Just last March, Ballet Austin found itself flourishing in the depths of the gothic and macabre with Stephen Mills’ POE / A Tale of Madness. This spring, the dance company is set to bloom in a different direction with the world premiere of Love’s Gentle Spring.
“Love’s Gentle Spring is really the opportunity to focus on things that bring positivity into our lives and happiness,” says Artistic Director Stephen Mills, “like [what] we think about after winter is finished and we’re moving on into a better time of the year, and the way life and nature regenerate during that part of the year. [It’s] sort of opening up that idea in the dance form.”
Antonín Dvořák’s American Quartet and Bryce Dessner’s Concerto for Two Pianos form the aural framework for the two-part ballet, which Mills discovered during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although these pieces of music aren’t new, creating fresh choreography for them isn’t as streamlined as putting together an already existing show like The Nutcracker.
Featured dancer Ian Bethany explained the distinction between constructing an original work as opposed to learning an established one. “It’s a different process,” he said. “We’re playing with it a lot more, and it’s becoming what it is because of what we’re dancing in each rehearsal. When we do Nutcracker, we have something that’s already staged. Then you’re learning movement that was maybe made on a different artist or choreographed a long time ago, and it’s set a certain way.”
“This is made on us,” he explained. “This is made on my body,”
Having been with the Ballet Austin company since 2009, Bethany is a soloist dancer for different movements of Love’s Gentle Spring‘s eponymous first part. Expanding on the learning process, he said that this production has differed from other productions he’s worked on. According to Bethany, Mills familiarized himself with the music before approaching any movement and then filmed himself doing improv to it. Bethany then came into the studio and they both worked on the choreography with Mills allowing the dancer to interpret it in his own way.
“If he gives you movement, or if we’re learning something off of a video that’s been filmed prior, [Stephen] likes to see the artist’s interpretation of [it] and what our inclinations are,” Bethany said.
Rehearsing intermittently in early fall and more frequently since the end of the Nutcracker season, the four weeks leading up to their March 28 world premiere have been the most crucial, the dancer said, with several hours per day dedicated to each of Love’s Gentle Spring‘s two parts. “For me as the artist,” Bethany explained, “I’m just seeing the broader scope of how much work goes into this and the amount of preparation and hours we’re putting in.”
For Bethany, the rehearsals and preparation have been particularly memorable, as this 16th season with Ballet Austin will be his last. “This has been a real treat for me to make this new piece with Stephen,” he said “because this will be our last collaborative process on a brand-new work … so in that way, it’s really special.”
As opening weekend nears and preparations escalate, Mills shared one final thought on the production. “I hope when people leave the theatre,” he said, “they come away with an understanding of [not only] the broad range of the physicality of dance that can happen, but the emotional range that can happen in a dance that is different from something they might see in The Nutcracker or Swan Lake.”
“There are so many ways for people to move,” Mills said, “and I would hope that they would find some relevance to their own life on the stage somewhere.”
Love’s Gentle Spring
March 28-30, the Long Center
This article appears in March 21 • 2025.