The second program of our 2008-09 season presents four ballets by Miro Magloire, including a world premiere.

Four Romantic Pieces for violin and piano by Antonin Dvorak were the inspiration for Magloire's new ballet, a lushly danced trio for three of the company women.

Sonatine, which premiered in September, is a demanding solo set to music by Karlheinz Stockhausen in which the dance at times goes strikingly against the music, only to find its way back again.

The haunting Silent Shadows evokes stirring, mysterious images of the underworld to Giacinto Scelsi's edgy violin music. And the final ballet on the program makes do with no music at all - at least in the conventional sense: in Dreams, it is the dancers' vocal sounds that make up the score for the dance.

Don't miss this program! Tickets are on sale already - reserve your seats today!

Saturday, November 22nd at 8pm &
Sunday, November 23rd at 8pm
New York City Center Studio 4
130 West 56th St, 4th floor (betw. 6th and 7th Ave)

When Miro Magloire's ballet Silent Shadows returns to the repertory this month, its haunting score will be interpreted by Erik Carlson (photo). As New Chamber Ballet's resident violinist since 2005, Erik's curiosity in exploring unusual scores and his sensitivity to the dancers have made him a key artist of the company.

"I like playing for dancers very much," he explains, "for me, physical movement is an extraordinary tool to understand a piece of music and it's gestures, flow, and phrasing."

Born in Stillwater, MN, Erik started to play the violin when he was five years old, emulating his older brother. After studying with violin teacher Jorja Fleezanis - whom Erik calls "a wise and compassionate guide" - he moved to New York and completed his training at the Juilliard School.

At New Chamber Ballet, Erik's most singular contributions have been expert renderings of contemporary scores such as Luciano Berio's Sequenza VIII (in Magloire's ballet Lace.) "Contemporary music interests me when composers find new and more direct methods of expression," Erik explains. "The best living composers have been able to explore areas of human expression that were untapped 100 years ago."

The music to Silent Shadows is a good example for this, with its meditative variations on a single note. Performing this piece is not without difficutlties: "The violin must be completely restrung, so that a single pitch can be easily played on all four strings simultaneously. I needed to relearn where to put my fingers in order to play each note." A challenge Erik was only to happy to take on.

New Chamber Ballet's season opening weekend in September brought us much press attention and sold out houses for both performances. The program, with world premieres by Miro Magloire, Constantine Baecher and Lauren Toole, was reviewed by Alastair Macaulay in the New York Times (read the review online.)

Macaulay pointed out that "in matters of dance vocabulary and choreographic method, you can see what Mr. Magloire and his colleagues have learned, from Balanchine in particular, while pursuing their own ideas: a real achievement;" before adding, "I admire its accomplishment, I'm grateful to have been led deeper into [the music], and I hope to see more."

Bridging the unusually long gap between the season opening in September and this month's performances, New Chamber Ballet appeared in a shared program, "Before the Swan Takes Flight," presented by Archer Watters LLC at the New Dance Group Arts Center in October. The theatrical setting offered an opportunity to see our repertory performed with stage lighting.

Pictured above, Elizabeth Brown, Emily SoRelle Adams and Garnetta Gonzalez (stepping in for Emery LeCrone) performed Dreams in all its colorful splendor. While the experience did not persuade us to abandon our trademark studio setting, it was enriching nonetheless: the ballet's sculptural details came to the fore, with the light adding its own poetry. An experiment to be repeated occasionally!

In the absence of our resident pianist Melody Fader, who is in San Francisco until the end of the year, we welcome Victoria Tzotzkova to join us for our upcoming performances.

Victoria, a Bulgarian-born pianist and music theorist, has appeared as recitalist and chamber musician in Europe and America, notably at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Steinway Hall, the Tsai Performance Center in Boston, Salle Cortot in Paris, and other prestigious venues across Europe. Victoria has worked with Alexis Weissenberg, Philippe Entremont, Peter Takacs, and other world famous artists at international festivals and master classes.

In our performances, she will be performing alongside Erik Carlson in Stockhausen's Sonatine for violin and piano and Dvorak's Four Romantic pieces.

Here's what New Chamber Ballet's artists have been up to since the last show:
Company member Emery LeCrone is choreographing a new ballet for the Columbia Ballet Collaborative, to be premiered later this month... Emery also appeared in the Metropolitan Opera's production of La Gioconda, choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon, alongside Emily SoRelle Adams... Emily continues to dance at the Met in this month's new production of La Damnation de Faust... Maddie Deavenport (photo, in Sonatine) just returned from Philadelphia where she danced with Pennsylvania Ballet in Twyla Tharp's Push Comes to Shove... Violinist Erik Carlson is currently touring Mexico and Peru... And pianist Melody Fader is spending the fall in San Francisco, where she gave her first concert last month. She will be back performing with us in early 2009.

Yes, the economy, the economy, and always the economy - and here we are asking for your money! Why? Ticket sales still cover only about 20% of the costs of each performance. Since long before the current financial woes we have aimed to keep our costs as low as possible. But some costs are unavoidable: rehearsal studio fees (a big item here in the city), performance space fees, music royalties, performer fees, printing costs, costuming and costume maintenance, sheet music costs, stamps, banking fees, advance ticket sale fees, PR costs...

All of these items are just bare necessities to produce our no-frills performances. Instead of cutting back, we try to perform more to keep our art alive and you, our audience, happy. Not an easy task, and we can only do it with your help! Please take a moment to go to our website and find out how you can support our work...