My’Kal Stromile, whose new piece premieres this week in Smuin Contemporary Ballet’s Bay Area performances, went from being a dancer to choreographer and arts administrator with Boston Ballet during a period when was he was stuck in thought, trying to understand his identity.
“I was in metacognition — I was thinking about thinking — and it was a time of so many questions that I was asking myself. So I made this piece that I myself danced in and created two pas de deuxs with it, and the work was very autobiographical. But I wanted to see if there was a way I could potentially expand that idea of maybe being lost in thought,” he says.
The more expansive vision of that piece, a Smuin-commissioned dance called “I-SCRIT-AH-SCREE-TAH-SKRATT,” is the centerpiece of “French Kiss,” the troupe’s fall season opening program, which also includes artistic director Amy Seiwert’s 2023 “French Kiss” and Michael Smuin’s 2002 “Stabat Mater” and is onstage Sept. 11-13 in Mountain View, Sept. 18-19 in Walnut Creek and Oct. 9-18 in San Francisco.
“It’s a completely preposterous, made-up phonetic phrase I made when I was trying to organize my thinking, and it almost sounds like thoughts buffering or something trying to make sense of itself,” Stromile, who has choreographed works for Ailey II, Paris Opera Ballet and Vail Dance Festival, among others, says.
A native of Dallas, Stromile graduated from The Juilliard School in New York in 2018. He cites The Black Academy of Arts and Letters founder and president Curtis King and choreographer and former Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater dancer Dereque Whiturs as his most influential mentors.
“They are Black men who over several years of my youth were people I saw in positions of leadership, who I saw directing in the front of the room and rehearsals, having a point of view, being creative,” Stromile says. “That kind of early exposure to seeing this is possible, that it was OK to take up space and stand in your skin as a creative.”
Stromile, who calls his choreographic style “polyphonic,” says his training incorporated everything from street dance and hip-hop to jazz to Martha Graham, Lester Horton, José Limón and Merce Cunningham to classical ballet.
“I’m what some might call a movement polyglot, as I speak a lot of languages in my body because that was the information I was exposed to,” he says. “However, I’m never trying to quote those techniques or practices as merely regurgitation, but I can flex back and forth in between movement, philosophies and ideas quite quickly.”
Stromile, whose new dance examines thought as a generative process, uses foundational classical ballet body positions, such as croisé (crossed), effacé (shaded) and écarté (separated), as “kinetic thought engines” in the piece.
“For croisé, it’s how many ideas can I create under the ideas of crossing — crossing each other, limbs crossing each other, crossing the plane or vector — to see how far I can take that idea,” he explains. “So by the end of the croisé section, even if an audience member is not familiar with the classical ballet vocabulary or the vernacular they have this sense of, ‘Oh, I saw this idea quite legibly,’ to the point where at the end of that section perhaps we couldn’t go any further. So I’m trying to build a work that feels like thinking in real time, like it’s generating itself from its own propositions.”
The new work is set to the Symphony in F major by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, Baroque master Johann Sebastian Bach’s eldest son. Stromile says the younger Bach strived to stay out of his father’s shadow by composing music that went against the grain of what his father was known for; his works, then, provide space for dynamism in choreography.
“This particular music is completely bizarre, and some of the counting structures and themes I find to be so incredibly compelling; they don’t have a typical classical cadence to them,” Stromile says. “I love the freedom inside of that of not knowing exactly how this is going to end, which makes me feel very in line with how thoughts work.”
“I-SCRIT-AH-SCREE-TAH-SKRATT,” which Stromile calls a “boutique ballet,” is set on seven dancers. So far in rehearsal, the choreographer has been impressed with Smuin dancers.
“They are completely unafraid and were on board from the very beginning, and they were extremely focused and hungry to see what they could do with the movement,” he says. “When there’s that kind of alignment between choreographer and dancers, sometimes you make things you wouldn’t have guessed you could have made.”
Smuin Contemporary Ballet performs “French Kiss” on Sept. 11-13 at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View; Sept. 18-19 at the Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek; and Oct. 9-18 in Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, 2 Marina Blvd., San Francisco. Tickets are $25-$120 at smuinballet.org.