Charles Askegard’s Live Live Love Celebrates the Spirit of American Music and Dance at Performance Garage
- Lauren Berlin
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 3 hours ago
By: Lauren Berlin
Jeanne Ruddy has long occupied a singular place in Philadelphia’s dance landscape as a former principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company, where she performed internationally for a decade, and later as the founder of Jeanne Ruddy Dance and co-founder of Performance Garage, a leading center for contemporary dance performance and rehearsal in Philadelphia.
Ruddy’s curatorial approach prioritizes formally rigorous dance work presented in an intimate setting rather than large-scale theatrical spectacle. If you have never been to Performance Garage, it is one of Philadelphia’s great performance spaces and, for me, one of the city’s most rewarding venues for dance. The exposed brick, warm lighting, superb acoustics, and close quarters create an unusually intimate atmosphere where audiences experience work at an almost tactile proximity. More than just a theater, it fosters a rare sense of immediacy and artistic exchange — a space I would recommend to anyone seeking exceptional performing arts in Philadelphia outside of the city’s larger institutional stages.
Live Life Love: A Celebration of American Music and Dance, created by Charles Askegard for DanceVisions, unfolds in three sections that flow easily from one to the next rather than feeling strictly divided. The evening offers an inviting throughline: ballet feels most alive when choreography, music, and performance are closely in sync, each supporting the other in a shared sense of clarity and energy.
At a certain point, I stopped reading the steps as vocabulary and started reading them as response—the choreography translating the soul of the American compositions into visual form through a neoclassical movement language that felt clear, expansive, and luminous, carrying universal themes and emoting directly to the audience this weekend. Charles Askegard brings a refined eye for ballet composition, much like Ruddy’s curatorial vision, shaping the work so that musical intent and choreographic structure feel tightly and intelligently aligned.
The opening work, In Still Life (William Grant Still, Suite for Violin and Piano), settles into a quiet, inward mood right away. Still’s score carries a layered American lyricism that feels grounded but searching, and the choreography meets it with restraint rather than display. Movements unfold with care—phrases pause, restart, and resolve with clean precision. When a step extends just slightly past where the music seems ready to close, it lands with a subtle but noticeable charge.
If the first section turns inward, Where Lies Love (Florence Price) opens things up. Price’s score shifts unpredictably between tension and release, and the choreography follows those changes closely instead of smoothing them out. Love here is not presented as a fixed story or idea, but as something that keeps changing shape depending on the music in the moment.
That responsiveness becomes especially clear in Firmament (Life After Life Sonata for Violin and Piano, Philip Glass). Glass builds motion through repetition that gradually shifts over time, and Askegard matches that structure step for step—repeating, adjusting, and redirecting movement as the music evolves. You can see how closely the choreography tracks the score: small changes in the music produce visible changes in direction, timing, and energy, so the two feel tightly connected throughout.
Charles Askegard, a former dancer with both New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, brings his musical intelligence to the work. He understands the thrill of ballet movement because he understands the thrill of music.
The clearest expression of this is the relationship between Askegard, pianist Jenny Chen, and violinist Tess Varley. They are not accompaniment. They are active collaborators shaping the pace and emotional texture of the evening together.
Askegard sits beside the grand piano, just feet from the dancers and musicians, and while he is technically conducting, that word doesn’t quite capture what’s happening. He’s inside the performance with them. His gestures read almost like choreography—sharp and expansive in the faster passages, then small, suspended, and controlled when the music pulls back—responding to the score with the same physical urgency as the dancers moving across the stage.
One of the most compelling aspects of the evening is seeing Askegard in real-time exchange with Chen and Varley. Direction, music, and movement don’t sit in separate lanes; they converge in a single current. The dancers commit fully, the musicians do too, and nothing feels like accompaniment in the background. The result is a shared momentum through the room—less like watching a performance unfold at a distance and more like being carried forward with it.
Inside Performance Garage, that closeness intensifies everything. The audience is close enough to hear breath, effort, and recovery. Technique stops feeling abstract and becomes something physical and visible, a kind of labor happening in real time just a few feet away.
That immediacy is especially clear in a piano glissando—a rapid sweep across the keys that creates a continuous rush of sound rather than separate notes. In Jenny Chen’s performance, it doesn’t read as decoration but as force.
It cuts through the room and briefly changes how everything is being experienced. People react before they have time to process it, as if the energy in the space has physically shifted.
The cast drawn from Philadelphia Ballet includes Oksana Maslova, Yuka Iseda, Yuval Cohen, Nicholas Patterson, Kyleigh Johnson, Siobhan Howley, Jorge Garcia Alonso, Charlotte Erickson, Federico D’Ortenzi, and Sophie Savas Carstens. What stands out is not uniformity, but shared commitment. Every dancer attacks the choreography with complete conviction.
Nicholas Patterson’s performance carries particular resonance. Returning to the stage after treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2024, he dances with striking strength, clarity, and control. There is no hesitation or self-consciousness in his presence—only full physical commitment, delivered with speed, precision, and stamina from beginning to end. This is resilience at full force: power made visible in real time. What you see is the human body pushed into high demand and meeting it without compromise, carrying both technical rigor and artistic focus at a world-class level.
Costume design by Jennifer Tierney remains restrained and allows the movement to stay at the forefront.
The pacing of the evening feels distinctly American, not in subject matter, but in energy. Stillness never feels passive. Allegro becomes the evening’s baseline pulse. The familiar vocabulary of ballet, adagio, allegro, coda, grand allegro, waltz, becomes less a set of categories than a shifting range of momentum and feeling.
At one point an audience member calls out “Okay!” and another responds “Work!” I smile because honestly, I was thinking the same...The moment does not feel disruptive. It feels earned.
What Askegard, Ruddy, the musicians, and the dancers ultimately create is an evening where every element operates at full capacity without competing for attention. Live Live Love succeeds not because one aspect dominates, but because all of them are fully alive at the same time.
This was a Win for Ballet.
Live, Life, Love: A Celebration of American Music and Dance, world premiere, DanceVisions 2025–2026 Resident Artist Program, Performance Garage, Philadelphia, PA, May 15–17, 2026. Choreography by Charles Askegard. Presented by Performance Garage.