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Chamber Dance Project at Arena Stage

But let’s step back a bit to a week before the show. It’s 2pm at the BalletNova Center for Dance in Falls Church, Virginia. We’re at an open rehearsal and privy to one of my favorite pastimes; the process! Observing how the sausage is made not only helps with context and appreciation, but it’s also a chance to see another side of a choreographer. In this case, it was two choreographers, both presenting world premier works.

The Holiday Show 2025 by The GMCW at Lincoln Theatre by Audrey Brown

Arriving to the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington’s Holiday Show 2025, performed at the Lincoln Theatre on U Street, I was greeted by two enormous, buzzing lines wrapped around the building. Was I in the right place? Was I mistaking the line for some highly-anticipated A-list singer-songwriter who forced fans to camp around the block in hopes of a ticket? No—this was the energy that the GMCW, now in its 44th season, drew to a cold D.C. night; and the selfsame energy was sustained throughout the performance, rife with caroling, dancing, and holiday cheer.

You Didn’t Boycott The Kennedy Center, Now Trump Has His Name On It.

I wrote an article in February about boycotting the Kennedy Center, and despite what I would call a solid case, you decided on a Diet Boycott with Lemon. -so Trump has renamed the Kennedy Center, placing his name first as "The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts". Now I'm back to tell you that this Diet Boycott with Lemon isn't going to work.

Lie Low by Solas Nua at Atlas by Audrey Brown

Written by Ciara Elizabeth Smyth and debuted at the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2022, Lie Low makes its overseas debut on a Washington, D.C. stage, supported by Solas Nua, an organization dedicated to uplifting modern Irish voices in the nation’s capital.

Côté Danse’s Hamlet at Wolf Trap by Audrey Brown

A danced production of Hamlet ends where it started; or, rather, it had started where it ends. We all know, whether or not we’re familiar with the intricacies of the plot, that Hamlet is a deeply tragic Shakespearean work. Thusly, Ex Machina and Côté Danse, in their entirely danced version of the classic, refuse to indulge the possibility that audiences to its “contemporary-slash-neoclassical Western dance company’s” staging of the classic might be surprised at the final scene’s bloodbath, instead cluing them immediately into the fact that the breathing bodies they see onstage throughout the piece will cease to breathe at its closing.
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