Featured Image: Bre Johnson/BFA.com
“BalletCollective offers a pathway into the art form, for both artists and audiences alike. It’s not a one-way street, however; for our artistic collaborators, the entire exercise is meant to engage them in the work of another art form, necessarily evolving their own artistic understanding in the process,” says Cara Lonergan, Executive Director of BalletCollective, a non-profit arts organization in New York City. “As a result, each year the Source Art’s presentation to the audience varies; its role in the resulting ballet could take many forms, and thus how each Collective wishes to engage the audience in the Source Art takes many forms.”
BalletCollective’s 2024 Source Artist is Mi’kmaw visual artist Jordan Bennett from Ktaqmkuk/Newfoundland, whose work challenges colonial perceptions of Indigenous history and presence. BalletCollective commissioned him to create a painting for The Past Delivers, a ballet that speaks to the duality of change and interwoven connections between beginnings and endings, choreographed and directed by Troy Schumacher, the founder of BalletCollective. The Past Delivers was one of three ballets presented in BalletCollective’s 2024 season, titled “The entrance is the exit,” which ran October 29 to November 1, 2024, in New York City.
“I’m always looking to bring people into the art form that doesn’t feel obvious. With BalletCollective, we are finding new pathways forward in the art form that feels relevant and moving and purposeful,” says Schumacher. “We are trying to discover different meanings that dance and music can really have and provide.”
He continues, “I was instantly so visually engaged [by Jordan’s work] and hooked by the patterns and the colours and the shapes, the vibrancy and aliveness.”
The black-tie gala of the world premiere of The Past Delivers on October 29 at Trinity Commons, 107 Greenwich Street in Manhattan, began with an immersive experience like no other. The evening featured a psychic lip-print reader—decoding the past, present, and future via lipstick marks—bead-making stations, a magician, and two sinister swan ballerinas playing games in a red-velvet-curtained space. Bennett and his wife, Amy Malbeuf, a Métis visual artist, were in attendance and making beaded bracelets for their children at home in Kjipuktuk/Halifax before the ballet.
“Have you had your lips read yet?” asked Bennett. Not only was I fortunate enough to have my kiss mark read, I was able to soak in the BalletCollective’s panache and their unique collaborative approach. New York’s BalletCollective has worked with 280-plus artists—architects, writers, poets, visual artists, and even a video game designer—who are leaders in their fields. Founded in 2010 by Schumacher, a New York City Ballet soloist, BalletCollective has performed over twenty-four original ballets with commissioned music through a deeply collaborative process.
The Past Delivers is set to music composed by The Westerlies, a quartet featuring Riley Mulkherkar and Chloe Rowlands on trumpet, and Andy Clausen and Addison Maye Saxon on trombone. The dancers were Andrew Veyette (a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet), Ashley Hod, Kloe Walker (a member of the corps de ballet of New York City Ballet), and Preston Chamblee.
The Past Delivers speaks to intergenerational connections, mirrors, and how transitions force us to bravely invent and reinvent one’s self. Part reflective, part kinetic, The Past Delivers begins slightly melancholic only to see the dancers soar within their poetic exchanges along with The Westerlies’ soundtrack.
Bennett’s painting was integral to the development of the visual design for The Past Delivers, from costumes to set design, despite it not appearing on stage in its physical form. For the ballet, the dancers were wearing different croppings and levels of saturation reflecting Bennett’s painting on their leotards, sweatpants, and long-sleeved shirts. Their costumes were designed by Victoria Bek in collaboration with Bennett and Schumacher. In addition to Bennett’s painting being part of the dancer’s costumes, it was also included in the program and featured on a limited-edition umbrella accessory gifted to patrons. Also, a full-size replica of the painting itself was in the performance hall each night.
As part of the collaborative process, Bennett spent time with members of The Collective, including The Westerlies. In addition to their many exchanges over Zoom, he attended a ballet performance in New York, visited the BalletCollective space, and experienced their diamond-shaped stage. Bennett’s research also took him to the online archives at the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts for Mi’kmaw quillwork.
“For this particular painting, I dove into the colours, forms, and visual language of past Mi’kmaw quill art from the mid nineteenth century in The Met’s collection to create the basis of this new work,” writes Bennett in the program. “Additionally, I am referencing the diamond shape of the stage where the BalletCollective performs, and the ballet comes to life.”
His commissioned painting was inspired by a Mi’kmaw quillwork chair and box, echoing some of their design, colours, and forms. The artist drew on the structure of the quill basket for his act of rematriation, wherein the painting becomes both an aerial view of the stage and a basket.
“Much like a quill basket, the stage holds the possibilities and elements of a story, knowledge, history, and time,” writes Bennett. “I reference the dancers through ‘Y’ and ‘X’ iconography within the piece, having them overlap the diamond shape, blurring the stage and the audience in what is a unique and beautiful experience being viewed in the round.”
“It is not an exact representation or reproduction by any means,” says Bennett. “But it is inspired by those ancestor artists and artworks.”
Akin to the artifacts of many Indigenous nations, the porcupine quillwork objects the Mi’kmaq created are now found in museum collections all over the world. Many of these artifacts were taken by institutions without consent of the makers or the community.
Bennett’s painting shape-shifts upon each of the dancer’s bodies, as the lines and shapes change through their fluid and elegant movements. Together Bennett’s painting and the dancers conjure the past, present, and future and illustrate how they are interwoven.
Bennett won the 2020 Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award for his 100-foot installation Tepkik, was long-listed for the 2020 Sobey Art Award and shortlisted for the 2018 Sobey Art Award, and represented Newfoundland and Labrador at the Venice Biennale in 2015. Bennett’s interdisciplinary work includes painting, sculpture, sound work, and immersive installations and is in galleries, institutions, and public spaces all over the world. His work features a lot of symmetry about beginnings and endings, which is what inspired BalletCollective to make him the Source Artist for their 2024 season, “The entrance is the exit.”
As a fellow Mi’kmaw artist from Newfoundland, I found it transformative to see Bennett’s work transposed through the physicality, musicality, and poetics of the ballet in New York. For the duration of the eighteen-minute performance, the lines between the past and the present blurred and the exit became the entrance.
