Female Choreographers Take Center Stage in Ballet Theater’s Fall Season

American Ballet Theater’s Women’s Movement — a recent initiative to support female choreographers, who have often struggled to get their dances staged by major companies — will yield more fruit this fall, when the company will present world premieres of ballets by Twyla Tharp and Gemma Bond and the New York premiere of a Jessica Lang work.

The season, which the company announced Thursday, will open Oct. 16 with a gala featuring the premiere of the new Tharp ballet, which will be set to Brahms’s String Quintet No. 2 in G major, Op. 111. The gala will also feature the New York premiere of Ms. Lang’s “Let Me Sing Forevermore,” a pas de deux set to a medley of songs recorded by Tony Bennett.

The following week the company will give the world premiere of a new work by Ms. Bond, a member of its corps de ballet, which she is setting to Benjamin Britten’s “Suite on English Folk Tunes.” And Ballet Theater will bring back a number of other works by women during the fall season, including Ms. Tharp’s popular “Deuce Coupe,” set to music by the Beach Boys; Ms Lang’s “Garden Blue,” which had its premiere last fall; and Michelle Dorrance’s “Dream within a Dream (deferred),” set to the music of Duke Ellington.

Other highlights include revivals of George Balanchine’s “Apollo” and Clark Tippet’s “Some Assembly Required”; the return of Alexei Ratmansky’s “The Seasons”; and a program celebrating the principal dancer Herman Cornejo’s 20th anniversary with the company. The season will run at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center from Oct. 16 through Oct. 27.

Michael Cooper covers classical music and dance. He was previously a national correspondent; a political reporter covering presidential campaigns; and a metro reporter covering the police, City Hall and Albany. @coopnytimes • Facebook

Source: Read Full Article