The Atlanta Ballet’s Choreographer-in-Residence Claudia Schreier is premiering a new ballet in the company’s “Liquid Motion” spring program running May 10-12.
Schreier’s work is called “Nighthawks” and is set to “The Jungle (Symphony No. 4) by the Grammy award winning jazz musician Wynton Marsalis. According to a press release, the ballet takes audience members “on a journey through musicality and inventive movement that reflects the complexities and fast pace of modern city life.”
The ballet features costumes by Abigail Dupree-Polston and a collaboration with local artist Charity Hamidullah. For the show, Hamidullah created 12 pieces of art for the show that were then photographed and reconstructed into costumes for the dancers. Hamidullah also worked on the set design that will be featured in the ballet.
Schreier has been working as the Atlanta Ballet’s choreographer-in-residence since 2020 and recently renewed her contract with the company for another three years. Ahead of the show, Rough Draft Atlanta spoke with Schreier about her work in ballet and the new production.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you come to ballet? Did you always know you wanted to work in dance?
Claudia Schreier: I started dancing at a young age. My parents put me in creative movement when I was three years old, living in New York City, and it kind of developed from there. I’ve studied classical ballet pretty much my whole life, through college, essentially.
Concurrently, at age eight or nine, I started having a desire to create movement. I didn’t really understand, I think, that early on what choreography would entail … especially that I could make a career out of it. But I had little opportunities here and there to either make a solo myself or make a little duet for a small school project. When I got to college, there were a number of opportunities to create [for] the student-run companies in the dance department there. Soit became this really welcoming and fertile environment in which to expand ideas, and it all developed from there.
By the time I had graduated, I started working full time and was taking on lots of opportunities on the side, kind of making it a side passion, and then discovered I could actually make it a career, which was obviously a dream come true.
You’ve been the choreographer in residence with Atlanta Ballet since 2020. I’m sure people ask you all the time about the pandemic aspect of that, and how that played into your experience was like for those first three years. You can get into that as well, but I wondered what has made Atlanta Ballet unique over that time, and what has drawn you to the company?
Schreier: I became choreographer-in-residence in 2020, but my first work for the company was in 2019. I started working with them in August of 2019, it premiered in September. So fortunately, I had a very “normal” first creative experience with the company before embarking on this pandemic journey together that we all experienced one way or another. That was a way to familiarize myself with the dancers, with the administration, with the production team, and kind of experience what [Atlanta Ballet] would be like in what you would call a normal capacity.
When I was invited to take on the role, for me it was an immediate yes. It was a no brainer because I had had such a positive experience with Atlanta Ballet from the get go. I felt like they were so welcoming, so responsive. They really embraced everything that I was trying to do with the work from day one, and I never felt anything other than support in bringing it to the stage.
What the pandemic did was really solidify for me just how dedicated and team-focused the company is, because it was such a trying time for so many reasons – most of which I don’t need to go into. But the specifics of creating a work remotely and safely required so much focus and attention and planning, pre-planning and all of that, that isn’t necessarily reflected step-to-step in the work, but that I am acutely aware of and can recall vividly in terms of what was implemented in order to keep the dancers safe and also put forth a product, a performance, that we were all proud of and that would have longevity beyond the pandemic.
I created a ballet called “Pleiades Dances” that I knew I wanted to exist and have a life outside of the pandemic. I would want audiences to look at it and not know that it was created during pandemic times, even though most dancers couldn’t touch each other. We had one principal couple that did a duet because they’re married, so they were allowed to be in the same room and touch, but with the exception of that, everything … took eight times as long to put together. But the camaraderie and the patience was there.
Going on to “Nighthawks,” the work that you choreographed for “Liquid Motion” – when did work on this particular piece begin?
Schreier: This one I started in fall of last year. So very end of summer into October, I created the majority of the first movement and about half the second movement. And I came back three weeks ago to complete the work.
The work is set to music by Wynton Marsalis. I’m a little on the outside of the ballet world, but that’s not the type of music I necessarily think about when I think of ballets. How did working from that music inform the choreography for you?
Schreier: I’ll start by saying Gennadi [Nedvigin, artistic director of the Atlanta Ballet] set out intentionally to present a jazz work, or a work set to jazz music. So the movement that is born out of that is directly in response to what I’m hearing in the music. A lot of it is specifically jazz inspired … there are so many textures and colors and patterns and rhythms. It vacillates quite quickly in such a way that it’s very fun for me to play with, because there’s just a large playground.
In terms of working with Wynton’s music specifically, I was very lucky to be able to work directly with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra starting back in 2017, and again in 2018 for the premiere of “SPACES,” which is a Wynton composition that was premiered in conjunction with this dance performance that was extremely cross-genre. It had Memphis jooker [a type of street dancer] Charles Riley, known as Lil Buck, and Jared Grimes. There was jookin’, there was tap – I mean, you name it.
My role in that capacity was choreographic assistant and rehearsal assistant, and so we had these extraordinary improvisational artists who were able to take that, harness it and then structure it and codify it within the context of this performance. We created a full evening work that premiered at Lincoln Center, first in New York, and then I took it on tour with them to California, we went to Hollywood Bowl and all over. That was just such a gratifying experience. You’re there in the room, working with Wynton directly, working with the conductors and musicians directly, and giving specific notes and reading through the sheet music, and kind of breaking things down into pieces. I just fell in love with his work in particular, but just also .being surrounded by that genre, because it’s not something that I grew up with. Like I said, I grew up with classical ballet. I have since very much expanded my repertoire, in terms of the type of music I work with and also my choreographic style, so I wouldn’t say that I’m a ballet choreographer at this point. I would say, I’m a choreographer and I work in a lot of different styles. So this felt like an opportunity to branch out and really create something that still feels very much me – everything that’s coming out feels extremely natural and organic to my body – but it’s in such a different context.
I was going to ask you if you think you have a signature style of choreographing. I guess the answer is no?
Schreier: I don’t want to sound like a broken record year after year, but everything to me always comes back to music. I really enjoy exploring new ways of moving through the conduit of music. So a lot of the time … the way in which I will move is in response to the music that I’m internalizing. I’ve found that’s a way in which my choreographic language develops. If I were to look back, I could not have anticipated what this work was going to turn into without having lived inside the music the way that I did for weeks on end, because it is, again, in response to it.
I mean, I still very much have a ballet background. There are elements of classical ballet and general contemporary ballet that are inherent to the work that I’m sure are throughlines in a lot of my work, and seen there. But we kind of turn them on their head and play with them in different ways now, which is just kind of fun.
You brought up collaboration earlier. There’s a lot of talk about collaboration surrounding this piece, with the muralist Charity Hamidullah and costume designer Abigail Dupree-Polston. Could you talk about what that work and collaboration has been like?
Schreier: This has been very exciting, particularly because Charity is so ingrained in the Atlanta arts community. Her ethos is so much a part of what we want to celebrate about Atlanta, which is a strong, feminine artistic voice, speaking to the joys and the ills of society and the importance of fostering community throughout all of that. Her work, it’s vibrant, it’s alive – it sings. Abby and I saw that immediately when we were seeking an artist. We knew that we wanted to bring in a third voice. Abby and I collaborate quite a bit on our works. This ballet is, in many ways, an homage to urban life and community, and the contrast between individuality and community, particularly in the context of what makes Atlanta so vibrant and forward moving.