Some musical works continue their journey long after they are completed, finding new life in places I never could have anticipated.
I am delighted to share that music from my album Polar Suite will be featured in Stillness, a new ballet choreographed by Ballet Arizona Resident Choreographer Nayon Iovino. Presented by Ballet Arizona as part of Desert Lines: An Evening at Desert Botanical Garden, in an outdoor double bill alongside Nacho Duato‘s Gnawa. Together, these two works create a distinctive evening of dance set against the unique landscape of the Sonoran Desert.The production will run May 12–29, 2027, at the Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona.
This project feels especially meaningful to me because it brings together the landscape of this collaboration—the Arctic and the Sonoran Desert—while also reflecting something broader in my work: all landscapes I have encountered over the years continue to shape my artistic voice in profound and ongoing ways.
Polar Suite in Desert Lines
I composed Polar Suite while living in Alaska, surrounded by vast glaciers, shifting ice fields, endless seasonal light and dark, and the deep silence of the North. The work was also supported by the prestigious Rasmuson Foundation, whose funding made it possible to fully realize and record the project.
The origin of Polar Suite reaches back to a defining moment during a flight from Alaska to Europe, when I looked down over Greenland and saw an unbroken expanse of ice and snow stretching as far as the eye can see. In that moment, the landscape revealed itself not as emptiness, but as vastness—an open field of pure potential, where meaning had not yet been assigned, and where identity could momentarily dissolve and be reimagined.
Duduk
That experience became the emotional and philosophical core of the work. In fact, the visual material for the project—photographs taken from the plane—came before the music. For the first time in my process, image preceded sound, and the compositions unfolded almost as a response to the land itself, as if listening back to it.
From this process emerged Alyeska (Aleut for “great land”), which became a central thread in the development of the work. To give voice to this state of solitary presence, I incorporated the duduk—an ancient Armenian double-reed instrument whose fragile, deeply human sound seemed to reflect the inner life of a figure within such vastness. Though it does not originate from the Arctic, its timbre carries vulnerability, breath, and emotional exposure.
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Alongside it, whispered vocal textures in a non-existent language appear throughout the work. These sounds do not communicate through words, but through breath and presence, reflecting the constant movement of thought, memory, and intuition that arises in solitude. Rather than dramatizing isolation, they explore the possibility of inhabiting it—of listening inwardly within silence rather than resisting it. In this sense, the music does not fill space; it listens to it. I would later continue to explore this vocal approach in my album *Pleiades*, where it evolved further as part of a broader sonic language of voice, texture, and atmosphere.
Over time, Alyeska evolved into Polar Suite—a meditation on the Arctic as a space of stillness and reflection, where outer landscape and inner experience mirror one another, and where sound becomes a bridge between the vastness of the world and the interior life of the self
This collaboration with Nayon Iovino continues an artistic dialogue that began last year during the inaugural Sedona Choreography Retreat, where we worked together for the first time on Santa Fe & Esmeralda, a new ballet set to music from my album Nostalgia: Reflections on Argentina. That experience revealed a shared interest in place, memory, and the ways music and movement can illuminate one another, and it laid the foundation for this ongoing collaboration.
With Stillness, that dialogue continues in a very different landscape.
Nayon’s choreography brings Polar Suite into conversation with the Arizona desert, creating a work that bridges Arctic quiet and desert energy. Set outdoors at the Desert Botanical Garden, Stillness unfolds as daylight fades—cacti, sky, and shifting desert light becoming part of the performance itself.
I am also incredibly honored that Desert Lines brings my music into a program alongside Nacho Duato’s Gnawa. Duato’s work is set to a powerful and atmospheric musical landscape featuring Gift of the Gnawa – “Ma’Bud Allah” by Hassan Hakmoun and Adam Rudolph; Carauari by Finis Africae (Juan Alberto Arteche and Javier Paxariño); and Nafas – “Window” by Rabih Abou-Khalil, Velez, Kusur, and Sarkissian. To share a program with such an iconic choreographer—and with music of such cultural depth and expressive range—is both humbling and deeply meaningful.
Together, these works form an evening shaped by movement, rhythm, and landscape, where different artistic voices meet under the open desert sky.
Tickets for Desert Lines: An Evening at Desert Botanical Garden go on sale July 1, 2026. This annual production is one of Ballet Arizona’s most anticipated events and typically sells out quickly, so early booking is strongly encouraged.