CELEBRATING ST. LOUIS’ VIBRANT DANCE COMMUNITY
St. Louis Dance HQ’s Blog is a compilation of writings and performance reviews from a variety of St. Louis based dance writers. If you’re interested in sharing your writing on our blog, please email stlouisdancehq@gmail.com.
HQ Review: Resilience Dance Company presents “Once Here, Still Moving” with Chicago-based company Hot Crowd
On Friday, April 24, Resilience Dance Company and Hot Crowd premiered their collaborative double-bill, Once Here, Still Moving, featuring two world premieres choreographed in response to the same central prompt: how space, place, and time define our embodied histories and shape our present selves.
HQ Review: Saint Louis Ballet presents “Cinderella”
This April 2026, Saint Louis Ballet presented Cinderella, marking Artistic Director Gen Horiuchi’s fifth staging of the ballet. During the Sunday matinee, the theater lobby was full of young families, including many little girls in sparkling dresses and tiaras, filing enthusiastically into their seats.
HQ Review: MADCO closes its 50th Anniversary Season with SHIFT
On April 9-11, MADCO closed out its 50th anniversary season of performances at COCA’s Staenberg Performance Lab with Shift, a concert featuring four world-premieres staged on the company this spring, and one returning work by 2024 guest artist Lily Sheppard.
HQ Review: Leverage Dance Theater presents “The Spaces Between Us”
The Jefferson Avenue Mission is quiet; street noise and chimes bleed in occasionally as the patrons of Leverage Dance Theater’s The Spaces Between Us eagerly wait for it to begin. The Spaces Between Us is the fifth iteration of Leverage’s Sacred Spaces series where the company creates site-specific work in spaces “designated for the purpose of encouraging, inviting or generating ‘spiritual’ connection or experience". Chosen for its former career as a house of worship, Jefferson Avenue Mission is the essential venue for this event’s part laboratory-part repertoire showing. Light streams through the walls of stained glass casting a yellow glow on the pews separated by an aisle, carpet, and audience at the head of the sanctuary.
HQ Review: New Movements at Greenfinch Theater and Dive
Nestled into the quaint black box theater at Greenfinch Theater & Dive on a breezy Friday night, an oversold audience crowded into and spilled around an assortment of eclectic, makeshift seating for New Movements, a mixed media performance assembled as a fundraiser for Saint Louis Sudbury School. There’s something beautifully charged and welcoming about the makeshift aesthetics of the performance space, a place that feels incredibly fertile for experimental performance.
HQ Review: Karlovsky and Company Dance presents SHIFTING TIME
One step. The unfolding of a toe. The releasing of breath as sand spills over. Time undulates. Bodies convulse. Kinner releases her grasp. Orion speaks into microphone. Schenkein supports the torso. Shreds of paper confound. Time and its precious nature. Time and its inevitable plight. We are not infinite creatures. Yet we transmute through space regardless. Disparate moments coagulate into a whole. “Shifting Time,” choreographed by Dawn Karlovsky alongside guest artist Megan Nicely is difficult to parse out into singular moments. But it is in its convolution that this work excels.
HQ Review: WashU MFA Dance Concert
Kapwa. Tapestry. Shared identity. Woven memory. These concepts thread themselves through the embodied research of these Washington University MFA candidates: Christopher J. Salango and Lorraine Stippec. Their respective works “Kapwa: Jukebox Rebolusyon!” and “Trauma’s Tapestry,” unravel dense thematic material with physical maturity, unveiling how dance can contribute to our cognitive understanding of humans in ways that other forms of research cannot.
Run It Back: Space Station features past collaborators in its 2026 fundraising show
This year's Space Station fundraising show will take place this weekend, March 27th and 28th, at the Chapel of the Arts at Hope United Church of Christ. Ticket sales from the weekend will directly support Space Station’s ongoing projects, including its annual Dance Residency—an initiative that has, since 2020, served as a vital site in St. Louis for experimental performance. Each year, choreographers and performers gather to take creative risk, incubate new ideas, and challenge both themselves and their audiences within a supportive and dynamic environment.
HQ Review: Collective Pulse’s inaugural performance “What Moves Us”
Collective Pulse’s concert “What Moves Us” premiered for one night at the Sun Theatre on March 14th. With eight pieces ranging in both tone and style, it featured performers from local companies, freelance artists and full-time professionals with careers outside of the dance industry.
HQ Review: Saint Louis Dance Theatre’s Winter Series features masterpieces by Inger and Kylián
Opening the second half of Saint Louis Dance Theatre’s (STLDT) Love Languages Season was their Winter Series, featuring two programs, each with vastly different styles, themes, and choreography to showcase the versatility of their incredible dancers. For this review, we will focus on the program performed on Saturday, February 28th, featuring: Jamar Roberts' Good Grief, Kirven Douthit-Boyd's Facing Shores, Johan Inger's Walking Mad, and Jiří Kylián's Sechs Tanze.
HQ Review: Ballet 314 presents Assemblé, a family-friendly educational ballet
On February 28th, Ballet 314 took the stage at the Foundry Art Center to present Assemblé: an original story centered around the four main components of an orchestra. Ballet 314, headed by artistic director Robert Poe and executive director Rachel Bodi, is a non-profit organization that produces up to 45 educational programs per season. As the time neared the top of the performance, kids from all age ranges excitedly clamored around the front of the stage, eager to witness and learn new ballet steps. A pre-show activity had taken place where audience members were welcome to create different percussion instruments from a wide assortment of arts and crafts.
HQ Review: MADCO and Jennifer Kayle present PULSE/imPULSE
At a time when the world feels like it’s burning down, we reach for a remedy; a quick pick-me-up, an escape, or the great salve of self introspection. MADCO’s PULSE/imPULSE concert Feb 20 at COCA’s Staenberg Performance Lab explored each approach with collaborator Jennifer Kayle, head of the University of Iowa’s department of dance. The evening highlighted the active artistic exchange between Iowa City and St. Louis.
HQ Review: Saint Louis Dance Theatre Trainee Winter Concert
Under the beautiful lights of the Grandel Theatre, Saint Louis Dance Theatre presented their annual Winter Trainee Concert as part of their Language of Art season - an evening that blended fresh voices with powerful returning works. The show opened by acknowledging the trainees’ main stage and community outreach performances this season. that all of the music was set to post-World War II tunes for one particular reason. The trainees perform for over thirty different senior living centers throughout the season, presenting works set to post-World War II tunes to keep their audiences engaged. For their Winter Concert, these hardworking individuals performed world premieres by acclaimed guest artists Ashley Tate and Carly Vanderheyden, returning audience favorites by Adam Parson, Mady Buerck, and Brandon Fink, as well as new works by current trainees Ellie Barry, Julia Dawson, and Meghan Lensmeyer.
HQ Review: Saint Louis Ballet presents Call It Love featuring the St. Louis Blues
On February 14th and 15th at Touhill Performing Arts Center, St. Louis Ballet performed Call It Love, featuring St. Louis Blues. Call It Love is one of those evenings at the ballet where movement, music, and emotion align so seamlessly that you leave the theater feeling both exhilarated and quietly reflective. Saint Louis Ballet’s program brings together intimacy, theatricality, and American musical traditions, creating an exploration of connection and romance.
HQ Review: Resilience Dance Company and Continuum Vocal Ensemble present Speak Easy Move Loud
Under the lavish chandelier of the Mahler Ballroom, Resilience Dance Company and Continuum Vocal Ensemble came together with a similar extravagance for “Speak Easy Move Loud” February 6 and 7. The two young companies combined their hunger for interdisciplinary collaboration with a cross-era program, aiming to bring the political and creative upheaval of the 1920s into conversation with America’s current climate.
HQ Review: MADCO’s Dare to Dance - Saturday
Saturday Night Performance | MADCO’s 2026 Dare to Dance Festival at the Center of Creative Arts
HQ Review: MADCO’s Dare to Dance - Friday
Friday Night Performance | MADCO’s 2026 Dare to Dance Festival at the Center of Creative Arts
HQ Review: Space Station’s Winter Weekend with Chew + Spit
Dyke Devotions, the second iteration of Chew & Spit, took the stage at Hope United Church of Christ on January 17th. The performance featured fourteen dancers, including Marlee Doniff, the project’s architect, who appeared briefly in a cameo at the top of the piece.
HQ Review: “Music in Motion” presented by Saint Louis Dance Theatre with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra
The Inspiration for the Saint Louis Symphony’s (SLSO) program titled “Music in Motion” was a quote by the late choreographer, George Balanchine, “Dancing is music made visible.” Conductor of SLSO, Stéphane Denève, wanted his audience to not only hear the wonderful ballet scores of the night but to experience them visually as well. The result: a collaboration with the Saint Louis Dance Theatre (STLDT) to perform one of the four pieces conducted during the program, Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite.
HQ Review: Space Station’s Winter Weekend with Miller, Halm, and Sapozhnikov
Launching Space Station’s 2026 season, Winter Weekends assembled six seasoned artists for a split-bill evening. Touring from Illinois with her collaborators, Anna Sapozhnikov presented “Good House Keep.” St. Louis-based artist Melissa Miller presented “Daphne” alongside her collaborator Laura Halm visiting from Baltimore, Maryland. Each work surfaced questions embedded in the subtle—yet pervasive—aspects of the feminine experience.