New York City Ballet to Present David Michalek's SLOWDANCING/NYCB

As New York City Ballet launches its 75th Anniversary Season in September, the Company will present SlowDancing/NYCB, a large-scale video installation by artist David Michalek, that will be displayed each night from September 18 through October 1 on the façade of the Company’s home, the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center.

Co-directed by Wendy Whelan, NYCB’s Associate Artistic Director, the installation will feature more than 50 hyper slow-moving images of 20 of NYCB’s current dancers performing iconic moments from the Company’s unparalleled repertory. More than 30 ballets will be included, from George Balanchine’s Apollo and Prodigal Son, created in 1928 and 1929 respectively, to one of the Company’s most recent creations, Justin Peck’s Copland Dance Episodes, which premiered in January 2023.

The exhibition has been conceived by Michalek and Whelan to commemorate NYCB’s 75th Anniversary Season, which will open at the Koch Theater on Tuesday, September 19, and continue for more than 25 weeks of performances that will take place from September 2023 through the summer of 2024. NYCB was founded in 1948 by the legendary choreographer George Balanchine and arts patron Lincoln Kirstein.

Each film from SlowDancing/NYCB, which captures a movement sequence of approximately five seconds in length recorded at 1000 high-definition frames per second, is played back over a span of 10 minutes in length. “In what might be thought of as durational dance photography, these glacially-paced short films operate in a realm between action and image, animation and immobility, theater and painting,” said Michalek.

The 50-plus films that comprise SlowDancing/NYCB will be displayed in a continuous loop on a triptych of screens, each measuring 40 feet high and 28 feet wide and mounted on the façade of the David H. Koch Theater, which is located on Lincoln Center’s Josie Robertson Plaza at West 63rd Street and Columbus Avenue. The installation, which will be on display each night from 7pm to 11:30pm, is free and open to the public.

“For this exhibition I wanted to take a deep dive into the repertory of New York City Ballet, one of the most important and creative mainstays of New York City’s cultural fabric, as it begins in 75th anniversary season,” said Michalek. “Working closely with Wendy, who has a profound knowledge of NYCB and its repertory, we were able to choose a selection of iconic choreographic moments that span the entire breadth of the Company’s history, with a particular emphasis on works by NYCB co-founder George Balanchine,” said Michalek.

“As we begin our 75th Anniversary Season I am thrilled that in addition to the works that our amazing dancers will perform on stage each night, audiences outside of the theater will also be able to enjoy many of these same artists and our extraordinary repertory in this incredibly unique medium,” said Whelan.

Michalek’s first iteration of SlowDancing was presented in the same location in July 2007 by the Lincoln Center Festival, and featured moving images of more than 40 acclaimed artists from around the world performing a broad range of dance styles. The New York Times called it “an unforgettable dance meets-technology evening...a revelation of energy, phrasing, stillness and style.”

In 2008 David Michalek and his studio won a Bessie Installation/New Media Award for the SlowDancing installation, which later traveled to museums, galleries, and public spaces in more than 40 international locations, including Cambridge, Massachusetts (Harvard University); Los Angeles, California (Los Angeles Music Center); London, England (Trafalgar Square); Venice, Italy (Venice Biennale); and Berlin, Germany (Gendarmenmarkt).

Since its premiere in 2007, Michalek has expanded SlowDancing to include a variety of iterations, each with a different focus. These include:

SlowDancing/Figure Studies (2012), which was commissioned by the Summerhall Arts Venue at the Edinburgh Festival, the Pomona College Museum of Art, and the Cambridge-based Art/Science lab, Le Laboratoire. SlowDancing/Figure Studies was designed with the aim of recording the kinds of daily movement that all humans engage in, such as standing, pushing, pulling, and lifting.

SlowDancing/TrioA (2017) was made in collaboration with Yvonne Rainer and provided a deep and probing look into the movements that comprise Rainer’s seminal dance work, Trio A, as performed by 50 different dancers. The piece was commissioned by Danspace Project to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Trio A.

SlowDancing/Groove (2022) was commissioned by the International Center of Photography and featured portraits of men, women, and children captured in the state of joy and abandon that accompanies expressive, personal dancing. The cast for the piece featured 100 subjects, including some well-known entertainers and business leaders, drawn from the greater New York City area.

David Michalek is an artist who has been closely tied to an interest in the contemporary person, which he explores through the use of photography, drawing, video/sound installations, relational aesthetics, performance techniques, public works, storytelling, movement, and gesture.

Michalek’s work in video has been focused on capturing carefully staged marginal moments that develop density with minimal action through interplays of image, sound, and – most especially – decelerated time. His recent work considers the potentiality of various forms of slowness alongside an examination of contemporary modes of public attention. He is drawn in particular to projects that bring together artists and ideas into effective pairings and in settings ranging from museums, galleries, theaters and public spaces, to houses of worship, community organizations, and centers of learning.

His solo and collaborative work has been shown nationally and internationally. He has been on the visiting faculty of the Yale Divinity School, where he lectured on Religion and Arts, and Harvard University’s Theater, Dance, and Media Program, where he’s lectured on the intersection of Art and Social Action.

Michalek resides in New York City and is married to acclaimed dancer and New York City Ballet Associate Artistic Director Wendy Whelan.