TRIFECTA

JORMA ELO is one of the most sought-after choreographers in the world. He has created works for companies including American Ballet Theatre, San Francisco Ballet, New York City Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet, Royal Danish Ballet, Royal Ballet of Flanders, Vienna State Opera Ballet, Stuttgart Ballet, Netherlands Dance Theater, Finnish National Ballet, and Boston Ballet, among others. Elo trained with the Finnish National Ballet School and the Kirov Ballet School in Leningrad. He danced with Finnish National Ballet and Cullberg Ballet until joining Netherlands Dance Theater in 1990, where he enjoyed a 15 year career.

Elo was appointed Resident Choreographer of Boston Ballet in 2005, and has been awarded the Benois de la Danse prize for best choreography in 2010, for his production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, commissioned by Vienna State Opera Ballet, and Slice to Sharp for the Stanislavsky Music Theatre.

In 2012, the Finnish Government awarded Elo the Dance Artist Prize. Elo has also been awarded the Choreography prize in the 2005 Helsinki International Ballet Competition, and he was the recipient of the Prince Charitable Trust Prize and the Choo-San Goh Choreographic Award in 2006. He was nominated for a 2008 Isadora Duncan Dance Award. Elo has been featured in Esquire, Dance, and Pointe magazines. Elo was awarded the 2015 Pro Finlandia Medal of the Order of the Lion of Finland, one of Finland’s highest honors.

In December 2018 I was the first female to be appointed resident choreographer of Louisville Ballet in Louisville, Kentucky. I have created four original works for the company, three of which were staged in collaboration with the Louisville Orchestra. I am thrilled to announce that my new choreography for the quintessential American ballet, Appalachian Spring, performed with the Louisville Orchestra in February 2019, is scheduled to go to Carnegie Hall, New York, in February 2021.

I was trained in South Africa and studied ballet and contemporary on scholarship at the Rambert Ballet School and Royal Ballet School in London, England. A professional dance career that included a number of years at Boston Ballet and the Nederlands Dans Theater ended abruptly due to injury.

Then my enduring love of choreography, which began as a child, was given rein to flourish with the support of schools and companies throughout the USA, in New Zealand, and in the country of my birth, South Africa.

I have since been awarded the ‘Outstanding Choreographer’ award at Youth America Grand Prix three times. I have created original works for Louisville Ballet, Kansas City Ballet, Royal New Zealand Ballet, Cincinnati Ballet, Grand Rapids Ballet, Festival Ballet Theatre, Columbia Ballet Collaborative, Ballet Theatre Afrikan, Cape Dance Company, Ballet Met, Santa Barbara Dance Theatre, State Street Ballet, Barak Ballet, The Joffrey Ballet Concert Group, and more. Other works include The Ashley Bouder Project, Bunheads television series, the movie Beautiful Now, Justin Beiber music video, and the Budweiser Superbowl television commercial, Star Trek Into Darkness.

It has also been my great pleasure and honor to work with some of the world’s best international ballet stars, who have either commissioned original solo works or danced in original pieces for gala events. They include, Ana Sophia Scheller (NYCB), Nicolai Gorodiski (PB), Chase Finlay (NYCB), Lauren Lovette (NYCB), Sara Mearns (NYCB), Adiarys Almeida, Maria Kochetkova (SFB), and Joaquin De Luz (formerly NYCB) now director of the Spanish National Dance Company.

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1947, Jiří Kylián started his dance career at the age of nine, at the School of the National Ballet in Prague. In 1962 he was accepted as a student at the Prague Conservatory. He left Prague when he received a scholarship for the Royal Ballet School in London in 1967. After this, he left to join the Stuttgart Ballet led by John Cranko. Kylián made his debut as a choreographer here with Paradox for the Noverre Gesellschaft. After having made three ballets for Nederlands Dans Theater, Viewers, Stoolgame and La Cathédrale Engloutie, he became artistic director of the company in 1975. In 1978 he put Nederlands Dans Theater on the international map with Sinfonietta. That same year, together with Carel Birnie, he founded Nederlands Dans Theater II, which served as a bridge between school and professional company life and was meant to give young dancers the opportunity to develop their skills and talents and to function as a breeding ground for young talent. He also initiated Nederlands Dans Theater III in 1991, the company for older dancers, above forty years of age. This three dimensional structure was unique in the world of dance. After an extraordinary record of service, Kylián handed over the artistic leadership in 1999, but remained associated to the dance company as house choreographer until December 2009. Jiří Kylián has created nearly 100 works of which many are performed all over the world. Kylián has not only made works for Nederlands Dans Theater, but also for the Stuttgart Ballet, the Paris Opéra Ballet, Bayerisches Staatsoper Münich, Swedish television, and the Tokyo Ballet.

Kylián has worked with many creative personalities of international stature, including composers Arne Nordheim (Ariadne, 1997) and Toru Takemitsu (Dream Time, 1983) and designers Walter Nobbe (Sinfonietta, 1978); Bill Katz (Symphony of Psalms, 1978); John Macfarlane (Forgotten Land, 1980); Michael Simon (Stepping Stones, 1991); Atsushi Kitagawara (One of a Kind, 1998); Susumu Shingu (Toss of a Dice, 2005); and Yoshiki Hishinuma (Zugvögel, 2009).

In the Summer of 2006, together with Film Art Director, Boris Paval Conen, he created the film Car-Men. It was choreographed “on location” on the surface brown coal mines of the Czech Republic. In 2010, Kylián served as Mentor in Dance in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. In 2013, together with NTR, he created the film Between Entrance and Exit which was nominated as one of the contestants for the ‘Gouden Kalf’ award during the Dutch Film Festival 2013 in Utrecht. For the Aichi Trienalle in Nagoya, Japan, he created the full-evening dance/film production, East Shadow which was dedicated to the victims of the Tsunami in Japan in 2011.

Over the course of his career, Kylián received many international awards including Officer of the Orange Order (Netherlands), Honorary Doctorate from The Juilliard School (New York), three Nijinsky Awards for best choreographer, company, and work (Monte Carlo), Benois de la Danse (Moscow and Berlin), Honorary Medal of the President of the Czech Republic, and Commander of the Legion d’honneur (France). In 2008 he was distinguished with one of the highest royal honors, the Medal of the Order of the House of Orange given to him by Her Majesty the Queen Beatrix from the Netherlands. In 2011, Kylián received the Lifetime Achievement Award in the field of dance and theater by the Czech Ministry of Culture in Prague.