Let’s take it back to the basics: Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky, classic Russian ballet masters. That’s what the Grigorovich Ballet Company is all about, with no apologies. The company was founded by someone still referred to as “maestro,” Yuri Grigorovich, the famed choreographer and director of the Bolshoi Ballet from the ’60s…

Last year, homeboy artist Daniel Arsham returned from his transplanted home of New York to put on the experimental dance performance Replica. He and his firm, Snarkitecture, created the amazing sets, and avant-garde dancer Jonah Bokaer provided much of the movement. The two have teamed up again for a brand-new…

“You say a word, I say a word, and we will make a sentence” That’s the premise of the Axis Dance Company’s premiere of Full of Words, presented by Tigertail Productions Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Colony Theatre. The dancers will create language with their bodies, completing a romantic…

What should you expect at the collaborative performance by boundary-breaking choreographers Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey, Tool Is Loot? A swan, a prince, a robot, sexual behavior, and two chairs — sometimes all at once, according to the duo. But that, of course, is simplistic and hardly conveys the creative…

The sensuous sounds and stylings of flamenco have grown in popularity outside of its Andalusian heartland, no more so than in Miami, which now has several festivals and its own companies. Ballet Flamenco La Rosa is one such troupe, which is just as comfortable performing in the intimate setting of…

Miami City Ballet is on fire as it enters 2012, appropriately the Year of the Dragon. After a string of international accolades in 2011, MCB kicks off its Program II at the Adrienne Arsht Center Friday at 8 p.m. with a world premiere from Liam Scarlett. He’s the uncommonly gifted…

Miami’s real cultural diversity and voice are expressed through dance. The latest example — Cordel, from local troupe Brazz Dance -— takes the stage at the South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center. Augusto Soledade, Brazz Dance’s Brazilian-born director and choreographer, has mixed tango, hip-hop, and a street-literature tradition from his homeland…

It’s more than fitting that the Miami City Ballet kicks off its 2011-12 season with a performance of George Balanchine’s Square Dance. One of the choreographer’s break-out stars was Edward Villella, MCB’s founder and director, who recently announced his retirement. Three years ago, Villella brought the troupe to New York,…

At an almost imperceptible creep, Miami has turned into a dance center. National and local troupes now regularly deliver topnotch stuff, from ultra-contemporary and hip-hop to folk and classical ballet. There’s maybe no better way to assess this arrival than looking at the 16th annual International Ballet Festival, which will…

Flamenco virtuoso Clarita Filgueiras has danced with the Gipsy Kings, Plácido Domingo, Florida Grand Opera, and numerous other troupes and groups — but really, she needs no extra backup. From Madrid to Miami, she is one of the lead performers and masters of the tablao, or flamenco stage. For this…

When Teo Castellanos donned numerous hats and accents in his 2002 one-man production, NE 2nd Avenue, he broke barriers all over the place. Not only did he wow the city with his humorous take on Miami characters, but also he placed himself front and center on the local theater stage…

Burlesque and Miami have always been a good fit. Both have elements of over-the-top theatrics, striptease, and just plain tease. So there is no better home for dancer Erika Moon’s debut of Evolution of Burlesque this Thursday at 9 p.m. than Colony Theatre. Though she has Latin-American roots, Moon was…

Back in the neon-colored-jackets-with-rolled-up-sleeves-days of ’80s Miami, cocaine cowboys, a decrepit SoBe, and, of course, Miami Vice, were synonymous with our “paradise lost.” Who would’ve thought, then, of moving here and heading a dance program for youth? Daniel “Danny” Lewis, that’s who. In 1987, Lewis became Dean of Dance at…

Are you a constant disappointment to your mother? Are your lady cajones bigger than the matzoth balls in your metaphoric soup? Then you might be a nice Jewish girl gone bad. And we have the perfect way for you to spend tomorrow night, the last night of Hanukah. A new…

For what would turn out to be one of his last multidisciplinary productions, the late, great modern dance innovator Merce Cunningham tapped the then-24-year-old artist Daniel Arsham to create the sets for eyeSpace in 2007. The result was a delicate, ephemeral work that was visually stunning and that would tour…

For what would turn out to be one of his last multidisciplinary productions, the late, great modern dance innovator Merce Cunningham tapped the then-24-year-old artist Daniel Arsham to create the sets for eyeSpace in 2007. The result was a delicate, ephemeral work that was visually stunning and that would tour…

In a pretty awesome coup for our tip of the peninsula, the Miami Art Museum will unveil “Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration,” a retrospective of 118 of Close’s works, with pieces ranging from 1972 to 2002. Fresh from a showing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,…

FRI 5/7 The last time Fernanda Porto (right) performed in Miami, she wowed the crowd at the awards ceremony of the Brazilian Film Festival with an eclectic mix of bossa nova, samba, drum and bass, and for that extra-special something, Japanese taiko drummers. The crowd was dazzled and the raspberry-haired…

THU 5/6 Here’s a dilemma. As you were giving birth to your first child, your doctors frantically informed you that they needed to perform an emergency hysterectomy. They took your uterus, but nice guys that they were, they left your ovaries intact. No more bearing children but you could still…

TUE 5/4 Only one man can spoof Prince as a basketball-playing, pancake-making fop; make milquetoast talk show host Wayne Brady seem insanely edgy (“White people love Wayne Brady because he makes Bryant Gumbel look like Malcolm X”); and single-handedly revive superfreak Rick James’s career with a plethora of punches and…

NOW 24/7 Coconut Grove is not exactly Basra. But as ever-increasing numbers of cars compete for ever-shrinking numbers of metered parking spaces (can we say valet parking?), the Grove sometimes feels like something of a gentrified war zone. As the battle for a parking space heats up, all we huddled…

FRI 3/5 For some people, guarding orchid-growing secrets is tantamount to the Department of Defense protecting information about nuclear warheads. They steal, they lie, they hire spies. You wouldn’t believe it. In case you haven’t read the book The Orchid Thief or seen the film Adaptation, you should know that…