For most Atlanta dance companies, coping with uncertainty from season to season is a fact of life. Financial precarity makes long-term planning difficult — sometimes impossible. Which is precisely why Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre’s ambitious new project inspired by Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has been eight years in the making. 

“We feel like high schoolers who survived our freshman year,” said Artistic Director John Welker. “We’ve found some stability that allows us to look farther out.”

The company will present the first installment of Welker’s vision at Serenbe, May 9 through May 18. Paired with an expanded version of Terminus co-founder Rachel Van Buskirk’s Secrets, Jimmy Orrante’s world-premiere, inspired by Vivaldi’s Spring, is the first of what Welker contemplates as four new ballets. Each new piece will be commissioned from a different choreographer over the course of the next two or three years and together will form a complete evening-length work. 

“With the four seasons theme, we are embracing the outdoor performing environment at Serenbe,” Welker said. Indeed, the vibrant green landscape and quietly riotous soundscape — birdsong, invisible waterways and leaves rustling in a gentle breeze — of Art Farm at Serenbe’s Wildflower Meadow has frequently provided a stunning setting for Terminus’ artistry.

To dance outdoors, though, is to be subject to the elements, and Terminus has experienced both the glorious beauty of perfect, sun-drenched spring days and the bitter disappointment of rained-out shows. “In Vivaldi’s music we hear that narrative,” he continued. “As the climate changes, the volatility Vivaldi captured is amplified as the boundaries among the seasons blur and shift and weather patterns become more unpredictable.”

Embodying the anticipation and energy of springtime, Spring! dancers perform in nature at Serenbe Art Farm. (Photo by Christina Massad)

Wanting to create something that is relevant to the present moment while honoring Vivaldi’s original music, Welker said the final full-length work will embody the answers offered by four artists grappling with the question of how humans evolve and adapt in the wake of climate change. He tapped Orrante to choreograph the first movement, Spring!, which represents the seasonal spirit of promise and the element of water and features company member Georgia Dalton as the principal figure embodying the season.

Orrante said he was intrigued by the prospect of creating the first piece of a larger whole that would come together over an extended period. “This approach definitely makes the process more intriguing. Who knows how what I’ve created now might be augmented as it is joined to the other dances?” he said.

This is the second work Orrante has created for Terminus. Welker commissioned the first after being impressed by Orrante’s rapport with the advanced students while setting a piece for the Terminus Modern Ballet School. 

“The energy this time around was wonderful,” said Orrante. “It’s such a pleasure to work with these seasoned dancers in a collaborative, relaxed environment where we are all feeding off of each others’ ideas.”

Welker asked for a piece of approximately 25 minutes, so Orrante selected other Vivaldi compositions that complemented the “Spring” parts from Four Seasons. He began with listening to how the music captures the essence of spring, the season’s feeling of anticipation and its objects –birds, flowers, flowing water. 

Orrante said that while he had an idea of where he wanted to start and where he thought he might go, in the end, the process took its own course. “As it came together, the dance told me what it was about.”

The biggest challenge, said Orrante, was creating a work of this scope for just six dancers. He needed to figure out how to make use of their talents throughout the piece without totally exhausting them. Dalton’s presence in each section is the consistent thread, and he described the finale as “an exaltation, an uplifting” of her body by the other dancers.

While Orrante’s work is mostly complete, at least for now, Welker’s has just begun. 

Overseeing creation of the next three “seasons” will require more of his involvement than the average commission. Welker said he and the other choreographers will have to develop consistent stage and costume design, and together they will solve the puzzle of how to transform contributions from four distinctive artists into a cohesive and coherent whole.

Welker said he has begun part of that work by creating a triad of each season with a spirit that will primarily be embodied by one dancer — a different dancer for each season — and one of the four elements of air, Earth, fire and water. 

Where Orrante began from the triad of spring, anticipation and water, Shane Urton will collaborate with composer Adam Clark to tackle summer, ambition and fire. As with Orrante, Welker said he took the opportunity in commissioning the next installment of Four Seasons to bring back Urton, whose previous work for Terminus, Devotion & Dreams, was both an audience and dancer favorite.

(Photo by Christina Massad)

According to Welker, to support Terminus’ mission to introduce Atlanta to emerging and less-recognized choreographic voices while growing the company’s roster, one must adopt a creative approach to building the repertoire. He said the company’s founding members — among them Tara Lee and Heath Gill — established the aesthetic foundations, but, as the company matures, even established works in the repertory may need to be updated.

Van Buskir’s Secrets, which premiered at the company’s first Out of the Box performance in their current Buckhead home base, will offer an example of what that process looks like. “Rachel is growing her roots in Houston, but we were able to bring her back and give her an opportunity to work with the composer to expand the score and build out the piece with an additional character,” Welker said. 

Together, Orrante’s spring-inspired work and Van Buskirk’s new-and-improved Secrets will showcase a company that has successfully weathered literal and figurative storms since its founding. While the company has found a place of relative financial and geographic stability, it is clearly still evolving, changing and adapting. The dance on display in Spring! at Serenbe emerges from the new processes necessitated by that continued motion.

Terminus performs Spring! Friday through Sunday, May 9- through 11 and May 16 through May 18, at 7:30 p.m. on the stage in Art Farm at Serenbe’s Wildflower Meadow, 10690 Hutcheson Ferry Road, Chattahoochee Hills.

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