In the back room of a hotel cafe in Lower Manhattan, the Irish director Garry Hynes was talking about Sean O’Casey, the laborer turned playwright whose frequently funny, sometimes blood-chilling, canonical 1920s tragicomedies are set amid the tenements of Dublin….

Read the full story by Laura Collins-Hughes, The New York Times.

“At the end of every play in the Dublin Trilogy, the stage has pushed beyond the real into a dense and resonant space of metaphor. O’Casey is too smart, and too funny, to succumb to nihilism, but he’s also too smart, and too full of grief, not to acknowledge the darkness on all sides…” – Sara Holdren, Vulture

“An eerier kind of togetherness emerged in John Jasperse’s ‘Visitation,’ for Doug LeCours, Tim Bendernagel and Cynthia Koppe. Invoking ghosts and ghostliness, this spacious yet intricate work managed to fill NYU Skirball’s expansive stage, building to a climax in which the three dancers, uncannily, appeared enmeshed as one. […] It was hard to look away from Koppe, who gave a quietly magnificent performance: so rigorously present in her body, she seemed to have broken through to a different realm.”

Based mainly in Europe, this American choreographer returned to New York with “Maggie the Cat,” a heady mix of runway, voguing and an energizing point of departure: “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” With his “Maggie” — a play, a character, a force? — Harrell created a bold, joyful show that elevated the notion of runway movement as dance and any old household objects, like pillows and towels, as couture. It was a sonic and visual delight.

“Eiko Otake and Margaret Leng Tan Reflect on Art, Friendship, and Life”

New York Magazine rates “The Duet Project” “Highbrow, Brilliant” in their Approval Matrix.

“New York fans of Daniel Fish’s Tony-nominated production of “Oklahoma!” will soon have the opportunity to experience another remix of an American classic by the director.”

“It’s about how bad news — the giving and the receiving of it — constitutes us as a community who now know just how wrong things can go.”

“Of course, the messenger is also a storyteller—one charged with passing on not only the facts, but their affective impact. In doing this they must relive the horror, embody it, share it, and evoke the audiences’ emotional responses.”

“Taylor Mac isn’t the only one doing 24-hour shows. A group of marathon performances will arrive at N.Y.U.’s Skirball Center next season that will test the endurance of both the performers and the audience.”

New York Times recommends a panel featuring Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway, Leah Daughtry, and Minyon Moore who will discuss their book “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics”

“For about a year beginning in 2013, Brian Rogers, a film director and video and sound artist, found himself living — half a week, every week — in a former Catholic church in upstate New York.”

A panel reflects on the legacy of the Stonewall rebellion and the L.G.B.T. rights movement at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan.

“…get to know the British theater company that cast a bottle of vinegar bottle as … Hamlet.”

“In “And on the Thousandth Night …” a handful of actors will greet the dawn with a bedtime story that never quite ends. And on subsequent nights those same performers will act out the complete works of Shakespeare in 36 solo performances with an assist from common household objects.”

“…inanimate objects, epic performances and why most Forced Entertainment shows — the Skirball ones, too — are built to fail.”

“There is something of the nursery in the show’s insistence on unfettered imagination, and something of the bedtime story in the way the best of these tales unfold. They’re not soporific but soothingly mesmeric, even the tragic ones. They’re at close range, too, with the audience seated onstage.”

“This fall’s dance calendar will feature inventive takes on old favorites and intriguing new works.”

“For one thing, he has removed the word “dance” from his company’s name. ‘We’re a contemporary performance ensemble,’”

“Bill T. Jones is one of the few choreographers who can weave together social consciousness with choreographic inventiveness.”

“For the past four years, Mr. Jones has found inspiration in transforming oral histories into dance-theater productions.”

“In his new piece, 10000 Gestures, each action is different—no repeats. This week, a horde of more than 20 dancers invades New York City’s NYU Skirball Center, each of them cramming a thousand gestures into one hour.”

“Each of its titular motions for a cast of twenty-five may be as small as a blink or as big as a leap, but, once executed, it does not recur. In place of conventional choreographic patterns, there’s a dense, bewildering rush, and Mozart’s “Requiem,” to make you think of death.”

“Some choreographers live for repetition, while others, like the French choreographer Boris Charmatz, at least in his 2017 work “10000 Gestures,” deliberately fights against it.”

“Tere related his choreographic processes to the nature of the mind itself, which remains in and out of a constant episodic flow of consciousness.”

“As tangential in sequence and unfixed in meaning as free-associative poetry, Tere O’Connor’s masterful works resist capsule description.”

“When a choreographer is in the middle of creating a new dance, there’s an inevitable freak-out moment. “

“He doesn’t, however, show us different things happening irrespective of one another. Everything seems connected, part of the same intricate organism.”

“…challenging his eight dancers to find calm despite negotiating numerous physical tasks involving polyrhythms, velocity and duration.”

“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.”

“In keeping with this idea, drawn from Marx’s writings, the festival will be entirely pay-what-you-wish. Guests will be presented with an itemized budget before each event, detailing how much it cost to put the event together.”

“Her new piece “Brujx” is part of Marx Festival: On Your Marx, and its socialist theme is the oppression of the proletariat: whether the idea of dance as labor can be transcended through a kind of primal magic.”

“‘I wanted my setting of Choral Marx to be a complicatedly multiple work that asks how Marx might reverberate now, at this political moment when we’re asking some very basic questions about world capitalism and how it is propelled by racism and nationalism.’”

“The power of Marx and his writings is the revolutionary way of seeing, giving individuals an alternate lens through which to view and dissect the seemingly inevitable progression of capitalism.  His ideology became a tool—a weapon—and as with all such items, its usage depends on the hand that wields it.”

“This Brooklyn-based choreographer, originally from Uruguay, presents the premiere of “Brujx,” in which she continues her investigation of dance as a healing art by ritualizing the labor of her dancers.”

“The crazed alacrity of the young audience was morbidly fascinating. I suspected that many were students in NYU’s various performance programs, and that many had found online videos of other presentations of P Project…”

““On Your Marx”– a two week long jubilee hosted by NYU to celebrate 200 years of Marx commenced. VICE News took a look at Marxist performance art, academic panels, and whatever Slavoj Zizek was thinking four minutes ago.”

“Theatergoers of New York, unite! You have nothing to lose but your time. NYU Skirball presents a two-week festival to commemorate the bicentennial of beard-stroking communist forefather Karl Marx.”

“While the allegations against Mr. Fabre are specific, they have also raised larger questions: whether dancers, trained from an early age to obey teachers, directors and choreographers, in an environment where physical proximity is a given, find it difficult to refuse inappropriate or excessive demands.”

“How do you encompass the stories and myriad characters of Greek tragedies in a single evening of theater? You don’t. You need a full day, or so proposes the avant-garde Belgian director and choreographer Jan Fabre.”

“Belgian activists, including some who once worked with the acclaimed multidisciplinary artist Jan Fabre, have demanded New York University do more to address allegations of sexual harassment against Mr. Fabre as his company prepares to perform at N.Y.U. on Saturday.”

“The choreographer John Heginbotham and the puppeteer Amy Trompetter create a world of large and tiny puppets alongside dancers to explore issues of morality. Fantastic characters, including giant babies, blue angels and heroic rats, come to life in a series of vignettes.”

“Set in motion by a suite of piano pieces by Rossini and Respighi, Heginbotham’s dancers and Trompetter’s homemade-looking puppets enact a kind of dance fable about the clash between good and evil, darkness and light.”

“The joyful finale of John Heginbotham’s “Fantasque,” set to music by Respighi, reminds the dancer Lindsey Jones of the “flowy freedom” of Isadora Duncan.”

“The word “fantasque,” originally French, is both noun (meaning fancy, fantasy) and adjective (meaning fanciful, fantastic).”

“Many have attempted the genre of burlesque revue, but Briefs, I’m happy to report, is among the best — smart, irreverent, and funny, with sex appeal to spare. The company’s ability to couple awe-inspiring physical feats with comedy and choreographic panache is where it finds its success.”

“The bit was full of bone-juggling fun and the performers diving through hula hoops, escalating until it ended with one of the humans getting a mouthful of faux dog poop. Disgusting? Sure. But it was a clear sign that their talk of pushing boundaries wasn’t just for show.”

“Opening with a full ensemble number of pulsating burlesque fans and breakaway costumes, Fa’anana declared the night was going to be “a bit of butch with a f*ckload of camp.” What was promised was delivered.”

“An aesthete who elevated recitation over print, Wilde would have been quite flummoxed by Gatz, the jaw-dropping literary installation by Elevator Repair Service. This eight-hour-plus immersion—in which 13 actors read aloud every blessed word of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—is thoroughly aural, even musical.”

“Here was a show that improbably transformed the intimate relationship between a reader and a book into a joyously collective act of literary seduction, performed by a chameleon cast of 13, and it became the season’s most coveted ticket.”

“‘There is a recitation of The Great Gatsby embedded in what we do, but that is not the totality of what we do,’ said Collins. ‘In Scott as Nick, this is the story of someone becoming completely lost in a great novel. And it is a slowly emerging hallucination of the novel against a very unlikely backdrop.’”

“Mr. Rau’s taboo-challenging productions over the last decade led one publication to call him “the world’s most controversial director.” Born in Bern, Switzerland, he broke out in 2009 with “The Last Days of the Ceausescus,” about the trial and execution of Romania’s Communist leader and his wife; he was sued afterward by Ceausescu’s son for using the family name.”

“For Milo Rau, making his American stage directing debut, the perversity is the point. Commissioned to create a work of children’s theater, he set out to redefine what that genre could mean — and also, it seems, to live up to his reputation as ‘the world’s most controversial director.’”

“He broke out in 2009 with “The Last Days of the Ceausescus,” about the trial and execution of Romania’s Communist leader and his wife, while “La Reprise” — in which he re-enacts the murder of a gay man in Belgium — was the talk of this year’s Avignon Festival.”

“Greek tragedies may go back 2,500 years, but theater directors continue to find them extraordinarily resonant, sometimes staging them in contemporary settings or finding other ways to emphasize how pride and passion, ancient or modern, can bleed out and leave a society in ruins.”

“Pinocchio always wanted to be a real boy, and the choreographer Kyle Abraham is wondering what that even means today. In “Live! The Realest M.C.,” Abraham uses the children’s tale as a starting point to dissect gender roles and black masculinity in the context of hip-hop culture.”

“But if you’re a black American, nothing has changed. People were spitting on us and making us feel inferior for a very long time, so I don’t feel any different with the current president in office– if that’s where people try to perceive in this work.”

“’For me, it was definitely in some ways an abstracted look back at my high school experience, but more than that because identity is a big part of the work and in some ways a buzz word that people are using today for whatever reason…’”

“In it, Abraham, wearing a long skirt, played with conventions of toughness and urban attitude. Now, more than a decade later, his ideas about identity and self-presentation have deepened, unfolding in a wider spectrum of colors.”

“Petronio presents the fifth edition of “Bloodlines,” an autobiographical project that pays homage to the creators of postmodern dance and traces the choreographer’s own influences.”

“…the Judson founders Steve Paxton and Trisha Brown —“it was not about emotion. It was about motion and the rules of motion. So that separated him in a certain way, and I was very curious.””

“In the foreground, dancers, sleekly costumed by H. Petal, etch geometric patterns onto the stage in front of numerous scenes: a barren forest, an exploding bomb, a soldier walking down a street, a torn flag.”

“Later in the month, the Joyce Theater will host three different companies presenting different Cunningham works, while the Skirball Center presents In Conversation with Merce, featuring different dancers’ responses to the choreographer’s legacy.”

“Part of “In Conversation With Merce” at @nyuskirball on Friday and Saturday — Mina is one of 3 dance artists exploring their relationship to the choreographer — “Hi, Merce!” combines text with Mina’s effervescent take on Butoh, a dance form that emerged in post-World War II Japan.”

“Netta Yerushalmy explores Cunningham’s dance vocabulary. Mina Nishimura, who hails from Japan, seeks a nexus between Cunningham’s abstraction and the expressionist dance style Butoh. The wild card is Moriah Evans…”

“Just because his 100th birthday has passed — observed with the breathtaking multicity event “Night of 100 Solos” — doesn’t mean we are done celebrating Merce Cunningham or contemplating his vast legacy.”

“This presentation, curated by Rashaun Mitchell, a former company member and a trustee with the Merce Cunningham Trust, explores the theoretical, practical and experiential approaches to Cunningham’s work. Three respected choreographers take part: Moriah Evans, Mina Nishimura and Netta Yerushalmy.”

“It’s about how do you continue rather than simply stopping . . . I think one thing that in the theater you have to learn: That when you go off, you are exiting. Don’t finish what you’re doing before you’re really off.”