BalletCollective Unveils 2024 Season, 'The Entrance Is The Exit'

"Change," says BalletCollective Founder and Artistic Director Troy Schumacher, "is at the forefront of nearly every conversation right now. This has had me thinking about how my perspectives dictate how I think about, anticipate, and experience change. Are transitions a beginning or an ending? They're both. The entrance is the exit. This year I asked our two commissioned Collectives to enter that liminal space. BalletCollective's 2024 season is named 'The Entrance is the Exit' and will feature two world premiere ballets that creatively inspect the duality of change and the connections between endings and beginnings, as interpreted by leaders in fields ranging from architecture to ballet to contemporary music to visual art."

BalletCollective, the New York-based interdisciplinary arts nonprofit known for its collaborative model, will present its thirteenth creative season, "The Entrance is the Exit," from Tuesday, October 29 - Friday, November 1, 2024 at Trinity Commons in Lower Manhattan.

An immersive and irreverent Gala evening will start the week on Tuesday, October 29, continuing BalletCollective's signature Gala format in which the celebration precedes the performance. The evening will feature BalletCollective's two 2024 commissions. The first will be choreographed by Troy Schumacher, with an original score by brass quartet The Westerlies and inspired by a commissioned work by visual artist Jordan Bennett. The second will be choreographed by Houston Thomas-the recipient of BalletCollective's 2024 Commission for Developing Choreographers-accompanied by an original score by Jonathan Bingham and inspired by an original multimedia work by architect Mario Gooden. Each performance of both premieres will feature live musical accompaniment.

Successive evenings will repeat the two ballets and pair them with BalletCollective's acclaimed 2023 commission, "The World We Left Behind," made in collaboration with Schumacher, composer Phong Tran and game designer Samantha Leigh. As in 2023, it will be accompanied live in performance by Tran himself each evening.

The decision to schedule four performances in New York City in 2024 comes after the success of BalletCollective's 2023 season, when all three performances at Trinity Commons sold out and accrued long waitlists for tickets.

"We are overjoyed to have built such a strong reputation in New York that our performances continue to sell out thirteen years since our first season," says Schumacher, "and we are grateful Trinity Commons was able to accommodate an additional performance this year in order to meet high public demand."

Choreography for the pieces will take place over two two-week creative residencies, the first in New York, NY between June 17 - 30 and the second in Millbrook, NY between July 15 - 28. The Millbrook residency, for which major studio and theatrical support is provided by Millbrook School and Dutchess Day School, will culminate on July 27 - 28 with two performances of the works-in-progress at Millbrook School. BalletCollective has been visiting Millbrook annually for a creative residencies since 2015 and has built a notable relationship with the community, including unprecedented use of the historic Wethersfield Estate & Garden to stage a nationally-acclaimed immersive production, "The Nutcracker at Wethersfield," during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic.

"Millbrook is a beautiful and transformative corner of the Hudson Valley for so many of its residents," says Board Chair Karin Kingsley, "and supporting BalletCollective and its dancers as they make their art has become an integral aspect of summer in the community."

BalletCollective will also host free educational events for both the Millbrook and Poughkeepsie communities during their residency. Events will take place on July 20 at Wethersfield Estate & Garden and on July 21 at the Cunneen-Hackett Arts Center in Poughkeepsie. More details about each day's itinerary will be released at a later date.

All programs and casting are subject to change.
The music for "The World We Left Behind" was commissioned by the Charles and Joan Gross Family Foundation.
Image by Samantha Casolari.

DANCERS
The following dancers are cast in BalletCollective's 2024 Season. All are from New York City Ballet.

Alexa Maxwell
Andrew Veyette
Ashley Hod Veyette*
David Gabriel*
Devin Alberda*
Dominika Afanasenkov*
Kennedy Targosz*
Olivia Boisson
Preston Chamblee*
Sebastian Villarini-Velez*

*Danced with BalletCollective in prior season(s)

TICKETING & VENUES

July 27 - 28, 2024: The July 27 performance will take place at 5 PM. The July 28 program will take place at 3 PM. Both will be located at Millbrook School at 131 Millbrook School Rd, Millbrook, NY 12545. Tickets are $10 for children/students and $25 for adults, and will be available online at balletcollective.com starting in mid-June 2024.

October 29 - November 1, 2024: Both the Gala and other performances in New York, NY will take place at Trinity Commons at 76 Trinity Place, New York, NY 10006.

Tickets to the October 29 Gala, "The Entrance is the Exit," start at $1,000 and will be available for purchase at balletcollective.com in May 2024. (For Leadership Ticket Packages for the 2024 Gala, please contact Cara Lonergan at cara@balletcollective.com.) The evening will begin at 6:30 PM.

Tickets to the October 30 - November 1 performances will be available online at balletcollective.com starting in August 2024. Each performance will begin at 7:30 PM. Tickets start at $25. The Wednesday, October 30 performance will be livestreamed for free at balletcollective.com/live.

ABOUT THE COLLABORATORS

BalletCollective
Founded in 2010 by Troy Schumacher, BalletCollective creates and performs forward-thinking works that reflect the world we live in. BalletCollective commissions emerging, established and acclaimed choreographers, composers, writers and visual artists to collaborate on ballet-based works. BalletCollective exclusively performs commissioned, collaborative work.

Each BalletCollective project takes as its source a contemporary work of art in any medium chosen or commissioned by its choreographer and composer. From this starting point, the choreographer and composer collaborate to make a work that interprets, explores, or responds to its source. The result of the collaboration is performed live. By its nature, BalletCollective consists of a rotating group of artists and collaborators, and with each new collective there are new ideas, new challenges, and, ultimately, new forms of expression that emerge.

BalletCollective has collaborated with more than 270 acclaimed artists, choreographers, composers, musicians, designers and dancers, including Zaria Forman, Ellis Ludwig-Leone, Karen Russell, James Ramsey, Ken Liu, Julianna Barwick, David Salle, Dafy Hagai, Judd Greenstein and Cynthia Zarin. It has produced 20 new ballets with commissioned music, including two full-length works. Its most recent full-length work, "The Night Falls", was honored by The New York Times as a Best of 2023.

BalletCollective's work has been presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Joyce Theater, NYU Skirball Center, Guggenheim Works & Process, PEAK Performances, Guggenheim Bilbao, Vail Dance Festival, the Fire Island Dance Festival,Telluride's Michael D. Palm Theatre, and the Savannah Music Festival.

In 2020, BalletCollective commissioned and safely produced both the first world-premiere one-act ballet, "Natural History," and the first world-premiere full-length ballet, "The Nutcracker at Wethersfield," to be performed in-person in the United States during the Covid-19 Pandemic.
https://balletcollective.com/

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