Tyler Walters continues to lead the Carolina Ballet Summer Intensive as Director. This year’s five-week program hosted 140 students from as far away as Paris, France, and Hawaii. These students were selected from more than 400 who auditioned during a 13-city national audition tour. Guest faculty for the program included dance luminaries Susan Jaffe and Michael Vernon, as well as Duke’s own Andrea E. Woods Valdés. The culminating performances at the Fletcher Opera Theater in Raleigh’s Progress Energy Center for the Performing Arts featured bravura pieces from the company’s repertory and new works danced by pro- gram students, trainees, and company dancers. Tyler created a new work for the program, Swervessence, which was performed by company dancers, trainees, and pre-professional students.
Carolina Performing Arts’ 2012-13 season featured a year-long commemoration of the centenary of Vaslav Nijinsky’s The Rite of Spring. As part of the celebration, Tyler was invited to be a guest lecturer for two of Prof. Erin Carlston’s courses at UNC-CH. These interactive presentations on Nijinski’s seminal work and the Jof- frey’s 1987 reconstruction by Millicent Hodson were offered to the undergraduate course Modernist Arts, and the graduate course International Modernism and the Arts. Additionally, Tyler was a presenter and panelist for “How Did The Rite of Spring Make it New?” an interdisciplinary panel for the UNC Royster Society of Fellows.
In addition to teaching ballet technique and repertory courses, Tyler collaborated with Profs. Thomas F. DeFrantz (Dance Program and AAAS) and Martin Brooke (Pratt School of Engineering) on the team-taught PUTTI course: Performance and Technology. The course successfully brought together students from Engineering, Dance and the graduate program in Experimental and Documentary Arts, among others. The collaboration has now received funding from Bass Connections and the Vice Provost for the Arts to teach a second iteration of the course in the spring of 2014 and to work on an interdisciplinary creative project this fall. Tyler’s choreographic contribution to November Dances 2012 was a reworked dance, B2B to the Nth, which creatively and playfully explores basic balletic movement concepts.
