Garth Fagan Dance opened at New York’s Joyce Theater on Wednesday for its 55th season, and the youngest member of the cast is 19. Every dancer on stage is under 30, and the longest-serving has been with the company four years.
Fagan, the Jamaican-born choreographer who won a Tony Award for the Broadway staging of The Lion King, built the Rochester company on his own blend of modern, post-modern, Afro-Caribbean and ballet technique. A Black choreographer’s company reaching 55 seasons is an achievement in a field where companies rarely last that long. In 2025 he received the Bessies’ lifetime achievement award.
The run, through Sunday, Nov. 8, is also a handover. Fagan has passed artistic direction to Norwood “PJ” Pennewell and co-leadership to Natalie Rogers-Cropper, the company’s executive director. He calls them his “muses.” Each has made a new work for the Joyce, and both are New York premieres: Pennewell’s Priestess Hill and Rogers-Cropper’s Messages To The Storm.
The program sets those beside Fagan’s own history. Prelude: Discipline is Freedom, a seminal early work, is on the bill. Never Top 40, made in 1985, returns to New York for the first time since 2001. The company marked the anniversary in Rochester in May at Nazareth University, with revivals of both works.
Principal dancers Kiara Haywood and Daria Clarke lead a cast that learned this repertory long after it was made. That is what a company has to do to last 55 years: hand itself to people who were not yet born when it started. Fagan has done it while he is still around to watch.
Performances are Wednesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets for Friday start at $84.
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