Bringing Firebird Back to Life

How Duke Dance Professor Iyun Ashani Harrison helped bring a noted ballet back to the stage

Two people dancing
Alexandra Hutchinson and Derek Brockington in the “Firebird” pas de deux. Photo courtesy Rachel Papo.

This is a summary of a story that originally ran on the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences.

Asked to help bring a notable ballet back to the stage, Duke dance professor Iyun Ashani Harrison first looked to the archives for reference.

He found just a shallow pool of resources – some shaky cell phone video, grainy VHS tapes, some oral histories and choreography notes. It would take some work to bring “Firebird” back to life.

A former dancer with the Dance Theatre of Harlem, Harrison was asked by that group’s leaders to join the team tasked with restaging the aged ballet. It hadn’t been performed there since 2004.

Working with former DTH ballerina Naimah Kisoki, Harrison dove deep into a type of archival research most don’t think about. They started with a VHS recording of a 2004 performance and then found others. The task was not easy on the eyes – the recordings were blurry, shaky and often didn’t show the entire stage.

But over time, they remounted a tapestry of performances from which they could draw conclusions about how the ballet had previously been staged. “The video of our performance was clear choreographically, meaning we could see patterns in the movements,” Harrison says. “But when we compared that performance against the archives from the 1980s and 1990s, we could see that some of the initial architecture of the choreography had been changed over time — we had information now that we hadn’t had before.” 

That project included a collaboration with the University of North Carolina School of Arts, where Harrison, Kisoki and DTH artistic director Robert Garland worked with students to further refine the corps de ballet (ensemble) sections. Now complete, the production travels to Paris this week, returning to Virginia and New York City later in the spring. 

Read a full version of this story on the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences website.