Van Cleef & Arpels’s love affair with dance goes back decades. In 1967, Claude Arpels—who headed the American operations of his family’s jewelry maison—inspired George Balanchine, cofounder of the New York City Ballet, to create Jewels: the first full-length abstract ballet. It forever changed the art form. Jewels consisted of three visually and sonically distinct dances: “Emeralds” (set to Gabriel Fauré), “Rubies” (Igor Stravinsky), and “Diamonds” (Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky); and that artfully fractured, avant-garde spirit carries into Dance Reflections, a festival featuring 12 works by the world’s most celebrated contemporary choreographers. (First launched in 2020, this year’s iteration runs through December 14.)
Before giving Dance Reflections its New York City debut this year, Van Cleef & Arpels staged it in London and Hong Kong. The decision to take it to Manhattan was—according to the company’s president and CEO, Nicolas Bos—an attempt to “contribute to the close and long-standing links between New York and the art of choreography.”
Reflections unites numerous choreographers, including the Franco Austrian Gisèle Vienne, the Senegalese Germaine Acogny, British Rwandan Dorothée Munyaneza, and American Lucinda Childs. The performances, taking place on stages across the city, range from joyous to dark—from transcendent to transgressive. Together, they constitute a shimmering showcase of the medium’s power.
Dance, of course, is both an art and a kind of sport. Central to the thrill of watching a performance is witnessing the human body defy gravity. The physicality of ritualized movement and its inherent risks are explored by Rachid Ouramdane in Corps Extrêmes, which debuts on October 27 and 28 at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House. Inspired by mountain adventurers in the French Alps, Ouramdane drafted acrobats for his aerial odyssey. During the performance, the stage transforms into a screen, its images of nature both forbidding and beautiful, evoking the landscapes that highliners and climbers typically traverse.