Azalea - Five Ballets by Miro Magloire

New Chamber Ballet continues its 2025-2026 Season with an evening of five ballets by Miro Magloire to music by Elizabeth Gartman, Wong Foo Jeng, Ya-Lan Chan, Hyesun Sun Lee, and Didi Gu.

Choreographed in Magloire's signature, in-the-round style with the audience seated on all sides of the stage, the five works showcase original, new voices of musical expression. Commissioned by New Chamber Ballet over the past five years, they are presented on a single program for the first time.

A highlight of the evening will be the world premiere of Magloire's new ballet, to Didi Gu's Undercurrent for violin and piano.

Another highlight will be an excerpt of Vox, a ballet resulting from a multi-year collaboration with Elizabeth Gartman. The score for piano and violin is inspired by the mechanics of vocal music. "Magloire’s kinesthetic structures expanded in this work,"wrote Stephanie Boyd in a review on ICareIfYouListen.com, "with dancers most often grouped in a set of two and a set of three, holding hands and weaving bodies and limbs so as to become a collective, new shape altogether."

Also on the program is The Distance Between Bones, a daring duet premiered in 2023 to a violin-and-piano piece by Ya-Lan Chan. "Magloire’s choreography proved to be a searingly exquisite representation of the work’s title, pairing these two dancers in such a way that their limbs combined and aligned at myriad angles throughout the ballet... The utter strength, teamwork, and grace on display in these demanding steps proved a visually stunning feat." (Stephanie Boyd, ICareIfYouListen.com)

Fog, set to music by Hyesun Sun Lee and premiered earlier this year, interweaves dancers and musicians, with the former making sounds and the latter traveling through space, whimsically escaping the constraints of their art forms.

The evening will close with Azalea, a kaleidoscopic quintet to a score by Wong Foo Jeng, premiered in 2022, that draws its inspiration from the relation of action, space, and time.

"The all-female company of dancers presented a delightful and at times frankly stunning merging of music and Magloire’s choreography... With the scores showcasing a wide range of minimalist sonic landscapes, the overall contemplative, earnest energy, and the eye-popping grace of these dancers, New Chamber Ballet invites audiences to relish a bounty of tensile beauty that the intimate-upcloseness of a small format allows." (Stephanie Boyd, ICareIfYouListen.com)

All five scores were originally commissioned as part of the composition prize for dance co-sponsored by the Manhattan School of Music and New Chamber Ballet.

Performers include the dancers Anabel Alpert, Megan Foley, Nicole McGinnis, Amber Neff, Rachele Perla, and Kayla Schmitt; as well as Madeline Hocking (violin) and Melody Fader (piano).

"It's heartening to see work so focused on the meeting of dance and music." -Alastair Macaulay, The New York Times

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