New ballets + new collaborators at Brooklyn Ballet's Spring Season
This week when Brooklyn Ballet takes to the stage for its spring season featuring collaborations with artists and musicians. Two Norte Maar artists have collaborated with resident choreographer Julia K. Gleich to create two new works on the company.
Brooklyn Ballet’s season runs April 3-6 and April 11-13, The Actors Fund Arts Center
What started off as an experiment in process, Quilt/One Night Stand, is a collaboration between resident choreographer Julia Gleich and Brooklyn Ballet's Artistic Director, Lynn Parkerson. The ballet creates itself anew each performance through the use of a mathematical concept of vectors established by Gleich and explored by the dancers to discover new movement. A different musician/composer will perform at each performance.
Quilt features a collaboration with Brooklyn-based artist Libby Hartle, whose obsessive process incorporates utopian architecture, geometric shapes, and networks of patterns with form and color. The animation for Quilt moves forwards and backwards through the process of making a drawing that through time and repetition will eventually obliterate itself. Hartle’s work has recently been featured at Pocket Utopia Gallery, Norte Maar, and Matteawan Gallery. Quilt is Hartle’s first collaboration with Julia K. Gleich and Brooklyn Ballet.The Solitude, another vector-based work by Ms. Gleich, was created without narrative, but has emerged as a somber study of aloneness versus togetherness. Movement themes arise that involve many dancers on stage but in separate private realms, as well as dancers coming together in duets and trios. The dance has a soulful sadness, which originates from the score by Malcolm Parson, for which the dance is named. The score was expanded to accommodate the dance and has been integral to the rehearsal process and violist Josh Henderson will perform the score live.
The Solitude features a collaboration with Norte Maar artist Tamara Gonzales whose one-person exhibition was featured at Norte Maar's apartment gallery in 2012. Gonzales uses a unique process of spray painting through found lace tablecloths, doilies and curtains. Vibrant and witty, layered and textured; the artist combines large gesture with tight patterns to create compositions that at once mimic the grand heroic gestures of the postwar painters, while capturing an all-over free spirit found in the graffiti that appears daily on the streets near her Bushwick studio. Recent solo exhibitions include James Siena’s Sometimes Gallery, Shoot The Lobster, and Norte Maar. L Magazine recently profiled Gonzales as 5 Brooklyn Artists You Need to Know. This is the artist's second collaboration with choreographer Julia K. Gleich and the first with Brooklyn Ballet.Choreographed to an original score by Malcolm Parson, The Solitude was created outdoors and made possible in part by a Dance at Socrates residency through Norte Maar and Socrates Sculpture Park. An earlier version was performed in CounterPointe in Brooklyn in November 2013 and included 21-year-old dancer Clay York, a graduate from Texas Christian University. This season’s performance is dedicated to Clay, who died on Dec 22, 2013. The New York City dance community lost an enthusiastic young dancer who was just beginning his journey. The Solitude was one of the last works in which he performed. Ms. Gleich would also like to dedicate this performance to her long time friend the artist, poet, and advocate for children, Ned O’Gorman, who passed away on March 7. Ned’s spirit is alive in this dance.__________Brooklyn Ballet 2014 SeasonVectors, Marys, and Snow: an eclectic mix of dance, live music, and collaborationApril 3-6, 11-13The Actors Fund Arts Center160 Schermerhorn StreetBrooklyn, NY 11201
