What a difference...

...a dancer makes.

I'm thinking of Katherine Crockett, that tall drink of water, brightening my evening as she defined the prophetic Chorus in Martha Graham's Cave of the Heart. She works that broad-striped fabric of her costume, unfolds it like a condor's wings and radiantly projects over what seems a vast distance in space and time with dire, desperate gestures that, for all their silence, "sound" to me like trumpets. I saw her, I heard her. There was no one and nothing like her on stage, then or later. Everything else seemed carefully managed and remote--even Bulareyaung Pagarlava's brand-new Chasing, a work that sets out to prove that Graham standard bearers can cut loose and frisk around. (Martha Graham Dance Company at The Rose Theater, now through Sunday. Click here for information and tickets.)

Souleymane Badolo (photo: Julie Lemberger for 92Y)

Speaking of difference, curating is something new and different for the great Jawole Willa Jo Zollar of Urban Bush Women fame. With her lineup for 92Y, running this weekend, she's offering a chance to watch distinctive performers like Souleymane Badolo, Lacina Coulibaly (his Burkina Faso compatriot), Maria Bauman, Samantha Speis and surprise guest Christal Brown bring ideas and space to gleaming life. The program includes works by Badolo and Bauman and two works inspired by Zollar's "Blind Date" invitation in which she matches pairs of dance artists for a last-minute creative relationship, just hours before the actual performance. If you, as a dance fan, look for the cohesion and depth that long-term creative process allows, this sort of thing is certainly a gamble, but the intelligence and power of these select artists reward Zollar's risk and your time. Having a chance to see a program with so much Badolo and Badolo choreography in it made me notice his uncanny relationship to performance space, the way he habitually dwells in or treads its periphery, rarely occupying its center or sending his dancers there. If memory serves me, I've seen this sort of thing in much of his work. Now I'm eager to find out why. (Jawole Willa Jo Zollar Curates, 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Festival, now through Sunday. Click here for information and tickets.)