Cast

Wolftanzt
 
Anne Marie Melendez
 
Aara Krumpe/Frank Shott
 
Rebecca Johnson/Christopher Swaim
 
Elise Pekarek, Oren Porterfield , Chelsea Marie Renner, Brittany Strickland, Michelle Thompson
 
Ian J. Bethany, Michael Burfield, Orlando Julius Canova, Jordan Moser, Preston Andrew Patterson
 
 
Though the Earth Gives Way
 
Ashley Lynn Gilfix, Anne Marie Melendez

Paul Michael Bloodgood, Orlando Julius Canova, Edward Carr, James Fuller
 
 
Echo Boom
 
Beth Terwilleger, Michelle Thompson, Kirby Wallis, Jaime Lynn Witts

Paul Michael Bloodgood, Michael Burfield, Edward Carr, Frank Shott, Christopher Swaim

• Credits >>

Credits

Wolftanzt
 
Choreography by Stephen Mills
Music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart(Piano Concerto No. 12 in A Major, K.414)
Musical accompaniment by Dr. Michelle Schumann and the Austin Chamber Music Center
Costume Design by Stephen Mills and Alexey Korygin
Lighting Design by Toni Tucci
 
 
Though the Earth Gives Way
 
Choreography by Stephen Mills
Music by Graham Reynolds
Musical accompaniment by Leah Zeger (electrified violin), Jonathan Dexter (electrified cello)
Costume Design by Stephen Mills and Alexey Korygin
Scenic Design by Michael Raiford
Lighting Design by Toni Tucci
 
 
Echo Boom
 
Choreography by Stephen Mills
Music by Paul Miller (after Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik)
Musical accompaniment by Paul Miller and Austin Chamber Music Center
Costume Design by Stephen Mills and Alexey Korygin
Film Design by Paul Miller
Lighting Design by Toni Tucci

• Artist Profiles >>

Artist Profiles

Stephen Mills
In his inaugural season as Artistic Director at Ballet Austin, Mills attracted attention from around the United States with his world-premiere production of Hamlet, hailed in Dance Magazine as “...sleek and sophisticated.” The Washington Post recognized Ballet Austin as “one of the nations’ best-kept secrets” in 2004 after Ballet Austin performed The Taming of the Shrew, which was commissioned by and performed at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. He led the Company to perform his A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2002 at the Kennedy Center, and his work has been showcased in New York at the choreographic showcase, Ballet Builders, and at the Joyce Theater. In 1998, he was the only American choreographer chosen to present his work, Ashes, at the Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis in Paris. Most recently, Mills was awarded the Steinberg Award, the top honor at the Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur International Choreographic Competition, for One/The Body’s Grace.

Mills has created more than 40 works for companies in the United States and abroad. His ballets are in the repertories of such companies as The Hong Kong Ballet, American Ballet Theatre Studio Company, The Atlanta Ballet, Washington Ballet, Cuballet in Havana, Cuba, BalletMet Columbus, The Dayton Ballet, The Sarasota Ballet of Florida, Ballet Pacifica, Dallas Black Dance Theater, The Louisville Ballet, The Nashville Ballet, Fort Worth/Dallas Ballet and Kaleidoscope. He has worked in collaboration with such luminaries as the eight-time Grammy Award-winning band, Asleep at the Wheel, Shawn Colvin, and internationally renowned flamenco artist José Greco II.


Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 – 1791)
Mozart was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical Era. He composed over 600 seminal works and is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers. Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood in Salzburg. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty. At 17, he was engaged as a court musician in Salzburg but grew restless and travelled in search of a better position, always composing abundantly. While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in the capital, where he achieved fame but little financial security. During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions of the Requiem, which was largely unfinished at the time of Mozart's death. The circumstances of his early death have been much mythologized. He was survived by his wife Constanze and two sons.

Mozart learned voraciously from others and developed a brilliance and maturity of style that encompassed the light and graceful along with the dark and passionate. His influence on subsequent Western art and music is profound. Beethoven wrote his own early compositions in the shadow of Mozart, of whom Joseph Haydn wrote that "posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years.”


Graham Reynolds
Austin, Texas-based composer-bandleader Graham Reynolds creates, performs, and records music for film, theater, dance, rock clubs, and concert halls with collaborators ranging from Richard Linklater to DJ Spooky to the Austin Symphony Orchestra. As bandleader of the jazz-based but far-reaching Golden Arm Trio, Reynolds has repeatedly toured the country and released three critically acclaimed albums. As Co-Artistic Director of Golden Hornet Project with Peter Stopschinski, Reynolds has produced more than 50 concerts of world-premier alt-classical music by more than sixty composers, as well as five symphonies, two concertos, and countless chamber pieces of his own. Reynolds’ music has been heard throughout the world on television, on stage, in films, and on the radio, from HBO to Showtime, the Cannes Film Festival to the Kennedy Center, and BBC to NPR. His score to the 2006 Robert Downey, Jr. film A Scanner Darkly was named Best Soundtrack of the Decade by Cinema Retro magazine. His awards include the Lowe Music Theater Award, five Austin Critics' Table Awards, the John Bustin Award, an AMP Award, five Austin Chronicle Best Composer wins, a B. Iden Payne Award, Meet the Composer and Map grants, as well as support from the National Endowment for the Arts for several projects.


Michelle Schumann
Austin, Texas-based pianist Michelle Schumann is the Artistic Director of the Austin Chamber Music Center and winner of the 2006 Janice K. Hodges Competition for Contemporary Music. Schumann’s performance of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, conducted by Peter Bay of the Austin Symphony, was named the #1 Classical Arts Event of 2008 by the Austin Chronicle. Additional accolades include the 2009 award for Best Instrumentalist and the 2006, 2007, and 2008 awards for Best Chamber Music Performance given by the Austin Critics’ Table. Schumann has also been a featured performer at international festivals and has helped to lead an array of projects, including designing and performing the music for Ballet Austin’s Truth and Beauty / The Bach Project, which featured solo piano music by J.S. Bach and Philip Glass and was later aired on the lauded PBS-KLRU program IN CONTEXT. In 2010, Schumann served as music director, conductor, and pianist for Michael Nyman’s chamber opera The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, in collaboration with the Austin Lyric Opera during the Austin Chamber Music Festival. Schumann is Artist-in-Residence and Associate Professor of Piano at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, where she is the founder and Artistic Director of the Hillman Visiting Artists Series. She received a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from The University of Texas at Austin and additionally holds a Young Artist Diploma from the Cleveland Institute of Music and a Performance Diploma from the Vienna Conservatory.


Paul D. Miller /DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid
Paul D. Miller is a composer, multimedia artist, and writer. His written work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Source, Artforum, and The Wire, among other publications. Miller's work as a media artist has appeared in a wide variety of contexts, such as the Whitney Biennial; the Venice Biennial for Architecture (2000); the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany; Kunsthalle, Vienna; The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and many other museums and galleries. His work New York Is Now has been exhibited in the Africa Pavilion of the 52nd Venice Biennial (2007) and the Art Basel Miami Beach fair (2007). Miller's first collection of essays, Rhythm Science, came out on MIT Press in 2004. His book Sound Unbound, an anthology of writings on electronic music and digital media, was recently released by MIT Press. Miller's deep interest in reggae and dub has resulted in a series of compilations, remixes, and collections of material from the vaults of the legendary Jamaican label, Trojan Records.

DJ Spooky's Rebirth of a Nation was commissioned in 2004 by the Lincoln Center Festival; Spoleto Festival USA; Weiner Festwochen; and the Festival d'Automne à Paris. It was his first large-scale multimedia performance piece and has been performed in venues around the world. His multimedia performance piece Terra Nova: Sinfornia Antarctica was commissioned by BAM for the 2009 Next Wave Festival; the Hopkins Center/Dartmouth College; UCSB Arts & Lectures; Melbourne International Arts Festival; and the Festival dei 2 Mondi in Spoleto, Italy. With video projections and a score composed by DJ Spooky and performed by a piano quartet, it is a portrait of a rapidly transforming continent.