Sedona Ballet will be collaborating with Ballet Arizona to host the first Sedona Choreography Retreat at the Sedona Performing Arts Center from Wednesday, June 11, through Friday, June 20, including a master class for local dance students, rehearsals of both old and new works and talks with dancers, choreographers and designers.

“The retreat is a workshop for the creation of new choreography, culminating in a final night performance of these original works,” Sedona Ballet founder Winnie Muench said. “This year, Ballet Arizona will also perform the pas de deux from ‘Take Me’ With You by Polish choreographer Robert Bondara — a powerful, emotionally charged work — unforgettable. Every moment leaves you breathless.”

Retreat Events

The retreat will begin with closed rehearsals for the dancers on June 11 and Thursday, June 12, followed by the master class at 2 p.m. on Friday, June 13. Open rehearsals will be held on Monday and Tuesday, June 16 and 17, at 1:30 p.m. both days, while the artist talks will take place from June 16 through 18 at 11 a.m. and on Thursday, June 19, at 10 a.m.

During these conversations, Ballet Arizona dancers will discuss their working lives, Mary Byrd of the Fine Art Museum of Sedona will address the collaborations between George Balanchine and Sedona artist Dorothea Tanning, choreographers Nayon Iovino and LaTasha Barnes will touch on the realization of choreography and Sedona composer Christel Veraart will describe her compositional process.

Friday, June 20 Performance

The final day of the retreat on Friday, June 20, will conclude with a 7 p.m. performance that will feature works by Balanchine, Bondara and Natasha Adorlee, as well as the premiere of “Santa Fe and Esmeralda,” choreographed by Iovino based on the book and music by Veraart, and “The Flow State Project,” choreographed by Barnes. Veraart will be releasing her latest album, “Nostalgia: Reflections on Argentina,” and a related short film as part of the retreat, with two of the tracks from the album providing the foundation for Iovino’s choreography.

“It’s a very enjoyable piece of music. I enjoy this Piazzola-esque style, I’m such a fan of the Argentine culture,” Iovino said. “Working with Christel, too, it’s been super fun. She’s very easy to work with and she really wants to hear my thoughts and she wants to help create a vision. It’s lovely to collaborate with her.”

Nayon Iovino

“It was perfect timing because this is my last season dancing and I’ve been wanting to do something with choreography to find opportunities. It was awesome,” said Iovino, who has choreographed a number of works for Ballet Arizona since 2013. “In advance, we’re just kind of planning the costume, the look and the feel for the piece, working with the lighting designer and the set, kind of setting a tone. When it comes to steps, it’s going to be 100% during the retreat, where I’ll work with the dancers and in the moment we create the movement to the music.”

“I definitely know I want to do it in pointe shoes and make it in a more elegant tone … the goal is to have a stronger classical influence for sure,” Iovino added. He also expected to end up with elements of Argentine dance in the mix: “I think it’s going to happen without me realizing it. Those classic tango moves and all that, I’m going to take some inspiration from that. Some of the folk poetry, too. There’s both the tango and the folk influence in the two pieces of music that I’m using.”

LaTasha Barnes

Barnes, on the other hand, plans to go in the opposite direction from classical dance with her presentation, which will follow on to another piece she presented in February as part of the Sedona Arts Center’s “Vision and Sound Symposium,” which she described as exploring “this dialogue between my biomechanical self and my physical self.”

“Dance neuroscience has always been a fascination of mine, particularly given my own exploration and understanding of the manifestations of my synaesthesia,” Barnes said. “One touch point that’s always been of interest to me is the measurability of those points where we feel our highest sense of self, our highest sense of creative capacity … not just what we’re thinking about in, I guess you could say, words, but imagery — how are our synapses connecting?

“To that end, I found some higher-level technology — a synaptic tagging machine, but that is not available for this exploration, that requires more money,” Barnes laughed. “But a smaller version is to be able to map the [brainwave] frequency at which we’re experiencing some of these elevated sensations through the use of the Muse headband. This is right now a tool that’s being used to assist folks with ADHD for finding better methods for focusing … Using that technology inversely, the intention is going to be to map out where our frequencies are when we’re at those heightened states, those deeply creative states. And then from there, I have a sound designer who’s also an audio engineer who’s going to create a soundscape in alignment with those points of actualization for each individual dancer. It’s going to be a self-composing kind of experience. From them watching previous footage of themselves in that actualized state, those measurements are going to be taken and then used to create a soundscape that they’re going to then create to live in front of the studio audience.”

“That’s going to be the draw, seeing beautiful dancers who have trained themselves to open them selves up to the possibilities of their creation, going through this negotiation,” Barnes explained. “My aim is to eventually take this application of the technology and apply it to everyday people.”

Barnes has been working on developing such a program for the last five years but said that her efforts had been held back by technological shortcomings, in particular the challenge of accurately registering signal changes in the brains of moving dancers without static overwhelming the signal. She added that she hoped the experience would inform the audience about dance as a social technology: “That’s my ultimate goal: Recentering the physical self, the human, as the ultimate form of technology.”

“Sedona Ballet has begun to imagine what this could become in the years ahead — something in the spirit of Jacob’s Pillow, a place where creation is the purpose and artistry is the measure of success,” Muench reflected. “It’s not about the size of the audience, but the depth of the work. That’s where the magic lives.”

For more information or to purchase tickets for the events, visit sedonaballet.org. Sedona Ballet is also seeking volunteers to help with stage setup and take down for the retreat; if interested, contact Muench at (928) 554-5698.