Van Cleef & Arpels’s love affair with dance goes back decades. In 1967, Claude Arpels – who headed the American operations of his family’s jewellery maison – inspired George Balanchine, cofounder of the New York City Ballet, to create Jewels: the first full-length abstract ballet. It forever changed the art form. Jewels consisted of three visually and sonically distinct dances – “Emeralds” (set to Gabriel Fauré), “Rubies” (Igor Stravinsky), and “Diamonds” (Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky) – and that artfully fractured, avant-garde spirit carries into Dance Reflections, a festival featuring 12 works by the world’s most celebrated contemporary choreographers. (First launched in 2020, this year’s iteration runs through 14 December.)
Before giving Dance Reflections its New York City debut this year, Van Cleef & Arpels staged it in London and Hong Kong. The decision to take it to Manhattan was – according to the company’s president and CEO, Nicolas Bos – an attempt to “contribute to the close and long-standing links between New York and the art of choreography.”
Reflections unites numerous choreographers, including the Franco Austrian Gisèle Vienne, the Senegalese Germaine Acogny, British Rwandan Dorothée Munyaneza, and American Lucinda Childs. The performances, taking place on stages across the city, range from joyous to dark – from transcendent to transgressive. Together, they constitute a shimmering showcase of the medium’s power.
Dance, of course, is both an art and a kind of sport. Central to the thrill of watching a performance is witnessing the human body defy gravity. The physicality of ritualised movement and its inherent risks are explored by Rachid Ouramdane in Corps Extrêmes, which debuted this month at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House. Inspired by mountain adventurers in the French Alps, Ouramdane drafted acrobats for his aerial odyssey. During the performance, the stage transforms into a screen, its images of nature both forbidding and beautiful, evoking the landscapes that highliners and climbers typically traverse.
“Some were artists, others were athletes,” Ouramdane says of his cast. “What they have in common is a way to challenge the body and explore the limits.” Despite its meditative sensibility, an atmosphere of danger ignites the piece; bodies seem liable to suddenly give way. Yet, as Ouramdane see it, “Fragility is not a weakness but a strength.”
In contrast to the pure abstraction embraced by Ouramdane, other choreographers are using the stage to interrogate modernity. In Dimitri Chamblas’s Takemehome at NYU Skirball on 17 and 18 November, nine performers wander and writhe beneath an enormous zeppelin. The 65-minute work, inspired by those lost and forgotten in contemporary society, was developed with musician Kim Gordon, who created a haunting soundscape with electric guitars and amplifiers.
“The images came from me driving home at night in Los Angeles from a level 4 prison,” says Chamblas, who has long challenged mass incarceration. “You know how in LA at night time there are not many people in the street? Those [who are], you have a feeling that they are lost. You see dark silhouettes. I started to invent stories.”
Chamblas credits Gordon, who is also his neighbour, as a motivation for the work. “We wanted to experience a new type of relationship between music and dance,” he says. That involved having the dancers (who Chamblas emphatically calls “the best in the world, seriously”) make music as well as move to it. They can be seen both playing instruments onstage and creating sounds with their bodies. “There is a trajectory between humans being dancers, being themselves, and being musicians,” he adds.
Indeed, most everything presented in Reflections is the product of a rich collaborative effort. On 19 October, the festival kicked off with Dance by Lucinda Childs. (With her white hair and regal bearing, Childs – now 83 – remains as glamorous and active as she was in the 1950s.) The 60-minute work from 1979 is set to music by Philip Glass and against a projection conceived by artist Sol LeWitt.
At the New York City Center last week, Dance was performed by 17 dancers from the Lyon Opera Ballet. Originally, LeWitt’s backdrop comprised recordings of the very dancers performing onstage, filmed from various angles and projected onto a scrim – the effect was at once technologically revolutionary and uncannily hypnotic. After Lyon added the piece to its repertoire in 2016, however, Childs felt that it should evolve accordingly.
“When Lyon asked for the work,” she recalls, “I said, ‘We have to redo the film in the concept of Sol LeWitt, because it really should be your dancers.’” Thus, after decades of using the original video by LeWitt, who died in 2007, the film was remade. “It was completely reconstructed,” Childs says. “It copies, frame by frame, the storyboards by Sol LeWitt. It has been exciting because it’s new, in beautiful condition. The sound is beautiful and the dancers are beautiful.”
A New York native whose work is performed around the world, Childs goes on to describe her joy at Dance being revived in the city of her birth. “I was very grateful to have the piece come here,” she says. “Thanks to Van Cleef & Arpels.”
