Dance: Sarah Crompton’s five best shows of 2023

‘Full of love’: Christine Flores, Melissa Toogood, Victor Lozano, Maile Okamura and Zachary Gonder in Song of Songs by Pam Tanowitz. Photograph: Maria Baranova/ Barbican

1. Song of Songs
Barbican, London; October
American choreographer Pam Tanowitz has had a gleaming 2023, with a triple bill for the Royal Ballet (Secret Things, Dispatch Duet and Everyone Keeps Me) that revealed her deep understanding of dance history. But it was Song of Songs, for her own company, that sealed her reputation as one of the most significant dance-makers of our own time. Cool, rigorous, and intricately structured, unfolding in perfect marriage with David Lang’s score, it was quite simply the most beautiful piece of the year, full of love.

2. Find Your Eyes
Manchester Academy; July

‘Strikingly original’: Find Your Eyes by Benji Reid for the Manchester international festival. Photograph: Oluwatosin Daniju

John McGrath, director of the Manchester international festival, has spent years trying to persuade photographer and hip-hop dance star Benji Reid, a former member of Soul II Soul, to make a new piece. The wait was worth it. Find Your Eyes was a strikingly original work about seeing and seeing differently that blended dance, photography and theatre to stunning effect.

3. Untitled, 2023
Royal Opera House, London; June

Untitled, 2023 by Wayne McGregor and the Royal Ballet, with designs by Carmen Herrera. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Wayne McGregor’s new piece for the company where he is resident choreographer was inspired by the artist Carmen Herrera. Before her death at the age of 106, she designed its airy set, and her spirit of inquiry, her clarity and sense of space seemed to fill McGregor’s gloriously evocative choreography as well.

4. Romeo and Juliet
Sadler’s Wells, London; August
The revival of Matthew Bourne’s 2019 look at an old classic revealed it as one of his best works. It sets its star-crossed lovers in an institute for troubled young people and introduces themes such as rape and homophobia, but its passionate response to Prokofiev’s score and the sheer invention of the choreography are as striking as its radical rethinking.

5. Turn It Out With Tiler Peck & Friends
Sadler’s Wells; March

Speed and power… Tiler Peck in The Barre Project, Blake Works II from Turn It Out with Tiler Peck and Friends. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

The New York City Ballet star Tiler Peck breezed into Britain with a show that brought tap and ballet into sharp, revealing collision, as well as highlighting Peck’s own astonishing desire to communicate her love of dance, her speed, her power. She made you want to see more of her.