Works & Process at the Guggenheim Presents a Costume and Dance Commission

Works & Process at the Guggenheim
Presents a Costume and Dance Commission
Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung Design Dialogues
New Choreography by Christopher Williams and Netta Yerulshamy
in collaboration with
NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World’s
Hymn to Apollo: The Ancient World and the Ballets Russes
Sunday and Monday, April 28 and 29, 2019 at 7:30pm

Works & Process, the performing arts series at the Guggenheim, presents a Works & Process dance and costume commission by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung with new choreography by Christopher Williams and Netta Yerulshamy in collaboration with NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World’s exhibition, Hymn to Apollo: The Ancient World and the Ballets Russes, on Sunday and Monday, April 28 and 29, 2019 at 7:30pm

Inspired by Hymn to Apollo: The Ancient World and the Ballets Russes, the first exhibition to focus specifically on the role of ancient world and the Ballet Russes, costume designers Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung will use original Ballets Russes costumes and designs as their point of departure for this Works & Process costume and dance commission featuring music excerpts from Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe. Interspersed between the performances, Linda Murray, curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, will moderate the discussion.

Choreographer Netta Yerulshamy’s abstract telling of Daphnis and Chloe will feature dancers Reid Bartelme, Brittany Engel Adams, Marc Crousillat, Harriet Jung, and Amos Machanic.

Choreographer Christopher William’s literal telling of Daphnis and Chloe will feature Sara Mearns as Chloe (a shepherdess); I-Ling Liu as Bryaxis (a pirate captain); Christiana Axelsen, Marc Crousillat, Caitlin Scranton, and Carlo Antonio Villanueva as the pirates; Reid Bartelme, Maggie Cloud, and Casey Hess as nymphs; and Cemiyon Barber, Casey Hess, Logan Pedon, Victor Lozano, and Carlo Antonio Villanueva as creatures of Pan.

Hymn to Apollo: The Ancient World and the Ballets Russes
The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) continues to illuminate the rich dialogue between the ancient and the modern with Hymn to Apollo: The Ancient World and the Ballets Russes, an exhibition exploring the seminal role of antiquity in shaping the radically new creations of the famed ballet troupe founded in 1909 by Sergei Diaghilev. The first exhibition to examine this topic, Hymn to Apollo contains around 95 objects, including outstanding examples of ancient pottery, sculpture, metalwork, and more, coupled with costumes, photographs, watercolors, musical scores, digitized films of Ballets Russes productions, and a rich trove of archival material. 

Hymn to Apollo is on view from March 6 through June 2, 2019. It has been organized by ISAW and is co-curated by Clare Fitzgerald, Associate Director of Exhibitions and Gallery Curator, and Rachel Herschman, Curatorial Assistant, both at ISAW. Ballets Russes scholar Lynn Garafola served as an outside advisor. 

PERFORMANCE TICKETS & VENUE
Peter B. Lewis Theater
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue, New York
$45, $40 Guggenheim Members and Friends of Works & Process
Box Office (212) 423-3575 or worksandprocess.org

EXHIBITION HOURS & LOCATION
NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
15 East 84th Street, New York
ISAW’s exhibition galleries are open free of charge: Wednesday-Sunday, 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., until 8:00 p.m. on Fridays. Free guided tours at 6:00 p.m. on Fridays. For additional information, the public can visit www.isaw.nyu.edu.

Lead funding for Works & Process is provided by The Florence Gould Foundation, The Christian Humann Foundation, Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Evelyn Sharp Foundation, with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Reid & Harriet Design
Costume Designers Harriet Jung and Reid Bartelme founded Reid & Harriet Design in the fall of 2011. Prior to meeting at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Reid spent 10 years working as a dancer and Harriet studied visual arts and completed a degree in Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley. They have designed costumes for many dance productions domestically and internationally, including New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève, American Ballet Theatre, and Pam Tanowitz Dance. They have produced their own costume centric dance performances at the Guggenheim and the Museum of Art and Design in New York City.  Reid & Harriet design aim to expand the notions of costume in dance performance and evolve traditional notions on collaboration.
A curious alchemist of theatre interested in transcending boundaries between a variety of art forms, Christopher Williams continues to hone a distinctive style that combines contemporary dance with visual design, music, and puppetry to yield a unique genre of contemporary performance. Preferring to cast each new project specifically rather than maintaining a set company, he assembles a wide variety of performers that juxtapose many body types, ethnicities, genders, and orientations as well as span many ages in order to instill each of his works with an unusual corporeal counterpoint.

Christopher is particularly interested in expanding the scope and meaning of contemporary dance by exploring the potential relationship of mythology, folklore, and historical literature, early and contemporary music, sculptural costume, mask, and a variety of puppetry forms to the gesture of the human body. He notices an intricate harmony between traditionally disparate art forms due to their common potential for movement, and seeks to build polyphonous compositions drawing upon each of their innate properties. In his work, dancers’ bodies can move independently or become bases for prosthetic accoutrement, musical vessels, media through which puppets can rouse, and even magical shapeshifters.

Fascinated by the ways in which the earliest bands of humans ritually engaged with supernatural denizens of otherworlds, Christopher creates works that present his own contemporary queer testimony to an ancient cultural impulse to journey beyond the known realm. By combining his highly technical choreographic vocabulary with vivid visual designs and music integral to each new work, Williams restores a forgotten sense of ritual and spectacle in the interest of immersing a broad public in fantastical new worlds.

Netta Yerushalmy is a dance artist based in New York City. Her work aims to engage with audiences by imparting the sensation of things as they are perceived, not as they are known, and to challenge how meaning is attributed and constructed.

For her choreographic work Netta has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, Jerome Robbins Bogliasco Fellowship, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, National Dance Project Grant, commission from LMCC’s Extended Life program, Six Points Fellowship, and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. She was recently a Research Fellow at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and is currently a Toulmin Fellow for Women Leaders in Dance at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University, as well as a New York City Center Choreography Fellow. Netta will be an Arts Fellow at Princeton University in 2019-2021.

Her work has been commissioned and presented by venues such as Danspace Project, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Joyce Theater, American Dance Festival, HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Wexner Center for the Arts, La Mama, River to River Festival, Center for the Arts/Buffalo, International Dance (Jerusalem), Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Foundation, 62 Center for the Arts/Williamstown, ODC & Bridge Project, Suzanne Dellal Center for Dance (Tel Aviv), Harkness Dance Festival, International Solo Festival (Stuttgart), Roulette. 

Her work has been supported by the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Watermill Center, National Center for Choreography/Akron, Djerassi Arts Program, Movement Research, Gibney’s DiP, Trinity College. 
Netta works across genres and disciplines: she contributed to artist Josiah McElheny’s “Prismatic Park” at Madison Square Park, choreographed a Red Hot Chili Peppers music video, worked with cellist Maya Beiser and composer Julia Wolfe on “Spinning”, and collaborated on evenings of theory and performance at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI Berlin).

As Guest Artist and visiting faculty, Netta has created work with repertory companies and students nationally at the University of the Arts, Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Juilliard School, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Rutgers University, University of Utah, Zenon Dance Company, American Dance Festival, Alvin Ailey School, SUNY Brockport, University of Texas at Austin, James Madison University, Long Island University, UNC Charlotte, Roger Williams University, and Sarah Lawrence College.

As a performer Netta has worked with Pam Tanowitz Dance, Doug Varone and Dancers, Joanna Kotze, Karinne Keithley, Nancy Bannon, Mark Jarecki, the Metropolitan Opera Ballet.
Netta grew up in Galilee, Israel. She received a BFA in Dance from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and has been in New York ever since.

ISAW 
Established in 2006, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University is an independent center for scholarly research and graduate education, intended to cultivate comparative and connective investigations of the ancient world. ISAW encourages approaches that encompass 5 cultures from the western Mediterranean to China, and that cross the traditional boundaries between academic disciplines, promoting methodologies open to the integration of every category of evidence and method of analysis. It also engages the larger scholarly community and the public with an ongoing program of exhibitions, lectures, and publications that reflect its mission and scholarship. Shelby White is the founder of ISAW. Alexander Jones is Leon Levy Director.

Works & Process at the Guggenheim 
Described by The New York Times as “an exceptional opportunity to understand something of the creative process,” for over 34 years and in over 500 productions, New Yorkers have been able to see, hear, and meet the most acclaimed artists in the world, in an intimate setting unlike any other. Works & Process, the performing arts series at the Guggenheim, has championed new works and offered audiences unprecedented access to generations of leading creators and performers. Most performances take place in the Guggenheim’s intimate Frank Lloyd Wright-designed 285-seat Peter B. Lewis Theater. In 2017, Works & Process established a new residency and commissioning program, inviting artists to create new works, made in and for the iconic Guggenheim rotunda. worksandprocess.org.