Fall 2021 Issue
Choreographed for American Ballet Theatre (ABT) during the onset of the pandemic, Christopher Rudd’s pas de deux Touché follows dancers João Menegussi and Calvin Royal III through a charged, vulnerable, and ultimately tender love story. The work is unique for its challenge of ballet’s traditional gender roles and its use of an intimacy director to navigate choreographic consent. Here, in excerpts from a conversation with scholar Clare Croft, the artists reflect on the politics, poetics, and process of bringing this groundbreaking duet to life. Originally presented as a dance film in November 2020, Touché will have its stage premiere in ABT’s fall 2021 season.
Calvin Royal III and João Menegussi in rehearsal for Touché (2020), choreographed by Christopher Rudd, Silver Bay, New York, 2020. Photo: Christopher Rudd and João Menegussi
Calvin Royal III and João Menegussi in rehearsal for Touché (2020), choreographed by Christopher Rudd, Silver Bay, New York, 2020. Photo: Christopher Rudd and João Menegussi
I started dancing at Armour Dance Theatre, a classical ballet school. I love ballet with all of me. Contemporary ballet feels better in my body; rather than forcing steps, it takes the foundation of ballet and allows for organic movement. When I joined Cirque du Soleil, my imagination for movement changed. I started looking up. Not only are there elements of acrobatics and circus practices in Touché, but the balletic conventions are also overturned: in the classical tradition, men don’t partner men and men don’t get partnered. Being able to take the time to focus on that dynamic—mutual partnering—within the choreography was really important to this work.
—Christopher Rudd
Calvin Royal III and João Menegussi in rehearsal for Touché (2020), choreographed by Christopher Rudd, Silver Bay, New York, 2020. Photo: Christopher Rudd and João Menegussi
At a moment when we couldn’t touch each other due to covid, seeing something dealing with the importance of touch was potent. Some of the touches are more obviously coded as sexual or sensual, when the dancers’ hands move toward each other’s hips and so forth, but by the end, every touch feels powerful and coded, even, in the final moment, holding each other’s ankles. I don’t think of touching somebody’s ankle as a super intimate thing. Yet over the course of the work, the choreography teaches us how to experience touch through watching others’ bodies, which resonates deeply in the context of the pandemic. And for those of us who are queer and gay and lesbian and trans folks, we don’t get to see people touch in the way we yearn for in public all that often. To have this explicitly homosexual relationship—very intimate, very sensual, very sexual—beaming into my home was incredibly moving.
—Clare Croft
João Menegussi and Calvin Royal III in rehearsal for Touché (2020), choreographed by Christopher Rudd, Silver Bay, New York, 2020. Photo: Christopher Rudd and João Menegussi
In the process of creating the characters in this piece, we each referenced our own stories. What I like about the evolution of the piece are the moments when something from the beginning is mirrored later. Although we were on our individual journeys, there are parallels to what each of us was going through; from the beginning to end, for me at least, it’s like an unveiling. The first half has a sort of tension and shame and loathing, expressed through an internal approach to the movement. And as the piece evolves, we grow in ourselves and we grow in the choreography. Those layers, including the clothing, are slowly stripped back to reveal what’s beneath. By the second half, we may not necessarily be 100 percent free or safe, but we’ve been able to expose ourselves and be bare with each other in the bigger context of the world that these characters are residing in.
—Calvin Royal III
Calvin Royal III and João Menegussi in Touché (2020), choreographed by Christopher Rudd. Photo: courtesy Matador Content
This was the first time I’ve ever worked with an intimacy director. It was an experience from another world. When we’re in the studio, we’re basically naked, in tights and leotards—there’s a feeling of exposure. Bringing an intimacy director into the studio changes the game, because that person is there to watch after us and make sure we feel comfortable in the process of creation. In our field, we’re trained not to speak and to listen only. We never have a voice. I say that with full confidence because it is what it is. I can’t lie about this. Having Sarah Lozoff there gave us a voice. She gave us the opportunity to express how we feel about this, what we think of it, and tell our story.
—João Menegussi
João Menegussi and Calvin Royal III in Touché (2020), choreographed by Christopher Rudd. Photo: courtesy Matador Content
Touché will be performed as part of American Ballet Theatre’s Fall Season at David H. Koch Theater, New York, on October 27 and 30, 2021
Clare Croft is a dance theorist, historian, dramaturge, curator, and associate professor of American culture at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Dancers as Diplomats: American Choreography in Cultural Exchange; the editor and curator of the anthology and website Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings; and the producing curator of the EXPLODE Queer Dance Festival.
Originally from Brazil, João Menegussi began his professional dance studies at Tanz Akademie Zürich in 2012. Menegussi joined the American Ballet Theatre Studio Company in 2016, becoming a member of the corps de ballet in 2018. His repertoire includes the Spanish Dance in Alexei Ratmansky’s Nutcracker and a featured role in Deuce Coupe.
Calvin Royal III began his training at the Pinellas County Center for the Arts at Gibbs High School in St. Petersburg, Florida. In 2006, he was awarded the Ethan Stiefel Scholarship to attend American Ballet Theatre’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School, and in 2020 was appointed Principal Dancer. He has been named the 2020/21 artist-in-residence at Vail Dance Festival.
Christopher Rudd is a Jamaican-born dance maker and 2019 Guggenheim Choreography Fellow. He began his training with Armour Dance Theatre and has performed with the Carolina Ballet, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, and Cirque du Soleil. Rudd has choreographed for the Alvin Ailey School and Harlem Stage’s E-Moves, among other companies. In 2015, he founded RudduR Dance.
Ahead of Alex Israel’s exhibition of four new Fin sculptures at Gagosian, London, the artist spoke with Susan Casey, author of The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean (2010), about the ocean, surfing, and Los Angeles.
On April 16, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, opened the first midcareer survey of Derrick Adams’s multidisciplinary practice. Covering over twenty years of work, the exhibition, titled View Master, brings together the artist’s painting, sculpture, collage, performance, and video, as well as a vibrant new commission created for the museum’s façade. Ahead of the opening, Adams met with Tessa Bachi Haas, cocurator of the survey, to discuss his formative experiences with television, the impact of his work in arts education on his practice, and the importance of taking a more complex, more joyful, and more expansive approach to Black American life and culture.
Jeff Koons tells Alison McDonald about his appreciation for the pioneering artist and thinker Marcel Duchamp.
The Singular Experience at Gagosian’s Le Bourget gallery is the largest exhibition of Walter De Maria’s work in France in several decades. Organized by Donna De Salvo, senior adjunct curator at Dia Art Foundation, the exhibition marks the first time De Maria’s final sculpture, Truck Trilogy (2011–17), is being shown outside of the United States. Here, De Salvo speaks with artist Lucy Raven about her evolving kinship with De Maria and more.
Ed Ruscha sits down with the author and explorer Erling Kagge to discuss existence.
Following the debut of her Fall/Winter 2026 collection at Dia Chelsea, New York, Ulla Johnson met with Sarah Godfrey to discuss her recent collaborations with the Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner foundations, her upbringing in and dedication to New York City, and her nonhierarchical approach to collecting.
Andrew Durbin’s dual biography, The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, tracks the convergences and divergences in the lives of the two artists, from their first meeting in Coral Cables, Florida, in 1956 through their generative romantic and creative partnership in New York, Italy, Fire Island, and beyond. Ahead of the release, Durbin met with the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier to speak about the development of the project, the sublime noncompliance of these two artists, and the motifs of love, death, and rebirth that weave through the telling of their story.
On March 28, a major exhibition of Jenny Saville’s work opened at Ca’ Pesaro–Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna in Venice, bringing together nearly thirty paintings from the 1990s to the present. The exhibition is curated by Elisabetta Barisoni, head of the museums division at Venice’s Ca’ Pesaro, Museo Fortuny, and head of MUVE in Mestre. Saville’s monumental canvases are set in dialogue with the great Venetian artists of the past, creating a unique encounter between contemporary painting and the city’s artistic heritage. Here, the artist speaks with Stefania Ventra, professor with Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, about her early trips to Venice, the radicality of Titian’s painting, and depicting emotional truth.
Daniel Roseberry, the creative director of Schiaparelli, met with the Quarterly’s Derek C. Blasberg at the maison’s historic headquarters at 21 place Vendôme, Paris, following the Schiaparelli Fall/Winter 2026–27 ready-to-wear show. Since taking the helm in 2019, Roseberry has been credited with advancing the heritage of the house through unpredictable sculptural designs that carry Elsa Schiaparelli’s Surrealist spirit into a new century. The pair discuss the much-anticipated exhibition Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, now on view at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, as well as Roseberry’s early exposures to art, his continued dedication to drawing, and the enduring legacy of Elsa Schiaparelli’s daring vision.
Helter Skelter—an exhibition at Fondazione Prada’s Venetian venue, Ca’ Corner della Regina—marks the first creative dialogue between two visionaries of American art, Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince. The show explores the grit, grift, violence, and ingenuity of American culture through more than fifty works, including photography, video, and large-scale installations that interrogate themes of race, gender, media, and politics. In the interview below, Nancy Spector, the exhibition’s curator, speaks about the shared motifs—from apocalyptic sunsets to a fascination with “monstrosity”—that led her to pair these artists for the first time.
A conversation between Theaster Gates and Jessica Bell Brown, with an introduction by Sydney Stutterheim.
Valentina Castellani speaks with the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald about her new book, Trading Beauty: Art Market Histories from the Altar to the Gallery. The illustrated survey traces the evolution of the Western art market from the medieval era to the present day.