Slouching Toward Bethlehem

Weekly rehearsals to be scheduled with mutual availability including full-cast rehearsals on friday evenings and weekends. The culmination will be a film shoot at the end of summer with the possiblity of live-performance opportunities to follow.

About "Slouching Toward Bethlehem":
"Fragmentation is a theme I’ve been addressing in my work since 2010. My ballet Fracture, which premiered in 2015, used ideas from theoretical physics as visual metaphors for the combustible energies that were already threatening the social cohesion of American society. While this earlier work offered a formal and abstract description of a fraying order, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, the project I’m currently developing, looks much more specifically at social and cultural unrest, suggesting that in the chaos unleashed by fracture, ever-present vices rise to the surface and, furthermore, that we tend to project our needs — often simplistic and base — onto an anointed figure.

Slouching will be a three-movement piece for six dancers (three men and three women) to the music of the contemporary composer Erik Friedlander. The deconstruction and unraveling of a neoclassical vocabulary in the first movement will serve as a metaphor for the breakdown of cohesion. In the second movement, a series of solos will analyze the frayed bonds and corrupting impulses of the day. Ultimately, a messianic figure emerges upon whom the populace projects their hopes and their vices. By the conclusion of the work, this anointed creature will have left a path of wreckage in her wake before slouching on toward dark new conquests. Certainly not an uplifting work, this proposed ballet holds a mirror up to the historical moment."