Alexei Ratmansky's THE FAIRY'S KISS, Headed to Miami City Ballet, Set for Guggenheim's 'Works & Process' Series

On Sunday, January 29, 2017 at 3:00pm and 7:30pm and Monday, January 30, 2017 at 7:30pm, Works & Process at the Guggenheim presents a discussion with acclaimed choreographer Alexei Ratmansky and excerpts of his ballet The Fairy's Kiss set to premiere at Miami City Ballet this winter.

Set to a score by Igor Stravinsky, the production is inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's story The Ice-Maiden.

Ratmansky, projection designer Wendall K. Harrington, and artistic director Lourdes Lopez will participate in a discussion moderated by dance historian and Pacific Northwest Ballet Audience Education Manager, Doug Fullington.

Ratmansky's ballet The Fairy's Kiss will have its world premiere in Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center on February 10, 2017.

Tickets are $40; $35 Guggenheim members and Friends of Works & Process. $10 Student Rush Tickets available one hour prior to each performance if space allows (for students under 25 with valid ID). Priority ticket access and preferred seat selection is now available for Friends of Works & Process or Guggenheim Members Associate level and above. Contact the Box Office at (212) 423-3575, (M-F, 1-5pm) or online at worksandprocess.org. Performances take place at the Peter B. Lewis Theater, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY.

Born in St. Petersburg and trained at the Bolshoi Ballet School in Moscow, Alexei Ratmansky's performing career includes positions as principal dancer with Ukrainian National Ballet, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet. He has choreographed ballets for the Mariinsky Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, the Royal Swedish Ballet, Dutch National Ballet New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, The Australian Ballet, Kiev Ballet, and the State Ballet of Georgia, as well as for Nina Ananiashvili, Diana Vishneva, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. His 1998 work, Dreams of Japan, earned a prestigious Golden Mask Award by The Theatre Union of Russia. In 2005, he was awarded the Benois de la Danse prize for his choreography of Anna Karenina for the Royal Danish Ballet. He was made Knight of Dannebrog by Queen Margrethe II of Denmark in 2001. Ratmansky was named artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet in January 2004. For the Bolshoi Ballet, he choreographed full-length productions of The Bright Stream (2003) and The Bolt (2005) and re-staged Le Corsaire (2007) and the Soviet-era Flames of Paris (2008). Under Ratmansky's direction, the Bolshoi Ballet was named "Best Foreign Company" in 2005 and 2007 by The Critics' Circle in London, and he received a Critics' Circle National Dance Award for The Bright Stream in 2006. In 2007, he won a Golden Mask Award for Best Choreographer for his production of Jeu de Cartes for the Bolshoi Ballet. In 2009, Ratmansky choreographed new dances for the Metropolitan Opera's production of Aida. Ratmansky joined American Ballet Theatre as Artist in Residence in January 2009. For American Ballet Theatre, Ratmansky has choreographed On the Dnieper (2009), Seven Sonatas (2009), Waltz Masquerade - a ballet honoring Nina Ananiashvili's final season - (2009), The Nutcracker (2010), The Bright Stream (2011), Dumbarton (2011), Firebird (2012), Symphony #9 (2012), Chamber Symphony (2013) and Piano Concerto #1 (2013). Ratmansky was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow for 2013.

Wendall K. Harrington is an award-winning designer of sets and projections for performance with extensive credits across theatre, ballet, opera, concerts, and more. Named the "godmother of modern projection design" (Live Design Magazine) her Ballet design credits include The Ballad of You and Me (Lynn Taylor Corbett), Othello (Lar Lubovich), Ballet Mecanique (Doug Varone & Dancers), The Nutcracker (Helgi Tomasson), Deconstructing English (Doug Varone & Dancers), Anna Karenina (Alexi Ratmansky), The Firebird (Alexei Ratmansky), Cinderella (Alexei Ratmansky), Don Quixote (Yuri Possokhov), OPERA! (Alexei Ratmansky), and Pictures at an Exhibition (Alexei Ratmansky). She has over thirty Broadway credits including The Music Man, The Glass Menagerie, The Who's Tommy, Ragtime, Grey Gardens, Driving Miss Daisy, and Annie, and countless Off-Broadway credits beyond that. She won the Drama Desk, American Theater Wing Award, and the Outer Circle Critics Award for The Who's Tommy (1993), the1995 Obie for Sustained Excellence in Projections, the 2000 Michael Merrit Award for Design and Collaboration, the 2015 USITT Distinguished Achievement in Education, and she was The Players Club "Theatre Person of the Year" 2015. www.wendallharrington.com.

Artistic Director of Miami City Ballet and former Principal Dancer of New York City Ballet, Lourdes Lopez is a world-renowned force in the ballet world. Born in Havana, Cuba and raised in Miami by her parents, she received a full scholarship to the School of American Ballet, at age eleven and at sixteen, joined the corps de ballet of New York City Ballet. She was promoted to Soloist in 1981, Principal Dancer in 1984, and retired in 1997. At New York City Ballet, she danced for ballet legends George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, performing countless featured roles including Violin Concerto, Firebird, Serenade, Liebeslieder Walzer, Divertimento No. 15, and Agon. Upon retirement in 1997, Lopez joined WNBC-TV in New York as a Cultural Arts reporter, writing and producing feature segments on the arts, artists and arts education. She was also a full-time senior faculty member and Director of Student Placement, Student Evaluation and Curriculum Planning at New York's Ballet Academy East. She served on the dance faculty of Barnard College and guest taught at numerous dance institutions and festivals in the United States. In 2002, Lopez became the Executive Director of The George Balanchine Foundation, which works to educate the public about dance and to further the art of ballet, with a special emphasis on the work and achievements of George Balanchine. In 2007, Lopez co-founded Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company with Christopher Wheeldon serving as its Executive Director. In September 2012, Lopez was named the Artistic Director of Miami City Ballet, bringing with her a vast career in dance, television, teaching and arts management. In 2014, Lopez was elected to serve on the Ford Foundation's Board of Trustees, marking the first time an artist was elected to serve on its board. She is a member of the The Kennedy Center Honors artist committee. In 2011, she received the prestigious Jerome Robbins Award for her years in dance. She has also served as a dance panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, and has received numerous Hispanic Heritage awards.

As a dance historian, Doug Fullington is an fluent reader of Stepanov notation, a classical ballet notation system developed in Russia and used in the Imperial Theatres, St. Petersburg, between about 1895 and 1915. The Stepanov notations are now housed at the Harvard Theatre Collection as part of the Sergeev Collection. Mr. Fullington, with his colleague Manard Stewart, has reconstructed dances from Petipa's The Daughter of Pharaoh (1862/c.1905) for the Bolshoi Ballet's revival, re-staged by Pierre Lacotte (2000). He has also worked with Donald Byrd/The Group to re-stage dances from Petipa's Sleeping Beauty and La Bayadère and has worked privately with dancers to re-stage excerpts from ballets choreographed by Marius Petipa from Stepanov notation. Mr. Fullington's articles on ballet and the Stepanov notations have been published in Ballet Review (New York), Dancing Times (London), Ballet Alert! and Dance View (both Washington, DC). Mr. Fullington also edits ballet music of the Imperial era based on manuscript sources in the Sergeev Collection and elsewhere. Mr. Fullington has recently been appointed by The George Balanchine Foundation as a principal researcher for the Foundation's "Popular Balanchine" project, in which the famous choreographer's Broadway and film works will be explored and possibly revived.

For over 31 years and in over 400 productions, New Yorkers have been able to see, hear, and meet the most acclaimed artists in the world, in an intimate setting unlike any other. Works & Process, the performing arts series at the Guggenheim, has championed new works and offered audiences unprecedented access to generations of leading creators and performers. Each performance takes place in the Guggenheim's intimate Frank Lloyd Wright-designed 285-seat Peter B. Lewis Theater. Described bythe New York Times as "an exceptional opportunity to understand something of the creative process," Works & Process is produced by founder Mary Sharp Cronson. Visit worksandprocess.org.