Alysa Pires becomes first Canadian woman to create work for New York City Ballet

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Like many performing artists, choreographer Alysa Pires doesn’t typically read reviews. But when The New York Times sent a critic to her latest premiere, she couldn’t resist taking a peek.

With the debut of Standard Deviation last month, Pires became the first Canadian woman to create a work for New York City Ballet. In the review, the Times critic described Pires as a “little-known Canadian choreographer.”

Hopefully for the first and last time.

“I try to avoid reviews, but I read that one,” Pires admitted, reflecting on the experience from her parents’ home in Saanichton, B.C., where she was visiting with her toddler daughter, Sawyer. “There were some nice things in there.”

New York City Ballet’s leaders were so optimistic about the prospects of Standard Deviation that they scheduled it for the season-opening gala in May and are bringing the piece on the road to the Kennedy Center in Washington for three performances beginning June 7.

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Canadian dance audiences have believed in Pires for years: Companies in three provinces commissioned her before she turned 30. She received the City Ballet commission back in 2019, after working with student dancers at the New York Choreographic Institute. Then came a nearly four-year pandemic delay.

In the interim, Pires had a baby, created her first full-length ballet (a Macbeth adaptation for Ballet Kelowna) and her first mainstage piece for the National Ballet of Canada – Skyward. Both that and Standard Deviation feature costumes by Stratford Festival designer Dana Osborne.

Pires spoke with The Globe and Mail about her New York City Ballet debut, the increasing cachet of female Canadian choreographers and her career trajectory, which began with creating dances for her cousins as a kid in suburban Victoria.

Many choreographers pivot to making dances after retiring from performing. You’re only 32. Why were you drawn to choreography so early?

I was always making dances. Even as a kid, I was forcing my cousins to do performances for our family. I was training as a dancer in many different styles – tap, jazz, ballet, all that – and then I joined Dancestreams Youth Dance Company, a pre-professional company when I was in high school.

It was all contemporary dance. We were working with choreographers and resetting existing works, and I fell in love with the process. All my peers were always talking about how being onstage was the most amazing feeling, and I was like, “But is it really? I like being in the studio.” Then I moved to Toronto to go to what is now Toronto Metropolitan University and I had a lot of opportunities to choreograph there.

Your background is in contemporary dance, yet most of your commissions have come from ballet companies. Has that been a conscious choice?

No. That’s the financing. After college, I was applying for every residency and every work-in-process showing and spending my life savings self-producing projects. And I was reaching out to small ballet companies across Canada, because they were the only people who were commissioning.

How did you end up becoming a choreographic associate at the National Ballet of Canada, and eventually make it to New York?

I had an opportunity to apply for a choreographic workshop at the National Ballet, and to his credit, curator and producer Robert Binet saw my application and told me, “You can definitely work in ballet.” He saw that there was an athleticism and a line in my work.

I dove into choreographing en pointe and now that’s where I live. Through Robert’s encouragement, I applied to the New York Choreographic Institute. I had applied before many times and never heard anything. And then I made one piece en pointe with National Ballet of Canada dancers, and I got in.

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The legacy of City Ballet’s founder, George Balanchine, must still loom so large at that company. What was it like, making work with those dancers, in those studios?

Balanchine is in air and in the walls and in the DNA of that institution. When Juilliard composer Jack Frerer and I first started working together, we talked a lot about what it’s like to be inside these big institutions with defined legacies, and being an individual inside what can feel like a machine with a relentless pace.

That ended up becoming the crux of the work: individuality versus conformity. There’s this idea of a big machine, and these dancers are trying to break away from it. We call it Stormtrooper moments, as if they are taking off their helmets and we get to see the life inside.

Other Canadian choreographers have created work for major companies, most notably Crystal Pite and Aszure Barton, but you’re the first to make a piece for City Ballet. There are also a few other Canadian women starting to get commissions in Europe and for other small North American companies including Helen Simoneau and Dorotea Saykaly. It feels like the momentum is continuing.

Helen has been making beautiful work for a really long time. And Kirsten Wicklund, who made a piece for Ballet BC and is dancing in Belgium. It’s a great moment for female choreographers, and it’s long overdue. We have some pretty phenomenal female choreographers, obviously Crystal Pite and Aszure Barton, but there is a legacy of Canadian women making really exciting work.

Hopefully we will get to see all of these voices on a bigger scale. I hope that my City Ballet commission is swinging the door open with others to come behind me. I’m excited to see what’s next, for all of us.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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