A phone is ringing in an empty office at the IDS Tower in Minneapolis … it’s for you. Answer it and embark on a journey that crosses continents, dissolves borders between audience and performer, and challenges cultural expectations. During the hourlong conversation with a call-center agent in India, everyday life is turned into theater, surprises are revealed, and our highly networked world is made…

Two continents, two great rivers, and two of contemporary dance’s biggest talents: The Good Dance: Dakar/Brooklyn is the culmination of a landmark three-year collaboration between American dance/theater-maker Reggie Wilson and Congolese contemporary dance creator Andréya Ouamba. As a new commission receiving its world premiere at the Walker, the piece will be polished during a two-week residency…

By now, many have recounted the profound impact that Merce Cunningham, who passed away in July at the age of 90, had on dance as well as the broader worlds of performing and visual arts. Fewer, perhaps, have noted how deeply he was also admired, in fact beloved, by so many in those worlds he inhabited—so much so that everyone forever just referred to him as “Merce,” as if he were a shared old friend of…

Two cardboard coffins, ten pink biscuit wafers, six cans of Harp, a wig, and countless costume changes… . Acclaimed Irish playwright Enda Walsh applies the frenetic antics of farce—an inherently British genre—to an Irish immigrant and his two grown sons. Holed up in their grimy London flat, the trio reenacts a peculiar family story on a daily basis, a bizarrely entertaining routine that has the sons…

Ancient and innovative, profound and joyous, Dhvee (Duality) is an intensive collaboration between the Minneapolis-based Ragamala Dance and the Balinese ensemble Çudamani. While both groups are rooted in traditional forms—Ragamala in classical Southern Indian Bharatanatyam and Çudamani in Balinese music and dance—they’re equally committed to creating contemporary works. Their meeting ground for …

Simultaneously quiet and electrifying, Bolero Variations opens the Walker’s 2009–2010 performing arts season and introduces a singular European artist to American audiences. Raimund Hoghe began creating and performing his own work 20 years ago, after serving throughout the 1980s as dramaturge for Pina Bausch. While Bausch’s visceral choreography and often elaborate sets defined German tanztheater…

How to celebrate the Twin Cities’ burgeoning dance scene? The Walker, with its nearly 40 years of support of local dance, is just one point within a sizable community, but it has played an essential, sometimes catalytic role. It is more than Momentum, the always-popular summer showcase for new voices copresented with the Southern Theater. The Walker also commissions new works from select local…

“Tony,” a child-size puppet with a cherubic doll’s face, a turtle-shell potbelly, and an otherwise spindly body made from odds and ends, is the surprising protagonist in Nami Yamamoto’s a howling flower. Four human performers maneuver around him, their sense of delicate devotion shifting abruptly to more forceful movements. In Convoys, Curfews and Roadblocks, soloist Nora Chipaumire brims with raw energy…

German dramatist Bertolt Brecht viewed most wars as a political panacea for economic downturns and a purposeful division of people by color, religion, language, and geography—a timely perspective in an era defined by the “war on terror,” fears about immigration, and ethnic conflict worldwide. For this reimagining of Brecht and composer Hanns Eisler’s rarely performed music-theater work Roundheads and…