Roots Collective, the Brooklyn-based contemporary dance company that has, over the past five years, been building a reputation across New York's smaller dance venues, completed a three-evening residency at NYU's Skirball Center this week with a programme that demonstrates the company's continued artistic ascent.

The programme

The programme of four pieces — two recent works and two reconstructed earlier pieces — carries the kind of curatorial intelligence that allows audiences to register the company's specific artistic trajectory. The two earlier pieces, performed by the current company under the original choreographers' supervision, sit cleanly alongside the more recent work.

The choreography

The choreography across all four pieces favours the kind of physical specificity that distinguishes Roots Collective's work from the more abstract contemporary dance vocabulary. The dancers' bodies carry weight, contact, and effort in ways that the audience reads as substantive rather than ornamental.

The performances

The performances by the eight company members were uniformly strong. The company has clearly invested in the kind of ensemble cohesion that the more demanding sections of the programme require; the cohesion shows in the moments when the company's collective work registers as more than the sum of the individual performances.

The technical support

The lighting and sound design supporting the programme were calibrated to the specific venue conditions in ways that smaller dance companies often cannot afford to invest in. The investment paid off across the three evenings.

The verdict

Roots Collective's NYU residency was the strongest contemporary-dance programme of the spring season. The company's continued ascent is one of the more interesting artistic developments in New York dance over the past several years; their next major engagement, scheduled for the autumn, will be one to watch.