DANCE NOW FESTIVAL at Joe’s Pub (Sept. 4-7, 7 p.m.). For decades, this post-Labor Day sampler platter has ushered in the busy fall season with sweet and savory snippets of dance. Over four consecutive nights, 40 local artists will face the festival’s challenge to present a “clear and complete artistic statement” in five minutes or less on the postage-stamp-size stage at Joe’s Pub. Participants range from veterans like Gus Solomons Jr. to young innovators like Caleb Teicher to under-the-radar artists like Satoshi Haga and Rie Fukuzawa, performing as binbinFactory. After this week’s competition, producers will select the 10 they feel did the best, and those dancers will then return for an encore on Sept. 26, when an overall winner will be chosen.

212-967-7555, publictheater.org

[Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead.]

‘ELLINGTON PERFORMANCE SERIES’ at Birdland (Sept. 1, 5:30 p.m.). Hosted by the American Tap Dance Foundation and the Duke Ellington Center for the Arts, this series of performances puts the music of the jazz great Duke Ellington in a dialogue with dance. This chapter, called “Sacred Sunday, the Gospel According to Ellington,” features music from “My People,” Ellington’s 1963 revue about African-American history, and “A Concert of Sacred Music,” an album culled from performances in 1965 at the Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. The Sacred Sunday Band and Gospel Choir, led by the musical director Anthony Evans, provides the music, accompanied by the vocalist Jeannine Otis and the tap dancer DeWitt Fleming Jr.

212-581-3080, birdlandjazz.com