Bodiography dances through life’s journey in Maria Caruso’s ‘Evensong’

Heartbreakingly gorgeous music, rich with evocative strings, spiritual soprano voices and electronic underpinnings, inspires Maria Caruso 's newest ballet, "Evensong."

The fluid lifts and shifting patterns are of her design, but the ballet's concept is not.

"It's very unusual to find a composer who says, 'This is the score. This is what it's about. I want you to do the ballet,'" says Caruso, founding artistic director of Maria Caruso's Bodiography and an internationally in-demand choreographer. "This has only happened to me twice," in the past 24 years.

"Evensong," slated to premiere Nov. 15-17 at the Kelly Strayhorn Theater with a succeeding run in New York City , is the brainchild of American composer Kevin Keller .

"Maria is the perfect person to flip the script on," says the New York-based Keller, an award-winning composer who specializes in ambient chamber music that melds traditional instruments with electronic effects. " Evensong " is his first album based on vocal music.

Evensong by Kevin Keller

Last summer, Caruso began her choreographic journey into Keller's mystical odyssey, which is guided by 12th century Latin plainchant written by German abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179).

Caruso's assignment was to develop movement material to the album's eight tracks — to follow the life cycle theme from conception into the afterlife and to choreograph it for a group of women.

"Kevin was adamant that it be for a group of women," says Caruso, who first heard the score while the album was in development. She had hoped to use it for her newest solo concert, "Incarnation," seen in São Paulo, Brazil, and London earlier this fall.

The artists agreed on casting four women and adding one man (to facilitate complex partnering).

Keller says his preference for four female dancers is in correlation with the four sopranos who sing in unison on the album and notes that he had initially heard Hildegard's music sung a cappella by vocal group Anonymous Four.

"It was really beautiful, a transcendent experience," he recalls, adding that afterward, Hildegard's melodies lingered in his memory for 30 years.

In 2021, the fully formed thought "popped into my mind, like a vision, centered on Hildegard of Bingen, called 'Evensong,'" says Keller, who imagined it as a ballet from the get-go. "I immediately called Maria."

Initially, he selected one of Hildegard's plainchants, drafted his own accompaniment and began experimenting — but the music was not scored, metered or notated in contemporary format.

Trial and error continued for a year as he scoured Hildegard's repertory for plainchant that fit with the life cycle theme and then utilized her melodies on four tracks.

"The job has been to fit the music into the structure I created," says Keller, who completed the album in 2023.

Keller, a non-dancer whose music has translated into ballets for the Joffrey, Tulsa and Dayton ballets, first caught Caruso's attention in 2014, when the composer pitched music samples to choreographers he had researched online.

Caruso listened, liked and sought out more of his material. She licensed two of his pieces for "Doors and Windows" (2019). In 2020 she added music from his discography into " Metamorphosis ," her internationally acclaimed first solo concert and later collaborated with Keller on "Emerald City" (2021).

"I wanted to commission an original work," says Caruso. "He had two pieces of music that he'd been working on. We built those into what I wanted," she says. "For 'Evensong,' I'm creating the choreography because of Kevin's influence.

"The more he articulated what the vision was for the composition, the more connected I felt to his vision and less about mine. I needed to honor what his vision was and that was the really important thing for me," she says.

The ballet's premise evolved from Keller's fascination with the word evensong, which refers to a religious service denoting day's end and is tied to the early Christian concept of delineating the day with fixed intervals for prayer. "The passage of a day can also be the metaphor for the passage of a whole life," he says. "I wanted it to reflect life's journey from start to finish."

(Coincidently, it also parallels the evolution of a career, as principal artist Elektra Davis will retire after the run.)

Keller was most challenged by the first track. "We spent 90 minutes recording a seven- minute song. In the recording studio, they did it the way I wrote it. But it didn't sound right. Later I re-scored the vocal part. I never had to re-record before."

Caruso's creative process usually begins with workshop sessions, as she tests out phrases, combinations and ideas — and not always to the actual score.

However she fully jumped into "Evensong" during a residency in her Squirrel Hill studio.

"I had the music for so long. And because of my bicoastal life, my schedule has changed and so has my process," says the now Los Angeles-based choreographer, who directs her commercial production company, M-Train Productions, there.

"The second movement was the most challenging," says Caruso, an artist with a strong onstage dramatic presence that filters into her choreography and a passion for the old school modern dance techniques of Merce Cunningham, Lester Horton and José Limón.

"I could understand the music and movement in my body and mind, but it was a challenge to communicate that to the dancers," as was developing loosely thematic material.

"The abstraction component — that's just never been my thing. It's hard for me to do non-narrative work!" she says.

Keller loves how dance — like music — can communicate ideas, concepts, emotions and stories to an audience. "The entire process had way more moving parts than I would have expected," he says.

"The take-away," says Caruso, "is having all those traditional vocabularies in such a spiritual work. It's like the past, coming into the present and going into the future."