International arts festivals are usually left to the bureaucrats to organize. The dance division of the Venice Biennale, by contrast, takes an auteur approach, with extreme-ballet choreographer Wayne McGregor at its helm. So the pleasure is twofold: to watch the dances as usual—and as many in the brief, fulsome season as your attention allows—and to imagine how a thoughtful choreographer (if not McGregor in particular) might see them and absorb them into his or her work. McGregor has titled his sixth Biennale Time Does Not Exist. With its mix of generations, he might have appended it “… but history does.” Choreographer Molissa Fenley dances her old Bardo, an homage to her friend Keith Haring, on a double bill with her acclaimed solo take on The Rite of Spring, revived for an unleashed Cassandra Trenary. Relatively young Sámi director Elle Sofe Sara, with an assist from the Icelandic choreographer Hlín Diego Hjálmarsdóttir, reflects on one colonial conquest; Eiko Otake (of Eiko & Koma renown) and Wen Hui contend with the aftereffects of another. As for Mamela Nyamza’s Herd/Less, the European premiere condenses decades of Black South African subjection and resistance into a single mass, a single dance. —Apollinaire Scherr