New Dance Alliance
40th Annual Performance Mix Festival
Abrons Arts Center
June 4–7, 2026
New York
The 40th Annual Performance Mix Festival is nothing if not generous in scope. Presented by New Dance Alliance and performed at Abrons Arts Center over four heavily-scheduled days in June, the festival transcends conventional concert dance with a wide array of performances and workshops delivered by over thirty-five choreographers and performance artists. (Diversity and experimentation appear to be enduring themes for the festival, hearkening back to its first iteration in 1986.) Abrons Arts Center, the interior of which feels like being inside a particularly cozy cinderblock, is now clearly populated with friends and kin of the performers; exclamations of greeting and support bubble forth before, after, and even during the show. We consume the mix in bite-sized chunks of three-ish performances per show, thoughtfully curated to balance deeply quirky work alongside technically complex creations and solid crowd-pleasers. Despite disparate styles among the artists, the 2026 festival relays an overall sense of groundedness and reactivity to literal and figurative external forces.
RESONANCE, created and performed by Passion Fruit Dance Company (Tatiana Desardouin & K’niin “TPM” Abbrey) provides a dreamy exploration of bodies reacting to each other’s physical and energetic space. Under a slow-strobing light, the dancers skim across the stage. They flow through choreography with the rhythm of street dance and the composition of a disconnected tango. The dancers push and pull their arms through space, spiraling off each other’s movements with their unbuttoned shirttails swirling like falling flower petals.
In comparison, James Barrett’s delightful Panoramic Fashion creates a tableau in which the ensemble of dancers reacts to a seemingly invisible force billowing around the space. They assemble themselves in a clump, at times grasping each other’s limbs, then stumble through space as if shoved toward earth. Sporadically, the dancers escape their headwinds, singing in unison about the difficulty of having a body and muscles as they execute a crisp walking phrase punctuated by small tilts and precise head movements.
In other work, Performance Mix offered themes of overcoming external pressures in a more sociopolitical sense. Fuegos salvajes y turista !! by Antonio Ramos in collaboration with Saúl Ulerio, addresses the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. The dancers cavort in laps around the stage and up and down the stairs, nude save a couple of white wigs. Freewheeling turns and legs lifted in jaunty attitudes precede the appearance of a kiddie pool, where one dancer douses another with watery liquids. In perhaps the most hands-on interpretation, Leche Hervida en Vivo, IV Castellanos solicits volunteers to write messages on slim white squares, then punch through them. Laden with a microphone, hand-held light, and jangling metal loop around their neck, Castellanos presents as a human kinetic sculpture on the otherwise dark stage. The low light and sound limits perception and prompts questions for the viewer: Should we be able to see everything, identify everything, hear everything? Or are the limitations the point?