Vengeful gods, eternal punishments, love and betrayal: with so much drama, It’s no wonder we keep telling and re-telling the Greek myths. 

The MaMa Project is an annual satellite project of Orchesis, one of Columbia’s student dance groups. It brings with it the joy and beautiful dancing of the Orchesis semesterly shows, but with a little more cohesion and narrative. One choreographer, or a pair, is given the space and resources to create a full evening-length work. Previous themes have ranged from the zodiac to ghosts to bugs; this year, director Grace Petrusek (BC ‘25) chose the theme Mythics, focusing on Greek mythology.  

Petrusek chose to focus each song on a particular god, hero, or story, the first act featuring stories from the underworld, the second from above ground. Her choreography, largely in the lyrical-modern realm with clear infusions of ballet and jazz, captured an appropriate mix of elegance and theatrical drama, showcasing both fierce acrobatics and graceful waltzes. 

The show attempted to explore the act of storytelling itself, in brief, fascinating moments. Five mismatched wooden chairs made appearances throughout the night, with dancers on top of them in the opening number (“Mythological Beauty”), then sitting in them holding lit candles at the back of the stage, becoming the set (“Nyx”), then as the scene of a ritualistic blindfolding and then wonderfully staged dance (“Cassandra”). This combined with the uniformity of the costumes (flowy tunics over black pants) gave the sense of dancers-as-storytellers, not necessarily portraying gods themselves, but stepping into roles briefly to tell a story, then rejoining the group. Still, it wasn’t always clear exactly what stories the dancers were telling, with movement that was lyrical and often visually beautiful, but often not deeply invested in emotion or theatrical narrative. 

Even when the stories were clear or well-known, the dancing didn’t always seem to match the myth. Perhaps the most entertaining number of the night, “Sisyphus,” saw Annie Fasulo (BC ‘25), Isabel McFarland (BC ‘26), Madeleine Rosenthal (BC ‘26), and Reese Yen (CC ‘27) as a kind of collective Sisyphus figure. Sisyphus was cursed to push a boulder up a hill, but never reach the top, restarting and restarting to eternity. But the exuberance and silliness of the quartet—theatrically posing, gasping, falling, skipping; the endlessly charismatic McFarland smirking and flipping off the audience on a line that went “To hell with this”–didn’t feel like it matched the somber, dark reality of the myth or the song (Andrew Bird’s “Sisyphus”). Still, it was hilarious, and excellently danced and acted. 

On the other hand, “Venus,” danced by the fabulous trio of Brooke Cullen (CC ‘25), Suzanne Ye (BC ‘26), and Sophie Zhu (BC ‘26), was campy, theatrical, and sexy, fitting for the goddess of love, beauty, and desire. “Icarus,” telling the story of a boy with engineered wings who fell when he flew too close to the sun, saw its dancers (Fasulo, Eirik Peterson (CC ‘26), Charlotte Ries (BC ‘26), Christina Wang (SEAS ‘28), and Zhu) in long, floating, luxurious lifts, flying and falling with a communal sense of care and connection that was unmatched throughout the night.

Sometimes, the dancers, choreography, myth, and music came together in a wonderful synergy. “Orpheus and Eurydice” saw a cast of six shifting fluidly between Orpheus and Eurydice, pairing up, then coming together as a group; the moment of Orpheus looking back played out over and over again, endless, almost painful, becoming a kind of celebration of his love (as in Hozier’s interpretation of the myth, “Talk,” the soundtack to this piece). They turned back and turned back and turned back. Ginevra Levin (BC ‘28) froze—like a final desperate attempt to change fate—but the rest of the cast held and turned her, and so she, too, looked back. When the final Orpheus, Rosenthal, was left behind, spotlit, devastated, it was heartbreaking anew.

“Cassandra,” with blindfolds and its slow, ritualistic opening, was another standout. Each dancer of the five-person cast began by slowly walking to a chair and tying a bright-red blindfold over their eyes, echoing Cassandra’s curse to see the future but never be believed. Breathless lifts, a series of nicely constructed, escalating solos, and chair-ography made it both visually interesting and affective, capturing the wild power and grief of Cassandra.

Petrusek’s solos, for Dahlia Seidel (BC ‘25) as “Nyx” and for herself as “Persephone at the River Styx” were also stunning. The combination of her lyrical movement and Seidel’s quiet determination made for a performance of a character that felt genuinely divine. Petrusek’s dancing has a similar inner strength, and in this solo she used the costumes very nicely, the tulle flying and slicing, almost in duet with her. Both pieces played with reverberations, with single moves (a shoulder shrugging, a torso twisting) repeating and rebounding, in a way that made me think of Sisyphus again. 

Guest choreographers Abby Mankin (BC ‘25) and Anya Trumbach (SEAS ‘25) contributed, respectively, the first act’s finale and the second act’s opener. Mankin’s intuitive sense of space gave her piece, “Rhiannon,” a beautiful sense of scale, with almost cinematic zooms or fades. Her piece was one of the sharpest of the night, with precise beats that the entire cast executed flawlessly. Trumbach’s “Daphne” was likewise precise and well-choreographed, with interweaving lines and a series of duets. Trumbach’s tableaus, blossoming out from the opening pose to smaller groups, were nicely composed and statuesque.

The finale left the audience on a joyful, exuberant note, with a piece full of catches, grasping, and energetic swings and smiles. The final pose saw the dancers’ chests bared in a triumphant here-I-am pose, then looking up, in prayer or thanks or joy, a perfect way to end the evening with a last hint of the divine. 

As a whole, the evening felt like a traditional revue-style Orchesis show, with each song its own wholly separate world. There’s nothing wrong with that normally—it’s lovely, in fact!—but for a show designed as an evening-length work, I wanted more purpose. It was hard not to feel like the show missed the full, vibrant potential of its topic. Regardless, Petrusek’s movement and dancers were, genuinely, beautiful, and it remained an evening well spent.

MaMa dancers via Olivia Kuan-Romano.