PARSONS DANCE

Presented at The Joyce Theater, Parsons Dance’s latest program brings together works spanning more than four decades, from 1982 to 2026. The evening features David Parsons’s Ludwig, Caught, and Nascimento Novo, alongside Brothers, co-created with Daniel Ezralow. Complementing these repertory works are newer additions: Mayte Natalio’s Do Not Go Gentle and Courtney Balenciaga Washington’s Fearless. Across generations of choreography, the program reflects both the company’s enduring athleticism and its struggle to evolve beyond its own legacy.

Most striking is the dancers’ impeccable precision and commitment to movement, each gesture carried through with remarkable clarity and intention. The company features Megan Garcia Ziminski, Téa Pérez, Joseph Cyranski, Justine Delius, Joanne Hwang, Emerson Earnshaw, Odin Brock, Luke Biddinger, and Gabrielle Dinizo. In particular, Luke Biddinger and Odin Brock deliver exquisite partner work marked by both strength and sensitivity, while Joseph Cyranski demonstrates astonishing endurance in Caught.

Ludwig, making its world premiere, opens the evening set to the second movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, with dancers dressed in sunset-orange costumes. Parsons borrows heavily from Paul Taylor’s signature blend of pedestrian and athletic movement: clean arm lines, brisk walking patterns, and buoyant ensemble phrasing.

Yet Parsons interrupts these sequences with gestures borrowed from hip-hop vocabulary, stomping and krumping, that feel awkwardly inserted rather than organically integrated. The piece lacks conceptual depth, reading less as an original work than an attempt to modernize Taylor’s aesthetic. Though newly premiered, it somehow already feels dated.

Similarly, Brothers is cheeky, playful, and faintly homoerotic, but ultimately slight. Caught, however, remains genuinely impressive: through precisely timed strobe lighting, a lone dancer appears to levitate across the stage, freezing midair in impossible poses.

The technical endurance required of both performer and stage crew is extraordinary. Nascimento Novo, commissioned by company president Stephan Morris for his wife’s sixtieth birthday, fares less successfully. Beyond a projected “LOVE MOM <3” message, the work never fully develops its emotional premise.

The strongest works of the evening come from Mayte Natalio and Courtney Balenciaga Washington. Natalio’s Do Not Go Gentle, inspired by “Do not go gentle into that good night” and Pale Blue Dot, possesses a dramaturgical richness absent from Parsons’s choreography.

Dancers in chic, cosmic-inspired costumes, by Márion Talán de la Rosa, move with existential wonder, creating a world that feels expansive and emotionally resonant. Washington’s Fearless blends Parsons’s athleticism with ballroom and vogue influences to exhilarating effect. High-energy and unapologetically contemporary, it feels like the future Parsons Dance has yet to fully embrace.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Frankie Lehr