Remi Wörtmeyer creates movement, costumes, sets for Atlanta Ballet premiere

“I want to see color. I want to see light,” said choreographer and multi-disciplinary artist Remi Wörtmeyer during a recent Atlanta Ballet rehearsal. “I want to see a team of people working together, pushing further, creating, sculpting their bodies. That is, ultimately, the idea: a celebration of life, dance, art and creativity, all of us working together to accomplish something greater than we could as individuals.”

Wörtmeyer recently spoke with ArtsATL about his new work Significant Others. Created for Atlanta Ballet, it will have its world premiere this weekend on the company’s mixed bill. Significant Others is Wörtmeyer’s first major commission in North America, and he is stage and costume designer as well as choreographer.

The program promises to be a grand finale for what has so far been an outstanding season and includes another world premiere, Carnivale, by Atlanta Ballet choreographer-in-residence Claudia Schreier and Ben Stevenson’s 1969 canonical neoclassical pas de deux, Three Preludes.

Inspired by Fannie Mendelssohn-Hensel’s music and Sonia Delaunay’s modernist art and design, Significant Others explores the dynamics of close artistic collaboration, the neglected “other halves” of famous partnerships and how theatrical dance has often fused high art and popular culture. Wörtmeyer described it as visual art set to music; “I want the audience to feel like they’re inside a Delaunay painting.”

While watching the company in rehearsal, it became clear that though the work is grounded in intimacy — between siblings, spouses and artists — Significant Others will be a big ballet. More than half the company often filled the studio together, executing ambitious, technically challenging turns, partnered adagio and allegro in close synchronization. Still, intimate moments, like the interactions of a couple or trio, or an individual’s struggle, emerged organically from the group, as if brought into focus by a telephoto lens.

The same maximalist impulse that fuels Wörtmeyer’s choreography for Significant Others has also influenced his costume and stage design, both of which unleash the arrested momentum of Delaunay’s paintings. A peek into the set construction and costume shops gave tantalizing glimpses of enormous black, white and gray circles that will be part of the moving set and boldly colorful geometric patterns hand-painted onto the cream-colored silk of short, sleeveless shifts, and sleeveless shirts and trouser-like pants.

Formerly a member of The Australian Ballet and American Ballet Theater, and principal dancer and choreographer-designer at the Dutch National Ballet, Wörtmeyer retired from the stage in 2022 to focus full-time on choreography, sculpture and fashion design. His ballets have been staged throughout Europe and Australia, and his sculptures have been shown in solo and collective exhibitions in several European and Australian galleries.

Wörtmeyer’s notable collaborations include creating movement and designs in concert with Paco Rabanne and G-Star RAW. At Paris Couture Week 2023, he created jewelry for couture house Ronald Van Der Kemp’s runway show, and he is currently designing a line of couture sculptural evening bags for an as-yet-undisclosed design house. Also in 2023, he teamed up with Roberto Bolle and  Galleria d’Italia to bring dance into their galleries across Italy.

Significant Others has presented Wörtmeyer with an opportunity to use what he describes as his entire multi-disciplinary tool kit for solving the creative problem of balancing structure — aural, temporal, visual — in space to evoke an emotional response. “People like to put you in a box,” he said. “They want to say, ‘This is what you do.’ In my brain, though, the music videos, the sculpture, the fashion, the musical theater, the opera, the teaching, the ballet, all of these things are the same thing. And that is what I want to do.”

Wörtmeyer speaks of ballet as a sculptor might speak of material, rather than as a form or vocabulary: “I interpret the music, and that’s why one work can look so different from another. We have these incredibly talented dancers. They learn everything. I want to use all of that to create beautiful movement that expresses what the music is doing, without worrying about genre or adhering to some particular aesthetic.”

He says Atlanta Ballet has been “incredible.” Last year, he spent a week with the dancers, gauging their abilities, figuring out who would be best for the lead roles.

During an audition of sorts, the répétiteurs paired everyone into couples, and Wörtmeyer was amazed. “I gave them extremely difficult lifts and jumps and turns, and the whole company, like en masse, would just do it! That is rare, that the whole company can do that kind of movement in such a consistent way.” So, what was meant to be the most challenging material for the strongest dancers instead became work for the group, and Wörtmeyer was able to raise the bar even higher.

The other world premiere on the program is Schreier’s Carnivale, set to Concierto in Modo Galante by Joaquín Rodrigo. It’s billed as “a festive, jubilant modern ballet,” and a preview of a few of Abigail Dupree-Polston’s set pieces, sketches and costumes suggested the stage design is both festive and jubilant and will complement the ingenuity of Schreier’s distinctive choreographic style.

The entire program, showing Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, promises to close Atlanta Ballet’s season with color and panache.

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Robin Wharton studied dance at the School of American Ballet and the Pacific Northwest Ballet School. As an undergraduate at Tulane University in New Orleans, she was a member of the Newcomb Dance Company. In addition to a Bachelor of Arts in English from Tulane, Robin holds a law degree and a Ph.D. in English, both from the University of Georgia.