Tell Me Where It Comes From Program

“If you tell me where this light went, I will tell you where it comes from.”

The final words spoken in Adagio Lamentoso (1981), one of George Balanchine's last ballets.*

Conceived, choreographed, and written by: Emily Coates
Directed by: Ain Gordon
Performance material developed by: Emily Coates, Ain Gordon, Derek Lucci, Charles Burnham
Original music composed by: Charles Burnham
Musical composition exercises by: George Balanchine
Additional music: The Unanswered Question (1908) by Charles Ives; Gaspard de la Nuit / II. Le Gibet(1908) by Maurice Ravel

Performers: Emily Coates and Derek Lucci
Special cameo: Henry Seth
Musicians: Charles Burnham and Melvin Chen

Lighting design by: Krista Smith
Costume design by: Harriet Jung and Reid Bartelme
Production Stage Manager: Ed Fitzgerald
Translations by: Alice Stone Nakhimovsky and Alexander Nakhimovsky (1936 letter); Sophia Schwaner and Constantine Muravnik (1930s music theory lessons)
Text in Russian read by: Alexander Nakhimovsky
Music transcription: Luke Haaksma
Musicology: Stephanie Venturino
Sound design: Adam Lenz and Sophia Schwaner
Project Manager: Natalie King

Action/gesture quotations from the following Balanchine ballets: Serenade, Orpheus, Stravinsky Violin Concerto, Episodes, La Sonnambula, Ivesiana. Full quotation of the male quartet’s choreography in The Unanswered Question.

Additional movement sources: Still photographs by George Platt Lynes in 1950s NYCB publicity brochures (from the private collection of Gary Haller, Henry Prentiss Becton Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science, Yale University). 1934-35 photographs of Balanchine ballets Errante,Transcendence, Reminiscence, Alma Mater, Serenade. Museum of Modern Art Photographs: Ballet (NewYork Public Library for the Performing Arts, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, Lincoln Center). Printed postcards of Balanchine and Vera Zorina (Vera Zorina Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University).

BALANCHINE is a trademark of The George Balanchine Trust. Choreography by George Balanchine© The George Balanchine Trust.

Tell Me Where It Comes From is commissioned by Works & Process. The iterative development has included a Works & Process LaunchP AD residency at The Church (2025) in Sag Harbor, home to George Balanchine's grave. The project continued to be supported with a Works & Process LaunchPAD residencyat the Catskill Mountain Foundation in Hunter, New York where Jacques d’Amboise lived for seven decades. Additional developmental support was provided by the Quick Center for the Arts at Fairfield University, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Supported by the New England Foundation for the Arts Dance Fund. Tell Me Where It Comes From was created in part during a residency at the Pillow Lab at Jacob’s Pillow. With additional support from the O’Donnell-Green Music and Dance Foundation.
 

*Quoted by Anna Kisselgoff in her New York Times review of the ballet, as relayed by the choreographer in an interview. (In the only surviving film of the ballet, the words are not audible.) Jacques D’Amboise believes Balanchine encountered this Sufi parable through Hafez—D'Amboise himself loved to quote Hafez—although Rumi’s teacher Shaykh Senai told the same tale centuries prior. The one difference is that the little boy who utters these words in the Balanchine ballet was, in the earlier story, a little girl.