Chamber Dance Project’s Summer Season Features the DC Premiere of Red Angels

In November 1997, Diane Coburn Bruning was at the world premiere of her Symphony of Psalms at Pacific Northwest Ballet when she noticed something: Members of the audience in the far seats were watching her piece through opera glasses.

“It really bothered me,” says Bruning. “I didn’t want my work, or other people’s work, to be seen so far away.”

Bruning, who at the time worked as a freelance choreographer based in New York City, began to think about intimate theater settings. She’d also been considering the lack of live music in productions across the country, as well as how dancers often had to spend their summer layoffs on unemployment. “There was a waste of talent all summer,” she says.

In 2000, she came up with her own solution to those issues by founding Chamber Dance Project, a small contemporary ballet company that performs to live music in intimate spaces, focuses on new works, and employs dancers during common layoff periods. Now based in Washington, DC, the 10-member company is gearing up for its 2025 summer season, which runs June 25–27 at Harman Hall. The program includes the DC premiere of Ulysses Dove’s Red Angels, a world premiere by Jorge Amarante, an excerpt from Christian Denice’s Dwellings, and Bruning’s company staples Prufrock and Songs by Cole. PNB artistic director Peter Boal—who is a friend of Bruning’s and, when he was a principal at New York City Ballet, was in the cast of Red Angels’ 1994 world premiere—is setting Dove’s classic piece on the CDP dancers.

Pointe spoke with Bruning to learn more about the company’s upcoming summer season, working with Boal, and where she sees CDP going next.

It’s a big deal for a company the size of CDP to present the DC premiere of Red Angels. What went into the decision of adding it to your repertoire?

I went to the world premiere at New York City Ballet and loved it—Dove’s verve. Red Angels is grounded in classicism, but it pushes that edge without losing its soul. We were financially stable enough to do it this year, and I wanted to bring in work that the dancers would love doing, and that would push them. We have Red Angels for five years now.

How did Peter Boal get involved?

I had a relationship with Peter from choreographing on him years ago for CDP; Peter was in his last few years at NYCB, and he called me and said he’d love to guest with us. I made two works on him, in 2001 and 2002: one was a duet (Journey, with Lisa Tachick) that still is being done a lot, and the other was a male duet with a principal from Atlanta Ballet, John Welker. Peter is a prince to work with, and I thought, I want that for my dancers, too.

What went into the creation of the rest of the program?

Music is always our stake in the ground. Every performance has our string quartet, and then guest musicians. Prufrock is a work I did with a theater designer, Matt Torney, using the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T.S. Eliot. It has actually, I think, been one of my signature works. Matt is coming from Atlanta to recite the poem live; it has a commissioned electronic score by James Bigbee Garver under it.

On the lighter side, we’re bringing back Songs by Cole, set to music by Cole Porter. The most popular vignette is the cowboy one, “Don’t Fence Me In.” It always brings down the house because at the end, they have a squirt-gun fight. One of my joys is making something witty that people really guffaw at.

Jorge Amarante was the first choreographer I commissioned here in DC. His first piece was to Astor Piazzolla. After seeing that ballet again last season I wanted to start new with him on another Argentinian tango work. We applied for a visa for him long ago, but we have not gotten it. So we had to salvage something from our original idea. He was planning a duet in the middle, so we created that over Zoom (it felt like the pandemic!) in place of the bigger work. We’re also now bringing back a movement from Christian Denice’s Dwellings.

The string quartet will also play the DC premiere of Charlton Singleton’s Testimony, without dancers.

We always have our quartet do something alone. We’re using Testimony for a commission for January. It’s beautiful music based on Singleton’s experience being raised in the church with his father, who was a minister, and the Gullah culture. So the audiences will hear it first, and then we’ll have it in a program in the fall with choreography.

What do you hope for CDP going forward?

Touring more. There are so many medium-sized cities with no ballet companies, and what we bring is not just high-level dancers, but musicians and interesting contemporary rep.

And continue to commission boldly. We’re a little more established ourselves, so I can go after more established choreographers. I want to continue to reach out into the now and really engage with powerful voices of our time.