visionary dances
Laura Fernandez Gromova, Alessandro Cavallo (Heatscape)
Victor Caixeta (Yugen)
about today’s performance
“They have stretched classical ballet and pushed it in new directions. Twyla Tharp was one of the firsts to open this door with her iconic work In the Upper Room. For the first time, she brought together two different worlds: modern and classical. It is a piece that has left its mark on the history of ballet. Justin Peck and Wayne McGregor have found their style in very different ways. They have created their own voices and expanded into different areas. Justin Peck does Broadway, films, he has a very specific American language. Heatscape is one of his most classical pieces. Wayne McGregor has taken classical ballet to the extreme. He has broken the rules. Yugen shows a different side of him, it is very lyrical, moving and fragile. I love this side of Wayne McGregor because he can explore the real depth of an emotion in an abstract way.” By programming Visionary Dances, Ballet Director Alessandra Ferri not only shows how classical ballet can be anchored in the contemporary but also how alive the art form is. This evening of ballet brings together three choreographers who have each found their own approach to the vocabulary of academic dance and explore the art of ballet and its possibilities for movement in an individual manner. While Twyla Tharp’s pioneering In the Upper Room celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2026, the choreographies of Justin Peck and Wayne McGregor are younger works that open up dance and visual worlds that are no less varied. As a result, Visionary Dances not only presents three different readings of the language of ballet, but also exciting, powerful yet poetic collaborations between choreographers, designers and both visual and street artists.
ABOUT TODAY’S PERFORMANCE
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Chiara Uderzo, Duccio Tariello (In the Upper Room)
architecture of dance
JUSTIN PECK IN CONVERSATION WITH NASTASJA FISCHER
In a promotional video for the Miami City Ballet premiere of Heatscape, we see you walking around Miami with headphones on and suddenly dancers appear and start moving as if they were dancing images inspired by the environment you are in. What was the initial inspiration for your piece? Heatscape was made at a point where I was coming into my own as a choreographer and I was very much curious about exploring the classical ballet form and how to tweak it, subvert it and push it a little further. It was a commission by the Miami City Ballet, one of my first major commissions outside of New York City Ballet. I had built a very close relationship with those dancers and the company, and I wanted to make something that felt distinct for them – not just for who they are as artists, but also for where they existed in terms of place. I made this ballet that created a world inspired slightly by the art scene happening in the Wynwood Art District of Miami. What was so unique about that neighborhood is that it became this explosion of street art, you could walk around and everywhere were these huge murals that had just been made within the last couple of years. It was a new kind of explosion of artwork, and I had never seen any place like that. It was so inspiring, it brought art to JP
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the people, to the public. I spent a lot of time getting to know those artists, who can be seen there, and ultimately wanted to commission one of them to create an emblem backdrop for this ballet. I decided to shoot for the stars and reach out to Shepard Fairey, who is the “godfather” of street art in a lot of ways. To my surprise and delight, he said yes and committed to creating a stage design for my choreography. A lot of the architecture of the ballet is inspired by certain techniques of drawing, painting and patterning. The movement structure became a reflection of what Shepard Fairey painted for the backdrop. There is a lot of interplay between the architecture of the dance and the architecture of his work. How did you and Shepard Fairey work together on the piece as the art involved in the stage design also inspired the dance? JP
It was very much a collaboration. We passed a lot of ideas back and forth. Shepard started by sharing four or five options for what the drop could be. Then I edited what he shared with me or gave him feedback to reach the final composition. That ended up being an in-depth process. He likes to use a lot of repetition with certain symbols in his work. A lot of the building blocks of the backdrop are part of his identity as an artist. For example, there is a bird symbol and that was something Shepard had done in preexisting work, but I really encouraged him to include it because the bird is such a symbol of ballet. In ballet’s history you have all these stories of the Firebird and Swan Lake, the bird is a constant character that exists in ballet. There’s something about the quality of a bird that is ephemeral and fleeting and that quality is so much what it’s like to experience ballet. That was one specific that I wanted to include. Then of course I loved how we evolved the design so that it almost felt like the bottom quarter of the backdrop is its own art mural wall. It reflected what it feels to be in Wynwood. What is hidden behind the title Heatscape apart from the reference to the hot streets of Miami? JP
The title was partly inspired by a dance that Merce Cunningham made, called Summerspace. When Merce created that, he described it as a dance that could go on beyond the confines of the stage, space and the wings. I loved that way of thinking about dance. I tried to apply that quality to this choreography in terms of its energy, its expanse. It feels almost like it’s busting at the seams. You’ve created on Bohuslav Martinů’s Piano Concerto No 1. What inspired you to choreograph on this composition? JP
I’ve always loved the music of Martinů. He is an intriguing character, and I was really drawn to this Piano Concerto, which he wrote when he was very young. It had so much energy, felt very danceable, and it also defied the period it 15
ARCHITECTURE OF DANCE
Zsolt Török, Milda Luckuté
Cassandra Trenary, Victor Caixeta, Davide Dato & Ensemble
a hybrid of dance styles IRIS FREY
She is one of the most influential choreographers of the second half of the 20th century and has long been an icon in the world of dance. To this day the tirelessly creative Twyla Tharp has choreographed more than 160 works – as well as ballets, TV specials, Hollywood films, Broadway shows and ice dance routines – and has received numerous awards, including a Tony, two Emmys and the “Golden Lion” at the 2025 Biennale Danza di Venezia for her life’s work. From her choreographic beginnings in the radical avantgarde in the mid-1960s to her artistic peak, applying forms of expression from popular culture in the 70s and 80s in the especially vibrant New York art scene of the time, her work has been highly unconventional and transcended the boundaries of various dance traditions. She chopped up traditional movement material from classical ballet and modern dance and reassembled it afresh – supplemented by elements from the everyday, social dances and Broadway influences together with some subtle comedy and a certain coolness. Her choice of music also spans a similarly wide arc that stretches from pop hits, songs by Frank Sinatra and the Beach Boys to compositions by Bach and Haydn and on to the minimal music of Philip Glass. The spaces she has created for were similarly unconventional and diverse. For example, she showed her early pieces in industrial spaces, museums and outdoor public spaces. When she began creating for major ballet companies, she also chose conventional performance venues such as the New York State Theater and City Center. Her pieces are abstract but always atmospheric, focussing on the movement which – seemingly chaotic – suddenly falls into a precise structure. “Chaos is only momentary. Everything fits”, is how Tharp described this in The New Yorker. Numerous influences led to her now incomparable style. At first, she trained with the greats of modern dance such as Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor –
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in whose company she also danced for two years – whose influences included physical intensity, especially of the torso, and movement in space. In 1965, she founded her own company, Twyla Tharp Dance, and created her very first piece, which only lasted around four minutes and was unusual and ambiguous: Tank Dive, performed in 1965 in New York, in Room 1604 at the Hunter College Art & Art History. Alongside four non-dancers, Tharp herself appeared – at first in pumps, then in outsized wooden shoes that she used as a springboard for her exaggerated diver’s poses. The title reflected Tharp’s belief that “becoming a successful choreographer is equivalent to the chances of successfully diving into a thimbleful of water from a great height”. The remarkable success of her works that soon followed exceeded all her expectations. Another important context for Tharp’s early works in the 1960s was the Judson Dance Theater movement, named after the Judson Memorial Church in New York, a venue to which choreographers including Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs belonged, who made a significant contribution to the definition of postmodern dance and were characterised by their openness to experimental forms and using everyday movements as material for dance. As part of the avantgarde scene Tharp created early minimalist works such as Re-Moves and Twelve Foot Change, which were both performed at the church in 1966. She also took great inspiration from the relaxed body posture and rhythmic, almost »grooving« movements of jazz dance and Broadway traditions, similar to those that Jerome Robbins also adopted in his choreographies. Later Tharp would increasingly turn towards classical ballet and worked with major companies including American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet. Here the influence of the neoclassical, highly musical and clearly structured style of George Balanchine was especially marked. Tharp achieved her breakthrough in 1973 with Deuce Coupe, her first big commission and the first crossover ballet, in which she merged the classical Joffrey Ballet with her own modern ensemble to songs by the Beach Boys and humorously showed off the strengths of each group. Another milestone was reached in 1976 with Push Comes to Shove for American Ballet Theatre and its star Mikhail Baryshnikov, who led his way through the piece with great wit. Tharp had already created works in which she combined classical and popular styles of music – here it was a ragtime with Haydn’s Symphony No. 82 – but this was the first piece of this kind to be produced by a major ballet company.
In the Upper Room Another now iconic work by Twyla Tharp, In the Upper Room, had its world premiere on 28 August 1986 in the Murray Theatre at the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, Illinois – one of North America’s oldest open-air music festivals. It was the first piece that her company Twyla Tharp Dance performed with a new line-up after a strenuous year on tour followed by a one-year break during which they appeared in the Broadway production of Singin’ in the Rain. It represented a fresh start with its unique blend of choreography, music, costumes and lighting together with classical ballet and modern dance – 37
A HYBRID OF DANCE STYLES