'A (MICRO) HISTORY OF WORLD ECONOMICS, DANCED'

Just over a century ago, the impresario Sergei Diaghilev launched his Ballets Russes in Paris, bringing together groundbreaking artists across a range of fields to produce new work in support of dance. His company, which lasted two decades, helped introduce choreographers like George Balanchine and Léonide Massine to the world, but perhaps more impactful was its support of composers like Igor Stravinsky and Erik Satie, and visual artists like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Coco Chanel—all of whom worked closely with the Ballets Russes and each other in an intensely collaborative process that proved far more effective than most other so-called creative partnerships. That same inclusive spirit, with its emphasis on discussion and co-development, animates the young company BalletCollective today.

There are few choreographers who can say they’ve had two works presented by New York City Ballet in the same day. It’s a very short list that includes Balanchine, Robbins, Martins, Wheeldon, and—after this Saturday—Justin Peck. At the matinée, his celebrated Year of the Rabbit, which debuted last October, will be danced, mere hours before the second-ever performance during the evening show of his latest work, Paz de la Jolla, which has its world première tonight.

We catch up with one of the most promising young ballet choreographers working today on the eve of his first commission for his home company of New York City Ballet.

When the Brooklyn Academy of Music opened its new Richard B. Fisher Building earlier this month, guests at the première performance were greeted by a floating plane of light. The glowing grid, composed of thirty-six bare bulbs hung precisely from the darkened ceiling above, was the artist Anthony McCall’s visual design for choreographer Jonah Bokaer’s latest work, “Eclipse,” which, in addition to inaugurating the Fisher Building, also marked the opening of the thirtieth edition of BAM’s celebrated wide-ranging Next Wave Festival. It was additionally, in a pleasant bit of serendipity, Bokaer’s thirtieth work as a choreographer. “It just crept up on us,” he laughs, “and it’s been interesting to arrive at this series of occasions.”

The dance world has, of late, been rather uncomfortably forced to confront the timeless and ultimately inevitable question of how to continue a company after the death of the founding choreographer. Merce Cunningham’s famously disbanded this year after a final worldwide tour, while Pina Bausch’s continues to search for a way forward. To a less-documented extent, Michael Smuin’s, founded in 1994 by the former San Francisco Ballet artistic director, has demonstrated that the loss of a guiding light is not necessarily a death sentence, as a recently concluded run at the Joyce in Chelsea proved that provocative new works from others can serve just as well for extending a legacy.

There’s no shortage of action in London this summer, but one of the highlights of the season has been the Pina Bausch retrospective at Sadler’s Wells, a collection of ten of the globe-spanning choreographer’s works, each created after living in a different international city as part of a roving, swirling travelogue of sorts. The run met with an ecstatic response, one appropriate for a towering talent of her stature, and yet the glory of the performances was darkened by the thought that, after Bausch’s death in 2009, her Tanztheater Wuppertal company is headed for a definite, if yet-unscheduled, demise of its own.

The nonstop composer talks his many collaborations, writing music for dance, and the genesis of his opera Two Boys, which made him the youngest composer ever commissioned by the Met.

One afternoon last December, the young choreographer Jonah Bokaer gave a tour of the Center for Performance Research, a warren of offices and studios in a LEED-certified residential building on the far end of Williamsburg. Moving from the risers in the whitebox performance space to the empty storefront, he paused to tidy up a pile of finger paints left over by an afterschool children’s arts class. “The work that I make often deals with large-scale visual and installation components,” he says of the provocative, leading-edge dances he has been crafting since 2002. “So having a space that could house that work for development was very important.”

We’ve been around awhile now, and we know a lot of our readers might not have had the opportunity to experience our earlier issues. So we wanted to give you the chance to discover one of our favorite stories from our archive every Friday. Some of them feature actors, musicians, or artists who eventually made it big, talents we are proud to have tapped early in their careers. Some have brilliant writing, and some have beautiful photography. Some have both. But all of them are so great we thought they deserved a second chance. This week we present Jonathan Shia’s Fall 2009 profile of former New York City Ballet principal and choreographer Benjamin Millepied, who returns to his former company with a new work next month.