BalletCollective opens the Savannah Music Festival on Thursday, March 27 with a program of three ballets that will immerse you in new worlds and illustrate just how far ballet can go in the twenty-first century—performed inside the meticulously restored 1920s Lucas Theatre for the Arts in the gorgeous Historic District of Savannah, GA.

Founded in 2010 by acclaimed choreographer, director, and New York City Ballet soloist Troy Schumacher, arts nonprofit BalletCollective asks not what ballet is, but what it can be—partnering with both emerging and established art makers and thought leaders to make forward-thinking ballet-based works using its signature collaborative model, The BalletCollective Process.

By its nature, it consists of a rotating group of artists and collaborators—over 314 to date—and with each new "Collective" new ideas, new challenges, and ultimately, new forms of expression emerge. BalletCollective has produced 23 original ballets with commissioned music, including two full-length works. Its most recent full-length work, The Night Falls (2023), was named a "Best of 2023" by The New York Times.

BalletCollective’s work has been presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Joyce Theater, NYU Skirball Center, Guggenheim Works & Process, PEAK Performances, Guggenheim Bilbao, Vail Dance Festival, the Fire Island Dance Festival, and is thrilled to be returning to the Savannah Music Festival—especially to present the work of Georgia natives Gabrielle Lamb, Phong Tran, Ben Rawson, and Troy Schumacher.

THE WORLD WE LEFT BEHIND
Choreography by Troy Schumacher
Music composed and performed by Phong Tran
Inspired by a custom tabletop role-playing game by Samantha Leigh
Lighting by Ben Rawson
Costumes styled by Troy Schumacher and Barbara Erin Delo
Danced by Devin Alberda, Jacqueline Bologna, Jovani Furlan, Ashley Laracey, Megan LeCrone, Sebastián Villarini-Vélez, and Emma Von Enck

The music for The World We Left Behind was commissioned by The Charles and Joan Gross Family Foundation.

Both the custom tabletop role-playing game that inspired The World We Left Behind and its commissioned score have been released and are available for purchase here. 

The score is also available to stream on all major platforms.

ORANGE
Choreography by Gabrielle Lamb, recipient of BalletCollective’s 2017 Commission for Developing Choreographers
Music composed by Caleb Burhans
Music performed by the Manhattan Chamber Players
Inspired by a work of Trevor Paglen, visual artist and geographer
Lighting by Brandon Stirling Baker
Costumes styled by Gabrielle Lamb
Danced by Devin Alberda, Jacqueline Bologna, Jovani Furlan, Ashley Laracey, and Megan LeCrone

Orange was inspired by MacArthur Fellow and visual artist Trevor Paglen. Paglen, whose work often explores how artificial intelligence is changing the world, had his AI produce an artwork of an orange [below] after studying 10,000 images of the citrus fruit. Burhans and Lamb used both Paglen’s process and the concept of a machine learning what it thinks is the “essence” of an orange as the starting point for this ballet.

TRANSLATION
Choreography by Troy Schumacher
Music composed by Julianna Barwick
Music performed by Eliza Bagg
Inspired a commissioned piece of writing by Ken Liu, speculative fiction writer
Installation by Sergio Mora-Diaz, new media artist
Costumes by Outdoor Voices
Danced by Devin Alberda, Jacqueline Bologna, Ashley Laracey, Megan LeCrone, Emma Von Enck, Sebastián Villarini-Vélez

Translation was inspired by an original, commissioned piece by Ken Liu [below].

The Plot of Our Lives
by Ken Liu

Neuroscience tells us that we do not live in the moment; rather, our awareness of the “now” is delayed in order to integrate the nerve inputs from the most distant parts of our bodies. (Pain signals, for example, travel at 0.61m/s, meaning that seconds will pass after you’ve stubbed your toe before you become aware of it). The brain is a sovereign imprisoned in the cranium, hearing reports from distant borders of the empire as news even if the events are already history. We are children sitting in the last row of rear-facing seats in a station wagon traveling down time’s highway, greedily drinking in the scenery only as it recedes into the past.

Not only is the future unknowable, so is the present. We muddle along, doing the best we can to react to the barrage of live-delayed choices, indistinguishable from chance.

Even our knowledge of the past is unreliable. We spend our entire lives telling and retelling stories about ourselves—and call the results memory. We draft and redraft our personal histories, magnify our kindnesses, minimize our cruelties, rationalize our moments of cowardice, emphasize our flashes of heroism, translate fortune into destiny, assign causes and effects to the macro-scale manifestations of quantum randomness. We can’t help imposing the shape of a plot to the chronicle of accidental events that make up our lives.

This is how we make living in this unfeeling, accidental universe tolerable.

That we call such a tendency “the narrative fallacy” doesn’t mean it doesn’t also touch upon some aspect of the truth. We’re not islands scattered in a melancholy-dark sea, but fellow travelers into terra incognita with a shared story. We are the stars in each other’s life-plays, the fixed points of light by which we navigate the stage, our gazes yearning for that miraculous connection, that spark that illuminates the dazzling web that weaves us into one constellation called Humanity.