DANCE REFLECTIONS VAN CLEEF & ARPELS

By Celia Ipiotis

This fall, Dance Reflections Van Cleef & Arpels is spreading out across the city showcasing French and American contemporary dance. Influences range from the postmodern choreographer Lucinda Childs to a reincarnation of American modern dance pioneer Loie Fuller’s Serpentine dance and France’s genre-breaking (La) Horde.

But why is this festival of dance selections curated and sponsored by the luxury company Van Cleef & Arpels? Most famously, that name has been associated in the USA with George Balanchine when Van Cleef & Arpels backed his ballet Jewels in 1967. 

Van Cleef & Arpels was founded in 1906, when the Paris Ballet reigned and three years before Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes emerged as the avant garde ballet company also based in Paris until 1929. One of the company founders, Louis Arpels frequently took his nephew Claude to see the venerable Paris Opera Ballet–exciting a life-long passion for dance. 

When Van Cleef & Arpels opened a boutique in NYC in 1942, their exquisite ballerina brooches charmed the populace.  Later, after being introduced by a mutual friend, Claude Arpels and Balanchine, who also loved precious stones, struck a fast friendship. 

Balanchine and Claude Arpels finally united their shared loves when Balanchine decided in 1967 to choreograph Jewels, a ballet built in three sections around emeralds, rubies and diamonds.  This secured  Van Cleef and Arpels’ first professional association with dance which blossomed again in 2012 when the company struck up a partnership with Benjamin Millipied and his La Dance Project.

More recently, Serge Laurent, former Centre Pompidou as Live Arts curator. was tapped to curate a wide-ranging festival launched in 2020 that includes performances, workshops and professional colloquiums in service of what Laurent calls  “Our wish…to support contemporary creation in dance and to give back to an art that also inspires us.”

Now a wide-ranging compendium of performance and visual arts related presentations, the festival under the guidance of Laurent,  “…organizes a festival twice a year. each time in a different city. The first edition of the festival Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels was held in London in March 2022, the next in Hong Kong in May 2023 and today we are New York.”

For dance in particular, this kind of financing and attention is embraced wholeheartedly by the community. A revolutionary artform in America, modern dance influenced the establishment of contemporary dance outside of the USA, the same way Europe seeded ballet. With bridges being built between cultures and societies and by forward looking projects like this festival, dance will only become stronger, better researched, documented and inspiring for generations to come.

If you haven’t imbibed in any of the performances, or colloquiums, there’s still time. Click here   DANCE REFLECTIONS

By Celia Ipiotis