has developed during the past year of solitary exploration. On Feb. 10, she and the modern-dance choreographer Mark Morris—a devotee of Indian classical music and dance—engage in a live conversation via Zoom.(bacnyc.org)

Our critics and writers have selected noteworthy cultural events to experience virtually.

We are still virtual, and as we close out Black History Month here are a few more events to add to your February dance calendar and to begin your March calendar.

“An electrical demand that exceeds the available supply of its power.” That’s how the choreographer Mariana Valencia defines “brownout” in her visual essay of the same name, made for the Baryshnikov Arts Center’s digital season. In the thirty-minute solo dance film, streaming on the center’s Web site March 1-15, she wryly teases out the metaphorical applications—physical, emotional, perceptual—of a drop in voltage with movement, spoken word, and semi-transparent visual effects.(bacnyc.org)

“Verklärte Nacht” (“Transfigured Night”) hews closely to both the tempestuous Schoenberg score of the same title and the poem that inspired it, in which a woman tells the man she loves that she is pregnant with another man’s child. The 2014 work—available April 8-15 on the Baryshnikov Arts Center’s digital platform—is highly dramatic, expressing emotion methodically through weight, momentum, and repetition.(bacnyc.org)

“Kolonial,” the title of Bland’s new film, alludes to exhibitions in which colonized people and their cultures were displayed for colonizers. But the dancers, isolated in plastic sheeting (an installation by Conrad Quesen), look as much like bodies in a morgue as like exhibited subjects. In the course of the twenty-minute film, available May 3-17 on the Baryshnikov Arts Center’s digital platform, they press their faces against the plastic and eventually tear through. Black-and-blue suggestions of disease and suppression give way to warmer tones of fire and escape.(bacnyc.org)

In IMPRESSIONS: Stefanie Batten Bland’s “Kolonial” with Installation by Conrad Quesen, a World Premiere Commissioned by Baryshnikov Arts Center, “Approximately twenty minutes long, the music, movement, and lighting bisect the piece into two halves, the first of confinement and the latter of community.” — Erin Bomboy

Talking dogs, green screen thrillers and gold turtles: Online productions, intended as a stopgap, are testing the boundaries of what makes theater theater.

Kyle Marshall’s new works, at the Baryshnikov Arts Center and the Shed, are about “creating something that actually feels joyful.”

Which comes first, music or dance? In Kyle Marshall’s choreography, it’s neither. Music and dance are two sides of one art form, interactively and spontaneously created, a kind of jazz. His “Stellar” knits together the grit of urban streets with the loneliness of deep space, and grounds them in the earth of Mother Africa.

Igor Golyak’s adaptation of the Chekhov classic will also be available virtually.

Sonja Kostich, a cultural administrator and dancer, will lead the group as it works to expand its audience amid the pandemic.

Mikhail Baryshnikov shares his thoughts on artistry, the war in Ukraine and lessons learned during the pandemic.

Serge Lamothe’s adaptation of the Yasushi Inoue novel is headed Off-Broadway following earlier productions in Montreal and Japan.

In an interview, the dancer discusses his birthday celebration: a day-long show with artists including Laurie Anderson and Regina Spektor.

In an interview, the dancer discusses his birthday celebration: a day-long show with artists including Laurie Anderson and Regina Spektor.

Choreographers John Welker and John Heginbotham will celebrate ballet great Mikhail Baryshnikov on Sunday at the Breman Museum.

Two dances at Baryshnikov Arts Center are part of Christopher Williams’s project of reimagining, and often queering, works by Diaghilev’s company.

Baryshnikov Arts announces its 2024 Spring Season featuring film, dance, music, visual art, opera, and puppetry. The season includes newly commissioned projects and will take place at the Jerome Robbins Theater in NYC.

Baryshnikov Arts announces its 2024 Spring Residency Artists, providing space and support for creative investigation in all performing arts disciplines.

Ballet was never the same.

The choreographers Baye & Asa usher the Sphinx puzzler into a vaguely menacing landscape.

A multicultural collaboration at Baryshnikov Arts will be taking over the Tivoli center in June.

Another short guide to rhythm-improvisation-community vibes in the Hudson Valley + Shows: Maria “Mange” Valencia / Randy Weston Tribute Band / Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy / “Latinoise” / and much more

June is a wonderful time to visit New York’s Hudson Valley, and whether you’re planning a day trip, a weekend getaway or a longer excursion, there is so much to see and do here in Dutchess County. Here is a list of the Top 10 Dutchess Events in June — a mere fraction of the county’s many can’t-miss attractions and experiences.

Ballet was never the same.

It was a short sprint from the stage door of the O’Keefe Centre (now Meridian Hall), at the corner of the Esplanade and Yonge Street, to the back of the old King Edward Hotel. But 50 years ago, on a damp Saturday evening, that sprint made history.

Fifty years ago, Baryshnikov defected from the Soviet Union. He discusses that day, the war in Ukraine and the challenges facing Russian artists today.

Although his homeland labelled him a traitor, he knew instead he was a symbol of hope for all Russian artists whose spirits long to be free

Baryshnikov Arts Center reveals its Fall 2024 season, featuring a diverse lineup of performances including dance, theater, and music, highlighting both emerging and established artists.

Sept. 2-29 + Dance List turns one!

LEADERS Interview with Sonja Kostich, President and Executive Director, Baryshnikov Arts by David Schner

Baryshnikov Arts will present a fall season of dance, music, and digital performances beginning September 20 with the encore of MERCE / MISHA / MORE, a film celebrating decades of friendship, mutual admiration, and collaboration between Mikhail Baryshnikov and Merce Cunningham.

Baryshnikov Arts Center reveals its Fall 2024 season, featuring a diverse lineup of performances including dance, theater, and music, highlighting both emerging and established artists.

From a new opera about drone warfare to a dance performance that’s part rave, part alien invasion, here are 12 must-see shows this coming season.

The season brings new works by Kyle Abraham and Helen Pickett, as well as revivals of City Ballet’s “Coppélia” and Bill T. Jones’s “Still/Here.”

Baryshnikov Arts and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s will present an evening-length immersive co-production celebrating two milestone anniversaries—20 and 50 years, respectively—on Thursday, May 8 at 7 PM.

Arts leaders agree: When it comes to the business of dance, things are hard right now. Really hard. Ticket sales are down. Individual giving is down. Grants are a moving target. And all of it is the purview of executive directors, who are feeling the pressure.

While I can’t swear this is the first production to merge Bertolt Brecht with the disco anthem “Funkytown,” I’d put good money on it. With A Mother, this is only the beginning. Think of it as a…

Brecht once said, “In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times.” This must have been the inspiration for A Mother, a truly amusing collection of heartfelt life snippets by writer Neena Beber, co-conceived with actress Jessica Hecht, now playing at Baryshnikov Arts. It is not […]

Last night, Neena Beber’s new play A Mother opened at the Baryshnikov Arts Center as part of the performing arts institution’s 20th anniversary season. Conceived by Beber alongside beloved stage actress Jessica Hecht, the prismatic play combines elements of Brechtian theater, musical theater (namely, Lerner and Loewe’s Paint Your Wagon), and even disco culture to animate a theatrical memoir — of sorts. I say “of sorts” because its fractured memories (a cornucopia featuring young romance, theater camp, race riots, etc.) are inextricably intertwined with and presented through the lens of Brecht’s rarely-performed play The Mother.

Co-conceived by its playwright, Neena Beber, ‘A Mother,’ now being presented as part of Baryshnikov Arts’ 20th anniversary spring season, is obviously a…

Founded in 2005 by Artistic Director Mikhail Baryshnikov, Baryshnikov Arts has launched its 20th anniversary season with the world premiere of A Mother, a loose time-traveling metatheatrical autobiographical adaptation with music of Bertolt Brecht’s 1932 banned play The Mother (itself based on the 1906 novel of the same name by Maxim Gorky), written by Neena […]

Celia Rowlson-Hall’s “Sissy” at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, a dance-theater hybrid featuring Marisa Tomei, pokes at the boundaries between art and life.

Yellow caution tape dangles from the doorway to the Jerome Robbins Theater and ropes off every row of seats. Not only have we entered the Baryshnikov Arts Center space, we’ve also crossed a portal directly into the world of “Sissy,” Celia Rowlson-Hall’s new dance-theater production, where a troupe of interpretive dance

The creation process is challenging enough for an independent choreographer; add in a young child and an ailing parent, and suddenly daily existence takes on a palpable weight. That’s the premise of Celia Rowlson-Hall’s “SISSY,” running this weekend in New York.

The director-actor-choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall is best known for her idiosyncratic work in music videos (Alicia Keys’s “In Common”), TV (“Girls”), and film (“Aftersun”; her own short films; and her surreal, feature-length “MA”). Her latest piece, “Sissy,” is made for the stage, but that doesn’t mean it’s any more conventional.

The modern-day take on Sisyphus of Greek mythology will also star Marisa Tomei.

Marisa Tomei and the dancer Ida Saki perform this new dance theater piece, which puts a contemporary female lens on the myth of Sisyphus. In this retelling — written, choreographed and directed by Celia Rowlson-Hall (“Smile 2”) — Sisyphean labors come with being a woman in the world. (April 24-April 26, Baryshnikov Arts)

“Combination and recombination are the DNA of Merce Cunningham’s art. Cunningham’s dances can be set and reset, folded into each other, danced to new music, capped with new choreography, adapted into other art forms. All this was on display at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, with the mixed results that come with mutation. The most brilliant recombination was an expansion of the central duet from XOVER (2007).” —Tom Phillips, New York