“Remember, more is more,” ” the choreographer Kiyon Ross told the young cast of his new ballet, “Proof of Light.”
The dancers, students at the School of American Ballet, were rehearsing sections of the work and about to do a run-through. They nodded.
“Try to be down in your legs,” Ross said, crossing one foot over the other in a plié. “That’s really important to me. Using your bodies, right?”
He stretched a leg and lunged forward. They nodded again.
“And I don’t want you to think straight up and down and perfect,” he added. “I want you right on the edge of danger.”
Ross, 44, didn’t mean the dancers should be sloppy or reckless — his choreography is a visceral mix of dynamism and precision — but when students focus on perfection, they turn inward. “Performance is the opposite,” he said in an interview. “A performance is a sharing of your gift. No one is coming just to see you do tendu à la seconde perfectly to the side. They want to feel something”
As the associate artistic director of Pacific Northwest Ballet, Ross, who trained at the School of American Ballet and more recently has been a principal guest teacher at the school, wants to help the students get noticed as they enter the professional realm. When he and Peter Boal, Pacific Northwest’s artistic director, watch videos of dancers, “the thing that I’m most drawn to is dancers who fill space, who are really expansive,” he said. “You can make a shape, but can you dance?”
For “Proof of Light,” a premiere for 20 dancers that is part of the school’s annual Workshop Performances on Saturday and Monday, Ross set out to make a celebratory ballet, one full of sparkling energy in which every dancer is seen.
In doing so, he will make history as the first Black choreographer to create a ballet for Workshop, which began in 1965 and has featured 31 choreographers since. Most frequently students perform works by George Balanchine, City Ballet’s founding choreographer. (This year, they perform three Balanchine selections.)
Ross knows firsthand that for students, this is a bittersweet moment. “I remember my workshop performances and just being like, ‘This is the last time that we’re going to spend all this time together,’” he said. “So I really wanted to make something that felt special.”
The dancers can sense that, too. “One great thing about working with Kiyon is that it’s his choreography, but he always says he’s giving it back to us,” Renée Augustyn, 18, said. “I feel everyone has found a piece of themselves in the choreography.”
The ballet, set to music by Michael Torke, Max Richter and Joby Talbot, has five sections, including a pas de deux for Augustyn and Ador Kadiasi, 17, that Ross choreographed late in the process. He said he had started to see the ballet as too much of a rocket ship; it needed a moment of quiet. The tranquil pas de deux unfurls seamlessly, like a poem without punctuation. During the run-through, many dancers watched — and cried.
“I saw that,” Ross said in a whisper. “I didn’t intend for that to happen.”
The invitation to create “Proof of Light” came from Jenifer Ringer, the former City Ballet principal who is now the director of the school’s intermediate and advanced divisions and artistic programming.
“He has this really energetic way of kind of exhorting the students to this high level of excellence,” Ringer said. “And he’s kind about it. There’s a sense that he knows they can do it, and they can get there. It just seemed like a no-brainer to have him create a ballet for our students.”
He admires her approach too. “I think that that’s exactly what the school needs at this moment,” Ross said. “Someone at the helm who has such a whole heart to lead this institution into this new space where they’re taking care of the whole human and not just the dancer.”
With “Proof of Light,” he wants to make the institution proud and the dancers feel important, which wasn’t necessarily his experience as a student. “It was like, if you weren’t one of the three or four,” he said, referring to the school’s top students of any year, “sometimes you weren’t even seen or looked at.”
Conventions surrounding what constituted the ideal ballet body plagued him. He was muscular and “a little bit stockier in the legs,” he said, adding that now there is a broader acceptance of shape and size. “Dancers are athletes,” he said. “You’re not meant to just be some sad sylph on the stage with this really thin, lithe body.”
When he told friends he was going to teach at the school, “They kept saying, ‘Why would you go back?’” Ross said.
But he needed to see if things had changed. And with the school’s new leadership and state-of-the-art wellness center, he saw that they had — dramatically. “It can hold the Balanchine tradition and all that we know about the School of American Ballet and New York City Ballet,” he said. “But it can also be a place that takes care of its students.”
Ross was lucky. During his time at the school, there was someone who believed in him: Boal, a former principal dancer at City Ballet who was also a teacher. “Peter has been sort of like cheerleading my entire career this whole time,” Ross said.
Boal encouraged the then-directors of Pacific Northwest to consider Ross for a position — he was hired — and then when Boal became artistic director there, Ross was given prominent parts in Balanchine ballets.
It was at Pacific Northwest that he met another mentor, Twyla Tharp. Until Tharp, Ross wasn’t used to being a choreographer’s first choice. “But Twyla came in and she saw my light clearer than I could,” Ross said. “And she picked me first.”
Ross’s choreographic style is fast and rhythmic. He is, as he put it, a Balanchine die-hard. But it’s clear that he is also influenced by Tharp in both her musicality and complexity of structure. Before working with her, Ross said his dances were formulaic. He learned that ballets could have layers to them and not be cluttered.
“I love the way she works,” he said. “She just would grab your hand and start moving you around the studio, and she’d let go of your hand and by the time she let go, you’re like, ‘there’s something there.’ I wanted that kind of kinetic feeling with the finale. I want it to build until it boils over. Until the audience just, they can’t take anymore. You know? It’s like that feeling of just joy.”
The students feel the joy, and they love his joy, especially as he looks, just as Boal and Tharp did, for the light in each of them. Lennon Sullivan, 18, now realizes that she can dance on a bigger scale. “I’m always like, I don’t think I can,” she said. “And then I’m like, wait — that actually kind of worked out.”
And their light can extend to the audience. “Maybe because we’re the next generation coming into the professional world, that can be seen as a light to all the darkness in the world,” Augustyn said. “I think bringing joy is something that we really need right now.”
