Over the last century, dance has diversified its stylistic vocabulary and global reach. The art form’s traditions and descendants—ballet, modern, street, folk, and circus—are flourishing, and innovations in movement have seeped into an impressive array of genres.
Breakthroughs in technology have catalyzed a revolution in how artists communicate, and the ways in which the audience absorbs their message. From formal and kinetic to immersive performance art—untethered by the proscenium if desired—anything can now go… anywhere.
Dance Reflections, a festival inaugurated in London in 2022 and supported by Van Cleef & Arpels, lands this fall in New York—one of the dance world’s most fertile laboratories. The festival’s program, which runs from Oct. 19 to Dec. 14, will take over seven prime performance venues across the city, hosting a group of artistic visionaries and celebrating its theater network.
The lineup comprises a cross section of international choreographers—from revered icons to young artists—who, in the words of Van Cleef & Arpels Director of Dance and Culture Program, Serge Laurent, “have in common the ability to invent languages, forms.” Juxtaposing new works with seminal ones, such as those by legends like Lucinda Childs, is crucial to Laurent: “History and context contribute to the evolution of choreographic art. It is important to underline this.”
The citywide celebration is a harbinger of the dance community’s enduring vitality and promising future, and a testament to the form’s possibilities. To mark the start of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival, six participating artists reflect on their work and inspirations.
Childs broke through as a member of the revolutionary Judson Church movement in 1960s New York, creating provocative work with found objects and everyday gestures. Dance, 1979, Childs’s first collaboration with Philip Glass, is accompanied by a Sol LeWitt film, and will be performed by Lyon Opera Ballet at New York City Center as part of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels. Childs’s work is also represented by Tempo Vicino, performed by (LA)HORDE and the Ballet National de Marseille at New York University’s Skirball Center, and by a work in Dancing with Glass: The Piano Etudes, alongside one of the composer’s most renowned interpreters, Maki Namekawa, at the Joyce Theater.
Describe yourself in one sentence.
Choreographer performer.
What sounds do you hear every day that put you in a good mood?
The birds outside in the morning.
Describe an aspect of your work that is challenging you right now.
Preparation.
Name an unexpected work of art that has influenced your practice.
Autumn Rhythm by Jackson Pollock [1950].
What’s a place that inspires you to make work?
A studio with dancers or actors or singers.
Gisèle Vienne’s L’Étang (The Pond) is an adaptation of a Robert Walser story about a boy who fakes suicide in order to test his mother’s love for him. It stars acclaimed French actor Adèle Haenel and longtime member of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Julie Shanahan. The Franco-Austrian director and choreographer weaves her distinct areas of study—dance, drama, visual art, philosophy, and puppetry—in her work, which has been presented in performance venues and festivals throughout the world, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Ruhrtriennale, along with art institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and Centre Pompidou.
Describe yourself in one sentence.
The music of Caterina Barbieri.
What sounds do you hear every day that put you in a good mood?
Trains.
Describe an aspect of your work that is challenging you right now.
One of my deepest challenges since 23 years, and still today, and probably all my life, is to understand always better perceptive frames and to move on creating perceptive shifts.
Name an unexpected work of art that has influenced your practice.
Self-Defense, a Philosophy of Violence by Elsa Dorlin.
What’s a place that inspires you to make work?
I hope to share with the audience, what I hope myself in experiencing art, is to go through a meaningful and life-changing experience.
In takemehome, Dimitri Chamblas’s collaboration with art-rock star Kim Gordon at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, a glowing zeppelin hovers over the space. Nontraditional spaces and unexpected collaborations are hallmarks of the choreographer’s wide-ranging practice: In addition to performing in live works and films, he has set pieces in sites as varied as the California State Prison in Lancaster, the Geffen Contemporary at MoCA, and the streets of Los Angeles. For Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, he blends the personal feeling of his past collaborations with Gordon and the spectacle of his grander pieces.
Describe yourself in one sentence.
I am a dancing human who moves from one space to another.
What sounds do you hear every day that put you in a good mood?
Coyotes in the evening, hummingbirds in the morning.
Describe an aspect of your work that is challenging you right now.
Resisting the speed of the globe, not dying from the noise of the world, continuing to live with a shine in my eyes. Creating contexts so that dance continues to come visit us.
What’s a place that inspires you to make work?
Hollywood Hills and its trail, a space that activates bodies and imaginations. A daily meditation overlooking the temple of creative industries.
Name an unexpected work of art that has influenced your practice.
Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons by Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Born in Kigali, Rwanda, in 1982, Munyaneza and her family relocated to London after the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi minority. She began her career as a musician, performing on the soundtrack to Hotel Rwanda in 2004, before expanding into movement. Haunted by the memories of her childhood, Munyaneza harnesses a potent blend of dance, poetry, and music to explore her own history. In Mailles, at New York Live Arts, she invites Ife Day, Yinka Esi Graves, Asmaa Jama, and Nido Uwera to the stage. The artists will impart their narratives through spoken word, song, and dance.
Describe yourself in one sentence.
In this life, I journey across borders, between ochre and nacre. I trace lines of the multitudes that I am, skin and mouth, always in motion, in resonance.
What sounds do you hear every day that put you in a good mood?
My children’s laughter, Nina Simone’s Sinnerman, a voice note from a loved one, Rujindiri and his inanga.
Describe an aspect of your work that is challenging you right now.
How to keep creating beauty even in the midst of hardship. How to keep creating a hybrid work that still pays homage to the departed ones, without fading detected. How to iterate joy.
Name an unexpected work of art that has influenced your practice.
Cedric Mizero, Strong Women, 2017.
What’s a place that inspires you to make work?
My aunt’s garden in Kigali. I have loved that garden for a lifetime. It’s abundance. It’s joy full of blue, I feel unrushed. There. Able to deposit silt under the surface.
In Bombyx Mori, three dancers manipulate black silk cloaks to create mesmerizing sculptural shapes and trompe l’œil tableaux. The Polish-born Ola Maciejewska drew inspiration for the piece from a decade spent studying the modern dance trailblazer Loïe Fuller’s 1890s “serpentine” dance. Fuller experimented with the body’s expressive potential when combined with the versatility of fabric, as well as the theatrical elements of lighting and sound. Maciejewska braids these archival strands together with her own choreography, creating a unique genre at once historically reverent and thoroughly modern. Maciej Sado, Leah Marojevic, and Jean Lesca will perform the piece at the French Institute as part of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels.
Describe yourself in one sentence.
Artist. Dancer. Choreographer.
What sounds do you hear every day that put you in a good mood?
Silence…
Describe an aspect of your work that is challenging you right now.
Shades of black fabric…
Name an unexpected work of art that has influenced your practice.
Horizons, Forests…
What’s a place that inspires you to make work?
The empty rooms of [Vilhelm] Hammershøi.
Dancers defy gravity in Ouramdane’s Corps Extrêmes—climbing, dangling, nearly flying—all in an attempt to hit the sweet fulcrum point between rising and falling. The work, which will be performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music during the festival, features a huge climbing wall upstage and a high-wire above. Eight acrobats, a climber, and a tightrope walker share personal stories alongside a sound score by Jean-Baptiste Julien. The French-Algerian choreographer creates works that trace narratives of police brutality, genocide, war crimes, and more. Ouramdane draws on heightened sensations to shape his varied oeuvre—the body or psyche under duress, at its most extreme.
Describe yourself in one sentence.
I am one of those people who think that art can transform people’s lives. I am convinced that art is a way to take out the veil of routine and to discover sensitive things in everything that surrounds us.
What sounds do you hear every day that put you in a good mood?
The sound of the audience in the theater just before the play begins. My children’s voices on the [phone] when I am on tour. The birds on Trocadero Square early in the morning before the noise of Paris covers them.
Describe an aspect of your work that is challenging you right now.
I am a choreographer and director of Chaillot National Dance Theater. This theater was directed by artists who have revolutionized French theater. Dealing with this heritage and these ghosts is a daily challenge.
Name an unexpected work of art that has influenced your practice.
Sunless by director Chris Marker is probably the film that made me discover how a work can bring together the intimate, the political, and the spiritual.
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