Four Refrains
Aaron Loux
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Aaron Loux (he/him) is a Seattle-born, Madison-based dance artist, choreographer, and educator. During two decades of living and working in New York City, Aaron completed his BFA at Juilliard before beginning his twelve-year tenure as a celebrated member of the Mark Morris Dance Group, acknowledged by the New York Times as one of the “Top Male Dance Performances of 2014.” Aaron has also performed with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, Merce Cunningham Trust, Ellen Cornfield, Christopher Williams, and most recently Tere O’Connor. His choreography has been commissioned by the Juilliard School, Marymount Manhattan College, Seattle’s Kaleidoscope Dance Company, the Guggenheim’s Works & Process Artists Virtual Commissions series, the Men in Dance Festival, and the Society for New Music. In 2023, he was awarded the CBA-Juilliard Fellowship at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU. Aaron has taught dance and yoga on the faculty of University of Wisconsin–Madison, Marymount Manhattan College, Adelphi University, Dance for Parkinson’s®, Steps on Broadway, Mark Morris Dance Center, and Gibney Dance Center, and has lead company classes for the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, Mark Morris Dance Group, and the José Limón, Paul Taylor, and Gibney dance companies. In 2025, Aaron graduated summa cum laude from Columbia University in 2025 with a BA in American Studies. His writing has appeared in multiple issues of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, published by MIT Press. This fall, he joined the inaugural cohort of UW–Madison’s Dance MFA in Creative Research, Culture, and Practice. After performing at the Men in Dance Festival in 1998, 2014, and 2024, Aaron is thrilled to return to the festival this year as a Featured Artist.
PROGRAM NOTES
Four Refrains is the third dance I have made for Sound Companion, a collaborative project that celebrates Henry Cowell’s radical early works for solo piano. Writing about Cowell shortly after his death in 1965, American composer and music educator Norman Lloyd described the composer as “the preferred sound-companion for the dances of Martha Graham, Charles Weidman, Hanya Holm, Erick Hawkins, Tina Flade, Jean Erdman, Gertrude Lippincott and many others.” I proudly step into this lineage, finding fresh inspiration in the vigor, playfulness, and authority in Cowell’s music.
From 1936 to 1940, Cowell was incarcerated at San Quentin prison, after his arrest on a “morals charge” under California’s anti-sodomy laws. During these years, Cowell conducted the prison orchestra, gave lessons to fellow inmates, and continued to compose new works. He wrote these three ritournelles, along with two other short pieces, for a production of Marriage at the Eiffel Tower at Cornish College in 1939. The invitation came from his composition student John Cage, who was working at Cornish as a dance accompanist at the time. Bonnie Bird, the choreographer and director of the production, rejected the ritournelles, finding them incompatible with her choreography. Uniting these works with dance, as they were intended, and bringing them to Seattle, where they were meant to premiere, feels like a homecoming.
Making this dance, I turned to Deleuze and Guattari’s exploration of the ritournelle (refrain) in their 1980 collaborative work, A Thousand Plateaus. I sought to explore how movement, like song, can create a protective space, shielded from the chaos of the outside world. I wondered: how do we create these spaces of comfort with our bodies, and how do we manage our inevitable desire to escape them?
DANCERS
Brian Lawson photographed by Steve Korn
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Brian Lawson (he/him) is a dance performer and educator who began dancing in Toronto, Canada. In 2005, he spent a year at Codarts in Rotterdam and subsequently began his degree at SUNY Purchase. While studying, he performed with Douglas Dunn and Dancers, Pam Tanowitz Dance and as a supplemental dancer for the Mark Morris Dance Group. He graduated summa cum laude from Purchase in 2010 with a B.F.A. in dance performance and received the President's Award in Modern Dance. He became a member of the Mark Morris Dance Group in 2011 and had the great pleasure of touring the United States and the world performing Morris' dances.
Brian earned his M.F.A. from the University of Washington in 2020 and subsequently joined the faculty at Cornish College of the Arts. At present, Lawson serves as an assistant professor of dance at Skidmore College. His artistic research is collaborative in nature and focuses on queering the ballet canon (with Adele Nickel) and exploring queer masculinities (with Aaron Loux.) He also engages in pedagogical research with regards to contemporary balletic practices. Brian is currently a member of Pam Tanowitz Dance, having originated roles in “Song of Songs” and “Day For Night” in recent seasons. He also continues to dance with MMDG as a guest artist.
Lawson enjoys teaching dance to diverse populations and has given masterclasses at Purchase College, NYU Tisch, and the American Dance Festival among others. He acts as a guest ballet teacher for the Jose Limon Dance Company, Mark Morris Dance Group, and at Gibney Dance. Lawson is a longtime student at the Merce Cunningham school and was certified as a teacher of the technique in 2020.
Kyle Gerry (he/him) studied dance, and political science and economics, at Columbia University, from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He currently dances for Lucinda Childs, performing her iconic collaborations with Philip Glass, Sol Lewitt, and others. He has also danced in many projects for Christopher Williams and the Merce Cunningham Trust, performing several of Merce’s solo roles. He created, in collaboration with composer Drake Andersen, an original evening-length opera based on Roland Barthe’s Mythologies. His current long term project, Following Orlando, has had workshop showings in Seattle, Detroit, and Toronto; an excerpted showing at the Poetry Project in New York; and a workshop showing in Paris in collaboration with students at Ecole 42.