Little mortal jump

Choreography

Alejandro Cerrudo

Staging

Ana Lopez & Pablo Piantino

Costume Design

Branimira Ivanova

Lighting Design

Michael Korsch

Scenic Design

Alejandro Cerrudo

Duration

26 minutes

Premiere

March 15, 2012
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago

PNB Premiere

March 18, 2016

Music

Beirut (“A Call to Arms” and “La Banlieue”), Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire (“Beware”), Alexandre Desplat (“See How They Fall—Dans Les Champs De Ble” and “A Self-made Hero—Theme de Heroes”), Philip Glass (“Glassworks/Analog: Orange Mountain Music Archive: Closing”), Hans Otte (“Wassermannmusik), Max Richter (“The Haunted Ocean 5” and “November”), Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan (“Fawn”)

The 2016 Pacific Northwest Ballet premiere of Alejandro Cerrudo’s Little mortal jump was generously underwritten by Jeffrey and Susan Brotman.

Little mortal jump, resident choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo’s tenth piece for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, is a bubbling blend of different styles and genres that distills into a fluid, cohesive whole. As a dance, it fuses the technicality of movement, the theatricality of the stage, and the dark humor inherent in relationships. As an experience, Cerrudo aims to transport his audience—to “make them forget what they did today, and what they will do tomorrow,” he says. From cubes that serve as frames and obstructions to diversely characterized couples to vastly contrasting music, Little mortal jump is layered with unexpected twists and turns. This work is a step in the evolution of Cerrudo’s choreographic style, of which he says, “I challenge myself to create more complex works and to do things that I haven’t done before.”

Notes courtesy of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago.

Artist Biographies

Alejandro Cerrudo

Alejandro Cerrudo is a Chicago based-choreographer born in Madrid, Spain. His professional career includes work with Stuttgart Ballet, Nederlands Dans Theater 2, and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago (HSDC). Cerrudo became HSDCʼs Resident Choreographer in 2008 and held that position until 2018. In 2020, Peter Boal named Cerrudo the first Resident Choreographer of Pacific Northwest Ballet, a post he will held for three seasons from 2020 to 2023.

Cerrudo’s body of work has been performed by more than 20 professional dance companies around the world. In March 2012, upon receiving the Joyce Theater Foundationʼs second Rudolf Nureyev Prize for New Dance, Cerrudo was invited by Pacific Northwest Ballet to choreograph his first work for the company, Memory Glow. Additional honors include an award from the Boomerang Fund for Artists (2011) and the Prince Prize for Commissioning Original Work from the Prince Charitable Trusts (2012) for his acclaimed major work, One Thousand Pieces. In 2014, he was awarded the USA Donnelley Fellowship by United States Artists.

Mr. Cerrudo was one of four choreographers invited by New York City Balletʼs Wendy Whelan to create and perform original duets for her program Restless Creature. In 2017, Cerrudo was invited by Daniil Simkin to choreograph a site-specific performance for the Guggenheim Rotunda, a Works & Process Rotunda Project commission featuring Daniil Simkin, with original costumes by Dior. Cerrudoʼs Sleeping Beauty, created for Ballet Theater Basel in 2016, was nominated as Production of the Year in Switzerland in Tanz, Jahrbuch 2016 by Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

In 2022, Mr. Cerrudo was appointed artistic director of Charlotte Ballet.

Alejandro Cerrudo’s choreographic residency with PNB was sponsored by Susan Brotman.