Dancer Sascha Radetsky, composer Tarik O’Regan, and writer/historian Marina Warner are among a group of eight fellows who will be in residence this fall at the Center for Ballet and the Arts (CBA), the first international institute devoted to the creation and study of ballet.

The Fellowship program, entering its third term this fall, supports artists and scholars engaging in projects of a variety of disciplines related to the creation and study of ballet. Previous fellows have included filmmaker Fredrick Wiseman, singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega, and director-choreographer John Carrafa. This fall’s group of fellows also includes scholar Juliet Bellow, author-producer Joseph Horowitz, art critic Jed Perl, choreographer John Selya, and puppeteer Basil Twist.

The CBA at NYU was launched in 2014 by former ballet dancer and prominent historian Jennifer Homans with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In the year since its founding, the CBA has helped to incubate and advance over a dozen ballet-related academic and artistic projects; hosted and sponsored numerous performances and events related to ballet and dance scholarship; and instituted, in cooperation with the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation, a scholarship supporting the work of women choreographers.

“As we near our one year anniversary, we’re quite honestly astonished by the level of interest in our Center’s work and in the talented, energetic, and vibrant community we’ve been able to create in such a short time,” said Dr. Homans. “We see this result as a validation of our core mission to invigorate the art form through interdisciplinary collaboration, and we’re tremendously grateful that so many talented and dedicated people share this goal.”

2015 CBA Fall Fellows

Juliet Bellow is an associate professor in the department of art at American University. Her books include Modernism on Stage: The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde. She also served as a Consulting Scholar for the 2013 exhibition “Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 1909-1929: When Art Danced With Music” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. At CBA her project “Rodin’s Dancers: Moving Toward the Limits of Sculpture,” will center on the role that dance and dancers played in the development of a modernist sculptural aesthetic.

Joseph Horowitz, an American cultural historian and pioneering concert producer, formerly served as Executive Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. His CBA residency will focus on the study of performance tradition in Russian Opera and Ballet with the goal of developing a vocabulary for comparing performance practice in opera and ballet, facilitating cross-disciplinary inquiry into traditional Russian practice.

Tarik O’Regan is a composer for a wide variety of ensembles and organizations including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Sydney Dance Company, Chamber Choir Ireland, and the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. He has received two GRAMMY® nominations and two British Composer Awards. At CBA, O’Regan will work on the orchestral score for Mata Hari, a full-length ballet based on the life of dancer, so-called courtesan and alleged World War I Spy, Margaretha Zell MacLeod.

Jed Perl was the art critic for the New Republic for twenty years, and has written for The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and Vogue, where he was a contributing editor for a decade. His many books include Magicians and Charlatans, Antoine’s Alphabet, Paris Without End, and New Art City, the latter of which was a New York Times Notable Book and an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of the Year in 2005. At CBA, Perl will study how dance inspired the work of American sculptor Alexander Calder.

Sascha Radetsky is a former soloist at the American Ballet Theater, and also served as a principal with the Dutch National Ballet, and as a guest principal with Pacific Northwest Ballet. He has choreographed for Bucknell University, and lectured at UCSB, AMDA College, and the ABT JKO School. Radetsky has written for Vogue.com, Dance Magazine, Dance Spirit, and Newsweek, and he starred in the film Center Stage and in Starz television’s Flesh and Bone. At CBA, he will work on a novel set in the ballet world.

Choreographer John Selya was trained at the School of American Ballet and ultimately joined the American Ballet Theatre, where he performed and choreographed from 1988 to 1999. Selya went on to join Twyla Tharp Dance, and onto Broadway where he earned numerous awards, most notably a Tony® nomination for Best Actor in a Musical for his performance in Tharp’s Movin’ Out. At CBA, Selya will create movement and choreography to be used in the upcoming play, Après Moi, which tells the story of a gifted young dancer and her struggle to ascend in a renowned classical ballet company.

Basil Twist creates iconic, visionary puppetry worlds with a remarkable range of style and scope, appearing in a variety of venues from intimate nightclubs to large orchestra halls. He is the sole American to graduate from the École Supérieure Nationale des Arts de la Marionnette in Charleville-Mezieres, France, one of the world’s premiere puppetry training programs. His goal at CBA is to explore the choreography of inanimate materials and “what makes something a ballet even if it is devoid of human dancers.”

Marina Warner is a writer and historian specializing in mythology and fairy-tales; with an emphasis on the part women play in them. Her award-winning books include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism, From the Beast to the Blonde and No Go the Bogeyman. She also writes fiction: The Lost Father, was short listed for the Booker prize, and in 2000, The Leto Bundle was long-listed. She is professor of English and creative writing at Birkbeck College, University of London, a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a professorial research fellow at SOAS, 2014-2017. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in the humanities in 2015. At CBA, Warner will explore the deep affinity fairy tales enjoy with ballet and, in collaboration with pianist Joanna MacGregor and choreographer Kim Brandstrup, will be creating a new work on the theme of water, taken from eastern and western medieval sources.

The Center for Ballet and the Arts is currently reviewing applications for the spring 2016 Fellowship program, and will be receiving applications for Fall 2016 and Spring 2017 fellowships from September 21 through November 21, 2015. Through the year, the programming at the Center includes many public workshops, lectures and collaborations with arts organizations interested in expanding ballet. For more information on upcoming performances, lectures, and other events, visit the Center for Ballet and the Arts.

###