ABT dancers Joao Menegussi and Calvin Royal III in Christoper Rudd’s “Touche.”/Photo: Rosalie O’Connor.
The New York-based American Ballet Theatre, widely considered the best ballet company in the country, if not the world, visits the Auditorium Theatre April 14-16. The program is mixed repertory, including “Touché,” a duet by Christopher Rudd that is sure to suspend every breath in the room for its ten-minute duration. Rudd’s quietly supercharged pas de deux for two men, originally created for film during the pandemic, packs worlds of emotion in its short running time and demands both virtuosic dancing and acting from its performers. Rudd set out to create a dance normalizing gay love and lust. What he made is hands down the most romantic and sexiest piece of theater you’ll see all year, period. I spoke with Rudd over the phone about the creation of “Touché.” He will also participate in a post-show discussion Saturday as part of a Pride Night Celebration at the Auditorium.
I saw a filmed version of “Touché” and I was struck by the tremendous acting of Calvin Royal III and João Menegussi. How did you prepare your dancers for such raw, emotional performances?
It took a lot of work to change the dancers’ way of performing. As stage artists, we’re used to projecting so people in the back row can see. I love watching television and movies. I often tell my dancers that our approach should be more intimate—the audience should lean into what we’re doing. We had the benefit of having an intimacy director who zoomed in each day to make sure what we’re doing was reading. It prepared us for an audience experiencing it over a screen.
We also went into the forest and found the authenticity of what we’re trying to do each moment, and what the characters were going through. Dancers were given homework assignments to write about their characters. A lot of the work feels so real, to me at least, because they were allowed to excavate their personal coming out stories. The first week all we did was talk about our journeys as gay men. Now I’m in a place where I can just watch as an audience member and feel how necessary it is. I get to see gay love in a way I’ve yearned for most of my life and never believed I would see in a ballet context.
You named the two characters Adam and Steve. We’ve all too often heard these names used in a derogatory way. Why did you name your characters and why these names?
I always name my characters. I spent a lot of time in the South where I kept hearing “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” But in fact, God did create Adam and Steve. We’re all here and we’re all valid and unique to the lives we’re supposed to live. And frankly, as an artist empowered to create made me feel like, not only am I going to validate gay love and lust but I’m going to also create the Adam and Steve we’re told don’t exist, but clearly do. It was a decision that was tongue-in-cheek to those who would deny or censor or belittle my life, or anyone’s life that isn’t a cookie-cutter version of what they think it should be. It was made in 2020, and now in 2023 there have been so many steps backward to gay rights that it feels all the more important to perform this and validate people through art in a way I find really exquisite and beautiful.
Anything else you’d like to mention?
How honored we were to have artistic director Susan Jaffe work on this piece with us. I hope other companies take the challenge that was given by [ABT dancer] James Whiteside to take this into their rep and perform it. I’m glad to see other gay works in classical spaces. It makes me proud to be one of the first to make explicit, undeniable, can’t-explain-away-their-love-as-anything-else in the classical ballet world.
American Ballet Theatre at the Auditorium Theatre, 50 East Ida B. Wells, April 14-16, Friday and Saturday at 7:30pm, Sunday at 2pm. Saturday evening features a Pride Night Celebration and post-show discussion. Tickets start at $48, (312)341-2300, auditoriumtheatre.org.
Related Stories
Complementary Opposites: A Preview of "Serenade" and "Of Mice and Men" by the Joffrey Ballet “Both [ballets] are trying to deal with a particular time: One by healing with the beauty of dance, the other by trying to create empathy for beaten-down humanity. Right now, we’re facing some of the same issues, such as huge migrations from the workplace. Steinbeck shone a light on his time, and I hope we’re able to do the same.”
Fools With Heart: A Review of The Rivals at American Players Theatre "The Rivals" has burrowed deep into the culture thanks largely to the inspired character of Mrs. Malaprop, the ignorant, but intellectually confident rich aunt who continually chooses words that sound like the ones she ought to use but miss the mark.
