Alec Knight and Taylor Stanley in Nicola Turner’s Fabric of Undoing installation at CARVALHO PARK, New York. Featured photo by Stephen Penta and courtesy of CARVALHO PARK, New York.
At New York City Ballet, Alec Knight and Taylor Stanley dazzle audiences as a soloist and principal dancer, respectively. But off the stage, the two are a real-life couple — and across the city at Brooklyn art gallery Carvalho Park, Knight and Stanley explored the nuance of queer (and human) relationships through their latest dance collaboration.
Their 20-minute piece, titled Ephemeral solace (in passing), ran for three performances in the gallery, taking inspiration from the current installation: Fabric of Undoing by UK-based artist Nicola Turner. Fabric of Undoing is a collection of massive sculptures crafted from knotted organic matter, including upcycled horsehair and wool, that arc upward through the gallery space like dark, heavy pillars of smoke.
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“The shapes that Nicola has created in this space makes for this sort of playground environment,” Stanley shares with INTO, “which has given us a lot of inspiration to enact these feelings of binding, of being pulled apart, of being intertwined.”
Indeed, Stanley and Knight treated Fabric of Undoing as a playground throughout their performance, climbing the organic structures, sliding underneath them, and rearranging them to paint portraits of love, constriction, and ultimately letting go. Ephemeral solace tells the abstracted story of a relationship — though it’s not directly based on Stanley and Knight’s own.
“What we really connected with was the structure that you make with someone, but also, what parts of that can you undo? What parts can you take away? What parts can you use to inform the next evolution of your relationship?” Knight muses. “This piece specifically has felt very cathartic in that way.”
Stanley became a company member at NYCB in 2010, followed by Knight in 2016. All these years later, they’ve grown accustomed to the conventions of a ballet institution: a traditional narrative, a commitment to classical technique, and a proscenium stage. All three needed reevaluation for this new piece. They knew they wanted to tell a story about relationships — but that didn’t mean everything needed to be spelled out for their audiences. Knight recalls fighting the urge to give Ephemeral solace a clear-cut button: “We’re so used to having this story arc of, like, ‘Oh, but what happens at the end? What happens when someone does break?’ And I, at least, found myself getting to that place where it’s like, ‘And then you have to die!’”
Instead, Ephemeral solace’s conclusion stayed open-ended, with Knight returning Stanley to the place he first encountered them, literally and figuratively, as he lifted Stanley back onto Fabric of Undoing’s largest sculpture, which they had laid on to begin the piece. Knight recalls taking inspiration from the song “Watching My Phone” by King Princess (an artist he loves), specifically the lyric, “I apologize for holding you so tight you couldn’t breathe.”
“That resonated a lot in this one moment, because of the way that Nicola has these sculptures, they all go upwards,” he explained — a shape that, for him, conjures asphyxiation. “You’re not really sure if it’s caused from someone else or if it’s caused from themselves,” Knight added.
Their dance style, too, had to take a turn (or a pirouette?) for this performance. Knight and Stanley blended modern dance with ballet, keeping in mind that just because Ephemeral solace isn’t a full-out ballet composition doesn’t mean all technique had to be abandoned. “In the past, I feel like sometimes we detach and try to do something completely off-grid,” Knight says. “This time, we feel a little bit more connected to both worlds.”
Even their devising process was a new venture for the couple. For Ephemeral solace, Knight and Stanley choreographed on one another, though they stress that neither became a dictator when given control. “It feels like we’re providing a framework for phrase work, rather than being like, ‘I hold the choreographic stick or baton now, bippity-boppity-boo, do these steps because I said so,’” Stanley explains.
And of course, it’s not lost on Stanley and Knight that their on-stage partnership is far from the norm for ballet. Stanley is one of only two nonbinary dancers in NYCB’s company, and both they and Knight have rarely gotten the chance to express their queer identity through dance. Knight says that though he believes in the adage “art imitates life,” he’d rarely seen it come true on professional stages.
“I’ve been at New York City Ballet for a decade, and I was always like, ‘Well, how come it’s not reflecting my experience coming to New York and coming out and all of the different turbulence that comes with queer dynamics, both politically and personally?’” he reflects. “And I think when [Stanley and I] started collaborating, there was this need and desire that we both had to really start filtering through our experiences and having them be reflected in our artistic dialogue.”
Naturally, then, queer storytelling becomes a priority when given freedom from ballet’s strict ruleset. “There is a cap to the queerness that we’re able to explore at work, just because we’re not really in charge of the ballets that we dance [at NYCB],” Knight says. “Whenever we do get that opportunity, the first theme for Tay and I always is, without it being showy or inauthentic, it’s like, ‘Okay, the first theme is always queerness.’ The first thing for us is always like, ‘Okay, how do we indulge in the things that we do feel like are just not as present in our day-to-day institutionalized careers?’”
“It feels radical even just to be where we are, in our normal, typical environment, and step out of it and really — I mean, it sounds cliche — but find our voices,” Stanley echoes. “Because you do kind of have to fall in line in a certain way in such an institutionalized environment.”
That includes cultivating and speaking to an audience that appreciates queer disruption in the dance world. At Ephemeral solace’s opening night at Carvalho Park, audience members lined the walls of the gallery, audibly marveling at seeing a queer couple performing lifts and traditional partnered dancing that, on a professional ballet stage, would nearly always be performed by a man and a woman. The crowd was equally conscious of the political climate in which a piece like Ephemeral solace was being performed — one viewer wore a patchwork jacket with the words “F*CK TRUMP” painted on the sleeve — a climate that Knight says encouraged him to take a wider view at queerness for the piece.
“I definitely feel more motivated and more stimulated by what’s going on now to make it a little bit more thought-provoking and less about our or my experience personally, and more about the collective understanding of what these relationships mean and how incredibly sacred they are,” Knight explains.
Stanley, too, knows the importance of putting queer stories on stage. “The visibility of queer art and these types of processes that are from the minds and creative bodies of people like us, I think it always speaks more than what we think it actually does,” they say. “These processes are so rare and come across very occasionally. So it’s cool to have that realization that, like, ‘Oh, I’m in this space, and I get to speak how I want to speak, and let it resonate for other people like me.’” ♦
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