The Joyce Theater Announces a Debut-Packed Season

After a total of 72 weeks of canceled programming since March 2020, the Joyce Theater will present its annual 48-week fall season, with renewed hopes to run each and every scheduled performance.

“We’ve had a whole year of opening and closing and opening and closing,” said Linda Shelton, the Joyce’s executive director. “Every week we wondered, ‘Are we going get through the week?’”

The fall-winter season, announced on Wednesday, will run from September to February and is set to showcase 18 companies, including debuts by LaTasha Barnes — familiar to the Chelsea stage as a dancer but new as a choreographer — with “The Jazz Continuum” (Oct. 11-16), an intergenerational celebration of Black dancers and musicians; Fouad Boussouf, whose choreography draws from contemporary dance, hip-hop and circus movement along with traditional dance from his native Morocco in “Näss” (Oct. 18-23); and the German contemporary company tanzmainz with Sharon Eyal’s “Soul Chain” (Jan. 24-28).

The season opens with “Burn” (Sept. 20-25), a dance-theater solo work by the Olivier and Tony Award-winning actor Alan Cumming and the Olivier-winning choreographer Steven Hoggett in a coproduction with the National Theater of Scotland, Edinburgh International Festival, centered on the triumphs and turmoils of the Scottish poet Robert Burns.

Shelton said that recently, backstage at a performance, Cumming told her, “I have one more dance piece in me, are you up for it?” To which she replied, “Of course.”

Returning to the Joyce Theater this season is Camille A. Brown (the two-time 2022 Tony nominee for her direction and choreography of “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf”) with a trio of works redefining Black identity, one of which is also an ode to Black girlhood (Oct. 25-30), and Ronald K. Brown and his company Evidence, with “The Equality of Night and Day” (Jan. 17-22), which aims to challenge societal presumptions of equity and fairness.

Visiting from abroad are the Cuban group Malpaso Dance Company (Oct. 4-9), in a 10th anniversary performance, and the contemporary company Cullberg, from Sweden, with “Horse, the solos” (Feb. 1-5), a new work by Deborah Hay.

For now, the theater, which reviews its Covid-19 policies weekly, will continue to require audience members to wear masks and provide proof of vaccination.

“There is so much desire to be onstage,” Shelton said. “We hear that from every company, that they just can’t wait to be one stage again.”

“We don’t know what this coming year will bring,” she added, “But we are going after it.”