INTERVIEW: Choreographer Houston Thomas is Creating a New Kind of Neoclassical Ballet
Rising choreographer Houston Thomas infuses neoclassical tradition with emotional insight. The result is quietly revelatory.
Chicago-born choreographer Houston Thomas isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel. That wheel has already been reinvented by the 20th-century neoclassical choreographers whose techniques he spent decades emulating—first as a student at the Joffrey and the School of American Ballet and then as a dancer with the Semperoper Ballet in Dresden.
Less than a decade into his career, Thomas has created new works for The Washington Ballet, ABT Studio Company, and Complexions. Rather than rejecting the styles he’s inherited, he collages them, showing off the same wheel from new angles. Balanchine’s fast-paced, long-limbed athleticism collides with Fosse’s meticulous hip isolations; Fosse’s shoulder-shrugging sensuality is layered on top of Forsythe’s off-kilter aesthetic. Like both Forsythe and Balanchine, Thomas revises classical steps to make the familiar foreign—adding a forced arch to a piqué, tilting a developpé sideways—and stretches lines only to break them.
Yet while these choreographic greats attend to the external—to molding and manipulating the human body to forge a new kind of dancing—Thomas looks inward. What distinguishes his choreography is its focus on interiority, on translating intimate emotions to movement and confronting what resists physical expression. U Don’t Know Me has all the sharp edges of any Balanchine ballet paired with moments of quiet vulnerability. Another standout work, A Dancer’s Prayer, centers the performer’s internal experience—their fears, their aspirations—rather than their physical virtuosity alone.
Thomas is part of a new generation of choreographers who seek not to impose their aesthetic onto dancers but to develop a distinct movement idiom in collaboration with each ensemble. “Every creation process is specific to those people, ” Thomas said. “They bring themselves into it, which I hope…allows them to feel responsible and have some type of connection to the work.” The result is a new kind of neoclassical ballet that is not self-congratulatory but quietly revelatory.
A Land, A Promise, Thomas’s latest work for Nimbus Dance in Jersey City, turns this inward-looking, collaborative approach toward urgent political questions. One of four contemporary works in the company’s spring program on May 15-16, “Sum of Parts," the piece responds to contemporary debates around immigration and the dehumanization of migrant populations. “I think that this is the first time that I'm actually saying something somewhat political,” Thomas reflected, marking a shift from abstract emotional concerns toward a more socially responsive form of dance making.
Yet Thomas isn’t trying to advance a singular political vision. Much like the immigrant community Thomas seeks to represent, the dance is polyphonic. It’s set to choral music by the renowned Filipino-Chinese composer Saunder Choi and performed live by the 70-member West Village Chorale. It takes inspiration from Emma Lazarus’s 1883 poem “The New Colossus,” whose invitation to shelter the “huddled masses” has long served as a beacon of hope to immigrants arriving in America. But it puts Lazarus’s sonnet in conversation with poems carved into the walls of an Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay—poems written by Chinese immigrants held for months and sometimes years under degraded conditions in the early 20th century.
In this sense, the dance is less about making a statement and more about, in Thomas’s words, striving “ to somewhat understand what people who are coming to this country, like many of our ancestors did, what that feeling may be, and trying to figure out what that means in such a heated moment in our political system.” His earlier works translated private experience into movement; A Land, A Promise pushes that inquiry outward, tying personal feeling to shared history and political life.
If this shift is any indication, it’s clear that Thomas won’t remain stagnant. His next ballet, Echoes in the Dark, will premiere with Karlruhe’s Staatsballett in June, and he’s already at work creating a new Firebird with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Unlike his predecessors, Thomas is not interested in a sudden rupture followed by the steady reinforcement of a dominating aesthetic. His evolution is one of expansive, curious exploration; his practice is one of conversation, reflection, and revision.
“I'm willing to take more risks with my voice and the things that I want to say,” Thomas said. I, for one, am keen to listen.
A Land, A Promise will be performed in Nimbus Dance's spring program on May 15th and 16th at the Nimbus Arts Center at 329 Warren Street, Jersey City, New Jersey. Tickets are available for purchase at this link. It will also be performed on May 17th at Judson Memorial Church at 55 Washington Square South, New York, New York. Tickets will be available at the door, and you can learn more about the performance at this link.
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