Performing Arts

It’s all about the café. Not coffee, mind you, but the café. This is what Elena Flores would have us believe as she gets through her busy day in search of an elusive cup of that hot, black glory that fuels Miami. Watered-down American coffee simply won’t do. Neither will a cuppa tricked-out joe from Starbucks. No self-respecting Miami Cuban would settle for anything less than a real café.

For Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater artistic director Robert Battle, this week marks a special return, not just to the Arsht Center, where his company performs annually, but also to the city where he grew up. “It’s more personal [performing in Miami]; it reminds me where I come from,” says Battle, a Liberty City native. “My mom [Dessie Williams] still lives in the same house. I used to dance on the marble floor of our front porch. The Arsht Center wasn’t far away.”

Art has always shone brightest in the midst of political oppression. And Mad Cat Theatre Company is tackling both art and political oppression during a time when those topics are controversial at best. February 23 through March 12, the eclectic and offbeat production company will open its 17th season by putting on two plays by subversive Czechoslovakian playwright Vaclav Havel.

She was told to go back to Cuba on a banana boat when she was growing up in Broward. Now award-winning actor and playwright Elena María García strikes back in the world premiere of ¡Fuácata! or a Latina’s Guide to Surviving the Universe at that Arsht Center February 23.

Choreographer Jeanguy Saintus works primarily from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, but his creative work has global appeal. He is a pioneering artist who blends Haiti’s traditional music and dance with more contemporary styles of movement and music. He isn’t afraid to throw in some Tchaikovsky or Ravel.

He might have been born a girl and voted homecoming queen, but from the beginning, Los Angeles-based performer Scott Turner Schofield knew he was a boy. “I spent a lot of my early childhood trying to convince people: ‘I’m not kidding, this isn’t a phase, I’m really a boy,’?” Schofield…

In 2006, during an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Dave Chappelle told his onetime sketch-comedy target: “I was doing sketches that were funny but socially irresponsible. I felt like I was deliberately being encouraged, and I was overwhelmed. It’s like you’re being flooded with things and you don’t pay attention to things like your ethics.”

You better get On Your Feet! Miami. Gloria and Emilio Estefan’s autobiographical Broadway musical is finally making its way to the Magic City, kicking off Broadway in Miami’s 2017-2018 season at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts this October. After more than a year of calling Broadway home,…

Playing on the words “armor” and “amour,” Miami-based choreographer Lazaro Godoy takes on the complexities of a key human experience: love. Working with a team of collaborators, including creative partner and performer Carlota Pradera, Godoy is extending the range of his creative language. Until now, movement has been his primary artistic mode. With ArMOUR, he incorporates still visual images, space, and movement.

Tigertail’s ScreenDance Miami festival is now in its fourth year. One of the few festivals in the nation dedicated solely to movement for film and video, ScreenDance aims high. The goal: to present top-caliber dance films showcasing makers locally and from around the world.

Last October, it was announced that Miami New Drama (MiND) would take over the historic Colony Theatre on Lincoln Road. And now, as part of that take-over, MiND is set to put on a play that requires full audience immersion. Terror is a courtroom drama unlike most others in that the folks sitting in the seats play a pivotal role themselves — as the jury. And the case they’re presented is an all-too-familiar one in our post-911 world.

GableStage’s Joseph Adler has made a career of producing shows about the multilayered complexities of the human experience. And no playwright portrays the dark, flawed mosaic of what makes people tick quite like Stephen Adly Guirgis. His 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning Between Riverside and Crazy, which opens at GableStage at the…

Thirty-two playwrights, a half-dozen directors, and around 90 plays in less than two hours: This is the South Florida One-Minute Play Festival, now in its fifth year. The festival, performed at the Deering Estate in Palmetto Bay and curated by Caitlin Wees and Dominic D’Andrea, has become a phenomenon. South…

If you like Saturday Night Live, you probably like improv comedy. Many of SNL’s biggest names cut their teeth in improv troupes; it’s where Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Bill Murray, Will Ferrell, and many others honed their skills. Poehler is a founder of New York’s Upright Citizens Brigade; Fey and Murray are both grads of Second City in Chicago; and Ferrell got his career off the ground with the Groundlings in L.A.

The white walls and well-trod floor of a light-pierced studio at Miami City Ballet enclose a charmed space — a field of incalculable energy. Inside, sets of coupled dancers rehearse in quick succession two company premieres for their second program of the season, opening Friday. On the schedule this day: the antic maneuvers of Calcium Light Night, Peter Martins’ 1977 choreographic debut, and Carousel Pas de Deux, a fairground for spinning passions, from the end of Kenneth MacMillan’s career.

Myth has it that a Cuban who doesn’t dance is a rare creature. Like the endangered Florida panther, you could live an entire lifetime without ever seeing one. “We come from a dancing island,” explains Fernando Sáez, founder and executive director of Cuban contemporary dance company Malpaso. From Afro-Cuban ritual…

When YoungArts alumna Isabela Dos Santos, originally from Weston but now a Miami Beach resident, found out she’d been accepted to the prestigious cultural program, it felt magical. “Going to YoungArts Week was like when Harry Potter finds out he’s a wizard and there’s a whole world out there for him. Suddenly, everything that I felt was ‘off’ about me was a superpower,” said Santos, a 2011 winner in cinematic arts.

Lizz Winstead can’t help but be funny. Even in the middle of a Minnesota thunder snow (“it’s a thing,” she insists), she quips about being the youngest of five, saying she always had to work to get attention. But now she’s not just trying to get her parents to listen. She’s trying to get America to listen too.

The year 2016 is over, and good riddance. The past 12 months catalogued the deaths of David Bowie, John Glenn, Elie Wiesel, Fidel Castro, Muhammad Ali, Prince, George Michael, Alan Rickman, Carrie Fisher, Anton Yelchin, and many other figures who shaped global culture. And though many blame the number 2016…