Chamber Dance Project at Woolly Mammoth by Lisa Traiger

Chamber Dance Project’s Grand Finale for Founding Artistic Director Diane Coburn Bruning

Iconic Works: Chamber Dance Project (@chamberdanceproject)
June 24-27, 2026
Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (@woollymammothtc)

By Lisa Traiger

Cover photo: “Book of Stones.” Choreographed by Christian Denice. Photo by xmb photography

When major and regional ballet companies go on hiatus for the summer, choreographer Diane Coburn Bruning turns the lights on and gets a selected few of those dancers back in rehearsal. Her Washington, D.C.-based Chamber Dance Project lives its name, producing one or two full dance concerts annually while the rest of the U.S. ballet world has closed shop for the summer.

The beauty of this project model is that Bruning gets the pick of top dancers from the home team Washington Ballet, plus temporary hires from companies as diverse as Carolina Ballet, Ballet Memphis, BalletMet, Milwaukee Ballet and Ballet Nacional de Cuba, among others.

Founded in 2000 in New York, Bruning, an active freelance choreographer, moved Chamber Dance Project out of the world dance capital in 2013 post 2008 recession, selecting the Washington, D.C., region for its burgeoning theater community – where she had contributed choreography. Encouragement also came from then-Washington Ballet artistic director Septime Webre. The part-time pick-up company kept its own pace and counsel, working away from mostly modern and contemporary DMV dance companies and makers who regularly plied stages at Dance Place, the Atlas, Lisner, the (now closed) Kennedy Center Millennium Stage, and Gunston Theatre in Arlington.

During her June 24-27, 2026, season on Woolly Mammoth Theater Company’s mainstage, Bruning announced her retirement. Principal rehearsal director Patric Palkens, a former principal with Cincinnati Ballet and soloist with Boston Ballet and Atlanta Ballet, will serve as interim artistic director for the forthcoming 2026-’27 season. In recent years, the DMV dance community has experienced challenging transitions and losses: at Dance Place, Joy of Motion Dance Center, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and even The Washington Ballet, which, following the long tenure of Webre, saw two successive ADs in seven years. It will be instructive to see how Chamber Dance Project navigates the transition on a smaller scale in coming years.

Centering live music has been a value woven into Bruning’s dance ethos since her years in New York and traveling the country as a freelance choreographer. Across the decades she found choreographic inspiration in Mozart, Scarlatti, Teleman, Philip Glass, Arvo Part, Astor Piazzolla, and Cole Porter among others, saying, “I don’t interpret music; I have a dialogue with it. That dialogue often includes musicians sharing the stage with dancers – a true treat for performers and audiences alike.

At Bruning’s farewell season, the Red Clay Ramblers from Durham, N.C., joined the company for choreographer Christian Denice’s “Book of Stones,” playing signature a commissioned score. Drawing on Appalachian mountain music, bluegrass, country rock, with the banjo, guitar, accordion, drums, keyboard and percussion, the Ramblers accompany lilting vocals of singer Skyler Herrick and the shape shifting motion of eight dancers. Amid bird calls, nature sounds and a mist-filled stage, Herrick’s haunting yodel-like trills hearken to a mystical wilderness where streams cut through forests and native flora and fauna create a soundtrack from dawn to darkness.

Dancers enter as a swirl of couples, arms and legs undulating like fields of corn or wheat bending in the breeze. A duet concludes with Jasmine Wong caught upside down by partner Marius Morawski, hanging like a pawpaw fruit. Later, the vocalist’s calls sound bird- or animal-like joined by tinkling and rustling sounds as dancers trickle into turns. A sense of poignancy fills the stage as a door opens – evoking other worlds to enter and explore.

An early work by Bruning, 2001’s “Ramblin’ Suite,” also features the Ramblers playing traditional songs like “The Old Jawbone” and “Pinch of Snuff” from the side balcony near the stage. The company’s men open the work, crossing the stage in muscular bare-chested glory, before grounding themselves with floor work, and a surprise back handspring thrown down by one particularly adept dancer. The women in soft blue dresses and pointe shoes offer up delicate footwork, flirty hip switches, and classical pirouettes that feel a bit out of character with the rooted, earthy muscular, opening. The men’s heavy stomps interplay with the women’s delicate pointe work. The second movement plays off of jazzy musical riffs for five couples, while “Woman Down in Memphis,” the third movement, bounces with some equally flirty interplay, before a series of virtuoso leaps for the men and more petit allegro for the women ends the set. A couple wander on in silence from opposite sides before a fiddle and hornpipe jot out an Irish-influenced jig for a duet. Soon the stage fills again with lines of dancers who braid in and out, circle and allemande in a sweet nod to American folkdance traditions.

A world premiere by choreographer William Moore, a former Pittsburgh Ballet dancer and present teacher at Point Park University, opened the evening. “Murmur” includes a contemporary string quartet playing a score from Mario Galeano Toro, Garth Knox and Philip Glass’s #3 from Quartet No. 5. Balletically infused with neoclassical Balanchinisms, circular arm shapes and gestures and women held aloft in arched figureheads, the piece allows the five dancers to display their technical skills cleanly and briskly.

One of Bruning’s earliest works, the 1994 duet “Berceuse,” spare and simply costumed in black leotards, connects dancers Jessy Fitzpatrick and Lope Lim to the romantically achy selection from composer Benjamin Godard played by Sally McLain and Karin Kelleher on violin, Jerome Gordon on viola and Steven Honigberg on cello. The two dancers fold into and pull away from each other with the tensegrity of a suspension bridge. The physical flow and stretch, push and pull, reflect the emotional currents beneath.

A reprise of Bruning’s “Chant” from 2018 is among her most collaborative and memorable works, drawing from Catholic liturgy and Gregorian chant dating back to between 600 to 800 C.E. Featuring ancient chants from the Agnus Dei, Plainsong, Veni Sancte Spiritus sung by members of Washington Men’s Camerata conducted by Scott Tucker and arranged by Michael McCarthy, the work embodies the harmonics, steps in the vocal scale and rhythmic complexity and power asserted by Don Johns on djembe and percussion.

The choral singers enter through the audience, in church-like procession, taking their place in the first row. Three men, their chests bear, wear long skirts suggesting a monks robe, yet the contrast between the profane physical display of skin and the hidden spiritual in the split the costume makes sets up a dichotomy between spirituality and physicality that emanates throughout the piece. The four women clad in short hooded tunics with loose, monk-like sleeves, their legs bare, sit their backs to the viewers. There’s a conflict between order and chaos, balance and instability that threads through the work. Men bound, leap, fall, support and grab ahold and tug at belts of their compatriots. This sense of unfettered masculinity within the structure of the musical accompaniment grows to a frenzy of tension and release. Dancers climb up one another, collapse, rebound, and strain.

In a duet, the female partner becomes a calming force, angelic as her arms in a halo circle her partner, they entwine to release as she pushes forward into that trademark arched arabesque Bruning loves and returns to. The choral and musical accompaniment with its liturgical underpinnings and heartfelt alleluias, along with the evocative costuming and bold movement language that modulates between grace and power, imbue “Chant” with a sacramental merging of body, voice and spirit that belies the profane worldliness associated with our modern era. It’s a work that needs a larger space, as it was seen in its premiere at the Lansburgh Theatre.

As a choreographic craftsperson, Bruning navigates the expanse of contemporary ballet with vision, skill and artistic integrity. She has built Chamber Dance Project into a strong ensemble with an organizational structure that can, one hopes, navigate the difficult variables the regional non-profit dance world is facing at this moment. While Chamber Dance Project and Bruning have not sought out many local collaborations with many active members of the DMV dance community, the ongoing commitment to bringing new works and commissions from choreographers as diverse and notable as Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, Jennifer Archibald, Andile Ndlovu and Darrell Grand Moultrie, will provide a solid foundation on which the next artistic director can build.

Lisa Traiger (she/her) has been observing, thinking and writing about dance in the DMV and beyond for more than four decades. She teaches dance appreciation at Montgomery College in Rockville, Md. When not in a theater seat, art gallery, or dance studio, you can find Lisa cultivating her garden, as Voltaire advised. You can read more about Lisa on our STAFF page!