What to do next week

By Claudia La Rocco
The New York Times

MEG STUART AND PHILIPP GEHMACHER Some shows generate buzz because of their content, others because of the artists involved. The content of “Maybe Forever,” which is to have its New York premiere at Dance Theater Workshop on Thursday, sounds interesting, but the reason to get excited about it springs from the artistic end: Meg Stuart, an American whose company, Damaged Goods, is based in Belgium, does not visit these shores often enough. A chance to see what she has been up to is not to be missed; success or failure, it is likely to provoke thought and engage the eye.

Ms. Stuart is quite the collaborator. In “Forgeries, Love and Other Matters,” her previous performance at Dance Theater Workshop in 2006, she joined the Montreal dancer Benoît Lachambre, as well as Hahn Rowe, a magician of a composer.

FORGERIES, LOVE AND OTHER MATTERS by Chris Van der Burght
Pictured: Benoit Lachambre and Meg Stuart

For “Maybe Forever” her onstage partners in crime are the Austrian choreographer Philipp Gehmacher, who leads the Mumbling Fish company in Vienna, and the singer-songwriter Niko Hafkenscheid, a member of the electronic-rock project aMute in Brussels. Janina Audick’s set is meant to conjure images of concert halls, as well as of crematoria.

In this evocative landscape expect the two choreographers to have a meeting that is more of the minds than a merging of movement languages. “Everyone struggles with something in the end,” reads the meditative artistic statement for “Maybe Forever” (above, a scene from the dance). But not everyone can make this struggle into art. (Wednesday through Feb. 2 at 7:30 p.m., Dance Theater Workshop, 219 West 19th Street, Chelsea, 212-924-0077, dtw.org; $25).