When Dormeshia and the other stellar tap dancers of “Ladies in the Shoe” perform at the 92nd Street Y, New York, on Saturday, the resonances will be both acoustic and historical. The hall they will be dancing in is the same one in which the great choreographer Martha Graham taught in the 1930s and ’40s.
The same but different: That space, Buttenwieser Hall, reopened on Wednesday after an extensive renovation. Besides the walls and the windows, just about all that remains of the original décor are the murals on the beamed ceiling — wheat sheaves, menorahs, lyres and biblical scenes painted in 1930 by Vincent Maragliotti and now gleamingly restored.
With the reopening also came the inauguration of the new Arnhold Center, a dance and performance complex encompassing the hall and an adjoining dance studio. A bigger studio, in a space now occupied by an office cluttered with cubicles, will be added soon.
The center is a boon for a New York dance scene still recovering from the setbacks of the pandemic. But it’s also an opportunity for an institution that was once central to dance in New York to regain importance, a possible realignment with a storied past.
Seth Pinsky, the chief executive of the 92nd Street Y, said the renovation — part of a $200 million larger redevelopment timed to coincide with organization’s 150th anniversary next year — was a “doubling down,” a choice of expansion over contraction, an investment in the future “that builds on our history.”
That history includes dance, in a major way. The choreographer Agnes de Mille once called the 92nd Street Y “the veritable cradle of the modern-dance movement.” Along with Graham and de Mille, the long list of those who taught and performed there includes Doris Humphrey, who directed its dance center in the 1940s. Among the seminal works first seen there: Jose Limón’s “The Moor’s Pavane” in 1949, Paul Taylor’s notoriously avant-garde “Seven New Dances” in 1957, and most famously, in 1960, Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations,” one of the most popular dances ever made.
Those premieres, though, were not in Buttenwieser Hall but in the building’s 900-seat Kaufmann Concert Hall. And from the 1970s until 2021, almost no dance appeared in there. During that period, dance performances were restricted to Buttenwieser, which was less of a theater than a banquet space with a tiny stage; a room, Pinsky said, with “the aesthetics of a high-school gym.”
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Now, Buttenwieser is a flexible black box theater, with raked and retractable seating for 250, a lighting grid and a slide-out stage. The dressing room used to be around the corner, so dancers had to run through the lobby for entrances. Now it is attached.
“We can properly present artists,” said Taryn Kaschock Russell, who as director of the 92NY Harkness Dance Center is in charge of programming. “The artists who were here before were very generous trying to embrace the history we had, but the space wasn’t showing them the same respect.”
Russell, who became director in 2019, put dance back into Kaufmann Concert Hall. In 2021, while making a short film on the Kaufmann stage with the dancer Shamel Pitts, she felt chills and a sense of sacred ground, she said: “It lit a fire under me to figure out what it would take to get dance back onto that stage.”
Her first step was to learn why it had fallen away. “Converging Movements,” Naomi M. Jackson’s history of dance at the 92nd Street Y, suggested several factors. A big one was the retirement in 1969 of William Kolodny, the organization’s educational director, who had brought on Graham and the rest in the 1930s and championed dance in the decades that followed. In 1977, the theater was unionized, making it more expensive, and soon after, a performing arts division was established that didn’t include dance, which was still classified under education.
Dance performances continued in the more amateur ambience of Buttenwieser — usually on the floor rather than the shallow stage — while the Kaufmann stage was occupied with prestigious music, poetry and lecture events. Getting dance back in to Kaufmann, Russell said, was a matter of fund-raising and a little risk-taking. Starting in 2021, she organized a series of one-night, in-person performances on Thursdays, which were filmed and then made available on the institution’s website.
This series kept dance performances going at 92nd Street Y while Buttenwieser was being renovated. But its reopening isn’t simply a return to business as usual.
“It takes the pressure off trying to fill a 900-person hall,” Russell said. She plans to continue programming single-night dance events in Kaufmann (performances have been announced through June), but in Buttenwieser, she can schedule longer runs — of two or three days — and the flexible space allows for different configurations. “Ladies in the Shoe” will tap on the new floor. Others might opt for the stage, which comes down from the back wall, or even to perform in-the-round.
Most importantly, she added, having the two theaters allows her to take more risks on new artists. This is also part of the history of the 92nd Street Y, which presented the first New York performances of dozens and dozens of dancers, including luminaries like Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus, and the debuts of companies like Ailey’s.
“It’s exciting that ‘Revelations’ happened on that stage,” Russell said, “but what’s really exciting is that they didn’t know what ‘Revelations’ was. They invested in that artist, and then that’s what came out.”
This all pleases Jody Arnhold, the 92NY board’s chair, who with her husband, John, donated $30 million to the renovation. “We have to have the physical facilities to match our programming,” she said during an interview at the 92nd Street Y.
Dance is Arnhold’s life’s work, especially dance education. “Don’t say dance without saying dance education,” she insisted. At the 92nd Street Y in 1995, she founded the Dance Education Laboratory, a training program for dance educators. She’s taught in the program ever since. The new Arnhold Center provides more space for the 92nd Street Y’s dance classes and for the Laboratory, which has been operating mostly online since the start of the pandemic.
“The 150th gives us a chance to look back at what happened here,” Arnhold said, “but also to draw attention to what’s happening here now and what’s going to happen.”
This summer, Arnhold’s classes will return to Buttenwieser Hall, the same space but different — long ago a cradle and now, thanks to her support, part of a place that has doubled down on dance.
