This Thursday--May 29 at 8 p.m. to be exact--the Nouveau Classical Project, a contemporary production hub that puts, quote, "a new face on classical music" (at least according to NPR Music's Deceptive Cadence), presents the world premiere of a new modern ballet entitled Potential Energies at the newly opened Fishman space at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Fort Greene.
The hour-long piece, choreographed by Barbie Diewald to the sounds of one Trevor Gureckis, will be featured in a one-off performance by the Nouveau Classical Project and the TrioDance Collective.
In advance of the movement, Classicalite spoke with Gureckis--the composer behind it all. And as you can read below, he had a lot to say about collaboration, costumes and the role of any composer at large.
Classicalite: Let's talk about the initial creative stages--the origin story of Potential Energies. How did you and Nouveau Classical Project artistic director Sugar Vendil meet?
Trevor Gureckis: We started working together on a project called Lost Generation that was commissioned by the JFund and premiered at Symphony Space. It was a concert piece of about 15 minutes, a collaboration with designer Heidi Lee.
We had talked about doing something bigger, but it wasn't "sit down meeting" serious until 2012. At that, point she had come up with the idea of having dancers share the stage with her musicians. We didn't know what we were going to say, but we had the physical premise.
Clite: Of Potential Energies, Vendil has talked about wanting to mimic the natural choreography of musicians while they play. And the trailer for the production (watch it HERE via Clite A.V.) certainly seems to mimic that. How did choreographer Barbie Diewald, co-artistic director of TrioDance Collective, contribute to this notion?
TG: Barbie and her dancers watched a lot of videos of musicians playing and explored ways to incorporate some of the movements into her choreography. At the same time, since the musicians were on stage, Barbie needed to incorporate some of the dancer's choreography into what the musicians were doing while playing, to meld the two together--one of the major points of the ballet.
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