CAMERON McMILLAN - THE INHERITANCE OF FORM

In part, a response to the dense forward trajectory and multi-layered complexity of Steve Reich’s Triple Quartet, a piece of cool intelligence and scope that resets the boundaries of a most celebrated and traditional musical format. Its turbulent, self-reflective quality drives an emotional core without sentiment and lays a framework for the inherent conflict in evolution between the past and the present to play out in equal measure.

The work is interested in the rigorous expansion of ballet’s pure and formal architecture, and engaging in its realm of possibility, redefinition and evolution. By acknowledging how the dancing body has been a canvas for which cultural and classical ideals are placed upon, at every level of scale there has been an attempt to both distill and expand our view of the classical framework. The very act of placing these artifacts in a contemporary space transforms them and asks us to reconsider their position and our own.

As the layers of the past fall away like decay, and into memory, we begin to see this process acting as a metaphor for the increasingly rapid nature of change we experience in our lives and that which we discard and sacrifice to achieve it.