The Work

Take Your Time was created by Terence Kohler for the National Ballet of China’s first choreographic workshop in Beijing. Made in April 2010, the work belongs to an international context of choreographic exchange: a workshop setting in which new movement languages, ensemble structures, and theatrical ideas could be tested within one of China’s major ballet institutions.

Kohler’s point of departure was time itself. Searching for something that could connect Western and Chinese cultures beyond spoken language, he treated time as a shared human condition: time moving forward, accelerating, reversing, stopping, and becoming unstable. The title therefore functions both as an instruction and as a philosophical premise.

The musical architecture combines Sofia Gubaidulina’s Am Rande des Abgrunds with Lera Auerbach’s A Cello Prelude. The pairing suggests a concentrated dramatic world: edge, abyss, pulse, breath, and line. Within this setting, Auerbach’s cello writing introduces an intimate temporal register — a voice of memory, suspension, and interior pressure.

With a cast of 28 dancers, the work appears to have been conceived not as a miniature but as an ensemble meditation on temporal force. Time becomes something bodies enter, resist, measure, and disturb: a choreographic condition rather than a neutral frame around the dance.

In the broader Auerbach–Kohler collaboration, Take Your Time sits between earlier and later stage works as a compact but significant international project: part workshop, part cultural encounter, part choreographic study of duration, acceleration, return, and stillness.

** Catalogue marker: mixed-composer ballet / dance work including music by Lera Auerbach.

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References and Production Sources