American Contemporary Ballet’s The Euterpides Puts Classical Art in the Hollywood Spotlight
This June, Los Angeles’ American Contemporary Ballet will fuse Hollywood flash with classical tradition in The Euterpides, a new ballet from ACB director Lincoln Jones and composer Alma Deutscher.
The piece, presented June 5–28 alongside George Balanchine’s Serenade, takes its inspiration from Euterpe, 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 audiences to feel like the dancers “are moving in an infinite space.”
As a child prodigy, Deutscher, now 20, composed her first piano sonata at age 5 and her first full opera at 10. The Euterpides is her first-ever ballet, which she composed remotely from her home in Vienna, Austria. “It’s quite different [than opera],” she says. “I felt a bit freer. I was actually imagining the dancing a lot in my mind.”
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].”
The result, Jones says, is a score that melds old and new. “It has these moments where it somewhat sounds like the 19th century, but then also where it feels like Debussy, and then like a grand 1940s movie musical. But it all just completely gels.”
This was Deutscher’s goal. “I was aiming for a lot of contrast in a short period of time, to enable more visual variety onstage,” she says.
Jones then got to work creating movement that reflected 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.”
The soundstage, he continues, lets him guide what the audience sees using light: “Dancers can disappear into darkness or appear into light. Without the proscenium, it’s much more like experiencing it in your own imagination.”
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.”
