Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – Dance Reflections continues seductively with Millepied’s ROMEO & JULIET SUITE and De Keersmaeker’s EXIT ABOVE

• By drediman
• March 10, 2026
• No Comments

The 2026 edition of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef and Arpels continued seductively with two large scale, full length global dance presentations by renowned choreographers at NYU Skirball and the Park Avenue Armory, respectively. Read on for my thoughts.

ROMEO & JULIET SUITE
Park Avenue Armory
Through March 21

Currently unfolding nightly at the cavernous drill hall and ancillary rooms of Park Avenue Armory is Benjamin Millepied’s Romeo & Juliet Suite (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED), a distilled and refreshing new take of the classic ballet. Despite the massive and sprawling venue, the site-specific production manages to capture the intimacy and emotion of the famously tragic story with style and subtle understanding — in part due to the tasteful use of video capture, which is projected on a large screen behind the bare stage. This gives Millepied the ability to engage in a kind of stylized cinematic storytelling that allows the tragic story to spill organically through perceived performative barriers into a number of playing spaces. No matter which performance you attend, a certain level of freshness is guaranteed given that a unique pair of dancers, agnostic of gender and race, have been have been tapped to play the titular characters at each show. At the performance I attended, the roles were portrayed by David Adrian Freeland, Jr. and Morgan Lugo — both magnificent dancers — with tenderness and visceral charge. Throughout, Millepied’s choreography felt disarmingly natural yet pregnant with intent, especially as performed by his L.A. Dance Project dancers (who are no doubt well-versed in his style). And although the staging is infused with touches modernism, you don’t lose the essence and emotional timelessness in this truncated version of the tragic love story (although I did miss the live playing of the powerful Prokofiev score). Millepied is turning out to be the darling of the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef and Arpels, having had a triptych of his works already presented by the festival at PAC NYC. This evening turned out to be even more memorable.

EXIT ABOVE
NYU Skirball
Closed

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker returned to New York with a vengeance with Exit Above (RECOMMENDED), the iconic Belgian choreographer’s evening length meditation on youth and resilience. In short, the dance/music hybrid is one of her most energetic and accessible works to date, if not quite her most cohesive. After a brief but tempestuous (quite literally) prologue, the work commences simply on the motif of walking, tentatively morphing into a swirling, relentlessly rhythmic rave for the entire company, and concluding with a gentle, not insignificant nod to Shakespeare’s final work The Tempest. Throughout, the cadence and tone of the piece is largely driven by the blues-inspired music-making of guitarist Carlos Garbin and extraordinary vocalist Meskerem Mees, who often join in the dance. Mees in particular is a beguiling force, drawing you in with her angelic voice and uncannily calming stage presence. There’s a maximalism and sometimes infuriatingly freewheeling quality to the piece that’s in sharp contrast to the rigorous patterning and austere movements of De Keersmaeker’s early works, many of them now considered classics. Indeed, at over 90 minutes, the production is at least 20 minutes too long. Much like Bill T. Jones’s concoctions these days, Exit Above has the essence of a devised piece of dance theater, infusing the work with the distinctive and unfiltered energies, perspectives, senses of musicality of the choreographer’s largely youthful cast. Thankfully, underneath all the noise, I could still discern De Keersmaeker’s unique dance aesthetic wherein counterweighted movements become the genesis for the shape of the dance.