The cycle of endings and creations: The 2026 Newport Dance Festival 

Great Friends Meeting House, Newport, RI.
July 17, 2026.

The Newport Dance Festival is my favorite annual summer event. There’s often something bittersweet at hand: abounding creativity and collaboration, with so many companies working together and offering a plethora of visions and voices, yet it also being the last performance for one or more dancers of Newport Contemporary Ballet (as the last official program of the season each year, excepting the company’s annual gala).

Works this year also incorporated themes of freedom and American identity: including Danielle Genest’s Outcry and Fugitive Ground, and Anniela Huidobro Castro’s Raíces Vivas [Living Roots] (all of which I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing before) – poignant in this 250^th anniversary year of this nation. 

An excerpt of DaYoung Jung’s The Shape We Become, which I’ve also reviewed before, investigated interpersonal dynamics and personal development through life’s twists and turns: those intertwined with freedom and social context. The cycle of change and creation proliferates in our wider nation and society, too. Dance can be its mirror. 

The absolute blast that was Houston Street Hootenanny, from Alison Cook Beatty Dance, came next. The ensemble of eight dancers wore 1970s-style costumes (from Tony Musco) and danced along to Bob Dylan: expansively, vivaciously, fearlessly. They toggled between codified vocabulary and simply “grooving out” in their own free movement – certainly key in the “party feel” at hand. 

Cook Beatty’s keen spatial organization kept all of that energy and action legible, digestible. This work was also right in line with her fresh, innovative concepts. For their part, the dancers brought the lively, committed theatricality they always do. They moved, from shoulder-shimmies to throwing limbs to propel turns, with the wild abandon this concept seemed to call for. 

With certain lyrics in the Dylan tracks, as well as the American flags as sometimes costume, sometimes prop, a patriotic theme was also undeniable. Here, American pride and identity seemed connected with joyful creativity as well as unity. To me, that’s the best of us, and works like this can remind us of that. 

AVID: Artistic Ventures in Dance’s rigorous Atoll, choreographed by Emily Speed and danced by Brooke Gilliam and Spencer Wetherington, followed. Mystery came through a pulsing score (by Anne-Marie Keane) and the duet partners’ spatial tension – the push and pull of their weight propelling the physics of their unfolding through space. Long lines and smooth circularity, as well as the dancers’ supreme classical precision, kept pathways clear. 

I did crave more vulnerability and risk-taking – the losing control to regain it again that can be so entrancing in this art form. I wondered what that might have brought to the technical prowess and choreographic meticulousness on offer in this commendable duet. 

I did see that vulnerability and risk-taking in another memorable work from DaYoung Jung, also a duet – Entre Les Notes (danced by Lauren Collett and Jules Mabie). Collett melted into Mabie in a lift, fully released her torso as she folded forward – trusting in his supportive hold. 

Spirals moved into gestures in ways that traversed those spaces between notes, per the title. Subtle shifts of the spine and joints filled the spaces that sound left a vacuum. Superb musicality, in both crafting and executing movement, would seem required to make this concept work – and, with those ingredients mixed in, here it did (score from Alfonso Peduto). 

Emily Baker’s Shattered Glass was a bit of a stylistic departure for her, laudable in and off itself – and she made something indelible out of a comfort zone. From slow walks and breathy spinal contractions as dancers entered, there was a certain simplicity at hand. Timing, shaping of movement, and organization of dancers in space all offered a spare, unassuming quality. 

For dancers, it can be harder to move more slowly (the control that sustainment requires!). For choreographers, it takes awareness to know less can be more. The consistent clarity and unity in the ether here felt more impactful than high speed and athleticism could have managed. Even when the work did escalate in size and speed, it stayed intimately connected with what seems fundamental, undeniable, timeless. 

That resonates with Baker’s stated theme: the intractability of the glass ceiling that limits half of the population, women. Aspects of the score and the dancers’ theatricality – particularly in a more somber, reflective section towards the end – imbued a mournfulness. Perhaps that’s from understanding what the glass ceiling has kept inaccessible through the years. 

Yet just, if not more present, was that unity the dancers embodied: consistently lifting each other, catalyzing others’ paths, standing and moving forward together. In the ending image, some dancers stood while others had just fallen to the stage. Some may see the glass shattered, some may never – yet all will have been part of its breaking.

Another work from Alison Cook Beatty Dance – quite different in atmosphere, but similarly memorable – closed the program: Enlightenment. Maddie Burnett’s beginning solo exuded yearning, passion, and persistence – key to the Martin Luther King Jr. sermon accompanying the work, “Drum Major Instinct.” Starting with the electric Burnett, the ensemble again brought stellar theatricality as they embodied King’s deep ideas and oratory fervency. 

Cook Beatty again organized the ensemble to keep dynamic action digestible. Thrashing shapes conveyed distortion, falls to the stage the self-destruction that King described. Timing was also affecting; pauses served to multiply the drama of King’s speech paired with Arvo Pärt’s piano instrumentation. 

Dancers walked forward with arms rising and then backwards, arms quickly releasing one after the other: somehow speaking the sadness King noted, sadness about his country’s current actions. That felt quite poignant on this 250th anniversary, just as the earlier piece from the company did, yet in a slightly different way. 

This work reminded us of possibility and potential, yet also warned about how the source of that can also lead to dangerous, destructive outcomes. Both are possible, and neither are imminent. Yet on a summer’s night, immersed in artmaking and the spontaneous community of audience, I felt the possibility. 

This year, at the festival’s end, the company applauded Lauren Difede for 13 years with the company before she embarks on the next part of her journey. Congratulations also goes out to Margot Aknin, who after five years with the company will be dancing on the other U.S. coast. 

Something quite on the other end of a “dancer” spectrum caught my eye; two little ones got up and started dancing while the professionals filled the stage. Perhaps in 30 or so years, a dance company will applaud them and wish them well on the next stage of their lives. There are always endings, but also beginnings. And perhaps in that there will always be hope. Dance can reflect it for us. 

By Kathryn Boland of Dance Informa.

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