Alexander Ekman

Alexander Ekman is an international choreographer/director creating pieces for theatres, opera houses and museums.

• Read More
  • He also directs films and creates live performances/events in pop up locations around the world. Ekman has created and collaborated with around 45 dance companies worldwide including the Royal Swedish Ballet, Cullberg Ballet, Compañia Nacional de Danza Goteborg Ballet, Iceland Dance Company, Bern Ballet, Cedar Lake Contemporary Dance, Ballet de l’Opéra du Rhin, The Norwegian National Ballet, Boston Ballet, Royal Ballet of Flanders, Sydney Dance Company, The Royal Ballet of Denmark and Vienna Ballet.

    Ekman’s 2010 work Cacti has become a worldwide hit and has been performed by 15 dance companies including Sydney Dance Company. In 2012 he collaborated with Alicia
    Keys and incorporated her into his work Tuplet. In 2014 Ekman created his own version of Swan Lake, a new take on the most famous ballet of them all. A Swan Lake received enormous attention worldwide. In 2015 Ekman created his own version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Royal Swedish Ballet. In September of that year he received the Swedish Medea Award for “Inventor and renewer.” In 2016, he received the German theatre award “Der Faust” for his ballet COW for the Semperoper Ballet.

Mikael Karlsson

Mikael Karlsson is a Swedish composer based in New York City.

• Read More
  • Mikael Karlsson lives in Harlem, NYC. He moved to New York from Sweden in 2000. Mr. Karlsson’s music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, Le Poisson Rouge, Lincoln Center, MoMA, Park Avenue Armory, Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden, Paris Opera, Oslo Opera House, Royal Swedish Opera House, Semperoper in Dresden, Le Poisson Rouge in NYC, Ingmar Bergman Center at Fårö, Joyce Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and at new music festivals and opera houses across the world. His first opera, The Echo Drift, premiered at the PROTOTYPE Festival in NYC in 2018. Mr. Karlsson’s enjoys an ongoing working relationship with celebrated choreographer and director Alexander Ekman. Since they first started working together, in 2012, the two have presented 9 stage works – among them Play (Paris Opera Ballet, 2018), Tyll (Royal Swedish Ballet, 2012; US premiere in 2015 by the Joffrey Ballet), A Swan Lake (Norwegian National Ballet, 2014), Midsummer Night’s Dream (Royal Swedish Ballet, 2015), COW (Dresden Semperoper, 2016) and Rooms (Norwegian National Ballet, 2017). Karlsson composed an electronic version of the “Flocking” section from Alexander Ekman’s A Swan Lake for envelope-pushing fashion designer Henrik Vibskov’s SS15 at Paris Fashion Week and at Copenhagen Fashion Week. In 2014 Mr. Karlsson founded his own production company, Rough State Sound.
    Since 2014, Mr. Karlsson collaborates on his orchestral scores with orchestrator Michael P. Atkinson.

    Learn more at mikaelk.com

Laura Cappelle

Laura Cappelle is an arts writer and sociologist who lives in France.

• Read More
  • She is the Paris-based theater critic for the New York Times and covers dance for the Financial Times. Additionally, she writes a monthly column, “France/Dance,” for Dancing Times, and has contributed to the Guardian, Pointe, Dance Magazine and The Globe and Mail, among other publications. Laura Cappelle earned her PhD in sociology at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 in 2018, with a doctoral thesis about the creation process in ballet companies. She was the dance consultant for the BAFTA-nominated 2015 docudrama Rudolf Nureyev – Dance to Freedom, directed by Richard Curson Smith. In 2020, she edited a new French-language introduction to western dance history, Nouvelle histoire de la danse en Occident (Seuil).