Premiere

Production exclusively for Spoleto52 Festival dei 2Mondi

program

RUSSIAN SEASONS
Choreography Alexei Ratmansky
Music Leonid Desyatnikov

Performers Jared Angle, Jenifer Ringer, Abi Stafford, Jonathan Stafford, Wendy Whelan, Antonio Carmena, Adam Hendrickson, Rebecca Krohn, Amar Ramasar, Sean Suozzi, Alina Dronova, Georgina Pazcoguin
Principal Dancers and Soloists of New York City Ballet

AFTER THE RAIN
Choreography Christopher Wheeldon
Music Arvo Pärt Tabula Rasa (1977) (first Movement-Ludus), Spiegel Im Spiegel (1978)

Starring Wendy Whelan, Maria Kowroski, Teresa Reichlen, Craig Hall,Jason Fowler, Edward Liang

MORPHOSES
THE WHEELDON COMPANY
Artistic director Christopher Wheeldon

ERAZOR
Choreography Wayne McGregor
Plaid Music (Andy Turner & Ed Handley)

Starring Neil Fleming Brown, Catarina Carvahlo, Agnès López Rio, Paolo Mangiola, Ángel Martinez Hernandez, Anh Ngoc Nguyen, Anna Nowak, Maxime Thomas, Antoine Vereecken, Jessica Wright
Wayne McGregor | RANDOM DANCE COMPANY
Direction Wayne McGregor

Classical ballet today is in the hands of three choreographers: Wayne McGregor, Alexei Ratmansky, Christopher Wheeldon.
In the 1900s great masters such as Ashton, McMillan, Balanchine ,Grigorovich, Petit, created for the most important companies of the world such as Bolshoi-Royal Ballet-American Ballet Theater-New York City Ballet. These three choreographers are their successors.
Choreographing Today is an exceptional and hardly repeatable evening, never in any theater has there been an opportunity to see their ballets together.It´s a great and unique opportunity that the Spoleto Festival offers its audience: to get to know the classical dance of the beginning of the new millennium.
Alessandra Ferri

MEET

Saturday, July 4, at 5:30 p.m.

Christopher Wheeldon

Alexei Ratmansky

moderator Wendy PeronAtMeeting Point "La Limonaia"

Free admission

Alexei Ratmansky

born to San Pietroburgo studied at the Moscow Bolshoi Theater School.
He has danced as Principal dancer with the Ukrainian National Ballet, at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet. He has created over 20 new works for the world's leading dance companies: the Dutch National Ballet, the Kirov Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, the Royal Swedish Ballet, the New York City Ballet, the San Francisco Ballet, and the National Ballet of Georgia. In 1998, the choreography Dreams of Japan, created for Nina Ananiashvili, won the prestigious Golden Mask Award given from Theatre Union of Russia. In 2005, he won the Benois de la Danse award as the best choreographer of the year for Anna Karenina created for Royal Danish Ballet.
In 2003 he created The Bright Stream for the Moscow Bolshoi Theater Ballet, and it was because of its incredible success that the following year he was appointed artistic director of the company. During the years of his directorship (which ended on December 31, 2008) he created new works for the company, including The Bolt (2005), The Corsair (2007), and Flames of Paris (2008).
In 2005 and 2007 the Bolshoi Theater Ballet won the award given by the Critics' Circle in London as the best foreign company, and in 2006 it won the Critics' Circle National Dance Award for The Bright Stream. In 2007 he won the Golden Mask Award as best choreographer for the production Jeu de Cartes also created for the Bolshoi. Alexei Ratmansky in January 2009 was appointed resident choreographer of the American Ballet Theatre.

Christopher Wheeldon
Acclaimed British talent Christopher Wheeldon is artistic director and co-founder of Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company. He studied at the School of the Royal Ballet in London and graduated and joined the Royal Ballet. In 1991 he won the Gold Medal at the Prix de Lausanne, moved to New York City Ballet in 1993 and became its Soloist in 1998. In 2000, he decided to leave dancing to devote himself exclusively to choreography. From 2001 to 2008 he was resident choreographer of New York City Ballet. In 2007 he created Morphoses with the goal of bringing a new spirit of innovation to classical ballet by encouraging and promoting collaboration among choreographers, dancers, designers, visual artists, composers and other artists who can bring new life to ballet. Among his important creations for New York City Ballet are: Mercurial Manoeuvers, Pholyphonia, Variations Sérieuses, Morphoses, Carousel (to Dance), Carnival of Animals, Liturgy, After the Rain, An American in Paris, Klavier and The Nightingale and the Rose. Other major companies have commissioned new works from him, they include: San Francisco Ballet (Continuum) Royal Ballet of London (Tryst and DGV Danse à Grand Vitesse) Pennsylvania Ballet (Swan Lake), Metropolitan Opera House (The Dance of at in The Mona Lisa), the Bolshoi Theatre Ballet(Misericors). In 2005 Wheeldon received the Dance Magazine Award and the London Critics' Circle Award as best creation of the season with the ballet Polyphonia, which also received the Olivier Award for best performance. In 2006 DGV Danse à Grad Vitesse was nominated for the Olivier Award. Other major awards include the Martin E.Segal Award from Lincoln Center and the American Choreography Award. Morphoses /The Wheeldon Company wins the prestigious South Bank Show Award for the 2007 season.

Morphoses/The Wheeldon Company

is a young and dynamic company founded in 2007 from Christopher Wheeldon and Lourdes Lopez based to New York and London. The goal is to expand the vision of classical ballet by drawing attention to innovation and supporting creativity through artistic collaboration. The company's debut was at the Vail International Festival in Colorado, followed from performances at Sadler's Wells in London and New York City Center. to following its success, the company was named "resident" at both to London and to New York. The company won the prestigious South Bank Show Award for the 2007 season. Christopher Wheeldon has created two new works for Morphoses: Fools' Paradice and Prokofiev Pas de Deux. Also appearing in the repertoire are choreographies by G.Balanchine, W.Forsythe, M.Clarke, L.Lorent., E.Liang. Morphoses' dancers come from the world's leading companies-New York City Ballet, Royal Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, George Piper Dances, Hamburg Ballet, Pacific Northwest and National Ballet of Canada.

Wayne McGregor
Cultured and unprejudiced, the 39-year-old McGregor is a spearhead of the current British scene, for his unmistakable trait of a dystonic vision of the body that corresponds to the fragmented and dysfunctional world in which we live, led to dance and choreography from a childhood dazzlement for the John Travolta of "Saturday Night Fever."
He founded the Random Dance Company in 1992, to 22 years, establishing it to internationally precisely because of his exploration of the relationship between dance and technology, collaborating with multidisciplinary artists to creations that have established his company among the leading groups on the British scene. Winner of the "Time Out Live Award" - in 2001 and again in 2003 - and courted in the international dance mainstream, Wayne McGregor has received commissions from the Royal Ballet and the Rambert Dance Company, but he also choreographed movements for the fourth episode of the Harry Potter film saga, The Goblet of Fire, choreographed Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, Woman in White, site-specific installations for Hayward Gallery, Canary Wharf, Centre Pompidou, and signed direction and choreography for Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas at La Scala. Opera which in March 2009 is revived at the Royal Opera House along with a new production of Acis and Galatea opera for which McGregor is directing and choreographing. Recently McGregor was appointed resident choreographer of the Royal Ballet, the first in 16 years and the only to to come from the contemporary dance world. Wayne McGregor, however, is bold but not iconoclastic, rather a champion of positive body thinking, of a good relationship with one's body and what it can do, "thinking physically." The intent is to bring the values of art dance, conceptual in his case, to establishment venues, where until now only classically trained choreographers had a home, which is not his case.

In January 2009 he received from British critics the prestigious South Bank Show Award for Infra last creation for the Royal Ballet and Entity for his company. McGregor himself comments on his win receiving the award this way from Arlene Phillips, of Strictly Come Dancing: I am delighted to receive this award. "Everything I do is completely in tune with nature, so this is an award from share. I know I am particularly fortunate to work with some of the best dancers in the world--both from the Royal Ballet and my company, Wayne McGregor|Random Dance--and I would like to thank them, in particular, for their continued inspiration."

Wayne McGregor | RANDOM DANCE COMPANY

was founded in 1992 and became the medium through which British choreographer Wayne McGregor developed his drastically fast-paced and articulate choreographic language. The company became a symbol for its radical approach to new technologies - integrating animation, digital footage, 3-dimensional architecture, electronic music and virtual dancers to dance and choreography.
In Nemesis (2002) the dancers dueled with long metal prosthetics on their arms and a musical soundtrack on which telephone conversations were embedded; in AtaXia (2004 ) Wayne McGregor's fellowship with the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge fueled the choreography; in Amu (2005) neurological dysfunctions of the heart nurtured the creative process; and in Entity (2008) an autonomous choreographic entity is imagined in a soundscape created from Jon Hopkins collaborator of Coldplay and from Jody Talbot who also collaborated on the music for Chroma (2006).

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