year in review(s)

what i saw and didn't see in 2024 and what i plan and hope to see in 2025!! i never published this for some reason but now that everyone is subscribing... why not!

I saw 51 shows in 2024! Of those, 26 were dance, 23 were theater, and 2 were both. 18 were student works. 2 were works that I performed in but saw the dress run of other pieces in. I reviewed 7 shows for Bwog and 4 for myself or for Substack.

My busiest month was November, where I saw 7 shows. During November I also performed in four shows, went home for Thanksgiving, had my parents visit me, had a friend visit me at school, and somehow still didn’t fail my midterms. My least busy month was January, where I did not see a single show, sadly (but this makes sense because I was mostly home).

Of these shows, I worked at 10, 16 were free, 3 were press comps, and 2 were shows that I was in as mentioned above. I saw the most off-campus shows at the Joyce, where I saw 5 shows, although the 10 shows I worked were all on Broadway which to me is a sort of metaphysical single place.

So without further ado… my favorite pieces of the year, broken out into dance and theater, and listed chronologically because narrowing them down was hard enough.

Dance

1. Tricoteuse (Celia Krefter, Eliza Voorheis, Rachel Greenfeld, Geo Kester, Movement Lab Ae/eI Festival)

   • Slow and unfurling, meditative, peaceful. Audience members held threads of yarn that became a web for Eliza to improvise around and through, or to lie down and do nothing at all, if she felt like it. Celia played the accordion in the corner. The others were knitting or crocheting. This was my first introduction to the Movement Lab, to the green cushions, to the world of Columbia student dance; it’s hard to imagine a piece more suited to the Movement Lab or for me.

2. MUDPIT (Celia Krefter & many, Movement Lab Student Artist-in-Residence)

   • Clever and funny; thoughtful but never pedantic; moving and interesting. I talked about this show for months after I saw it. It remains my benchmark for good dance-theater, in its ability to make movement and monologues feel like sides of the same impulse instead of battling forces.

3. Serenade (George Balanchine, New York City Ballet)

   • A rich beauty, an overwhelming experience, movement as meaning in a way I could tangibly sense. I thought I was done with ballet as a performer and as an audience member until I saw this. There is a fiery delicacy to Balanchine’s choreography here, a bold, definitive insistence on softness, so you feel the fire and the boldness even in the most graceful moments.

4. Group Primary Accumulation (Trisha Brown, Fifth Avenue Blooms by Van Cleef & Arpels)

   • There was a moment where the dancers curled their hand around their ear, protectively, that has stuck in my mind since I saw this. Trisha’s work feels so peaceful, so neat, so intuitive. The simple additive process of this piece makes it easy to slip inside of it, test it out. (In 2025 I saw Brown’s “Accumulation,” singular, and felt the same way.)

5. Toxic Pedicure (Lisa Fagan & Lena Engelstein)

   • I’m biased, of course, but I loved this piece. The very serious approach to creating absurdity that Lisa and Lena took resulted in a piece where every new moment was a new delight. You could find moments to be impressed by the dancing; you could find moments to laugh out loud; mostly you could just enjoy it. I plan on seeing anything they ever do. (In 2025 I saw “Friday Night Rat Catchers,” which I liked, but not nearly as much; I still plan on seeing anything they ever do, though.)

Theater

1. Dance Nation (Barnard College Theater Department)

   • I think about the line I want to do something cosmic frequently. Well-acted, well-produced, well-directed. Pimprenelle as Zuzu was heartbreaking and lovely. Captured a truth about meaningful desire that I can’t quite articulate but felt so strongly.

2. Illinoise (Justin Peck, Sufjan Stevens)

   • This is apparently controversial, but I really loved this show. Peck’s choreography does get derivative/boring quickly, but when it’s used to tell a story, like here and like in Become a Mountain, or even in the ad set in a subway for The Times Are Racing, I think it works really well. I also am a fan of more forms of dance on Broadway, and of Sufjan Stevens and this album in particular, and of visible orchestras… so a lot of elements in this spoke to me.

3. Job (Max Wolf Friedrich)

   • The show I felt the most struck by in a visceral sense. I couldn’t talk to anyone for a while after it ended. I still don’t know if I liked it or not which to me is the sign of a really interesting show. It wasn’t scared of forcing you to confront horror; it wasn’t impressed with sentimentality, generally. It wasn’t raw itself, but it made me feel raw.

4. Deep History (David Finnigan, Public Theater)

   • How do you think about confronting systemic failure and effecting systemic change without collapsing into existential crisis? I still don’t know, but it was nice to have this kind of conversation with someone. A one-man play, which I balked at a little, but Finnigan was charming, and the lecture-like structure was effective.

5. suppose beautiful madeline harvey

   • My favorite theater piece of the year, pretty much unequivocably. Endlessly interesting. Incomprehensible in its clearest moments but all made sense, in a sort of luminous way. What I mean by that is if you held a flashlight up to this play’s eyes it could roll over and explain exactly what it was about and why everything happened and the exact symbolism of such-and-such happening at such-and-such a point. But that would be boring, and so instead you have to kind of let it wash over you. Felt a lot, thought a lot. Pretty sure I exist but you can never know for sure!

2025 predictions and hopes: More secret plays in kitchens and bars and apartments and parks; more required reading; more experimental opera; more interesting sets for dance pieces; more interesting lighting. Not to see more shows but to be more intentional about what I see: more experimental theater, more student work, more works-in-progress, less established rep. More work in museums so I can think about my thesis…