When Martha Clarke first set foot on the Peabody Institute campus, she couldn't have imagined that one day she'd be shepherding Peabody's largest collaboration to date involving composers, dancers, actors, videographers, and writers.

After all, she was just five years old.

From kindergarten through high school, Clarke attended Peabody Dance, a department of the Peabody Preparatory and the oldest dance school in the country. "It was a wonderful beginning to my career," says Clarke, who grew up in Baltimore's Greenspring Valley. "I have happy memories of getting out of school and going to dance." At the end of 11th grade, she became the first Peabody Prep dance student to attend Juilliard. Her career since has placed her at the nexus of groundbreaking collaborations between dance, theater, and opera, earning her an international reputation as an influential artist.

A MacArthur "Genius Award" winner, Clarke is a founding member of Pilobolus Dance Theatre. She has choreographed for the Joffrey Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, among others, directed her own productions, including The Gardens of Earthly Delights and Vienna: Lusthaus, and directed theater and opera productions worldwide. Her list of awards and grants is equally impressive: two Obie awards; the L.A. Critics Award; a Drama Desk Award; two Guggenheim Foundation grants; and 15 grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her artistic vision has been the subject of a PBS film, Martha Clarke, Light and Dark, and last November, the New York Theater Workshop debuted her latest production, Kaos, in which she directed and choreographed the short stories of Luigi Pirandello, in Italian with Italian actors.

Little wonder, then, that Clarke was the obvious choice when Carol Bartlett, Peabody Dance's artistic director, was asked by Peabody to submit names of potential distinguished guest artists to help celebrate the Institute's sesquicentennial in 2007. "Martha doesn't perform or teach per se," explains Bartlett, who has led Peabody Dance for 17 years. "What she is famous for is collaborating and directing, and we felt she could really function as a mentor."

Barbara Weisberger, artistic advisor to Peabody Dance, was dispatched to New York City to talk with Clarke. Her task? Invite the program's most famous alumna to become its first artist-in-residence.

If anyone could convince Clarke of the merits of the project, it was dance visionary Weisberger. A protégé of George Balanchine, Weisberger founded the Pennsylvania Ballet and later created the distinctive Carlisle Project for the professional development of choreographers and dancers, before joining Peabody in 2001.

Says Weisberger, "We didn't pick Martha. She picked herself in a way. There are not too many [dance] alumni who have made it. Martha has."

Clarke's answer of yes has been a revelation to Peabody Dance, the Institute, the region's arts community, and to Clarke herself. "Martha hadn't returned to Baltimore in 40 years except to bury relatives," recalls Bartlett. "The last time she was on Friedberg Hall stage, she was 9." On April 14 and 15, 2007, Clarke returns to the same stage for the premiere of NEW WORK, which will be the culmination of Clarke's residency.

NEW WORK brings together 28 artists, ages 16 to 61, from across several disciplines to produce four new collaborative works. The artistic teams include Peabody Conservatory composition doctoral students and an impressive array of Peabody Dance faculty and students, videographers from Peabody's Recording Arts and Sciences Department, and students and freelance artists from Towson University's MFA Theater Program, Goucher College, Baltimore School for the Arts, Baltimore Shakespeare Festival, and the Washington, D.C. School of Ballet.

"What we're talking about here is starting with a blank page," says Bartlett, who serves as NEW WORK's artistic producer. "The Clarke Residency brings artists together with no preconceived idea or piece of music in front of them. The whole privilege of being invited to work with Martha Clarke stands for itself as an enlargement process for each artist." Weisberger echoes the intrinsic value of starting fresh: "Most choreographers go to existing music. It's not the same simultaneous combustion as when choreography and new music meet."

Both Bartlett and Weisberger have extensive experience collaborating with other artists and art forms within and beyond Peabody. Bartlett herself is choreographing a NEW WORK piece based on Peabody doctoral student Angel Lam's composition inspired by a childhood memory (see pg.13). "Angel's story in sound is only eight minutes," Bartlett explains. "The question becomes, How can I manipulate her music? What will she allow and disallow? In this collaborative effort, all of the disciplines are opening themselves. What I hope comes through this is an organic integration of music, visual image, and dancer."

To begin what Bartlett dubs "vulnerable" conversations, Clarke met last May with the initial participants to talk about backgrounds, ideas, and the number of collaborative projects the group members thought they could handle. Throughout her residency, which encompasses four weekends at Peabody, Clarke's goal is to guide, not direct. "I want to have people learn to communicate with artists who do other things, how three or four visions can make a single vision," she explains. "My work with Peabody is with people who are beginning these dialogues. To merge art forms takes an enormous amount of trust and generosity."

An animal lover from her childhood days of riding horses, Clarke likens her role to that of a Belgian sheepdog. "I watch the parameters. If they have too many ideas, I help them focus, and I give them tips to work with other artists. You can't teach art, but you can help people realize their vision by conversation."

For writer/director Juanita Rockwell, founding artistic director of Towson University's MFA Theater Program, learning how to have these conversations is one of the most important elements of the Clarke residency. "As an artist, it's a different way of thinking," she says. "You have to reorganize your language and speak across a culture. This forces the artists to examine their own prejudices and beliefs."

During the summer and fall, each group met regularly to hone ideas, create a shared vision, and rehearse. As the projects developed, the individual groups cast their nets locally and nationally for set, costume, video, and lighting designers, as well as other creative collaborators.

Both Bartlett and Weisberger hope the Clarke residency sparks the next significant step in the evolution of the 93-year-old Peabody Dance program. Recognized for innovation—Peabody pioneered the study of Native American dance, Dalcroze, and nationally regarded Spanish dance instruction—the program today focuses on contemporary dance, led by Bartlett, and ballet, which has been restructured and reinvigorated under Weisberger's tutelage. Peabody Dance has three main curricula. The Pre-Professional Program is an intensive, graded core training track for dancers ages 7 to young adult. The foundation-building Young Children's Program is for 4-to-6-year-olds, and the less-intensive Open Program is open to dancers of all ages and abilities.

"Peabody has its chamber music following, its opera following, and a small dance following," says Bartlett. "If you put something like [NEW WORK] on, you're integrating audiences. This is a service to encourage the ever-widening Baltimore arts collaboration." NEW WORK choreographer Lisa Green-Cudek strongly echoes this hope: "Our collaboration is forging relationships and future collaborations between art forms, between artists, and between institutions," she says. NEW WORK and the Clarke residency "could energize the Baltimore arts world."

Clarke is delighted that her Peabody homecoming is inspiring new beginnings and new artistic explorations. "There are not a lot of places in the country that focus on interdisciplinary collaborations," she says."Dance and theater departments can get so involved with their own scheduling that they don't open the window and let fresh air come in. The success of the [NEW WORK] pieces is less important than the success of the participants working with other disciplines." Says Clarke, "Process is everything."

Project 1: Untitled

Choreographer Elizabeth Gahl and composer Ying-Chen Kao didn't need to look very far for inspiration for their NEW WORK collaboration with videographer Erik Trester. They needed only to go outside and take a walk. "People get the impression that the city is dirty and noisy, but there is a little magic there," says Gahl. "You can see different emotions when you pass people on the street."

The ballet Gahl is choreographing for a handful of performers from Peabody Dance, the Baltimore School for the Arts, and Goucher College is abstract in concept, but the dancers will wear traditional ballet attire, not street clothes. Kao, a Peabody doctoral student, has a compositional style that lends itself well to the theme of differing attitudes. "I have that element in my music, using rhythms and several different layers to represent different emotions," she explains. Erik Trester, an up-and-coming video artist is working with the pair to create images that may include shots of the dancers and various city scenes, as well as audio to supplement Kao's music.

The mix of their artistic talents also makes for a little magic. A native of Taiwan, Kao's compositions have won several awards, including the 2005 Peabody Camerata Composer Contest, the ERMmedia "Masterworks of the New Era," and the 2006 Otto Ortman awards. Gahl, a Georgetown University senior, is a graduate of the Washington, D.C. School of Ballet, and has had her choreography performed at the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater and the Youth America Grand Prix Competition. She became connected to Carol Bartlett as a regular attendee of the Peabody Dance choreography workshops, which are open to regional choreographers. Trester holds an masters in multimedia systems from Dublin's Trinity College and has worked as a video and sound designer for Studio Theater in Washington, D.C.

"As a composer, you can't randomly grab a choreographer or videographer to work with," says Kao. "This experience has helped push me to a place where I can explore more collaborative elements in my composition style." For Gahl, it's all one big experiment. "There's potential for so many possibilities to arise because we're three very different artists and individuals," she says. "We all enrich each other. To come together and work on one project is very exciting."

Project 2: Midnight Run

A woman in an evening gown runs through the streets at midnight, the yellow fabric of her dress flowing in the wind behind her. High above on a balcony, a little girl watches in the moonlight. Peabody doctoral candidate in composition Angel Lam always assumed this image from her childhood memory represented her waiting mother and absent father. "As I grew older, I realized that I was wrong," she explains. "This running beauty is not related to my family, only to me."

When she paired with Carol Bartlett to create a piece as part of NEW WORK and re-told her story, Bartlett saw immediately its potential for artistic expression through movement. "I was captivated by Angel's facial expressions and tone and timbre of her voice," recalls Bartlett. "To me, that was choreographic material, and I knew I wanted to work with video." A call to Charles Thompson, acting director of Peabody's Recording Arts and Sciences department, brought his graduate assistant Nathan Bark on board. Currently a Recording Arts and Sciences undergraduate and Acoustical Studies graduate student, Bark holds a bachelor's in trombone performance from Peabody and has professional sound experience in television production. "I'm very much learning as I go," says Bark. "The camera is another instrument, just like the trombone and microphone are instruments. [Working with Lam and Bartlett] is an open, honest environment."

"Angel is not only a talented composer, she is full of her own personal tales and visions," says Bartlett. "Her story symbolizes her always being on the edge of the creative process." Lam's talent has also placed her on one of the world's most famous stages. In September, she debuted her first piece at Carnegie Hall, "Empty Mountain, Spring Rain," in a project with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, and in April, she will premiere her second Carnegie Hall commission created during a professional workshop with Osvaldo Golijov and Dawn Upshaw.

To add a narrative element, Bartlett introduced Lam to poet and Peabody Dance alumna Jesse Nissim, who wrote 16 poems based on Lam's story. Both verse and music provide the backbone for choreography and dramatic content. During their first studio session with Clarke, a dancer moved in response to a video backcloth of her torso and arms. Clarke has offered constructive feedback on simplifying ideas for the piece, movement choices, and how to integrate visual elements to drive Lam's score and the lyrical story it tells.

Project 3: Ophelia Forever

Every artist knows there there is more than one way to tell a story, even a story the world has known for centuries. After viewing a visual arts exhibition inspired by Ophelia's story in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Peabody doctoral student Amy Beth Kirsten was inspired to write the opera Ophelia Forever. A promising composer, Kirsten is the winner of both the 2006 Theodore Presser Award and the 2006 Randolph S. Rothschild Award.

For NEW WORK, she and choreographer Lisa Green-Cudek are combining opera, dance, and theater to shed new light on Ophelia's familiar, tragic tale. Kirsten's original opera envisioned Ophelia as three archetypes: the Violated Saint; the Faithful Seductress, and the Mad Mermaid. The NEW WORK group has used this structure as a starting point for their work.

 "We are finding that artists from different mediums absorb elements of each other's perspective," says Peabody Dance faculty member Green-Cudek, who founded and co-directed the Jewish/German Dance Theatre, a collaboration of third-generation German Gentile and Jewish American dancers and actors. She has also taught dance at the University of the Arts, Temple University, and the Teacher Training Program at Tanz und Theaterwerkstaat in Germany. "The magic of Ophelia Forever's evolution has been the way images travel through the art forms: joining, relating, opposing, assuming new dimensions, transforming and propelling new images."

The singers performing the three aspects of Ophelia's character include Charity Tillemann-Dick, who has performed with Marvin Hamlisch and as a soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra, at the Kennedy Center and at embassies around the world; and Jessica Renfro, who holds a master's degree and graduate performance diploma in opera from Peabody. This season, Renfro will appear with Opera Vivente and the Bel Cantanti Opera in Washington, D.C. Angela Hodgins will play the role of the Violated Saint.

Actor, director, and producer James Kinstle is playing the part of Hamlet, a role he's directed in the past, though this time around there's a new twist: Hamlet is silent and uses only movement to tell his story. "Any opportunity to take Shakespeare's classic and look at it from the perspective of dance and music is a way to peel away the layers and find different layers of the piece," says Kinstle, who is artistic director for the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival and an alumnus of Towson's theatre program. "All art is interpretation."

It's a lesson that Green-Cudek learned from seeing Clarke's The Hunger Artist in the mid-1980s, a performance that was pivotal to her development as a choreographer and director, she says. "Clarke shapes performances from an array of ingredients (people, art forms, images) to form a poetic totality," Green-Cudek explains. "This is our goal, too."

 "In Hamlet, the pool is the site of Ophelia's surrender to oblivion, her release from the agonies of consciousness. In our collaboration, Shakespeare's tale may be thought of as the pool from which everything springs. The collaboration itself provides the depth. Through the shiny surface of performance, we hope that the artists and audience will glimpse themselves, the meaning, which often eludes us, revealed through the telling and retelling."

Project 4: Leaves Without a Name

Two years ago, performer/choreographer/director Barbara Lanciers had no idea that a conversation with her grandmother would lead to what Lanciers calls a self-archaeological dig—and a theater piece for NEW WORK.

Performing runs in the family for Lanciers, a company member and the resident chore-ographer for The Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf and a frequent collaborator with Anne Bogart and the SITI Company, both in New York City. Her grandmother had been "the Shirley Temple" of pre-World War II Budapest. "My grandmother left Hungary in 1944, and I knew I wanted to do a piece on her," says Lanciers of her decision to create her first production. A research trip to Budapest in 2005 yielded previously unknown details of her family's life. "I discovered many family secrets my grandmother kept to survive the war. I began to get a glimpse that perhaps my heritage is Jewish. My piece started out as homage to my grandmother but has become more about what one has to do to survive the horror of war."

Bartlett commissioned composer Baris Perker, a second-year Peabody DMA student and native of Turkey, to work with Lanciers on what will be a 40-minute piece. Perker has won several composition awards, including first prize in the 2006 Macht Orchestral Composition Competition (his work will be performed this spring by the Peabody Symphony Orchestra), the 2006 Prix D'Été second prize, and the 2005 Randolph S. Rothschild Award. "I have never ever had this kind of [collaborative] experience before," he says. "With this project, as a composer, I cannot do whatever I want or like. My inspiration is Barbara's imagination. I have to guide my musical thinking to common points that we decide together."

"Baris is more classically trained, and I've only worked with theater composers," Lanciers says, of her first-ever collaboration with Peabody. "We're trying to speak the same language, and he is so willing to try new things. We're both new to this, but it could be that I've found a collaborator for the long haul." Both are relishing the opportunity to work with Martha Clarke. "She's been one of my heroes for a very, very long time, so this is a dream come true," Lanciers says. "She listens to your vision and where you want it to go, then steers a path to get there."

Lanciers and two Towson University actors, Eileen Cuff and Carolynne Wilcox, will perform the piece. Both agree that Clarke's ideas and suggestions have helped guide the project's choreographic and musical directions. When the work premieres in April, the audience will include Lanciers' 81-year-old grandmother. "Most of us can trace our roots back to another country," says Lanciers. "Our project brings up universal questions of cultural, ethnic, national, and personal identity.