Symphony Area, New York, NY.
February 6-9, 2026.
Technological growth strikes on the velocity of sunshine as of late, it may possibly really feel like. A plethora of questions on such growth swirl within the ether, many who poignantly ask about our humanity in relation to rising applied sciences; will such improvements as spatial computing and AI make us lose contact with our essence, and is the comfort price it?
Mere phrases can really feel insufficient for addressing such gargantuan questions. Summary artwork varieties, comparable to dance, can supply us one other language and shift our perspective to new potentialities. The Dance on Digicam Competition has at all times platformed daring, insightful work that may develop our language and views in such methods.
Poignantly, this 12 months’s choices (33 in whole, from 12 international locations) name upon forward-thinking approaches to supply engaging glimpses into one thing way more natural, historical, and elementary: the depths of human the human soul. The three works detailed beneath are glittering examples of such leveraging the technological to focus on the religious.
Amanda Beane’s Chair Deconstruction (2024) provides a considerate and compelling questioning of our sedentary tradition. It juxtaposes the constriction of bodily stasis and the liberty potential within the shifting physique. The movie opens on people sitting in folding chairs, arrayed in a half-circle in a gymnasium setting. The silence of their our bodies echoes the silence within the rating – till each motion and music rise. The motion is angular and barely propulsive, with tiny explosions of power – small releases of dormant kinetic pressure inside muscle and sinew.
The dancers roll their spines as they proceed with these tiny explosions of motion power, creating a way of indulgence; there may be deep pleasure on this motion, of the discharge of that power we comprise by way of static days. Damaged tones within the rating match the relative lack of continuity, of circulate, on this motion. Steadily shifting digicam angles add to that freneticism, that intermittency.
But, quite than rising nervousness, there’s a calm at hand: a launch of rigidity, the lengthy exhale after a deep and held inhale. It’s a launch into the pure human state: of motion, of bodily engagement, of sharing that state with different people.
Two dancers within the middle of the chairs turn out to be an emotional core; many of the close-ups are on them and their expressions. A second of an embrace between them is a deep and tender human sharing, shared with us and not using a phrase.
Later, dancers take pleasure in their very own motion whereas intently connecting in house: sharing within the personal bliss of private motion. There’s liberation in all of that, too, the liberty to really feel and to specific such feeling, to genuinely join with one other – no reservations at hand.
The motion begins breaking out into the gymnasium setting: spacious reaches, massive smiles, and the goofiness of chairs over heads and doing “the worm” proper on the ground. There are even athletic endeavors, comparable to backflips, and luxuriating in floor-based motion.
The virtuosity of many various motion types is welcome, as is the motion of merely being. After abandoning the confinement of chairs, their restrict is all the plentiful house that their our bodies can devour. “Shadow (an insert)” applies a contact extra tense thriller, with duet dancers shifting in a semi-spotlight. It’s an efficient shift to maintain viewers’ curiosity piqued, only a sprint of variance.
The work winds down with voiceover by way of a faculty loudspeaker, bringing expressions talking to “whoops…okay, again to the day, again to the grind.” One dancer’s eyes roam barely awkwardly: “nobody noticed that, proper?”. They rein in these visceral impulses as soon as once more and stack their folding chairs in an orderly style. There’s a feeling that their day and their duties proceed, however not less than they skilled this kinetic freedom – and can hopefully keep in mind it fondly sufficient to return quickly.
Grigory Dobrygin’s 5 Brahms Waltzes In The Method of Isadora Duncan (2025), with choreography from Frederick Ashton,is a memorable honoring of Isadora Duncan’s legacy: her motion packaged in a 21st century sensibility but very a lot retaining its essence. Duncan affirmed the significance of boiling all the way down to probably the most important parts and stripping away what was superfluous. This work carried that concept with magnificence and aplomb. Soloist Lynn Seymour strikes with equal elements impassioned energy and receptive softness – thus memorably representing Duncan’s ethos of nature’s fluid steadiness, its dynamic and harmonious integration, embodied.
The piano rating rises together with a highlight developing on Seymour. She wears a draping costume of sunshine material, and the house is Spartan: it’s simply her, the motion, and music. She slowly takes to her toes, her palms dexterously gesturing by way of her kinesphere. Her momentum builds because the rating additionally does, to have her quickly waltzing, stepping, and reaching by way of the open house throughout her – the digicam panning out to catch all of this ambulation.
The photo voltaic plexus leads her explorations of the house, of her personal physique’s potentialities, simply as Duncan would need. She appears to expertise an inwardly reflective second between separate scores; she doesn’t let the ability of the shifting second go unprocessed, unappreciated. That extra reflective demeanor continues within the rating, with a extra somber rating and decrease lighting to match.
The motion vocabulary stays pretty constant – with elegant shaping of pedestrian skips, steps, reaches, lunges, and the like – but additionally takes on a extra craving high quality. By means of such tonal shifts, the quick movie provides a satisfying emotional vary. There’s energy in her softly waving arms, together with her motions of pushing and pulling. Her legs deeply lunge, her gazes clear and sharp.
A shawl drops into the open house, into which she runs with abandon: the headscarf trailing behind her. A highlight follows her motion by way of the house, components so simple as small weight shifts and crossing steps made luminous by way of her kinetic absorption. Quickly comes a sprinkling of one thing that seems extra “technical” – a foot delicately positioned to a knee, operating with gesture and clear kind – but she doesn’t lose the simultaneous ease and abandon of the prior sections.
Her subsequent prop is handfuls of flower petals, which seems like an acknowledgement of Duncan’s deep connection to the pure world. Seymour savors a second of simply holding them, a reminder to take these gradual, intentional moments of appreciating nature’s items.
Such endurance, a cadence of those pauses between bursting power, permits such power to settle in and absolutely marinate for viewers. She then spreads the flower petals in a circle, then strikes round it, taking effervescent flight: a extra athletic embodiment of Duncan’s reference to nature, embodiment all the identical, no kind of worthy for its peak or velocity.
In conveying the Duncan ethos by way of such a rigorous, but easeful presentation of motion, this movie reminds us of the timelessness of that ethos. It involves us viewers wrapped in a “post-post-modern” sense that early twentieth-century work can come to us in a twenty-first sensibility, and there want be no discordance in so crossing centuries. If approached and supplied with intention and rigor, something can go, and imply a lot – and that was actually the case with this work.
Jessica Nupen’s Loom Physique (2025)is a contemporary, daring motion metaphor delivered in a thought-provoking quick movie – pairing the natural motion of the human physique and that of the mechanized loom. A blurred picture brings us into the movie, slowly getting clearer as we get nearer to a person. Frames splice the motion of that particular person with that of a loom: each with a jerky, steady, and rhythmic high quality. Different our bodies accumulate within the frames, shifting with that very same mechanized high quality.
The attitude shifts to incorporate what’s made within the loom; two ladies dance with giant cloths, and with one another. With them reaching, pulling, and sharing weight, the photographs transfer with a sure urgency, even an nervousness. But, simply as in Chair Deconstruction, there’s one way or the other additionally a relaxed at hand: within the stunning pure vistas, the rhythm of the loom sounds, the unforced and proudly assured motion model of the 2 dancers.
The digicam brings us right into a manufacturing unit with the dancers shifting in these loom qualities: accented, angular, persistently rhythmic. Poetic voiceover ties these qualities and actions to concepts of labor, self-worth, and the steadiness of obligation to the opposite and to the self. It’s a reasonably summary meditation on such massive concepts that one might doubtless tease aside and ponder for a while.
The motion is the heartbeat of such massive concepts, with a lot richness to savor in need of any round ruminations of existence. Simply as with every of those three works, eager and considerate use of filmic applied sciences opened small home windows into the huge expanses of what it means to have a craving spirit on this spinning world.
The 2026 Dance on Digicam Competition thus underscored that the digital and the natural do not need to be at odds – quite, when introduced along with intention and command of craft, may also help illuminate what it means to be human.
By Kathryn Boland of Dance Informa.
