An Outdoor Stage, Premieres and Past Favorites Shape Spring for Dance Companies

An excerpt from last year’s “Blue Pencil,” a resonant indictment of censorship featuring dancer David Harris, is part of Dance NOW! Miami’s shows on Friday, May 8 in Lauderhill and Saturday, May 9 in Aventura. (Photo by Simon Soong, courtesy of Dance NOW! Miami)

Staging new works or expanding into a new venue can bring a fresh view of a performing arts company and, with this, a confirmation of continuing vigor. For two of South Florida’s steadfast dance organizations these signs of one more forward-moving spring are about to brighten the calendar.

Dimensions Dance Theatre of Miami will be at Pinecrest Gardens’ geodesic-dome amphitheater for the first time on Saturday, May 9, reviving favorites that fit, as if made for it, the natural setting. And Dance NOW! Miami will unveil co-artistic director Hannah Baumgarten’s “Love-less: Dance of the Last Moho Braccatus,” alongside repertory standards and “Traces,” a world premiere by company co-director Diego Salterini, on Friday, May 8 at Lauderhill Performing Arts Center and on Saturday, May 9 at Aventura Arts & Cultural Center.

Emily Bromberg and Eric Paz in Dimensions Dance Theatre of Miami’s “In Bloom,” choreography by Yanis Eric Pikieris. (Photo by Simon Soong, courtesy of DDTM)

“Performing at Pinecrest Gardens’ Banyan Bowl feels incredibly meaningful for us,” says Jennifer Kronenberg, projecting a vision she and Carlos Guerra hold as DDTM co-artistic directors. “Our company is always looking for ways to make ballet accessible. We aim to meet audiences where they are. With this show we go further letting the environment become part of an overall experience.”

Although the DDTM offerings are not site-specific, the dancers will still stake their art on the surroundings.  “There’s something very special about stepping outside of a traditional theater to perform in tandem with nature,” says Kronenberg. “Here the lush greenery allows each ballet to breathe in a different way and transcend boundaries.”

It’s an additional asset that DDTM has ballets at hand which, developed throughout a decade, reveal reverence for the natural world through inspiration, mood, and imagery.

“This bouquet of works visually and emotionally resonates with the site’s openness and botanical backdrop,” explains Kronenberg.

Emily Bromberg with Alex Sokolov, Ariel Morill and Maikel Hernandez in DDTM’s “Phases.” (Photo by Simon Soong, courtesy of DDTM)

Excerpts from company artist-in-residence Yanis Pikieris’s “Four Seasons,” first restaged for Dimensions in 2021, move—with the changing color of phrases, the temperature of emotions rise and fall—to Antonio Vivaldi’s same-named, weather-wise set of violin concertos.

Pikieris’s son Yanis Eric, the company’s other artist-in-residence, contributes “In Bloom,” an ensemble work from 2025. His selections from Oliver Davis’s album “Dance” pulse with enough vitality to keep contemporary classicism in the pink.

When DDTM performed Ariel Rose’s “Vow” outdoors at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in 2018, this duet’s intimacies—searching to clinging, to Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds’s “1953”—grew in proportion to a view of Jacob’s Pillow’s home in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts. Now it trades that woodland for a hovering subtropical verdure letting the dancers reinvigorate their ardor.

Harmonizing with nature, each pose is part of a pact between dancers true to their hearts in Dimensions Dance Theatre of Miami’s “Vow.” Pictured, dancers Mayrel Martinez and Maikel Hernandez. (Photo by Jennifer Kronenberg, courtesy of DDTM)

Frequent performances of Ben Needham-Wood’s “Apollo and Daphne,” with a score by Arvo Pärt, have become a DDTM calling card. At Pinecrest Gardens every vine and curve of bark will seem to conspire with this myth of a nymph who, resisting the god’s advances, turns into a laurel tree.

Rafael Ruiz del Vizo, a DDTM company dancer, presents his “Phases,” to Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” telescoping into lunar cycles for Emily Bromberg—alongside Maikel Hernandez, Alexander Sokolov, and Ariel Morilla—to orbit through glow and shadows.

“We’re fortunate to have close relationships with these choreographers,” says Kronenberg. “Trust and understanding allow us to transfer their works to a new space while honoring their original intent. That said, performing outdoors requires adjusting to unique parameters. This isn’t a bad thing. Details barely noticed on a traditional stage may look more pronounced, and dancers can connect un-hemmed.”

Dancers’ lines and design find parallels in the style of Art Deco in Dance NOW! Miam’s “Deco-De.” (Photo by Simon Soong, courtesy of Dance NOW! Miami)

Dance NOW! Miami’s third program this season, “Love, Lost & Found,” will also reference nature and what’s natural to the human heart. “The evening’s pieces complement each other reflecting that theme,” says DNM’s co-artistic director Hannah Baumgarten, who points out how premieres and significant re-stagings have bolstered the company into its third decade.

“Forest Dreams” is by Tandy Beal, a West Coast wonder-wooing choreographer whose roots reach back to the ’70’s and the incomparable productions of Alwin Nikolais Dance Theatre. “From the 1980s, this is a beautifully crafted abstract-dance journey through the California redwoods,” says Baumgarten. “We first presented it in 2011 in our ‘Masterpiece in Motion’ series.”

An excerpt from last year’s “Blue Pencil,” a resonant indictment of censorship during Portugal’s Salazar regime, also returns. “This solo—danced with passion by David Harris—depicts someone being stripped of their identity yet struggling to regain agency,” says Baumgarten, who hopes it elicits timely reflection.

Commissioned by Miami Design Preservation League for Art Deco Weekend 2026, Salterini’s “Deco-de”—to George Gershwin’s “Lullaby”—is a trio that extols the sleek geometries of a style the choreographer admires.

His premiere, “Traces,” brings a more intimate tribute. This came about, according to Baumgarten, when Julia Faris, long a pillar of the company, announced her retirement. “Diego threads together works she’s danced in to create a loose narrative about her journey—from uncertainty to connection through the love that’ll take her to the next chapter.”

Julia Faris tall at the center of her own journey in rehearsal for “Traces.” (Photo by Sophia Pfitzenmaier, courtesy of Dance NOW! Miami)

Baumgarten, too, had specific dancers in mind—lanky and fleet Austin Duclos and Kirsten Velasco—when she turned to choreographing “Love-less . . . ,“ a duet, based on an environmental calamity, which had been stirring in her since she came upon Sam Green’s documentary “32 Sounds,” a Live Arts Miami/Miami Film Festival event at the Perez Art Museum.

“The director referred to a library of recordings in London where a librarian confessed her favorite sound was the last-known recording of the Hawaiian songbird Moho braccatus. I whipped out my notebook and hurriedly jot down the story.”

Already reduced to one breeding pair by climate change and other threats, the birds became extinct after a hurricane killed the female, leaving the male to call out—“a haunting, hollow sound,” says Baumgarten—for his mate. The choreographer seized upon this “for an allegory of our frailty and unpreparedness for the loss of those we’re bound to.”

Kirsten Velasco and Austin Duclos striking avian poses in rehearsal for Dance NOW! Miam’s “Love-less.” (Photo by Sophia Pfitzenmaier, courtesy of Dance NOW! Miami)

The scenario in four movements avoids strict literalness, its more subtle esthetic upheld in the costumes by Haydée and Maria Morales and the lighting and set design by Bruce F. Brown. Federico Bonacossa, whose score Baumgarten considers “paramount,” uses birdsong as a springboard for his eclectic musical progressions.

For Baumgarten, all these creations reveal DNM’s sustaining love for their artistic species. Kronenberg shares that sentiment regarding DDTM, saying, “Carlos and I adore revisiting the gifts of dancers and choreographers. They keep our art not just alive but evolving.”

WHAT: Dimensions Dance Theatre of Miami, Ballet in the Gardens

WHEN: 8 p.m., Saturday, May 9

WHERE: Banyan Bowl, Pinecrest Gardens, 11000 Red Road, Pinecrest

COST: $34.50, $42.50

INFORMATION: (305) 669-6990 and dimensionsdancemia.com/

WHAT: Dance NOW! Miami Program III: “Love, Lost & Found”

WHEN: 8 p.m., Saturday, May 9

WHERE: Aventura Arts & Cultural Center, 3385 NE 188th St., Aventura

ADDITIONAL PERFORMANCE: 8 p.m., Friday, May 8, Lauderhill Performing Arts Center, 3800 NW 11th Place, Lauderhill

COST: $25.96, $37.76, $49.56 at Aventura; $20, $30, $40 at Lauderhill.

INFORMATION: (305) 975-8489 and at dancenowmiami.org/

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