Ballet: American Signatures - Premiere - Schedule, Program & Tickets

Ballets by Jerome Robbins, Pam Tanowitz, Lar Lubovitch, and Jessica Lang

Jerome Robbins is one of the most important ballet creators of the 20th century and, with his unmistakable style, has decisively shaped American dance. Interplay, his second choreographic work, which premiered in New York in 1945, opens the four-part American Signatures with a flourish, uniting icons of dance with contemporary choreographic voices.

The title of Interplay, set to Morton Gould's jazz-infused score, becomes the program: As if on a playground, the dancers meet in a playful yet competitive way in Robbins' choreography, which enriches the classical ballet vocabulary with jazz elements, creating one of the works that decisively shaped his aesthetic.

Two pas de deux form the centerpiece of the ballet evening: Pam Tanowitz's Dispatch Duet, which the New York-based choreographer premiered with the Royal Ballet London, manipulates the formal classical step material in an unfamiliar and amusing way, creating a composition by the American Ted Hearne, who—parallel to Tanowitz's choreographic language—twist musical ideas and conventions and filter them through his own unique musical language. Lar Lubovitch's Each In Their Own Time is a more recent work by the choreographer, who has been one of America's most versatile and popular choreographers for decades. Created for two soloists of the New York City Ballet under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the duet creates an intimate, introspective world—choreographed with emotional depth and architectural clarity to piano works by Johannes Brahms, played onstage by a pianist.

Let Me Mingle Tears With Thee is Jessica Lang's visual-choreographic exploration of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's famous setting of Stabat Mater. The resident choreographer of the Pacific Northwest Ballet develops a touching movement language, at times flowing and soft, at others energetic and impulsive, bringing the sacred music to life with the dancers.

Subject to change.