A thought experiment: From these cherry-picked events by the city’s best opera and dance companies, choose two—one from each category—for a double bill. (Ignore actual show dates and times.) For example, check out Gelsey Bell’s trickily titled mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning], then head over to BAM for Bill T. Jones’s Still/Here. Both works examine mortality: cosmic and deeply individual. Ink is a Taiwanese multimedia piece that turns a great calligrapher’s work into movement; Indra’s Net transforms a Buddhist legend into music-theater. There’s a new opera about drone warfare (Grounded) whose topicality and politics could contrast nicely with an immersive dance experience about wraiths from another dimension (R.O.S.E.). Go ahead and play this game at home, but eventually, you’re going to have to leave the apartment!
OPERA
mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning] at Green Wood Cemetery Catacomb (September 12–14)
Can you imagine the end of humanity—and then a billion years after that? No need to; the ethereal composer-vocalist Gelsey Bell already has. Bell’s 2023 opera is at once apocalyptic, transcendent and quirky—a detailed description of the end of the Earth as we know it. Tickets to this Death of Classical event include a reception with drinks. The ridiculously apt venue? Underground tombs at Green Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
Grounded at the Metropolitan Opera (September 23–October 12)
Jeanine Tesori (Kimberly Akimbo) is more familiar to Broadway fans than opera goers, but she’s been going back and forth for years. Now the composer makes her Metropolitan Opera debut with a contemporary military tale. Mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo plays an army officer assigned to remote piloting of drones. Half a world away, these machines of destruction rain death from the skies. What is the psychic cost of killing people by remote control?
Indra’s Net at the Park Avenue Armory (September 23–October 6)
As a composer, director, performer and innovator in the field of vocal arts, Meredith Monk has redefined experimental music-theater for decades. Her 80-minute multidisciplinary work is bigger than simply an “opera,” but them’s the categories. The story? An ancient Buddhist legend about an enlightened king who unfurls a bejeweled net across the universe, symbolizing life’s interconnectedness. Monk performs with her vocal ensemble, accompanied by a sixteen-piece chamber orchestra and chorus.
Silent Light at National Sawdust (September 26–29)
The humble lives and torturous passions of Mennonites are the subject of composer Paola Prestini’s new music-drama, set to a libretto by Royce Vavrek (Breaking the Waves). Based on the 2007 film written and directed by Carlos Reygadas, the story concerns a Mennonite married man having an affair with another woman, a betrayal that destroys his wife.
Ainadamar at the Metropolitan Opera (October 15–November 9)
First seen in 2003 (and again in 2005 after revisions) Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov’s first opera is about the life of the great Spanish playwright Federico García Lorca, murdered by fascist forces at the start of the Spanish Civil War for being a socialist and a gay man. Playwright David Henry Hwang provides the reverse-chronology libretto, in which Lorca’s life is seen through the lens of his muse, Catalan actress Margarita Xirgu. Angel Blue plays Xirgu and, as Lorca himself, mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack takes on the “trouser role.”
Lucidity at the Abrons Arts Center (November 14–16)
The mysterious and powerful relationship of music to memory is the subject Laura Kaminsky (As One) tackles in her new opera with a libretto (full disclosure) by this writer. Presented at Abrons Arts Center by On Site Opera, the audience will sit on the stage and gaze into a theater of the mind. Legendary soprano Lucy Shelton plays a retired singer and composer in the early stages of dementia taking part in a music-therapy trial to improve her cognition. Director Sarah Meyers stages a cast that includes Blythe Gaissert, Cristina María Castro and Eric McKeever.
DANCE
R.O.S.E. at Park Avenue Armory (September 5–12)
Choreographer Sharon Eyal and her corps of fearless dancers don skintight torn-lace body suits (courtesy of Dior designer Maria Grazia Chiuri), smear their faces with makeup, and execute moves around audience members in the massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall. Part rave, part alien invasion, part kinesthetic immersion, the show was created in collaboration with stage director Gai Behar, DJ Ben UFO and others. In a way, each audience body is a collaborator, too.
Fall for Dance at New York City Center (September 18–29)
New York City Center’s global tasting menu of dance companies returns. The festival lineup includes National Ballet of Ukraine, Dutch National Ballet and Gandini Juggling from the UK. Legendary dancer Herman Cornejo reimagines Fokine’s beloved Le Spectre de la Rose and Cameron sinkʷə Fraser-Monroe (a member of the Tla’amin First Nation) creates a new work for Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet, co-commissioned by the Bard Center for Indigenous Studies.
Prisma at the Baryshnikov Arts Center (November 14–16)
Where do we come from? Easy to ask, but hard to answer. Through vignettes, this devised piece combines dance, live music and beatboxing mixed with classical strings to explore “genesis moments” of the performers. It will be fascinating to see how the cast unpack themselves over the course of an hour. Don’t forget: light goes into a prism white and comes out a rainbow.
Still/Here at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House (October 30–November 2)
When it debuted 30 years ago, Bill T. Jones’s meditation on illness, mortality and survival sparked criticism as to whether or not it was “victim art” and how critics were supposed to respond to it. Such arguments over aesthetics and ethics rage even more today. Jones derived this mix of pure dance, multimedia and original music from 10 months of “survival workshops,” in which he talked to people living with life-threatening conditions. Life may fade, but art endures.
Ink at the Rose Theater (November 2 & 3)
Taiwanese choreographer Huang Yi has danced with a robot; now he’s making hand-applied ink shimmy in three dimensions. Partnering with audiovisual designer Ryoichi Kurokawa, Ink brings to life the work of one of Taiwan’s foremost calligraphers Tong Yang-Tze (born in 1942). Performers’ bodies become brushes that splash ink across screens in real time. The eye-popping design includes deft use of holographic projection. Ancient craft meets futuristic tech.
Limón Dance Company at the Joyce Theater (November 5–10)
The troupe celebrates its 78th season by looking back at foundational works. There’s Doris Humphrey’s solo Two Ecstatic Themes (1931) followed by José Limón’s stirring retelling of Gethsemane, The Traitor. The lightness of a drumming quartet in Scherzo gives way to tremendous gravity in Limón’s Missa Brevis (1958), a tribute to survivors of war. And there’s something new: a world premiere by choreographer Kayla Farrish that reimagines two 1950s Limón works, one a meditation on collective labor, the other about social awakening.
