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.
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: 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.
HQ Review: Saint Louis Dance Theatre and Jazz St. Louis present “Gaslight Dreams”
In its second such collaboration, Jazz St. Louis and Saint Louis Dance Theatre, under the direction of Victor Goines and Kirven Douthit-Boyd, respectively, presented Gaslight Dreams at the Skip Viragh Center for the Arts. Joined by special guest Denise Thimes, this holiday-themed production featured some Christmas classics as well as a reimagining of The Nutcracker Suite by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.
HQ Review: Ballet 314’s “The Nutcracker and the World’s Fair”
This season marked Ballet 314’s seventh production of their particular version: “The Nutcracker & The World’s Fair.” In this clever retelling, choreographers and directors Rachel Bodi and Robert Poe incorporate an exciting chapter of St. Louis’ history into the ballet. The World’s Fair serves as an ideal backdrop for this magical story—a real-life event that engendered wonder and novelty, catapulting people of the time out of their everyday lives and connecting them with exciting new ideas and cultures. The fair offered everyday people a chance to engage with wonder: miniature Ferris wheels, colorful banners, towering exhibition halls, exciting inventions,
HQ Review: RESILIENCE hosts local arts’ new works at Seen: STL
This past weekend, I stepped foot into Intersect Arts Center in order to watch a showing of Seen: STL. The semi-annual viewing is both financially accessible and ruleless, with dancers signing up to show pieces that they have been working on. No rules, no time limit, just pure artistic movement made accessible for the Saint Louis community.
HQ Review: Grace Meraki Dance Company presents its first performance “Finding Home”
Encircled by stained glass and pews, Grace Mareki Dance Company made its performance debut at Hope United Church of Christ. The church served as a poignant setting for the Christian dance company’s first show, “Finding Home.” Director and choreographer Nina Serigos began incubating the idea for the production through conversations with her mentors while deliberating about her next steps in her career.
HQ Review: STAGED presented by Karlovsky and Company Dance
On November 21-22, 2025, Karlovsky and Company Dance showcased 5 pieces, each created by a different choreographer: Corpus Missa, Last Train Home, Catching, How Come We Never Talked About It, and Seeing You, Seeing Me. With the collaboration of nine company artists, twelve guest artists, three musicians, and one set designer each piece was filled with a unique voice and powerful emotional resonance.
HQ Review: Washington University Dance Theatre presents “Something is Happening”
On November 14, 15, and 16th, WashU’s WUDT performed their annual concert, this one entitled Something Is Happening, at Edison Theater. The talented students had the amazing opportunity to work with choreographers Elinor Harrison, Liz Lloyd, David Marchant, Ron K. Brown, and Xi Zhao. The dancers performed in works of many different genres including classical/neoclassical ballet, contemporary, West African and modern dance influences.