Shifting Perspectives
The Fall's world premiere of Fresh Voices in Dance at Jacob's Pillow
By Scott Edward Anderson
Fall 2026
My'Kal Stromile was 14 the first time he stood in a studio at Jacob's Pillow. It was 2017,
the last year Anna-Marie Holmes ran its classical ballet program. Before he became a dancer, he remembers being a kid who wanted to be a teacher. He would come home from school and set up a classroom in his bedroom, including a whiteboard and copies of the teacher's edition of a Houghton-Mifflin textbook given to him by his brother-in-law at the time.
Stromile's desire to teach later became a yearning to choreograph dances, even while he was a dancer. "You couldn't get me to shut up about wanting to be a choreographer," he says. "I just had this desire, this need to do it."
This fall, Stromile returns to the Pillow with his own work, a new piece titled Answers Will Vary. It will be part of the Fresh Voices in Dance program coming to the Pillow from October 16 to 18.
Fresh Voices in Dance stems from a fellowship created by Youth America
Grand Prix (YAGP) to promote new choreographers, says Larissa Saveliev, the founder and artistic director of the organization. A gift from Greg Hymowitz funded the Marcella Hymowitz Creative Fellowship for Choreography, and this fall's showcase marks the fellowship's first public performance.
YAGP conducted a global search and selected six inaugural fellows, including Stromile, Ashley Davis, William Dugan, Monoela Gonçalves, Gabriel Lorena, and Abdiel Figueroa Reyes. Each has created a new work that will premiere at the Pillow, danced by students and dancers from
American Ballet Theatre (ABT) Studio Company, Houston Ballet II, Alberta Ballet School, and the Ailey/Fordham BFA Program, with two more companies still to be named.
The idea behind the fellowship, according to Saveliev, is to give young choreographers a platform on stages they might not be able to access or afford themselves, by funding experimentation, creation, and production costs. "When you have a new creation, you never know what's going to come out of it," she says. "It's more about the process so they can have a little bit more freedom to try things."
This is a natural extension for an organization that has spent nearly three decades discovering young dance talent. YAGP, founded in 1999, is the largest ballet scholarship organization in the world. Its impressive partner list includes current New York City Ballet artist-in-residence Alexi Ratmansky and Tony Award®-winning choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, as well as this year’s Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award recipient Tiler Peck, who was featured in the May/June issue of Berkshire Magazine.
Several contemporary international ballet stars began their careers with YAGP scholarships, among them Isabella Boylston, who received the scholarshipin 2001 and became a principal dancer with the ABT; Sergei Polunin, who gained global fame as the Royal Ballet’s youngest- ever principal dancer; and the Sierra Leone-born Michaela DePrince of the Dutch National Ballet, Dance Theatreof Harlem, and Boston Ballet, who died suddenly in 2024.
Dancers from the ABT Studio Company will perform Stromile’s work, the title of which comes from that grade- school textbook he used when playing school. “Inside the teachers’ editions of the books, there were moments whereit would ask open-ended questions, and in parentheses it would say ‘answers will vary,’” he says. “Even for grade school students, they realize that there’s so much space for interpretation in how someone can answer a question.”
Stromile has explored differing perspectives in other works, and in this new piece, he returns to it even in his choice of music. Stromile built the piece around Bach’s Fugue in G minor, known as the “Little Fugue,” in both an orchestral version and a solo piano transcription. “I’m treating this almost like two ways of encountering the same text,” he says.
In the first section, danced to the orchestral fugue, which he’s calling “Public Reading,” he will feature five dancers on the stage in a relentless, synchronized, large-scale series of movements. Then the piece collapses inward for “Close Reading,” set to the piano version, exploring the same ideas in a closer, more intimate scale. “You go from this kind of outwardly very expressive, expansive piece of music and choreography,” Stromile says, “to almost this microscopic understanding of the minutiae of how it works.”
Stromile says his choreographicworks often begin with an idea about perception, rather than a story. “I’m not really a person who, right now anyway, choreographically is super interested in creating literal narratives,” he says. “I like to have a conceptual anchor and a starting point, but I’m more interested in how movement can be perceived, even though it’s under the canon of classical ballet.” He prefers to work inside the vocabulary he was trained in, while pushing at its edges. “We have this base of understanding from the classical ballet, but there is room for it to stretch, because classical ballet has rules, but choreography does not.”
The Fresh Voices program marks YAGP’s first collaboration with the Pillow, and Saveliev is “extremely excited,” she says, emphasizing that the Pillow is “the defini- tion of serious programming, the combina- tion of choreography and dancers, every- thing—and, for me, they are number one.”
Stromile’s own path back to thePillow runs through The Juilliard School, where he trained under Larry Rhodes. “Juilliard was the place where I got alot of time and space and opportunityto make work, and I think that’s whereI started to gain confidence in being a dance maker.” Stromile won the school’s Hector Zaraspe Prize in Choreography and earned Choreographic Honors for three consecutive years.
He then danced with Boston Ballet from 2018 to 2024, and it was there,in 2023, that he got his first company commission, Form and Gesture, made possible, he says, by the company’s artistic director Mikko Nissinen’s early belief in him. He was still dancing in the company at the time, choreographing for his own colleagues while performing alongside them in the same program. “It made the process in the studio feel so organic and seamless,” Stromile says.
A year later came a commission from the Paris Opera Ballet, Word for Word, which Stromile describes as a kind of love letter to the roots of classical ballet itself, and to the great ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev’s imprint on the Paris company. “The premise is basically: this is all just classical ballet,” he says. “However, here’s a little twist and turn to consider, and perhaps this little twist can be accepted and adopted into this rich history here.”
This past year brought The Leisurely Installation of a New Window, a world premiere back at Boston Ballet, the company where he’d spent six years asa dancer, this time returning as the choreographer. And for Ailey II, he created Third Person Point of View, a trio built around a relationship that doesn’t fit within the usual expectations. “I was trying to take
this non-traditional approach to how a relationship or relationships are portrayed on stage,” says Stromile. The piece starts “in the middle of things” and only later loops back to the beginning, he says, and the cast itself shifts depending on the night: two women and a man in one casting, two men and a woman in the other. Across all his work, Stromile repeatedly asks dancers to “show me something I know but have never seen before.”
YAGP has had a long-standing relationship with Stromile, says Saveliev. “The first time we used one of his pieces, he was super, super young,” she says.
Stromile is aware of how quick his ascension has been as a choreographer, from Juilliard to Form and Gesture to the Paris Opera Ballet, back to Boston Ballet and Ailey II, all within a handful of years. A mentor once told him he was lucky because, in a brief time, he’s covered a lot of ground, but Stromile himself doesn’t entirely trust the pace. “It’s been such a short span of time, but I keep thinking I should be doing more,” he says.
Returning to the stage at Jacob’s Pillow, where he first danced as a young student possessing more conviction than credentials, and later as a dancer in three subsequent performance engagements with the Boston Ballet in 2019, the Ballet Coast to Coast program in 2021, and a 2023 memorial performance, he thinks “everything feels so full circle and connected. I feel extremely excited to come back in this way as a choreographer this time.”
Fresh Voices in Dance will perform four shows, October 16-18, including Friday at 7:30 p.m.; Saturday at 2 and 7:30 p.m.; and Sunday at 2 p.m. jacobspillow.org
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