AMERICAN SIGNATURES

Jerome Robbins is one of the most important ballet creators of the 20th century and has had a decisive influence on American dance with his unmistakable style. Interplay, his second choreographic work, which premiered in New York in 1945, opens the four-part American Signatures, which combines dance icons with contemporary choreographic voices.

To Morton Gould's jazz-inspired score, the title of the piece, Interplay, becomes the programme: as if on a playground, the dancers meet in Robbins' choreography, which enriches the classical ballet vocabulary with jazz elements and with which the theatre maker and dance artist created one of the works that decisively shaped his aesthetic.

Two pas de deux form the centrepiece of the ballet evening: Pam Tanowitz's Dispatch Duet, which the New York-based choreographer premiered with the Royal Ballet London, manipulates the formal classical step material in an unfamiliar and amusing way to a composition by the American Ted Hearne, who - parallel to Tanowitz's choreographic language - twists musical ideas and conventions and filters them through his individual musical language. Lar Lubovitch's Each In Their Own Time is a more recent work by the choreographer, who has been one of America's most versatile and popular choreographers for decades. Created for two soloists of the New York City Ballet under the impact of the Covid pandemic, the duet creates an intimate, inward-looking world - choreographed with emotional depth and architectural clarity to piano works by Johannes Brahms played on stage by a pianist.

Let Me Mingle Tears With Thee is Jessica Lang's visual-choreographic exploration of Giovanni Battista's Pergolesi's famous setting of Stabat mater. The resident choreographer of the Pacific Northwest Ballet develops a touching language of movement, sometimes flowing and soft, sometimes energetic and impulsive, and brings the sacred music to life with the dancers.