Boston Conservatory Heads to Tanglewood This Summer
Boston Conservatory dancers in an April 2025 performance of Ken Ossola’s Onward Still
Jim Coleman
Boston Conservatory at Berklee students will take the stage at Tanglewood this June, in collaboration with artists long associated with two world-class dance companies: Under the direction of former Boston Ballet principal dancer John Lam (now associate professor of dance at Boston Conservatory) students will perform a brand new work specially created for them by Lam’s friend Ken Ossola, who has worked for decades with Nederlands Dance Theater (NDT) as both a dancer and choreographer.
Ossola’s contemplative Onward Still was created for Boston Conservatory dancers in spring 2025 to “reflect quiet resilience and movement,” and it stands alongside his other acclaimed creations for many of the world’s leading dance companies, including NDT, Le Grand Ballet de Genève, Boston Ballet, and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal.
This past April, Ossola visited Boston Conservatory for two weeks to create Onward Still with student dancers and prepare them for the world premiere at the Conservatory’s Spring Dance Concert: Limitless. On June 21, they will perform the piece a second time at Tanglewood Learning Institute, with live musical accompaniment by instrumentalists and vocalists from Boston Conservatory’s Music Division. Original music for the piece was composed by Polle van Genechten with lyrics by Martino Müller, himself a choreographer whose career was launched at Nederlands Dance Theater.
Long a fixture in European contemporary dance, Ossola performed in the original cast of Jiří Kylián’s landmark ballet Bella Figura in 1995. Over the decades that followed, he adapted his gift for expressive movement into a career as a choreographer and ballet master. Learning from Ossola directly was a rare chance for students to go straight to the source, Lam says: “That type of knowledge is not teachable from someone else. It’s like saying, ‘Did you work with Albert Einstein, or did you work with someone that was in the room with Albert Einstein?’”
Lam and Ossola’s friendship grew from their work together in Boston, where Lam was a principal dancer for 20 years and Ossola launched world premieres of his own choreography as well as restagings of masterworks by his mentor, Kylián. For Lam’s very last performance with Boston Ballet in May 2024, he danced in the world premiere of Ossola’s The Space Between.
Choreographer Ken Ossola (foreground) leads Boston Conservatory at Berklee students in a rehearsal of his new work Onward Still, being performed at Tanglewood on June 21.
Johanna Snow
Students dancers work on steps from Onward Still.
Johanna Snow
Ossola and his friend John Lam, associate professor of dance at Boston Conservatory, take notes during rehearsal.
Johanna Snow
A Boston Conservatory dancer works on steps from Onward Still.
Johanna Snow
Ken Ossola offers feedback to a student.
Johanna Snow
Ossola spent his initial few days on campus sharing steps with students, observing their movement, and custom-fitting Onward Still to their capabilities. “There were a lot of questions and answers in that sense. And that also helped me to know each one of the students and to see what was the quality—where I wanted to go with them, where I wanted to lead them—and also to help them cross boundaries,” Ossola says. “It’s beautiful to see them grow and gain confidence.”
Working with Ossola pushed the students to expect more from themselves, professionalizing them in the process. “You can be taught in class what to do—this, that, and whatever. But when it comes down to a real choreographer in front of you, to produce is a very different story,” according to Lam. “It’s a very different process.”
Ossola says that he allowed music to lead the structure of the piece, and so his collaboration with Boston Conservatory has created unique opportunities for music students as well. Van Genechten’s electronic composition for Onward Still, entitled “One Stream,” was arranged for strings and percussion by Patrice Jackson-Tilghman, associate professor of cello. The instrumentalists support three vocal parts for soprano, tenor, and baritone, singing lyrics by Müller.
For Boston Conservatory students, the performance is a unique collaboration across the Music and Dance divisions, creating wholly original work. For audiences, the combination of live dance and music in Onward Still offers “something very riveting and very real because it’s in the moment,” Lam says. “You’re seeing live art being created.”
Get tickets to Onward Still at Tanglewood and learn more about Boston Conservatory at Berklee’s contemporary dance program.
