Magloire's New Chamber Ballet Takes The Stage At Mark Morris Center, April 14-15

Miro Magloire's New Chamber Ballet returns to the Mark Morris Dance Center with two world premieres and repertory works, April 14 & 15 at 7:30 PM.

As always, Magloire, who started his career as a composer, can be looked to for especially interesting and bold music choices. His two premieres are set to music by Wong Foo Jeng and Elizabeth Gartman, and repertory works are danced to Mozart and Friedrich Cerha.

A new ballet (as yet untitled) has music by composer/pianist Wong Foo Jeng and is created in collaboration with the Manhattan School of Music. Every year, Magloire chooses one of the School's advanced composition students to write a work for New Chamber Ballet. The native of Malaysia is also first prize winner of the El Paso Original Music/New Ideas Competition, and was a finalist for The American Prize in Composition.

His work has been presented at the St. Petersburg New Music Festival, Sao Paulo Contemporary Composers Festival, Kuala Lumpur P.A. Center, Borneo Jazz Festival, and more. Wong is the artistic director of BeComEnsemble, a NYC-based contemporary music ensemble.

For the evening's second premiere, Magloire continues his relationship with composer Elizabeth Gartman who was the first student, in 2021, at Manhattan School of Music to be chosen to write a score for New Chamber Ballet. The new ballet, set to her Vox for violin and piano, is an excerpt of a full-length work to be premiered by New Chamber Ballet in November 2023. Gartman, a trained vocalist as well as composer, is exploring parallels between singing and dancing. The excerpt presented in April is a series of musical miniatures that represent each of the company's dancers and their relationship to their own voices.

Gartman's music has been commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects, Pax Duo, the NYC Virtuoso Singers, and more, and has been presented at numerous venues and festival. Elizabeth holds degrees from the Manhattan School of Music (M.M. in Composition, 2021) and the U of Illinois (B.M. in Composition and Vocal Performance, 2019).

"Amity," premiered in 2017 and set to the Mozart Violin Sonata in C Major K.296, was commissioned by Edward Petrou in loving memory of his wife, Rachel Petrou. A quartet of dancers weave and unweave in kaleidoscopic formations in a ballet that ranges from solemnly slow to lightning fast.

"Gravity" is a trio to music for solo violin by Austrian composer Friedrich Cerha, who died earlier this month at the age of 96, and was created in 2016 as a tribute for Cherha's 90th birthday. Reviewing in 2017, Mary Cargill noted that "Magloire, a trained musician, has an impressive way of finding physical ways through the notes." About the trio, she remarked: "It was an abstract universe, but (the dancers) wary, careful moves and their intense gaze gave them a human warmth." (danceviewtimes, Feb. 2017).