Velocity

Canadian-American Aszure Barton is a choreographer, director, and innovator who has been creating dance works since her days as a student at Canada’s National Ballet School. In the early 2000s, she founded Aszure Barton & Artists in order to create an autonomous, interdisciplinary, and collaborative platform for process-centered creation, resulting in choreography that the US National Endowment for the Arts has equated to “watching the physical unfurling of the human psyche.” Over 30+ years, Aszure has worked with celebrated artists and companies including Mikhail Baryshnikov, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, Bayerisches Staatsballett, English National Ballet, Teatro alla Scala, Nederlands Dans Theater, Sydney Dance Company, National Ballet of Canada, Martha Graham Dance Company, Grand Théâtre de Genève, and Limón Dance Company, among others. She recently premiered a new work (Mere Mortals) at San Francisco Ballet in collaboration with British electronic music producer/DJ Floating Points and mixed media artists Hamill Industries, and she is also the current Resident Artist at Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. Throughout her career, she has received accolades including a Bessie Award for her work BUSK as well as the prestigious Canadian Arts & Letters Award. She was the first Martha Duffy Resident Artist at the Baryshnikov Arts Center and is an ambassador of contemporary dance in Canada. Aszure’s latest artistic venture is a creative partnership with acclaimed composer and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire.

Vladimir Martynov studied piano as a child, and later enrolled in the Moscow Conservatory where he studied piano under Mikhail Mezhlumov and composition under Nikolai Sidelnikov, graduating in 1971.

Martynov is known as a serious ethnomusicologist, specializing in the music of the Caucasian peoples, Tajikistan, and other ethnic groups in Russia. He studied medieval Russian and European music, as well as religious musical history and musicology. It also allowed him to study theology, religious philosophy and history.

In 1973, Martynov got a job at the studio for electronic music of the Alexander Scriabin Museum. Martynov also helped to form a rock group called Boomerang at the Scriabin Studio, for which he wrote a rock opera, Seraphic Visions from St. Francis of Assisi (1978). At about this time, he began teaching at the Academy of Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius in Sergiyev Posad.

In his early works, Martynov used serial music (or twelve-tone) technique. He became interested in the brand of minimalism developing in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s: a static, spiritually-inspired style without the shimmering pulse of American minimalism.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, he has written works that take on large Christian themes, such as Apocalypse (1991), Lamentations of Jeremiah (1992), Requiem (1998), and Opus Posthumum (1993).

In 2009, the London Philharmonic gave the world premiere of his opera Vita Nuova. Martynov’s composition The Beatitudes, as performed by Kronos Quartet, featured in La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty), the winner of the 2014 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Silas Farley is a ballet teacher and choreographer. He currently serves as the Armstrong Artist in Residence in Ballet in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University (SMU). Farley is a former dancer with New York City Ballet and former Dean of the Trudl Zipper Dance Institute at The Colburn School in Los Angeles, CA. Farley has taught for the School of American Ballet, New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Houston Ballet, The Washington Ballet, The School at Jacob's Pillow, the Peabody Conservatory, the Hartt School, Slovak National Ballet, and the Kennedy Center. He has choreographed for the School of American Ballet, The School at Jacob's Pillow, the New York Choreographic Institute, Columbia Ballet Collaborative at Columbia University, Works & Process at The Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Houston Ballet, The Washington Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, and New York City Ballet. Farley was an inaugural Jerome Robbins Dance Division Research Fellow at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Farley has served as a Scholar in Residence at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. He has written for Dance Magazine and Dance Index and lectured at the Museum of Modern Art.  Farley is the writer and host of the New York City Ballet podcast, Hear the Dance. Mr. Farley serves on the Board of The George Balanchine Foundation.

Kyle Werner is a NYC-based composer who creates new works for listeners and performers of classical music. His works have been featured by The Washington Ballet, Wolf Trap, MarqueeTV, Guggenheim Works & Process Digital Commissions, Windscape, the Chicago Chamber Musicians, Grand Rapids Symphony, mezzo-soprano Raehann Bryce-Davis, guitarist Jordan Dodson, members of Eighth Blackbird, the Colburn School, University of Michigan, University of Colorado-Boulder, Southern Methodist University, Midwest Composers’ Symposium, Opera on Tap, Palais de Fontainebleau, Society for American Music Annual Conference, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, Tenth Presbyterian Church, Emmanuel Presbyterian Church, Marble Collegiate Church, and New York-Presbyterian’s Allen Hospital. Werner has also served as composer-in-residence at Chamber Music Campania in Varano, Italy and as Music Director of Christ Church Anglican NYC on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He completed the Doctor and Master of Music degrees in Composition at Manhattan School of Music and a Bachelor of Music in Composition at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, in addition to summer study at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, France. His primary teachers included Joel Hoffman, Michael Fiday, Susan Botti, and J. Mark Stambaugh. A passionate music educator, Werner currently serves as the Director of the Geneva Conservatory at the Geneva School of Manhattan and as a member of the faculty at Manhattan School of Music Precollege. He and his wife, Laura, reside in northern Manhattan.
www.kylewerner.com

Stanton Welch was born in Melbourne to Marilyn Jones OBE and Garth Welch AM, two of Australia's most gifted dancers of the 1960s and 1970s.  He joined The Australian Ballet, rising to the rank of leading soloist and performing various principal roles, before serving as Resident Choreographer. During his decades long career, Welch has choreographed over 100 works including audience favorites Madame Butterfly (1995), Clear (2001), and Divergence (1994). His work can be seen in the repertoire of The Australian Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, and Birmingham Royal Ballet, among others. In July 2003, Welch was appointed Artistic Director of Houston Ballet, America's fourth-largest ballet company. Welch has choreographed more than 40 works for Houston Ballet, including Marie (2009) and spectacular stagings of Swan Lake (2006), La Bayadère (2010), Romeo and Juliet (2015), Giselle (2016), The Nutcracker (2016), Sylvia (2019), and the upcoming Raymonda (2025). Developing Houston Ballet into a choreographic Eden, Welch has commissioned over 30 works from notable choreographers such as Mark Morris, Aszure Barton, Dwight Rhoden, Trey McIntyre, and Justin Peck, while expanding the company’s repertoire with works from internationally acclaimed choreographers including George Balanchine, William Forsythe, Jiří Kylián, Sir Kenneth MacMillan, John Neumeier, Twyla Tharp, and Jerome Robbins. Under Welch’s leadership, Houston Ballet has appeared across the globe including recent engagements in Tokyo, Dubai, Melbourne, New York City, and Washington, D.C. Welch continues to nurture the next generation of artists through the Houston Ballet Academy, a leading institution in dance education and training. 

Michael Torke’s work has been described as "some of the most optimistic, joyful and thoroughly uplifting music to appear in recent years" (Gramophone). Hailed as a "vitally inventive composer" (Financial Times) and "a master orchestrator whose shimmering timbral palette makes him the Ravel of his generation" (New York Times), Torke has created a substantial body of works in virtually every genre; his recent piece SKY, written for violinist Tessa Lark, was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, and was nominated for a Grammy® award for “best classical instrument solo.” Torke has been commissioned by The Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the San Francisco Symphony, New York City Ballet, Alvin Ailey, National Ballet of Canada, Metropolitan Opera, Théâtre du Châtelet, English National Opera, London Sinfonietta, Lontano, De Volharding, and the Smith, Ying, and Amstel Quartets, among other orchestras, ballet companies, and ensembles. He has worked with conductors Simon Rattle, Kurt Mazur, Edo de Waart, and David Zinman; choreographers Christopher Wheeldon, James Kudelka, and Juri Kilian; librettists A. R. Gurney, Michael Korie, and Mark Campbell; and directors Des McAnuff, Bart Sher, and Michael Greif. He has been commissioned by entities as diverse as the Walt Disney Company, and Absolute Vodka; worked with soloists such as Tessa Lark, Christopher O'Reilly, Joyce Yang, and Joyce Castle; and written incidental music for The Public Theater, The Old Globe Theater, and Classic Stage Company, among others. He has been composer-in-residence with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Beginning his career with exclusive contracts with Boosey and Hawkes, and Decca Records, he now controls his own copyrights and masters through his publishing company, Adjustable Music, and record company, Ecstatic Records.