Nigerian Roots, “Romeo and Juliet”

The dancer-choreographer-actress Okwui Okpokwasili is a magnetic performer whose gravelly voice, challenging gaze, and physical intensity make it impossible to look away. Her recent work, of which “Adaku, part 2,” a collaboration with Peter Born, is the second installment, has turned to her prehistory: her family’s Nigerian roots, the slave trade, the rituals of survival and displacement experienced by African and African American women. Okpokwasili brings her piece—half mythology, half excavation—to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Nov. 11-15.

There is always a positive charge to Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre’s seasons at City Center (Dec. 2-Jan. 3). Who can resist “Revelations,” or “Cry,” Ailey’s tribute to Black womanhood? This year, the company adds a mood boost of a groovier sort—the former Ailey dancer Jamar Roberts’s “Power of Love,” set to the soulful, upbeat songs of Luther Vandross and made in collaboration with the Vandross estate. Later in the season, the Ailey dancers take on William Forsythe’s über-arch, technically dazzling “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated,” originally made in 1987, for the Paris Opéra Ballet.

The dancer, choreographer, and recent MacArthur Fellow Shamel Pitts creates worlds of almost painful intimacy, in which arduous encounters leave his dancers raw, vulnerable, exhausted. (He danced for years for the choreographer Ohad Naharin, whose technique seems to turn his dances inside out.) A recent work, “Touch of RED,” locked two men in a battle that suggested violence, love, and the ecstatic release of club dancing. Pitts’s latest, with his company, TRIBE, “Marks of RED”—part of the new Lincoln Center Contemporary Dance Festival (Alice Tully Hall; Jan. 17-18)—is for a cast of six women. Pitts has described it as “primitive, wonderful, groovy, wild,” which also describes his over-all vibe.

There is an infinite appetite for balletic versions of “Romeo and Juliet,” driven by the headlong rush of its love story and the cinematic sweep of Sergei Prokofiev’s score. New York City Ballet, at the start of its winter season (David H. Koch Theatre; Jan. 19-Feb. 28), replaces its current, rather soulless production, by Peter Martins, with a poetic one by Alexei Ratmansky, in which the characters explode with life, and the streets of Verona erupt in kaleidoscopic formations. At the end of the season, Taylor Stanley, a dancer whose fluidity and delicacy have always set him apart, will give his farewell performance, which includes Jerome Robbins’s otherworldly “Opus 19/The Dreamer” and a new solo by Kyle Abraham.—Marina Harss