ABT’s Melvin Lawovi Is Entering His Choreographer Era
Melvin Lawovi’s first experience as a professional choreographer was highly unusual. While working in a quarantine pod during the COVID pandemic, Lawovi, then still a newbie dancer at American Ballet Theatre, found himself creating for ABT Incubator (the company’s choreographic workshop) next to one of his idols: Alexei Ratmansky.
“It was so intimidating, because he was literally next door,” Lawovi tells Pointe, recalling how the two shared a studio with only a foldable wall separating them. “His music would play, and I would worry that my music was too loud for him.”
But the setup was also inspiring. After rehearsing his own piece, Lawovi would pop over to watch Ratmansky in action.
“He was so detail-oriented,” Lawovi says. “What I grasped was the efficiency, and how communication with the dancers is so important.”
Lawovi, 26, has since gained quite a few more choreographer credits, including a commission for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School (in partnership with MoBBallet’s Pathways to Performance program, where he has been mentored by dance luminaries such as Theresa Ruth Howard, Jennifer Archibald, and Donald Byrd); three ABT Incubator pieces; and Italian Symphony, for ABT’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School—an excerpt of which was performed at Youth America Grand Prix this spring and was revived at the ABTKids program this fall.
Now, he’s creating his first ballet for ABT Studio Company, Fête Galante, which premieres on November 5 during the company’s fall tour.
The commission “has been long overdue,” ABT Studio Company artistic director Sascha Radetsky told Pointe during a rehearsal for the piece in early October. “Coming off of his great success with the [JKO] school, I was like, ‘Why aren’t we stealing him for Studio? Let’s make it happen now.”
It’s also a return to familiar territory for Lawovi, who launched his ballet career with the Studio Company and has always had an urge to make dances. Growing up in Toulouse, France, Lawovi says he loved “creating worlds”; he would invent works on his family’s patio—pretending dancers occupied the square tiles on the floor, with the leaves in the bushes as his audience. After competing at YAGP in Barcelona, he was offered a contract with ABT Studio Company when he was 17, joining ABT as an apprentice in 2019 and becoming a member of the corps in 2021.
But balancing his choreographic ambitions with the demands of a full-time dancer’s schedule is no easy feat. This fall, Lawovi has been spending Mondays (his only day off from ABT) in rehearsals for the Studio Company piece. With his dancing commitments in between, Lawovi often doesn’t get to work again with the Studio Company until the following Monday. But the disjointed schedule has taught him flexibility.
“Normally, I overanalyze everything. This one has been a completely different process,” Lawovi says of the ABT Studio piece. “I have some videos I look at, and then I touch base with [the choreography] the following week. I just give myself room to breathe, and to not change everything right away.”
On that particularly busy rehearsal day in early October, Lawovi was constructing the skeleton of the roughly 13-minute Fête Galante with dancers in a studio at 890 Broadway. The music, by French composer Francis Poulenc, is also used in Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Biches—though Lawovi’s ballet depicts more innocent, youthful courtship. The choreography is sweet and pure, with one of the piece’s three couples rehearsing a playful peck on the cheek. It feels appropriate for the ballet’s young cast, but Lawovi also says joyful dancing is what he’s most interested in creating right now. And in today’s fraught political and social climate, that can feel novel.
“In a world of angsty, sort of overwrought choreography, Melvin’s work is very classical without being anachronistic,” Radetsky observes. “It’s still fresh, and very joyful. It’s just unapologetically earnest.”
Lawovi’s projects so far have been for schools and junior companies, but he dreams of creating longer works for professional companies—particularly ballets that shine a bigger spotlight on his fellow corps de ballet dancers.
“Literally every single one of these ladies could be a soloist or principal somewhere else,” Lawovi says of the corps. “I would love one day to choreograph on ABT and maybe create a ballet that is able to showcase them as much as Swan Lake.”
But, at 26, Lawovi says his dance career is also still a priority, and that his experiences as a choreographer have informed his own dancing, too. Not only has he learned to observe more, he approaches rehearsals differently—even when someone else is in charge.
“Regardless of who is in front of the room, I now enter it in a way that is more ‘Okay, how do I improve?’, and it’s okay to mess up,” Lawovi says. “I’m not coming here just to be perfect. I’m coming here to work on it.”
