Van Cleef & Arpels’ annual festival Dance Reflections is heading stateside. Taking on New York City once again, after 2023’s premiere edition in the city which saw around 10 different performances from repertoires past and present, as well as dance workshops, it returns from now until March 21. Last year, the festival unfolded in London and the year before, it was in Kyoto and Saitama, Japan. Inaugurated in 2022 – also in London –, this year’s edition marks the culmination of a series of maison-led initiatives in the Big Apple, most notably Fifth Avenue Blooms and the inauguration of the first Van Cleef & Arpels Chair in the History of Dance at New York University, held by Jennifer Homans.
Unfurling across 16 performances at venues spanning the city – from the gilded auditorium of New York City Center to the industrial vastness of Park Avenue Armory – expect to see choreographic works from the likes of (La)Horde, Benjamin Millepied, Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs and Christos Papadopoulos.
There is a pleasing precision to the programming. On opening night at City Center, the Lyon Opera Ballet performs Cunningham’s Biped (1999), its dancers moving through Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar’s ghostly digital projections, bodies split between flesh and hologram, set to Gavin Bryars’ brooding score. It’s paired with Papadopoulos’ Mycelium, a 60-minute study in accumulation and pulse, where lines of dancers ripple in minute, rhythmic shifts, as if tugged by an underground current.
Across the river at Brooklyn Academy of Music, (La)Horde’s Age of Content commandeers the Howard Gilman Opera House with a monumental set that resembles a cross between bunker and gaming arena. Avatars, fight sequences and Philip Glass’ propulsive minimalism collide in a slick, high-impact meditation on digital bodies and algorithmic identity.
A standout showcase will come in the form of a trio of contemporary ballet performances dubbed Reflections: A Triptych. Born from a 2012 dialogue between Van Cleef & Arpels and Millepied and from Jewels (1967) – a landmark ballet itself founded on a conversation between George Balanchine and Claude Arpels – it is presented in full for the first time in New York at the Perelman Performing Arts Center. Comprising Reflections, Hearts & Arrows and On the Other Side, the trilogy draws on the emotional and material qualities of precious stones. Barbara Kruger’s bold text-based visuals slice across the stage in Reflections; in Hearts & Arrows, Liam Gillick’s sculptural light structures frame dancers moving to Glass’ String Quartet No.3 “Mishima”; On the Other Side closes with a suite of Glass piano études, intimate and exposed.
Elsewhere, Millepied’s Romeo & Juliet Suite takes over the drill hall of Park Avenue Armory, blending live handheld video with Sergei Prokofiev’s score in a stripped-back retelling that casts different couples – male/female, male/male, female/female – across its run. At Guggenheim Museum, Lucinda Childs’ Early Works spiral up the rotunda, dancers tracing geometric patterns against Frank Lloyd Wright’s curve, while at NYU Skirball Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Exit Above folds walking and blues into a 90-minute, musician-led procession.
Crucially, this is not simply a parade of marquee names. Around 20 workshops will be held at the newly opened New York Center for Creativity & Dance, inviting professionals, students and children to test out the vocabulary of the choreographers themselves.
For a maison with a history in America stretching back to the 1930s, Dance Reflections reads like a long-term investment in the infrastructure of movement. Across five boroughs and four weeks, the city becomes a stage – and the stage, in turn, a site of dialogue between heritage and now. Get your tickets here.
Photography courtesy of Van Cleef & Arpels.
