Music Center Announces ADES & MCGREGOR: A DANCE COLLABORATION

The Music Center today announced new details regarding Adès & McGregor: A Dance Collaboration, a major partnership between the LA Phil and Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at The Music Center combining the creative talents of Grammy Award-winning composer-conductor Thomas Adès and multi award-winning British choreographer Wayne McGregor (July 12-13, 2019). This exclusive presentation at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion highlights the relationship between music and movement, and also features the work of visual artist Tacita Dean and video installation by designer Ben Cullen Williams. A new work by McGregor incorporates an AI-driven choreographic tool designed by Google Arts & Culture-a technological first for the dance world.

The Royal Ballet and Company Wayne McGregor will dance in Adès & McGregor, an evening featuring two dance world premieres, with performances by the LA Phil under the baton of the composer himself. This will be the first time the LA Phil has performed at the Pavilion since moving to The Music Center's Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2003. The weekend performances will also include special guests violinist Leila Josefowicz and pianist Kirill Gerstein. These special presentations close the Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at The Music Center's 2018/2019 season.

"Given The Music Center's legacy of bringing world-class companies and trailblazing artists to Los Angeles, we're thrilled to welcome phenomenal British creative artists Thomas Adès and Wayne McGregor to our stages," said Rachel Moore, president and CEO of The Music Center. "These in-demand artistic visionaries each create quite a stir for their ground-breaking approaches to art that juxtaposes classical origins with a contemporary vocabulary."

Created in partnership with LA Phil, Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at The Music Center, The Royal Ballet and Company Wayne McGregor, Adès & McGregor: A Dance Collaboration is an extraordinary meld of music and dance world premieres. Composer-conductor Thomas Adès will conduct the LA Phil, "the most significant and successful major orchestra anywhere" (Los Angeles Times), for an evening of the maestro's work. The LA Phil is celebrating their centennial year this season.

The program features two dance world premieres of Wayne McGregor's choreography, including Inferno and a yet-to-be-named second work. Inferno is set to Adès' new score of the same name, which premiered at The Music Center's Walt Disney Concert Hall on May 10, 2019, in a performance by the LA Phil conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. The music was commissioned by LA Phil and The Royal Ballet. The Royal Ballet will debut the dance world premiere of the piece created by McGregor, the Royal's resident choreographer. The Dante Project (Inferno) is an epic journey through the afterlife, inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy. The new work features set and costumes by celebrated visual artist, Tacita Dean, renowned for her pioneering and poetic work across film and multiple mediums. The creative team for this work includes lighting design by Lucy Carter and Simon Bennison and dramaturgy by Uzma Hameed. Inferno is the first act of this new ballet; The Royal Ballet will present the full three-act ballet as a complete work at the Royal Opera House in London in May 2020.

Co-commissioned by The Music Center and LA Phil, McGregor's second new work for this program will be danced by Company Wayne McGregor and choreographed to Adès' In Seven Days, a seven-movement piece for piano and orchestra from 2008. Fascinated in how AI might foster conversations about dance and the potential of choreographing through technology, McGregor is collaborating with the Google Arts & Culture Lab in Paris to develop "Living Archive." The "Living Archive" AI choreographic tool has been trained using hundreds of hours of video dance footage from Wayne's previous work. It then uses machine learning to generate entirely new movements and choreography in his style, creating a new "living" dialogue with his extensive archive. This piece will feature video installations designed by Ben Cullen Williams, who collaborated on the award-winning set and projection design for Company Wayne McGregor's Autobiography (which opened the Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at The Music Center's 2018/2019 season).

The Royal Ballet and Company Wayne McGregor will perform together in the West Coast premiere of McGregor'sOutlier, which was choreographed to Adès' 2005 violin concerto, Concentric Paths. Outlier features Bauhaus-inspired design by McGregor and Lucy Carter (lighting design), and costumes by Moritz Junge. McGregor created Outlier, informed by the minimalist notions of simplicity and color theory, for New York City Ballet's Architecture of Dance Festival in 2010.

Tickets for Adès & McGregor: A Dance Collaboration performances at The Music Center start at $34 and are available online at https://www.musiccenter.org/adesmcgregor; at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Box Office, 135 N. Grand Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90012; or by calling (213) 972-0711. For groups of 10 or more, call (213) 972-8555 or emailmcgroupsales@musiccenter.org.

The Royal Ballet also performs at The Music Center's Dorothy Chandler Pavilion the weekend prior, July 5-7, 2019, with their signature work Mayerling, a three act-work depicting scandal and murder in the 19th century Austro-Hungarian Empire. Tickets for Mayerling performances at The Music Center start at $34 and are available online at https://www.musiccenter.org/mayerling; at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Box Office, 135 N. Grand Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90012; or by calling (213) 972-0711. For groups of 10 or more, call (213) 972-8555 or email mcgroupsales@musiccenter.org.

Company Wayne McGregor photo by Ravi Deepres