By LAWRENCE RHODES

New Dances at Juilliard Edition 2003 will be unveiled in the Juilliard Theater on December 11-14. This program is a brand-new initiative in the Dance Division that is scheduled to become an annual event and is already very exciting to all of our young and terrific dancers.

Last year—my first as director of the Dance Division—I realized that not all of our fine students had the opportunity to work with professional choreographers and several did not get the chance to perform on the stage of the Juilliard Theater. Since I believe that being a part of the creative process and performing are essential to every dancer's education, I determined that something must be done to rectify this situation. The solution was simple: invite four choreographers to create four new dances, with each choreographer assigned to a class/year level. The choreographers understood that their new creation was to include every student in the class, either all together or in alternating casts. Eliminating auditions for this project guaranteed that all the young artists of the Dance Division would perform in December! This, as you might suspect, has been an overwhelming success as an initiative—and as I write, all of them are busy and happy, at work with their choreographers.

New Dances at Juilliard Edition 2003 Juilliard Theater Thursday-Sunday, Dec. 11-14 For time and ticket information, please see the calendar.

Insisting that creative process stay in the forefront of this project, I have asked the choreographers to work only three days a week—supporting the idea that there is time for reflection and digestion of the work that they expose the students to. This encourages the students to actively participate in the process, mastering the moves given to them, absorbing the music that they are dancing with, and freeing themselves to be expressive artists fully in control of their material.

I chose four very different choreographers, to create a diverse and interesting program and to expose the Dance Division to different approaches to the process of creation. Thaddeus Davis, Jacqulyn Buglisi, Dwight Rhoden, and Zvi Gotheiner are all choreographers of standing with unique, personal movement vocabularies. I am thrilled that they all had the time and accepted my offer to create at Juilliard—and they are equally thrilled to be working with such fine dancers at the School.

We have asked four dancers—Riley Watts, first year; Abbey Roesner, second year; Drew Sandbulte, third year; and Rachel Tess, fourth year—to provide a glimpse into the creative process of each choreographer for The Journal. We invite you to come to a performance and share in the results, and hope that you will find them as exciting, informative, and enlightening as we have.

Four Dance Students' Experiences With Guest Choreographers

First year: Riley Watts on Thaddeus Davis I won’t lie; working with Thaddeus Davis has been hell. I don’t mean hell in a “fire-and-brimstone” kind of way. Let me explain: This being the premiere major performance for the first-year class, each of us felt a certain pressure to make a good first impression. But there was nothing we could have done to prepare ourselves for Davis’s work. More...

Second Year: Abbey Roesner on Jacqulyn Buglisi Preparing for New Dances Edition 2003, the class of 2006 has had the opportunity to work this season with Juilliard faculty member Jacqulyn Buglisi, choreographer and co-artistic director of the Buglisi/Foreman Dance Company. Working with a different choreographer undoubtedly presents a fresh set of challenges, but it also brings new insight into how the creative process functions. More...

Third Year: Drew Sandbulte on Dwight Rhoden When the third-year dancers first found out who our choreographer would be, some of us found ourselves not really knowing anything about Dwight Rhoden’s work, and others were thrilled about the upcoming experience, having previously seen pieces that Dwight has choreographed. Despite how much knowledge people did or didn’t have of his work, we all went into the first rehearsal optimistic that this would be a worthwhile encounter. More...

Fourth Year: Rachel Tess on Zvi Gotheiner The Israeli-born, New York-based choreographer Zvi Gotheiner once said that a dance studio is comparable to a chemistry lab, a place of experimentation with room for “trial and error.” In rehearsal with the fourth-year students, he pushes us to “investigate the material, to find our own unique way of moving within it.” He challenges himself to find the magical moments we create through this process, searching for the sense of humanity integral to his works. More...