STANDING IN THE AIRY GALLERIES of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art on a brisk Thursday morning in March, I thought of the famous Rilke poem “The Panther”:

From endless passing of the bars his gaze
has wearied—there is no more it can hold.
There seem to be a thousand bars always,
and past those thousand bars there is no world.

The soft pad of his brawny, rippling pace
turns itself in a tightening circle till,
like a mighty dance around a tiny space,
it centers a numb but still enormous will.

But at times the shades of his pupils rise,
grasping an image he cannot resist;
through his tense, unmoving

DID VIRGINIA WOOLF drown herself in the Ouse because of the poetry of the act—the river as a passage between life and death—or because it seemed to her the most practical method available? Likely both. Rivers have always evoked otherworldly crossings. The Styx of Greek mythology, the Sai-no-Kawara of Japanese folklore, the west bank of the Nile of Ancient Egypt—all were envisioned as gateways to the afterlife. There is something about the constancy of river water, traveling beyond sight or into the vastness of an ocean, that reminds us of our own impermanence. It’s comforting to render death

A CRAMPED LIVING ROOM appears like a diorama of 1960s Greenwich Village bohemia, afloat in the engulfing expanse of the Harvey Theater’s stage. It contains all the warmth and ire and humanity that get bottled up in a typical New York apartment: a whole world unfolding with nowhere to go. The chasmic darkness of America waits just outside its cozily art-covered walls.

Incendiary optimism, depicted as a necessity in life and politics, suffuses Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964), staged this past February and March by Anne Kauffman at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in

A CRAMPED LIVING ROOM appears like a diorama of 1960s Greenwich Village bohemia, afloat in the engulfing expanse of the Harvey Theater’s stage. It contains all the warmth and ire and humanity that get bottled up in a typical New York apartment: a whole world unfolding with nowhere to go. The chasmic darkness of America waits just outside its cozily art-covered walls.

Incendiary optimism, depicted as a necessity in life and politics, suffuses Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964), which runs until March 24 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it is being staged

FIRST PRESENTED IN 1960 at the Reuben Gallery in New York, Robert Whitman’s Happening The American Moon was restaged in January at Pace Gallery’s small 508 West Twenty-Fifth Street space. Viewers were catapulted into a temporal rabbit hole. The work, now simply titled American Moon, encompassed five live performances; the prop-strewn set where the restaging had “happened,” viewable throughout the exhibition’s three weeks; a series of drawings from 1960 that had functioned as notations for the Reuben staging; a bulbous, exuberantly reconstructed fabric wall; and three unique, “generative” NFTs,

THE AUDIENCE SAUNTERS into the theater, immersed in distracted chatter, half-consciously awaiting the dimming of the stage lights. But they stay on longer than expected. Upstage, barefoot, hands clasped behind his back and wearing a floral dress around his neck, Trajal Harrell has been watching this routine unfold from the start. With bemusement? Apprehension? Measured curiosity? Occasionally, he bends over to warmly greet an acquaintance parked up near the stage or pulls a tissue out of his pocket to wipe his runny nose. The performance has already begun, if unremarkably. Feeling the room,

LEAVING THE THEATER after Tere O’Connor’s Rivulets, I distinctly felt that I had just seen a dance by Tere O’Connor. That might sound obvious, but it’s not something you can say about every choreographer—that their work feels unmistakably theirs. With the rupture of the pandemic between O’Connor’s last major project (Long Run, 2017) and this one, the continuity of his aesthetic struck me as both reassuring and surreal, a reminder that while so much has changed, some people, somehow, have managed to keep doing their thing.

When I think of a Tere O’Connor dance, I think of multiplicity, flourishing,

CAN AN ARTIST HIT THE JUGULAR while they’re reaching for the wallet at the same time? Only if the wallet and the jugular are the same thing. In the cultural devolution of “audience” to “eyeballs,” perhaps no genre has so loudly insisted on its robust resistance to power as comedy—and perhaps no genre’s complicity has, since 2017, been made more transparent. (Let the rise of Joe Rogan be citation enough here.) To borrow a one-liner from Morgan Bassichis’s brilliant solo performance Questions to Ask Beforehand (Bridget Donahue), “What stage of capitalism is it called when everyone’s a comedian?”

WITH THE WINDING TITLE of her latest dance, Mapping a Forest While Searching for an Opposite Term of Exorcist, the choreographer Mina Nishimura suggests she’s looking for a role, a word, which she has so far grasped only by way of its inverse. As the audience filed into Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church before the show, the work’s title was projected across one wall. If an exorcist expels spirits from a body, or a space, would Nishimura and her collaborators be inviting spirits in, summoning the supernatural into their bodies and the space of the church?

It sometimes seemed that way, if

FOR TIONA NEKKIA MCCLODDEN’S latest work, The Trace of an Implied Presence, currently on view at the Shed in New York, the artist has installed four dancefloors in the second-floor gallery, each tailored to different specifications. Two are covered in Marley (one black and one white). Two are made of hard wood. Suspended above each dancefloor is a screen, onto which are projected color and black-and-white filmed portraits of Black performers. Here McClodden presents Michael J. Love, a tap dancer and scholar, striking complex rhythms against the floor; Kim Grier-Martinez, current artistic director

IN THE UNDERLIT BASEMENT SPACE of the Palais de Tokyo, Italian dancer and choreographer Annamaria Ajmone’s La notte è il mio giorno preferito (Night is My Favorite Day) started with the sound of a deep animal howl, the reverberations of which lent dimension to the darkness and outlined the space of the performance, delineating its edges and corners. In the infrared glow of the overhanging green lights, a minimal representation of a forest emerged; a few sparse lianas built the habitat for the performance. Suddenly, a stealthy, human-animal hybrid figure appeared and began an evasive dance,

CUTTING THROUGH THE CENTER of the Australian pavilion is an enormous video screen, almost as big as the walls. Beside it sits a giant stack of amps, like a punctuation mark to a particularly emphatic billboard. Six in all, they are arranged in a grid-like ziggurat, the kind that might inspire a roadie’s ultimate (now archaic) words of praise: “sick stack.”Draped and coiled cables link them to an oversized computer hidden out of sight beneath the stage, where the number-crunching for the synchronization of images and sound takes place. On screen, the pictures appear in grayscale. The austerity