New York City Ballet Announces 2023 Winter Season Featuring a World Premiere by Justin Peck & More

New York City Ballet's 2023 Winter Season will open on Tuesday, January 17 with an all-Balanchine program consisting of Donizetti Variations, Haieff Divertimento, Valse-Fantaisie, and Stravinsky Violin Concerto, four of eight works by NYCB Co-Founder George Balanchine that will be performed during the Winter Season.

The six-week season - January 17 through February 26 - will feature performances of 17 ballets performed by New York City Ballet's 100 dancers and apprentices and the 62-piece New York City Ballet Orchestra; under the artistic leadership of Artistic Director Jonathan Stafford, Associate Artistic Director Wendy Whelan, Resident Choreographer and Artistic Advisor Justin Peck, and Music Director Andrew Litton.

Highlighting the season will be the January 26 World Premiere of Copland Dance Episodes, a new ballet by Justin Peck to the music of Aaron Copland, the dean of American composers. An abstract, non-narrative, full-evening piece, performed without intermission, Copland Dance Episodes will feature a cast of 30 dancers and the New York City Ballet Orchestra performing four of Copland's most acclaimed musical scores: Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid, Fanfare for the Common Man, and Rodeo.

The visual design for the ballet will be by the acclaimed American artist Jeffrey Gibson. A 2019 MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellow, Gibson was born in Colorado of Choctaw and Cherokee descent, and is known for incorporating elements of Native American art and craft into his practice. The lighting design will be by frequent Peck collaborator Brandon Stirling Baker, who will be collaborating with Peck on their 30th production with this work. The costume design will be by former NYCB dancer Ellen Warren (Ostrom), who will be designing costumes for NYCB for the first time.

Copland Dance Episodes will be the first original full-evening work created for NYCB since Susan Stroman's Double Feature in 2004, and only the second full-evening, abstract work to enter the Company's repertory since George Balanchine's Jewels was created in 1967.

In addition to the premiere on January 26, Copland Dance Episodes will also be performed on Saturday, January 28 at 8pm; Sunday, January 29 at 3pm; Friday, February 3 at 8pm; Saturday, February 4 at 8pm; and Tuesday, February 7 at 7:30pm

The second world premiere of the 2023 Winter Season, which will take place on Wednesday, February 1, will be a new work by dance artist and choreographer Keerati Jinakunwiphat, who is currently a dancer with A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, which she joined in 2016. This will be Jinakunwiphat's first work choreographed for NYCB.

In 2021 Jinakunwiphat participated in the Fall Working Session of the New York Choreographic Institute, an affiliate of NYCB, where she began to develop this work for nine dancers, which is set to two pieces of music by the Chinese-born, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun: an excerpt from Run in a Graveyard, and Air Glow, which received a Grammy nomination for Best Classical Contemporary Composition in 2019. The premiere will also mark the first time that choreography and music by female Asian artists have entered the NYCB repertory.

New York-based designer Karen Young, who has worked with many choreographers including Kyle Abraham, Pontus Lidberg, Benjamin Millepied, and Troy Schumacher, will design the costumes, and the lighting design will be by Brooklyn-based designer Dan Scully.

In addition to the premiere on February 1, the new Jinakunwiphat ballet, which will be included on a program with Alexei Ratmansky's Voices and Peck's Everywhere We Go, will also be performed on Wednesday, February 8 at 7:30pm; Thursday, February 9 at 7:30pm; and Saturday, February 11 at 2pm and 8pm.

The Winter Season will also include four additional works by George Balanchine: Allegro Brillante, Episodes, Firebird, and Walpurgisnacht Ballet; two works by NYCB co-founding choreographer Jerome Robbins: Fancy Free and Rondo, which was premiered and was last performed in 1980; and Christopher Wheeldon's Liturgy.

The Winter Season will close with a two-week run of the Company's production of The Sleeping Beauty from Wednesday, February 15 through Sunday, February 26. The full-length staging, one of NYCB's most lavish and elaborate productions, was created by Peter Martins in 1991 and is set to Tschaikovsky's beloved score. With more than 100 dancers in each performance, including students from the School of American Ballet, the production features choreography after Marius Petipa and George Balanchine, costumes by Patricia Zipprodt, sets by David Mitchell, and lighting by Mark Stanley.

All performances will take place at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, which is located at West 63rd Street and Columbus Avenue. Tickets start at just $38 and are available at nycballet.com, by calling 212-496-0600, or at the David H. Koch Theater box office.

CHOREOGRAPHERS FOR 2023 WINTER SEASON WORLD PREMIERES

Justin Peck

Justin Peck is the Resident Choreographer and Artistic Advisor of New York City Ballet. He has created more than 45 works for NYCB and other dance companies around the world, including the Paris Opéra Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Miami City Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Houston Ballet, L.A. Dance Project, and The Juilliard School. His works have also been performed by Dutch National Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, Acosta Danza, and Hong Kong Ballet, among other companies. A native of San Diego, California, Peck studied at California Ballet before enrolling at the School of American Ballet in 2003. He joined NYCB as a dancer in 2007, was promoted to Soloist in 2013. He concluded his career as a dancer with NYCB during the 2019 Spring Season. Peck first choreographed as a student at SAB in 2005. He participated in a working session at the New York Choreographic Institute, an affiliate of NYCB, in the fall of 2009, and received NYCI's first year-long choreographic residency in 2011.

Peck was named NYCB's Resident Choreographer, the second in the Company's history, in July 2014, and was also appointed Artistic Advisor in February 2019. He was the subject of the 2014 documentary film Ballet 422, which followed him for two months as he created NYCB's 422nd original ballet, Paz de la Jolla. In 2015, his ballet Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes won the Bessie Award for Outstanding Production and he is also the recipient of the 2018 Ted Arison Young Artist Award. Peck won a 2018 Tony Award for his choreography for the Broadway revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel, and he is the choreographer of Steven Spielberg's award-winning film adaptation of West Side Story.

KEERATI JINAKUNWIPHAT

Keerati Jinakunwiphat is a dance artist and choreographer who has been commissioned by Whim W'Him Seattle Contemporary Dance, the Evanston Dance Ensemble, the Martha Graham School, SUNY Purchase College Conservatory of Dance, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, Houston Contemporary Dance Company, New England Ballet Theatre, Battery Dance Festival, New Victory Dance, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Princeton University, PARA.MAR Dance Theatre, and Bang On A Can, and was selected to participate in the 2021 Fall Working Session of the New York Choreographic Institute. Originally from Chicago, Illinois, she received her BFA from the Conservatory of Dance at SUNY Purchase and was a recipient of the Adopt-A-Dancer Scholarship. She also studied at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, and Springboard Danse Montreal. Jinakunwiphat joined A.I.M as a dancer in 2016, and has performed works by artists such as Abraham, Nicole von Arx, Trisha Brown, Jasmine Ellis, Hannah Garner, Shannon Gillen, Andrea Miller, Kevin Wynn, and Doug Varone. Additionally, she has assisted Abraham in new commissioned work for New York City Ballet and Paul Taylor Dance Company. Jinakunwiphat was featured on the cover of Dance Magazine as part of the magazine's "25 to Watch" for 2021.