‘Crash’ taps renowned choreographer Watkins, Texas talent

With the world premiere of Jonathan Watkins’ ballet Crash this weekend, the folks at Texas Ballet Theater have set out to prove that they listened to a commissioned study that recommended it offer newer, edgier works from big names on the world dance stage.

Watkins, a former Royal Ballet dancer who calls London home, is one of the world’s rising stars as a choreographer.

But when assembling his Crash team, he ended up working with Texans: Dallas-based composer Ryan Cockerham and Austin-based costume designer Kari Perkins, who has dance on her résumé but is better known for costuming seven films by Texas director Richard Linklater, including the 2014 critical hit Boyhood.

Crash will be the new work in a program Friday through Sunday at Bass Hall that also includes Jiri Kylian’s Petite Mort — another coup for the company, its first time with the renowned Czech choreographer’s work — and Balanchine’s Rubies. The latter two were seen when TBT performed a mixed repertory program in Dallas a month ago.

The Bass Hall performances will make up TBT’s 2014-15 season finale.

Choreographer coup

Born in Barnsley, a town in South Yorkshire, England, Watkins trained in tennis and gymnastics as a boy, and was referred to a movement class, which led to dance. At age 12, he entered the Royal Ballet School and became a company dancer at age 19. Now 30, he left the company as a dancer two years ago.

He began choreographing for an annual contest and won the Kenneth MacMillan Award at age 16. About five years ago, Texas Ballet Theater artistic director Ben Stevenson saw one of Watkins’ ballets on video and called him. Their conversation led to this commission. Stevenson also trained at and danced for the Royal Ballet.

In addition to choreographing for Russia’s Ekaterinburg Ballet Theatre and Ballet Manila in the Philippines, Watkins has created dance pieces — contemporary work grounded in classical technique — for other projects, including a dance-on-film series.

An Internet search on his name and “Sofa” will bring up a link to a humorous short film featuring a man who does not have a typical dancer body type getting up from his sofa and dancing.

“I love the natural response to dance, the everyday, an extension of emotion,” Watkins says. “If someone won a lot of money or the lottery, you would probably express it in a little dance. I want to comment on a situation of an everyday person.”

But ballet patrons can expect something more rooted in neoclassical ballet structure when Watkins’ latest work premieres in Fort Worth.

Finding Texas talent

The Texas connections in Cockerham and Perkins are not what Watkins says he had planned in working with this North Texas company; it somehow worked out that way.

In looking for a costumer, he stumbled upon Perkins’ dance costumes, and it fit what he was looking for — something textured and layered, he says. Then there was the process of finding a composer, and Watkins admits that at this point in his career, he’s more interested in creating work to original music.

“With the music, I had a list of alum from the Royal Academy of Music, and I wanted to find recent graduates and new music,” Watkins says. “I looked at [Cockerham’s] website and thought the music was interesting, and I realized he had dance in his biography and that he was from Texas and was going back to Texas. We talked on Skype about the structure of the piece, and we agreed that it was a good fit.”

Cockerham, who graduated from Coppell High School and grew up attending Fort Worth Dallas Ballet’s (now Texas Ballet Theater) annual production of The Nutcracker, received his bachelor’s degree in violin performance at the University of Arkansas, but had become interested in composing and applied to the Royal Academy of Music after previously considering graduate work at Southern Methodist University.

While in London, Cockerham created an electronic/acoustic piece for an independent project for a choreographer with the English National Ballet. When he was contacted by Watkins, he says, he was amazed at Watkins’ vision for the new work.

It was not titled at the time — in fact, Crash has only been named in the past month — but Watkins had a clear idea of what he wanted.

“So I’d make a sample of something, send it to him, and he’d come back and say, ‘I love this, but can we think about doing this?’” Cockerham says. “I [would] take his idea and manifest that to the best I [could], and add my own sound on top of his idea. And we’d bounce back and forth.”

The title Crash conjures images of vehicles slamming into each other, or of the stock market or industries crashing, but Watkins’ concept is more about personal crashes.

“I really wanted to explore in a general way this buildup of energy in certain situations,” he says. “The reason I’ve gone toward ‘crash,’ it feels like it explores this buildup of everyone’s energy combining, and it goes up and up and up and can’t go anywhere else and it has to break to the crash point.”

To Cockerham — who says he has been inspired by modern electronic composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luc Ferrari and Pierre Schaeffer — he and Watkins shared a common language. The score has beautiful piano and violin music but also includes sounds that conjure modern technology and radio static.

“The piece begins with these pure sound waves, like they’re being pressed and smashed together and getting louder and louder, and it gloms together into this mass collision,” Cockerham says. “It turns into this hybrid of double concerto for piano and violin, with a score that’s electronic and brass.”

The music to which TBT will dance at Bass Hall will not be played live. In the recording, Cockerham plays the piano and creates the sounds, and the violin is played by his frequent collaborator, Korean violinist Er-Gene Kahng. She’s concertmaster for the Arkansas Philharmonic Orchestra, and she and Cockerham program a new music series at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark.

“We liked the melodic feel of the violin and piano, and we also wanted to intersperse this electric technological soundscape,” Watkins says. “[Cockerham] came up with the idea of basing it on the classical structure of a theme and variation.”

A full stage

In the dance itself, Watkins uses the entire company of 43 dancers, with a significant amount of corps work and occasional solos and duets with the principal dancers.

That’s something he was more excited about after arriving in Texas in late April and working with the dancers, he says.

“I didn’t know the company so well, but when I first got here I did workshoppy kind of things, not even to the composition that Ryan had done, so it was a great opportunity for me to get to know the dancers and them to get to know me as a choreographer and my movement,” he says.

“What I found in those three days was remarkable; I found dancers that had great technique, but on top of that I found dancers with enthusiasm and energy for new work and working with me. I got to know them quite quickly, and I’ve found them to have great energy and bringing so much to each rehearsal.”

This story was originally published May 26, 2015 at 12:36 PM with the headline "‘Crash’ taps renowned choreographer Watkins, Texas talent."