Dance Place

Social networking is the subject of books, research papers and an upcoming movie. And now it's the subject of "Everyone Intimate Alone Visibly," a production by the San Francisco-based troupe LEVYdance. Choreographer Benjamin Levy explores the topic through an evening-long duet with Aline Wachsmuth. They will perform amid a multimedia installation, and the audience will be encouraged to walk through the space, interacting with the dancers in a collaborative performance. Cameras will capture people's movements and create animated video projections, and...

When the dancers of Ezibu Muntu African Dance Theatre first stepped on the stage at Dance Place on Saturday, their appearance wasn't so much an entrance as an explosion. They bounded out of the wings with consecutive high jumps, snapping their necks backward in midair and sending their piles of braids or curls into beautiful, sweeping arcs. It was a strong start to the DanceAfrica festival, an annual celebration of the dance, music and culture of Africa that ended Sunday. The rest of the troupe's...

Dance Place , the well-regarded but rickety Northeast venue that's been presenting dance shows since 1986, will close its theater in 2013 to undergo a $4 million, five-month renovation project. It's a significant expansion that should benefit Washington's dance community in the long run but leaves many local companies without a place to perform next year. Deborah Riley, Dance Place's co-director, says most area choreographers knew the announcement was coming. Details for the plans will be unveiled Friday afternoon at an event Dance...

Touch is the major communication tool of Christopher K. Morgan & Artists. As men and women lean, lift, lower, tumble and roll each other around, they rarely depend on visual cues but instead communicate through a language stemming from contact improvisation. This practice grounds the ensemble in its confident placement of weight and balance, lending a stylistic cohesion that is deeply satisfying. Clearly, the dancers trust one another other and their material. Morgan incorporates the architecture of...

When the dancers of Pearson Widrig Dance Theater fall to the ground, it's rarely with a soft, sensible landing. Rather, their risky balances, flailing leaps and floor-grazing slides all seem to come crashing down in a glorious, bone-rattling thud. This propensity for big, sweeping movement that ultimately ends in a heap on the floor exemplifies what choreographers Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig are all about — taking chances and testing the human body's limits. The company's Saturday performance at Dance Place included two...

Great ideas. Poor execution. That sums up the hokey nightclub reenactment "Electro Shutdown and the Pea," put on Saturday by Next Reflex Dance Collective at Dance Place. This five-year-old company is led by, and stocked largely with, local university dance-program graduates, and it aims to experiment. For this piece, they transformed Dance Place into a nightclub ("the Pea") by using the whole space for the event and placing the live band ("Electro Shutdown") high in the bleachers.

"There will be a swan, a prince, a robot, sexual behavior and two chairs. Sometimes all at once," New York choreographer Wally Cardona is fond of saying about "Tool Is Loot," his project with French choreographer Jennifer Lacey. Their serio-comic work, which will be performed at Dance Place this weekend, combines movement non sequiturs, sundry found elements and a few wry surprises. The evening-length piece, elements of which were performed last year by Cardona, has truly been a collaborative process.

NEW YORK — It's noon on a mid-April Monday, and Kyle Abraham is worried about money. Not because he hasn't filed his taxes yet (though he hasn't) but because he's the artistic director of his own nascent dance company , and one of his dancers hasn't shown up. "I don't know what I'm going to do," the choreographer says. "I have six hours of studio time, but I'm down a dancer. " As he talks he has his feet crossed in third position, he's slowly going up on his toes, arms arced above his head.

When the dancers of Ezibu Muntu African Dance Theatre first stepped on the stage at Dance Place on Saturday, their appearance wasn't so much an entrance as an explosion. They bounded out of the wings with consecutive high jumps, snapping their necks backward in midair and sending their piles of braids or curls into beautiful, sweeping arcs. It was a strong start to the DanceAfrica festival, an annual celebration of the dance, music and culture of Africa that ended Sunday. The rest of the...

Touch is the major communication tool of Christopher K. Morgan & Artists. As men and women lean, lift, lower, tumble and roll each other around, they rarely depend on visual cues but instead communicate through a language stemming from contact improvisation. This practice grounds the ensemble in its confident placement of weight and balance, lending a stylistic cohesion that is deeply satisfying. Clearly, the dancers trust one another other and their material. Morgan incorporates the...

That the inner city is a hidden war zone is painfully clear in Kyle Abraham's "Pavement," a beautiful and severely honest work performed by his dance company, Abraham.In.Motion. But despite its name and subject matter, "Pavement" is not all hard edges. It delivers a sharp sense of reality with extraordinary softness, in dancing that is lush and seductive. As a result, you fall in love with the seven dancers, Abraham included. You're drawn in by their bodies, carried along by the fluid mix of urban...

If the 2008 mortgage crisis were a dance, it would look a lot like certain scenes in "Salaryman," Takehiro Ueyama's 2011 full-length work that was performed Saturday by his New-York based TAKE Dance company at Dance Place. The title is the Japanese term for corporate white-collar workers, and based on the costuming, lack of mobile phones and surplus of newspapers, the piece appears to be set during Japan's economic slump, known as "the lost decade. " Following a 1980s boom, the Nikkei stock index took a...

When Takehiro Ueyama was a high-schooler in Tokyo, he dreamed of playing pro baseball. Then the 18-year-old shortstop injured his shoulder, and his hopes were dashed. But Ueyama discovered dance and, with barely a year of ballet training, was accepted into Juilliard's famed dance program in New York. After graduation, he earned a spot in one of the world's preeminent modern dance companies, the Paul Taylor Dance Company, where he danced for the master choreographer for eight years.

Dance Exchange's premiere of "How to Lose a Mountain" on Saturday at Dance Place was the final event of a six-month dance project. The theater was filled to capacity, and the air crackled with excitement. "Mountain" delivered an emotionally powerful 60 minutes. Dance Exchange is about more than dance for dance's sake. The company is energized by issues. The issue in "Mountain"  is about a mining practice in which mountaintops are literally removed to get at thin coal seams...

Los Angeles-based choreographer Lionel Popkin premiered his latest work, "Ruth Doesn't Live Here Anymore," Saturday at Dance Place. "Ruth" proved inordinately engaging. It was sprinkled with jewels of movement sequences, striking visuals and thought-provoking moments. At the same time, it ho-hummed in spots like an interesting public speaker going on a bit too long. Popkin's works frequently explore his Indian heritage. (The Hindu elephant god Ganesha figured in his...

To see Benjamin Levy and Sidra Bell's choreography on the same program is to understand why these artists were so keen to collaborate with each other. Each has a distinct choreographic voice — Levy's tends toward quiet and instinctive, Bell's toward bold and detached. But their approach to dancemaking is very similar. In a Saturday performance at Dance Place by their companies, LEVYdance and Sidra Bell Dance New York, it was clear that the nucleus of each work was an extensively developed,...

Vincent E. Thomas is a passionate choreographer. When he performs, anguish washes over his handsome face, whether he is gracefully turning or crouched down, whipping his arms like leather lashes. Thomas is also black, gay and politically provocative. All three traits play into his evening-length work, "Witness," which debuted as a Kennedy Center commission last fall and received its second Washington staging Saturday at Dance Place. Eight young female dancers -- mostly students at, or recent graduates of, Goucher College...

Appalachian flatfooting mixes it up with hip-hop while traditional rhythm tap trades riffs with Irish stepping in " Vaudevival: Old is the new New ," an evening of dance, theater, dialogue and poetry that journeys through the archives of American vernacular dance. "I have had many interests that converged around American vernacular dance," says Emily Oleson, who conceived of the piece as a graduate student in the University of Maryland dance school. "I really had this sense that there was nothing that was off-limits,...

If there's a theme to the hefty spring dance roster, it's that excellence lies in all directions. Rely on the offerings of any single venue at your peril, for in this season — which looks to be one of the richest in recent years — interesting work, new voices, veteran masters and novel ideas will surface throughout the region. Consider what's in store right away for modern dance lovers. Some of the biggest names in the country are coming — for starters, Mark Morris (at George Mason University's Center for the Arts)

→Critics' recommendations are indicated by astrisks. Join Post critics Thursday at 1 p.m. during the weekly Going Out Guide chat for a conversation about their picks. You can also access interactive listings, find the latest showtimes, venue information and more events at washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide . JANUARY 27 Jane Franklin Dance: "Penelope's Pesky Pen. " This family-friendly dance production is inspired by Frank Dormer's children's book "The Obstinate Pen. " At Athenaeum.