During the Cold War, classical ballet companies such as the Kirov and the Bolshoi were among the most prominent cultural weapons of the Soviet Union. But the arsenal also included another kind of ballet troupe, one that took regional folk dances and customs and professionalized them, arranging them choreographically and with much artistic license for maximal theatrical impact. The most famous of these troupes was the Moiseyev Dance Company, based in Moscow, though many Soviet Republics had their own groups. The Georgian State Dance Company was one of the best and most popular in the West.
“Samaia,” a dance inspired by Georgian history, will be performed at Carnegie Hall.Photograph courtesy the Georgian National Ballet Sukhishvili
Now called the **Georgian National Ballet Sukhish…
During the Cold War, classical ballet companies such as the Kirov and the Bolshoi were among the most prominent cultural weapons of the Soviet Union. But the arsenal also included another kind of ballet troupe, one that took regional folk dances and customs and professionalized them, arranging them choreographically and with much artistic license for maximal theatrical impact. The most famous of these troupes was the Moiseyev Dance Company, based in Moscow, though many Soviet Republics had their own groups. The Georgian State Dance Company was one of the best and most popular in the West.
“Samaia,” a dance inspired by Georgian history, will be performed at Carnegie Hall.Photograph courtesy the Georgian National Ballet Sukhishvili
Now called the Georgian National Ballet Sukhishvili—and not to be confused with the more classical State Ballet of Georgia—the company was officially founded, in 1945, by the husband-and-wife team Iliko Sukhishvili, a folk dancer, and Nino Ramishvili, a ballerina. It is still run by their grandchildren. Sukhishvili and Ramishvili drew inspiration from the countryside and the court. Their company became known for the polar attributes of bravura and delicacy. To this day, the men clank swords, leap over one another, run on the tips of their soft boots, and turn on their knees. The women stream across the floor, propelled by tiny steps obscured by long dresses. The costumes, many referencing Soliko Virsaladze’s original designs, are both sumptuous and subtly detailed.
The dance “Samaia” (pictured) was inspired by a fresco of Queen Tamar, Georgia’s first female ruler during the medieval period. In it, three women, crowned and bejewelled, as majestic and impassive as Byzantine icons, rotate at a regally slow speed. From the nineteen-sixties through the early two-thousands, the troupe performed often in the U.S., but in recent years its visits have been more scarce. Touring the country anew, it makes its Carnegie Hall début on Jan. 17.—Brian Seibert
About Town
Folk
In 2020, the singer-songwriter Cassandra Jenkins was ready to quit music. Kismet wouldn’t allow it. She ended up making her 2021 album, “An Overview on Phenomenal Nature,” because she’d already scheduled the studio sessions, but the resulting LP, a breathtaking display of ambient folk, opened up a realm of new possibilities. Jenkins has since evolved into a chamber-pop auteur. Her 2024 follow-up, “My Light, My Destroyer,” honed her songcraft and magnified the intensity of her sound world through field recordings and more robust instrumentation. Jenkins’s music is fixated on space, in both the cosmic and the immersive sense, testing the interplay between bioacoustics and sound design, and the ways heavenly bodies help put life on Earth into perspective.—Sheldon Pearce (Stone Circle Theatre; Jan. 17.)
Movies
On Dec. 17, the day Rosa von Praunheim, a pioneering filmmaker of queer life, died, at eighty-three, the Criterion Channel announced that his documentaries “Tally Brown, New York” (1979) and “Fassbinder’s Women” (2000) would be available to stream as of January. Both films are revelatory portraits of heroic artists whose successes proved nonetheless thorny. Brown, a classically trained singer, acted in films by Andy Warhol in the sixties and became a cabaret star; when Praunheim filmed her, she was injured and idled yet glamorous and insightful. As for Fassbinder, who died in 1982, at thirty-seven, after making nearly forty features in fourteen years, Praunheim interviews many of his key collaborators, who discuss the emotional demands and the self-punishing methods that fuelled his meteoric career.—Richard Brody
Art
An installation view of “Joe Overstreet: To the North Star.”Art works by Joe Overstreet / Courtesy Eric Firestone Gallery / © 2025 Joe Overstreet / ARS; Photograph by Sam Glass
Joe Overstreet (1933-2019) was a restlessly inventive painter. His exhibition “To the North Star”—a footnote to the artist’s first major survey in decades, presented last year by Houston’s Menil Collection—offers a small sample of his experiments. In the nineteen-sixties, Overstreet made shaped canvases whose sui-generis forms both contain and clash with the ancient art-inspired motifs rendered on them. Next, he got really radical, by hanging, stretching, and draping his canvases into soft sculptures that evoke tarps and quilts. Two such works are the showstoppers here: cosmic color wheels that fuse radar screens with mandalas. In the nineties, Overstreet returned to more traditional formats, but his impastoed, layered surfaces retain a visceral power.—Jillian Steinhauer (Eric Firestone; through Jan. 24.)
Dance
Many will remember Daniil Simkin for his technically brilliant dancing at American Ballet Theatre. He is now a freelancer and a producer; his latest project, “Sons of Echo,” is an evening of dances made by female choreographers for a quintet of distinguished male dancers: Simkin, the Cuban dazzler Osiel Gouneo, the South African-born Siphesihle November (now at the National Ballet of Canada), Jeffrey Cirio (English National Ballet), and the affable Danish virtuoso Alban Lendorf. “Real Truth” is by the New York City Ballet dancer Tiler Peck, a virtuoso in her own right. The éminence grise here is the minimalist choreographer Lucinda Childs, whose “Notes” is a distillation of her “Notes of Longing,” which premièred last year in the Netherlands.—Marina Harss (Joyce Theatre; Jan. 14-25.)
Post-Rock Opera
“What to Wear,” at BAM.Photograph by Douglas Mason
Unsurprisingly, the late experimental-theatre maven Richard Foreman had a distaste for, as he put it, “normal narrative.” Instead, he preferred to focus on “the depth of the moment.” In 2006, at the REDCAT in Los Angeles, Foreman sank into a series of moments that made up his post-rock opera “What to Wear.” Created with the composer Michael Gordon, “What to Wear” is a wealth of unmoored curiosities, including a giant duck that plays golf and a group of “Madeline X” figures who attempt to answer the titular question. The avant-garde phenomenon returns to the stage, as a part of the Prototype Festival—with a little help from Bang on a Can and St. Vincent. Surrender the normal and feel the depth of the moment.—Jane Bua (BAM; Jan. 15-18.)
Movies
Gus Van Sant’s new drama, “Dead Man’s Wire,” eagerly but superficially details a peculiar real-life spectacle. In 1977, when a small-time Indianapolis businessman named Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) blames a mortgage company for his losses on a real-estate venture, he takes the company’s president, Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery), hostage. Holed up in his own modest apartment, Tony threatens to kill Richard unless the firm offers an apology and financial compensation. Van Sant considers the role of a d.j. (Colman Domingo) and of a TV reporter (Myha’la) in the crisis but, above all, focusses on the gamesmanship of the two antagonists in mortal peril. Unfortunately, the movie lacks a point of view. With Al Pacino as Richard’s domineering father, the company’s real boss.—R.B. (In limited release.)
Pick Three
Jennifer Wilson on cold-weather comforts.
1. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve skied, but I identify as a ski obsessive. I love the slopes primarily as a setting—for everything from marital discord (“Force Majeure”) to celebrity intrigue (Gwyneth Paltrow’s testimony in her Utah ski trial warranted a second Oscar). When I’m not listening to ski podcasts like “Big Stick Energy,” I’m reading “Hard Pack,” an edgy new ski magazine. Pick up Issue 6 for a raunchy short story about a bearskin rug as well as serious reporting about the bacchanalian parties that close out the ski season across the Rocky Mountains. Après ski comes the flood.
2. I can’t see children sledding without being reminded of “A Joke,” the short story by Anton Chekhov that simultaneously captures the terror and the thrill of young love. Little Nadia is afraid to go sledding on the big hill until a neighbor boy pressures her to go with him. Against the howling of the wind, she hears, in a whisper so soft she isn’t sure it’s real, “I love you” (the Russian verb “to love” has an aeolian ooh to it). Once safely at the bottom, Nadia looks at her neighbor turned sledding companion and says, “Let us slide down again.” We’ve all been there, Nadia.