Performance Dates: November 2nd and 3rd, 2022 at 7:30 PM
Performance Location: Trinity Church Commons, 89 Broadway, New York, NY 10006
Ticket information:. Tickets priced $20-$100 can be purchased at balletcollective.com/tickets, with November 2nd benefit tickets starting at $300.
Free live stream information: The November 3rd 7:30 PM performance will be live streamed for free at balletcollective.com/live
Running Time: 75 minutes

About the Show

This evening features two world premieres; “Forest of Shifting Time” by BalletCollective Artistic Director and choreographer Troy Schumacher, composer and Pulitzer Prize finalist Augusta Read Thomas whose new work will be performed by the Akropolis Reed Quintet, and designer Doug Fitch, and “The First and Last Light” by choreographer Bryn Cohn, composer Alex Somers, and art inspired by Olafur Eliasson. Cohn is the third recipient of BalletCollective’s Commission for Developing Choreographers.

Each piece is rooted in the choreographer and composer’s changed perception and understanding of time in recent years.

“Over the past three years, I’ve noticed a drastic shift in the way time presents itself to me and my relationships. For a while, I chalked it up to the birth of my twin girls, but in my conversations with my fellow artists, I began to realize that there’s been a profound alteration in how the people around me are experiencing and relating to time as well. As we began selecting our collaborators for the new season, this ‘time conversation’ was at the forefront of our discussions,” Schumacher observes.

The Fluidity of Time will feature dancers trained in a multitude of methodologies, including dancers from New York City Ballet and and Martha Graham. Detroit-based Akropolis Reed Quintet will accompany “Forest of Shifting Time.”

About The Artists

Troy Schumacher (Artistic Director and Choreographer) is an American choreographer, dancer, and director living in New York, NY. His athletic aesthetic draws upon the artists he collaborates with to produce fresh, unexpected results. He is a soloist with New York City Ballet and the founder and Artistic Director of BalletCollective. He has been dubbed a “visionary artist” by T Magazine and is “one of his generation’s most acclaimed choreographers” (PBS).

Schumacher’s work has been presented by New York City Ballet, Martha Graham Dance Company, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Performa, Danspace Project, Guggenheim Works & Process, Guggenheim Bilbao, Peak Performances, the Joyce Theater, the Savannah Music Festival, and NYU Skirball Center, among others. He has collaborated with many artists including Jeff Koons, Karen Russell, Zaria Forman, Thom Browne, Ken Liu, Ellis Ludwig-Leone, Maddie Ziegler, and David Salle. In addition to live performances, Schumacher has choreographed numerous art, fashion and commercial shoots, including works for Google, Sony PlayStation, Capezio, HP, Aritzia, CR Fashion Book, Tom Ford, and The New York Times.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Schumacher created, directed, and produced the first live world premiere ballets in the US: the one act Natural History and the full-length, immersive Nutcracker at Wethersfield. 

Augusta Read Thomas (composer) writes music that is nuanced, majestic, elegant, capricious, and colorful – “it isboldly considered music that celebrates the sound of instruments and reaffirms the vitality of orchestral music.” (Philadelphia Inquirer) Her impressive works embody unbridled passion & fierce poetry.  The New Yorker called her “a true virtuoso composer.” Critic Edward Reichel wrote, “Thomas has secured for herself a permanent place in the pantheon of American composers of the 20th and 21st centuries. She is without question one of the best and most important composers that this country has today. Her music has substance, depth, and a sense of purpose. She has a lot to say and knows how to say it —and in a way that is intelligent yet appealing and sophisticated.” Thomas was the longest-serving Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony, for Barenboim and Boulez, from 1997 through 2006. This residency culminated in the premiere of Astral Canticle, one of two finalists for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Music.

Recent commissions include those from the BBC Proms, Boston Symphony, Utah Symphony, Wigmore Hall in London, PEAK Performances and the Martha Graham Dance Company, Santa Fe Opera along with a consortium of seven opera companies, JACK quartet, Third Coast Percussion, Tanglewood, Spektral Quartet, Chicago Philharmonic, the Danish Chamber Players, and the Fromm Foundation. She won the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, among many other coveted awards. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Former American Music Center Board Chair, she serves on many boards and is a generous contributor to the profession at large. 

Akropolis Reed Quintet (Musical Ensemble) Celebrating their 14th year making music with a “collective voice driven by real excitement and a sense of adventure” (The Wire), Akropolis has “taken the chamber music world by storm” (Fanfare). As the first reed quintet to grace the Billboard Charts (May 2021), the untamed band of 5 reed players and entrepreneurs are united by a shared passion: to make music that sparks joy and wonder. Winner of 7 national chamber music prizes including the 2014 Fischoff Gold Medal, Akropolis delivers 120 concerts and educational events each year and has premiered over 130 works. They are the first ensemble of their kind to grace the stage on noteworthy series like Oneppo (Yale University), Chamber Music San Antonio, Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.), Summerwinds Münster (Germany), Flagler Museum (Palm Beach), and many more.

“There’s nothing tentative in [Akropolis’] approach, and that extends to their programming of multifariously challenging and imaginative new works” (The Wire). Currently, Akropolis is collaborating with GRAMMY-nominated pianist/composer Pascal Le Boeuf and drummer Christian Euman on their Are We Dreaming the Same Dream? project, an album and touring program drawing classical and jazz idioms together to reflect on American identity.

Akropolis’ 22-23 season will include premieres of the music of Augusta Read Thomas and Omar Thomas; imaginative renditions of music by Ravel, Bernstein, Rameau, Shostakovich, and Gershwin; and touring their 4th album, Ghost Light, lauded for its “range, agility, and grace” (The Whole Note). Winner of the 2015 Fischoff Educator Award and a nonprofit organization which has received 5 consecutive grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Akropolis runs a festival in Detroit called Together We Sound and an annual, yearlong residency at three public Detroit high schools.  The “pure gold” (San Francisco Chronicle) Akropolis Reed Quintet performs worldwide and is represented exclusively by Ariel Artists.

Douglas Fitch (contributing artist and costume designer) Visual artist, designer, director Doug Fitch’s several productions with the NY Philharmonic include Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre; Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen; A Dancer’s Dream: Two Works by Stravinsky; and HK Gruber’s Gloria – A Pig Tale.  Mr. Fitch has also created productions for Los Angeles Opera, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Santa Fe Opera, and Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, and for Bard’s SummerScape Festival. His Tanglewood production of Elliott Carter’s What Next? was conducted by James Levine; filmed and later screened at the Museum of Modern Art.

Fitch directed and designed Matthew Aucoin’s Orphic Moments at National Sawdust, a production, later remounted at Salzburg’s Landestheater, then reconfigured for Master Voices at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater. At La Jolla Summerfest, he performed a live-animated version of Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition Inon Barnaton.  His cabaret, Doug Fitch’s Art Gallery Variety Show, has appeared at National Sawdust and Maison Francaise at Columbia University.

Mr. Fitch is a co-founder of Giants Are Small, which, in co-production with Universal Music and Deutsche Grammophon, developed Peter and the Wolf in Hollywood — a digital album featuring Alice Cooper as narrator and the German National Youth Orchestra. Recent highlights include LA Opera’s remount of Hansel and Gretel, Le Grand Macabre at the ElbPhilharmonie in Hamburg and Punkitititi: a new show commissioned by Rolando Villazon for Mozart Woche 2020 with the Salzburg Marionette Theater, featuring Geoff Sobelle, and Pan, developed in collaboration with composer Marcos Balter and flutist Claire Chase. He is a Hermitage Fellow and lives in Brooklyn, NY.