Princeton and Academic Forays

2011/12 was a year of new ventures in university collaborations. I jumped into the academic sphere quite literally when I delivered an academic response to Susan Foster’s latest work while half naked and performing a choreographic summary of “So You Think You Can Dance.” I co-created and co-taught a course on George Balanchine with former Principal dancer with New York City Ballet Heather Watts. A goal of the course was to expose students to this monumental choreographer of the 20th Century through dancing the ballets, a process that is generally only available to professional dancers. Twice weekly students immersed themselves in the Balanchine ballets, taught by Heather, where they learned excerpts of his ballets from the 1920s until the 1970s. The third class each week I led the class in choreographic experimentation based on the aesthetics, musicality and physicality of the Balanchine Repertory. Together we choreographed a dance that manifested the productive influence of studying a master as a means to discover craft and personal choreographic vision. On the invitation of Princeton colleague Simon Morrison, my dancers and I shared the bill with Gabriel Prokofiev, grandson of Serge, for a site-specific performance in a Princeton eating club that The New York Times called “exhilarating.” Also part of the [After the End of Music History] Conference at Princeton University I directed a world premier dance adaptation of Alexandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin to Serge Prokofiev’s score of the same name with the Princeton Symphony Orchestra.

Read more in this article from the New Jersey Star Ledger.