The Work

After is a ballet of residue: what remains after rupture, after intimacy, after catastrophe, after the image has passed. Lia Cirio’s choreography responds to the emotional compression of Lera Auerbach’s preludes, where entire states of mind appear in miniature — crystalline, volatile, exposed, and quickly transformed.

The work places live violin and piano within a sculptural world of pale folds and suspended forms. John Farrell’s life-size object, developed from paper pleating, stands less as scenery than as a psychic terrain: a cave, shell, mountain, wound, shelter, and monument. The dancers move around it, toward it, and through its atmosphere, forming and dissolving like fragile communities after an unnamed event.

Cirio’s ballet is not narrative in a literal sense. It is built from sensations of aftermath: vulnerability and strength, erosion and persistence, solitude and collective repair. The dancers gather in delicate formations and then fracture away from them, as if each body were testing the possibility of remaining whole inside a shared field of instability.

In Auerbach’s music, the prelude becomes a charged fragment — brief, complete, and haunted by what surrounds it. After extends that principle into the visual and choreographic space. Each episode feels like an aperture: a glimpse of human presence emerging from a landscape of folds, shadows, and unfinished memory.

* In the catalogue, the asterisk indicates choreography to preexisting concert music by Lera Auerbach.

Music in Performance

The ballet uses selections from Auerbach’s 24 Preludes for Violin and Piano. In the 2026 Boston Ballet return engagement, critical coverage identified the live musicians as Boston Ballet Orchestra concertmaster Christine Vitale and principal solo pianist Alex Foaksman. The musical presence is integral: violin and piano do not merely accompany the choreography, but define the ballet’s emotional temperature.

Online Materials

Preview, References and Production Sources