July 2025
5 Can’t-Miss Premieres
Happening this Summer
Gillian Murphy reflects on Her Final Season at American Ballet Theater
American Contemporary Ballet’s The Euterpides Puts Classical Art in the Hollywood Spotlight
Table of Contents
Gillian Murphy reflects on Her Final Season at American Ballet Theater
Jacob’s Pillow Reopens Its Doris Duke Theatre, Which Aims to Be a Center for Dance and Technology While Focusing on the Land’s Indigenous Roots
American Contemporary Ballet’s The Euterpides Puts Classical Art in the Hollywood Spotlight
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5 Can’t-Miss Premieres Happening this Summer
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Gillian Murphy reflects on Her Final Season at American Ballet Theater
July 18 marks the end of an era: Gillian Murphy, American Ballet Theatre’s longest-standing current dancer, will give her final performance in Swan Lake after a 29-year career. (She’s been a principal dancer there since 2002.) Known for her bold technical strength, she is also an artist of profound intelligence, bringing nuanced, thoughtful interpretations to ballets like Sylvia, La Bayadère, La Fille Mal Gardée, Pillar of Fire, Le Corsaire, and so many more.
As such, each of her performances this final season has felt like a major event. Fans young We caught up with Murphy ahead of her last performance to talk about her legacy, her favorite roles, and what she is looking forward to next.
Q: How has this last season been going for you? Does everything feel heightened?
A: It does, and it feels very emotional. The amount of support and love from my peers has ratcheted up the intensity. But the season is going well. I’ve done a performance of Swan Lake and Woolf Works. It was very meaningful to portray Virginia Woolf as she reflects on time and identity and memory and letting go, especially right now, at the end of my career. Whenever I’m onstage, I’m very aware that we don’t know what will happen tomorrow, so it’s important to seize the moment and be grateful for the opportunity. This season I’m definitely feeling “extra,” on that front.
Q: Your partner for your first Swan Lake this season was corps member Michael de la Nuez, who was making his debut as Siegfried. What was that experience like?
It was thrilling. Someone said we were the alpha and omega—the beginning and the end. He only had a month to get it together because, unfortunately, the partner who I was going to dance with, Tom Forster, is dealing with an injury. [Back in May] my director, Susan Jaffe, had asked how I would feel about dancing the Black Swan pas de deux with Michael for the ABT gala, and I said, “Let’s do it.” After a couple rehearsals, I told her that if she wanted to give Michael a full-length, I’d be open to dancing with him for my first Swan Lake this season.
I tried to be as supportive and as helpful as possible in giving him confidence and offering constructive feedback. I knew he would be great, but he brought star power to the evening—he was astoundingly good. And he partnered me with such care and presence. The energy and support from the audience, for both of us, was absolutely wild.
Q: You’re dancing Swan Lake again with James Whiteside for your last performance. Why did you choose this ballet to go out on?
I have so many favorite ballets, but Swan Lake stood out as extra-special. I love both roles, Odette and Odile. It was also the ballet that I was filmed in when I was a young principal. Over the years, I’ve gotten countless messages from people around the country and world expressing how meaningful that film was to them. So it felt like the right choice to finish with. That being said, it’s not the easiest option!
Jacob’s Pillow Reopens Its Doris Duke Theatre, Which Aims to Be a Center for Dance and Technology While Focusing on the Land’s Indigenous
Roots
In 2020, Jacob’s Pillow faced major challenges. The pandemic forced the cancellation of its summer festival for the first time in 88 years. Later that year, the Doris Duke Theatre burned down. The fire’s cause was never determined, but no one was hurt. The loss of the 230-seat theater sparked widespread support from the dance community.
Nearly five years later, a new Doris Duke Theatre is opening. Designed by Mecanoo with Marvel and Charcoalblue, it seats 220–400 and was built on principles of Indigenous design, sustainability, accessibility, and advanced technology. The theater includes tools for interactive tech like spatial sound, lives-
treaming, and robotics. “It’s wired for any kind of technology,” says executive and artistic director Pamela Tatge, “but still has the intimacy and warmth” of the original.
In planning the space, the team engaged artists and the local Indigenous community. Artist Jeffrey Gibson helped incorporate Indigenous values and honor the land’s Mohican heritage. The design includes an Indigenous garden, medicinal plants, and a communal fire pit, along with a renewed focus on presenting Indigenous artists.
The theater also offers new amenities: improved booths, a production catwalk, exhibition space, and a larger lobby
“We’llsave a lot of time and labor,” says Tatge.
This summer’s nine-week festival will celebrate the reopening with performances by Camille A. Brown & Dancers, Annie-B Parson, Eiko Otake, Kinetic Light, and more. Many artists will use the theater’s new technology. The season will also see the return of Shamel Pitts | TRIBE, who were in residence during the 2020 fire.
“I’m most excited about people experiencing the possibility and beauty of the structure,” says Tatge. “It’s so responsive to the experience we want artists and audiences to have.”
American Contemporary Ballet’s
The Euterpides Puts Classical Art in the Hollywood Spotlight
This june, Los Angeles’ American Contemporary Ballet will fuse Hollywood with classcical tradition in the Euteroides, a new ballet from ACB director Lincoln Jones and composer Alma Deutscher.
The piece, presented June 5-28 alongside George Balanchine’s, the greek muse of music. ACB will present the show at a Los Angeles soundstage, Television City’s Stage 33, a space originally created for television filming. Jones says that with intentional lighting and spacing, it allows audiemces to feel like the dancers “are moving in an infinite space.”
When Jones commissioned Deutscher, he knew he’d have a string orchestra for Serenade and offered her the option to add piano, which she did. He began with an idea about using different violin bowing techniques for different variations, and then thought of Euterpe. “I thought, What if she had daughters?” he says. “They would be all the different effects that we know in music.”
Jones drafted 14 different
daughters, and Deutscher picked her favorite five for The Euterpides: Lyra (arpeggio), Anesis (relief), Pneumē (breath), Staktē (staccato), and Hemiola (a shift in meter). Deutscher structured the score as a theme and variations, with an initial group number set to the main theme, followed by each daughter dancing her variation, then a pas de deux between a mortal composer and Pneumē to complete the piece. “It’s really a way for people to see into the music,” says Jones.
With the daughters set, Jones sent Deutscher examples of what he considered great ballet music— Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, and Delibes topped the list, but he added a few videos of Balanchine ballets and Fred Astaire–era movie musicals, too. “I think any composer writing a ballet would be a bit inspired by Tchaikovsky,” says Deutscher. “But I also love Fred Astaire. There were a couple of moments where I had a vision of him dancing [while composing].”
Jones then got to work creating movement that reflect-
ed Deutscher’s contrasting variations. “With Anesis, there are these buildups and then releases in the music, these easings of tension,” he says. “I used uneven phrases for the dancer during the buildup so that you feel a rhythmic tension. And then they come together at the moment of release.”
The Stage 33 setting, Jones explains, was inspired by viewing ballet in the studio, and by video tapes he watched of Balanchine-era New York City Ballet at the public library. “I got used to seeing [dancers up close] rather than small and far away,” he says. “I think I wanted to replicate that cinematic experience.”
Deutscher will travel from Vienna to conduct the first two shows. Her trip will be the first time she sees Jones’ choreography: “I’m really looking forward to bringing the music to life, to see it coming together with the dancers and the choreography.”
5 Can’t-Miss Premieres Happening
Courtney Escoyne
Royal Reckoning
EDINBURGH For her first full-length ballet, Scottish Ballet choreographer in residence Sophie Laplane turns to a familiar—and appropriately dramatic—piece of Scotland’s history. Mary, Queen of Scots, co-created with director James Bonas, uses the framing device of Queen Elizabeth I contemplating memories, both real and imagined, of her cousin, who ruled as Queen of Scotland, was forced to abdicate and then imprisoned by Elizabeth, and was ultimately executed after plotting an assassination attempt. Scottish Ballet premieres the work Aug. 15–17 at Edinburgh International Festival, which will also feature works by Kim Brandstrup, Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney, and more. scottishballet.co.uk.
A Single Man, Doubled
MANCHESTER A new contemporary ballet adaptation of A Single Man, in which a gay, middle-aged professor is left reeling after the death of his partner, casts ballet star Ed Watson and singer-songwriter John Grant as George, with Watson embodying the protagonist’s exterior physicality while Grant performs his inner thoughts. Directed and choreographed by Jonathan Watkins, the production marks the first collaboration between Manchester International Festival, during which it will premiere, and The Royal Ballet, whose dancers perform. July 2–6. factoryinternational.org.
Happening this Summer Community in Practice
WASHINGTON, DC Jamison Curcio and Shanice Mason invite audiences to practice being in community with Black women and femmes with I have a secret to tell you…, premiering at the Kennedy Center’s Theater Lab as part of its Local Dance Commissioning Project. Aug. 22–23. kennedy-center.org.
Daring Duos
NEW YORK CITY The always-busy creative duo Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber team up with Ringdown (musicians Caroline Shaw and Danni Lee Parpan) to premiere Seven Scenes, a brand-new dance and music production with a dozen-strong cast that includes Schraiber and Smith, at Little Island’s The Amph. Aug. 22–28. littleisland.org.
SAINT-SAUVEUR, QUEBEC What secrets hide within each person you meet? Jo Strømgren pays tribute to unobserved moments and concealed wonders in his latest work for Ballets Jazz Montréal, in which the dancers perform with and alongside a vast sheet of paper. Premieres Aug. 3 at the Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur. bjmdanse.ca.
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