By Steve Sucato

Celebrating its 55th season, the Pittsburgh Dance Council Series this year features notable classical and contemporary dance companies from the United Kingdom, France, and the United States, including A.I.M. by Kyle Abraham, and the nation’s oldest dance company, the Martha Graham Dance Company.

In selecting the dance companies that comprise this 55th season, presented by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust at the Byham Theater, Trust Chief Programming & Engagement Officer Brooke Horejsi says she and Randal Miller, Director of Dance Programming and Special Projects, consider a multitude of factors. Tour date availability and cost are certainly key factors, says Horejsi, but so is programming a mixture of dance artists from different parts of the world and with differing movement languages and styles. 

“What is so great about dance is that it is one of the most accessible art forms,” says Horejsi. “In most cases, dance does not require a shared verbal language, so anyone can engage in the experience.”      

Kicking off the 2025-2026 Dance Council season will be French dance troupe Compagnie Hervé KOUBI, on Saturday, September 20, 2025. 

Founded by Hervé Koubi in 2000, the company blends martial arts, hip-hop, and street dance with contemporary styles.  

Koubi, who has Algerian roots but grew up in France, studied biology and dance at the University of Aix-Marseille. After graduating as a Pharmaceutical Doctor in 2002, Koubi decided instead to pursue a career in dance. He continued his dance training at the Rosella Hightower School of Dance in Cannes and has since established his eponymous dance company, which he has toured throughout Europe and North America.

For the company’s Pittsburgh debut, they will present Sol Invictus, an evening-length work named after the “invincible sun” deity, that is danced to a score by Swedish composer Mikael Karlsson, with excerpts by Steve Reich and digital composer Maxime Bodson.

“I want to talk about light, solidarity, and those bonds that unite us,” says Koubi about Sol Invictus. “Here, the sun and the dance will emerge victorious.”

The first of the company’s works to feature a mixed-gender cast, Horejsi says, Sol Invictus is the company’s strongest work to date. “It has a strong athleticism to it and an edge-of-your-seat excitement and pace that I really respond to and think our audience will too.”

Next, award-winning dancer and choreographer Aakash Odedra returns with his self-titled UK-based company on Saturday, October 11, 2025, with their latest work, Songs of the Bulbul. The company last appeared on the Dance Council season in 2012.

Choreographed by Rani Khanam with music by Rushil Ranjan, Songs of the Bulbul takes its inspiration from the ancient Sufi myth of a bulbul captured and held in captivity. In it, Odedra poses the question: Will we, like the caged bird, remain bound to the material world, or will we soar towards a higher existence of liberation and the divine?

“Akash’s work, while rooted in the traditional Indian dance styles of bharatanatyam and kathak, is contemporary dance,” says Horejsi. “One of the through lines in this new season is percussive movement, and it is interesting to see two differing approaches to percussive movement, this piece, and later in the season, Step Afrika’s The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence.

A rare mid-week show, the Martha Graham Dance Company brings its GRAHAM100, 100th Anniversary tour to Pittsburgh on Wednesday, January 28, 2026. 

Graham was born in 1894 in Allegheny City, before it was annexed by Pittsburgh in 1907 and became the city’s North Side. On her way to being known as the “Mother of Modern Dance” and a cultural icon, Graham was the first dancer to perform at the White House and later received the National Medal of Arts (1985) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976, the highest civilian award in the United States. She was also honored with the Key to the City of Paris and Japan’s Imperial Order of the Precious Crown. She died in 1991 at age 96.

The company history-spanning mixed repertory program features Graham favorites Lamentation (1930), Steps in the Street (1936), Immediate Tragedy (1937), plus choreographer Jamar Roberts’ We the People (2024) with music by Rhiannon Giddens, and Cortege, a 2025 new commission from choreographers Amadi ‘Baye’ Washington & Sam ‘Asa’ Pratt that focuses on Charon, the ferryman who shepherds souls across the Rivers Styx to the Underworld in Greek mythology.

The aforementioned Step Afrika! then performs their signature work, The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence, on Friday, February 13, 2026. The work is based on painter Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series (1940–41), a sequence of 60 small, tempera-on-hardboard paintings that chronicles the mass exodus of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North between World War I and the 1940s. 

“They are really enjoyable to watch and are making an interesting commentary on what it is to create a dance movement vocabulary based on ‘Stepping,’ a singular black tradition from the United States,” says Horejsi. 

Punctuating the season will be the return of Lincoln-Larimer neighborhood’s own Kyle Abraham and his company, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, on Saturday, May 9, 2026. Three of Abraham’s works will be presented, including 2018’s dynamic solo work, Show Pony, to music by electronic musician Jlin (Jerrilynn Patton); If We Were a Love Song (2021), a series of poetic solos and duets performed to music by Nina Simone, with versions created for both stage and screen, that unfold like a series of living portraits; and 2025’s 2×4, a new dance work set to composer Shelley Washington’s baritone saxophone score that uses geometrical playfulness to explore conversation, confrontation, stillness, and bustling movement phrasing. Also on the program will be NYC-based choreographer Andrea Miller’s Year (2024), a 33-minute piece to music by Frédéric Despierre, Rehearsal Director of England’s Hofesh Shechter Company, that welcomes its dancers and the audience into a space of ritual, practice, and meditation.

The Pittsburgh Dance Council 2025-2026 Season (55^th presenting season) runs from September 20, 2025, to May 9, 2026. All shows take place at the Byham Theater, 101 6th St, Pittsburgh, PA 15222. Single tickets (as low as $23) for each show are available at TrustArts.org/DANCE, by calling Guest Services at 412-456-6666, or in person at Theater Square Box Office, 655 Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15222.  For more information about Pittsburgh Cultural Trust presentations, visit TrustArts.org.

Groups of 10 or more tickets, please call 412-471-6930 or visit www.TrustArts.org/groups

Student Discounts: Students are welcome to spend a day off campus and explore the arts in the Cultural District!  Undergraduate and graduate students are eligible for ticket discounts of up to 50% off select Pittsburgh Cultural Trust performances. The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust is the premiere performing and visual arts organization in Pittsburgh’s Cultural District. For more information, visit the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s Student University Tickets webpage at www.TrustArts.org.