94 Dancers and 4 World Premieres
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It’s not every day that you come across a dance program sporting four world premieres. Or one that features a cast of 94 dancers. But that is the exciting promise of , which puts a premium on creativity and exploration.
Just before Thanksgiving, Zvi Gotheiner was observing the 23 third-year students tackling his nearly-completed dance, which is set to six selections from Nino Rota’s film scores. Next door, Helen Simoneau was asking the 24 first-year students to show her “the swirl” — a section of her Strange Garden where the huge mass of dancers navigate through twisty positions on the floor. Meanwhile, the senior class was rehearsing Kyle Abraham’s non sequitur paramour and Aszure Barton was casting her watchful eye over the 24 second-year students as they tried out a slow, lunging walk, then peeled off from a line stage right into a series of fluid, hypnotic solos.
“That way, there were a lot of students left out of performance opportunities,” he says. “They auditioned for the works to be performed in February, and those who weren’t cast never got to perform.” He went to Juilliard president Joseph Polisi with a proposal. “I said, ‘I think this isn’t a good idea, and that performance is part of training. I want to start a new program that guarantees that every dancer would have involvement with a professional choreographer every year, and that every dancer would perform on the big stage at least once a year.’ I wanted to make sure that they all were having these opportunities.”
“I’m looking for someone who shows me, in one way or another, that they know how to control space and how to use space,” says Rhodes, who seems to attend every dance event in the city and has numerous friends and contacts from his years as a dancer and company artistic director.
Simoneau is collaborating with composer Jerome Begin, whose original score will be performed live, as will Caroline Shaw’s piano score (which “wraps around” a Chopin mazurka) for Barton’s return to patience.
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Susan Reiter regularly covers dance for TDF Stages.
Photos by Jessica Liese. Top photo: Third-year students Conner Bormann, Katherine Garcia, and Casey Hess.
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Susan Reiter covers dance for TDF Stages.