These look to be dark days for dance in the Twin Cities.

While every branch of the performing arts is struggling to get back on its feet post-COVID, dance is experiencing more of a crisis than most. One study said that balance sheets and audiences are down 75% from 2019 for American dance companies, so perhaps this winter’s news should have been unsurprising.

In January, it was announced that the art form’s local capitol, the Cowles Center, would close the area’s foremost performance space devoted to dance, the Goodale Theater, at the end of March. Then the dean of Twin Cities dance troupes – the 62-year-old Minnesota Dance Theatre founded by the legendary Loyce Houlton – said that it would “pause” from performing in May to concentrate exclusively on its educational offerings.

So it’s best not to think of the Minnesota Dance Theatre presentation currently gracing the stage of the West Bank’s grand old Southern Theater as a goodbye to a storied local arts institution that’s older than the Guthrie. Instead, head to the Southern and celebrate what terrific talent we have in our midst.

That’s the overarching impression left with me by Friday’s opening night performance. Featuring three world premieres and the local debut of a 2021 piece, it was an evening full of imaginative art, the modern dance works served with ample dashes of classical ballet’s graceful movement vocabulary. Executed with maximum expressiveness by 10 dancers, it felt less like a sad farewell than an inspiring reminder of what this art form can do for your soul.

Such epiphanies may arise while experiencing choreographer Zachary Tuazon’s “Animi de Gaia,” a five-part piece set to solo piano works by Frederic Chopin. Opening with the blaze of “Ignis (Fire),” which found nine dancers swirling about the stage, and closing with the solemn quartet, “Mors (Death),” the work was most breathtakingly beautiful in Sasha Hayden Zitofsky and Ken Shiozawa’s pas de deux, “Aqua (Water).”

But no piece captured the emotions of the moment more eloquently than “Premonition of this Present Moment,” a piece by Javan Mngrezzo that expressed struggle, liberation and several steps between them. Beginning with six dancers seemingly pushing on the expansive brick wall at the back of the Southern stage, it was a ballet/modern dance mix with a sense of ancient ritual driven in part by the music of Rey & Kjavik and yMusic.

The company’s interim artistic director, Elayna Waxse, collaborated with the dancers to create “Don’t Forget You Are Precious.” Perhaps it was Emily Pitts’ arresting solo in a pseudo-nightgown that lent the impression that we were in something of a dream scene, the other dancers products of her subconscious. Zitofsky emerged as the messenger of unbounded exultation, the other five dancers embracing that spirit to a concluding rocker by Duluth-based band Low. And kudos to Jesse Cogswell’s very inventive lighting design.

Nia-Amina Minor’s “And yet here we are” was at its best when at its most unfettered, the dancers matching the high-energy feel of Makaya McCraven’s jazz. It underlined the evening’s overriding impression that there’s nothing quite like being in a room with an extraordinarily talented group of dancers expressing themselves through the prism of a gifted choreographer’s vision.

Minnesota Dance Theatre

When: 2 p.m. Sunday, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. next Sunday

Where: Southern Theater, 1420 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis

Tickets: $32-$20, available at southerntheater.org

Capsule: An inspiring reminder of what dance can do.

Rob Hubbard can be reached at wordhub@yahoo.com.

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