Diane Coburn Bruning. Photo by Emmanuel Williams_Bella Luna Photography, Courtesy of Chamber Dance Project.
Diane Coburn Bruning founded Chamber Dance Project in New York in 2000. In 2014, the company relocated to Washington, DC, and it has been a staple feature of dance in the DMV ever since. Now, 26 years later, Bruning is preparing to step back from the company she founded. Although Bruning has shaped the 2026-27 season, Patrick Palkins, a long time Chamber Dance performer and the company’s Principal Rehearsal Director, will be stepping in as the Interim Artistic Director following their June season.
How did you come to start Chamber Dance?
I spent about 22 years as a choreographer, freelancing around the country and a bit abroad. I came to feel there were a few things that were not being done in the dance world. It was after having my second son and I thought I have more to give than just running around the country for my own work. I think having children has had that impact on many people, and I started to look at what I could do for others. Can I help choreographers? Can I give dancers work during what I found out where sometimes 12 to 18-week layoffs?
I felt vehemently, and still do, that dance should be a collaboration with musicians, or poets, or live sound, not a recording, unless of course a specific composer composed a sound score. I saw the dance world getting further and further away from having live music as an integral part of performance. Those were a couple of the pillars. The other was sharing the work with other people in the rehearsal process. I think this year we have about five open rehearsals and I just love them.
All of that combined with one other pillar which was intimate spaces. I created a work for Pacific Northwest ballet in 1998 and it premiered at the Seattle Opera House. It’s huge, and at the premiere I looked up, and people in the first balcony were watching my ballet with opera glasses. There was something about watching dance from a football field away that just turned my stomach. That’s when I committed myself to smaller spaces.
How has working with live music changed how you think about your work as a choreographer?
As a choreographer, I was being asked to work with tapes more and more. I had plenty of opportunities to work with live music and many times I requested it, but it was getting harder and harder to get commissions with live music.
Early in my career I created a work “Italian Concerto” that went on to be done by many companies. It is set to a Bach solo piano work called ‘Italian Concerto.’ Most of the companies agreed to perform it with a live pianist. Why would any company not be able to get a pianist? There are arguments about affordability that I just don’t buy. There are always ways to work with live music. For example, we have the string quartet which is the smallest classical ensemble that can perform the most wide-ranging repertoire. We’ve taken works that were written for larger groups and have them performed by our string quartet. I rail against this idea that live music is always so expensive. It only became expensive when recordings became so cheap!
I have worked a lot with live music for my commissions with Juilliard. There, I think I have had six or seven commissioned scores where I have gotten to work directly with composers. It’s wonderful and it did change my work.
Now I ask every choreographer I commission ‘is your work is with string quartet or how can we arrange it?’ For many of them, I want to say for most, it has been their first time collaborating with live musicians—and we collaborate. The musicians come in the studio, and they are on the stage. They’re equal partners and not subjugated down below never saying a peep. I have the musicians front and center on stage with us. Where there’s a will there’s a way. We have specific funding and grants for music. People recognize what we are doing, and they realize it’s somewhat rare in the dance world, except for the biggest and most major dance companies.
What is one thing that really stands out from the last 26 years of Chamber Dance Project?
I started Chamber Dance Project in 2000. Then the Great Recession came, and we went on hiatus for six years until 2014. There was a gap where I went back to creating freelance work and I relocated to DC. I was choreographing for Washington National Opera at The Kennedy Center and various theatres. I created a work in Berlin and I worked with Milwaukee Ballet. So it’s been about eight years in New York and since 2014 here in DC.
I am not sure there is a single moment, but there is an overall feeling of having given and continuing to give. I would think first and foremost of the choreographers, outstanding dancers and live music, nice theaters, and good audiences.
My number one priority with Chamber Dance Project was to focus on new work of our time and artists of our time. Everything else really follows that. That and creating the opportunity for the dancers work with multiple choreographers over time. They come here and have kind of a second home. Life isn’t always easy in a big company. I feel like we are the honeymoon company they call for five or six weeks. Hopefully within a couple years it will be eight.
There are moments, but none supersedes the overall feeling that what I set out to do is well on its way, and that I’ve helped people’s work and I’ve helped their careers go forward on their artistic journey. It is the overall feeling of having had a positive impact in the world for my medium which is dance.
You are a choreographer but as the Artistic Director of Chamber Dance Project, you are also a notable curator of other choreographers’ work. Has programming other choreographers’ dance informed your own work as a choreographer, and do you ever find that there is a tension between those two aspects of your practice?
In 2000, I chose to stop putting myself and my work first. That was a conscious choice. I had 22 years of proving to myself that my work was strong enough to impact people and to be hired all over the place. I had an NEA fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the New York foundation for the Arts. I had awards and all of that. I wanted to keep choreographing and that passion didn’t go away with the choice to found Chamber Dance Project. I wanted to facilitate other people in their voice and give them more opportunities. Remember this was a time when many ballet companies had Balanchine on almost every program. The opportunity for choreographers in 2000 is not what it is now. We still have Balanchine of course, but his work was ubiquitous. That is one slot on the program a living choreographer doesn’t get. We have a lot more opportunities for choreographers now than we did when I found a Chamber Dance Project. But we have been persistent in commissioning new work. Do I find tension? Not really. The challenge for me is not in terms of my work and other choreographers’ work, but between my work and my responsibilities as an artistic director.
My main identity is as a choreographer first and foremost, but do I commission work that is so great and I and we have it on the program. The central movement of “Chant” by Andile Ndlovu is one of my favorites, and I couldn’t be more thrilled with how he realized my ideas for a work with Gregorian chant. I gave him the assignment for three men in monastic skirts and I love it. “Book of Stones” is fantastic. I think it’s Christian Denice’s best work we’ve commissioned. I’m cheering right with them because their success is the company’s success.
Tell me about the June season, there is a world premiere and a wide range of your work being presented. do you have a favorite and what should we look for?
These are all really iconic works because they represent different periods of my career, and what we do at Chamber Dance Project. So, in chronological order:
“Berceuse” is a pas de deux that I created for two Juilliard dancers after having worked with the Juilliard dance ensemble. Muriel Topaz commissioned me two or three times. All Julliard dancers were then required to have a choreographer come in or do a choreographed work for their graduation. So they commissioned me. I think the school gave them 500 dollars, and I said fine, you find the music and we’ll do it. It became one of my signature works.
“Ramblin’ Suite” is sort of emblematic of my many years choreographing for companies around the country. It was commissioned by John McFall at Atlanta Ballet. He wanted work that was based on string band bluegrass that they would premiere in North Carolina where they had a summer home and then bring back to the Fox Theater in Atlanta. He asked who I wanted for the music and I said the Red Clay Ramblers. He said, ‘I don’t know who they are but I’ll find out.’ An hour later he came back and said ‘the Ramblers are in!’ They, of course, the are the Tony award-winning band behind “Fool Moon” on Broadway. I had seen them and heard them in New York several times, and then we collaborated on “Ramblin’ Suite.” I restaged it for Milwaukee Ballet and that is how I met two of our central dancers, LuzSan Miguel and Davit Hovhannisyan. “Ramblin’ Suite” was also the big work I created just after 9/11. I remember sitting in Atlanta Ballet studios reading the New York Times and all the obituaries. So, to me, it represents that period when I was choreographing around the country and I was just starting to think about Chamber Dance Project.
“Chant” is the work that I think represents one of my strongest collaborations in DC with Michael McCarthy who was the music director at National Cathedral for many years. I love Gregorian chant and early polyphony and I wanted to create a work all with chant. We collaborated on the score based on the mass. I wanted this male trio and Andile Ndlovu at Washington Ballet was a dancer with us. I had seen some of his choreographic studies and his movement was so interesting. So I said, ‘Andile I want you to do a male trio. They’re going to be in skirts, and here’s the music.” I think it’s really a powerful work so I’m proud that I collaborated within one work. You first hear the Gregorian chant from afar, and then it comes in. I tried to envelop the space with the sound.
Of course central to my work for all these years has been commissioning, so William Moore will premiere “Murmur” which he started in January as just one movement. I like it so very much I said, ‘okay let’s let’s do a bigger ballet’ and we commissioned two more movements. That will be the world premiere. Then “Book of Stones” represents commissions I’ve been doing all along. I very much supported the choreographic career of Christian Denise when he first came to us as a dancer. I think I gave him one of his first big opportunities with “Dwelling” which we started in the pandemic and then performed at the National Cathedral as soon as everybody could come out again.
I didn’t consciously do it but this covers the spectrum of my career and what I believe in with Chamber Dance and in general. I’m very excited that it also includes the musicians playing alone two times. The quartet is playing a work from our early years in New York called “Don’t Tread on Me or on My String Quartet.” It’s been kind of a signature work. People ask why I don’t choreograph it, and I say because it’s too perfect to just have them do it and why would I want to take that away from them? Then the other sort of hair-brained collaboration is that I asked the string quartet and The Red Clay Ramblers to collaborate. I have never seen such joy on our string quartet’s faces because they’re collaborating with other musicians. They both admire each other so much for their different genres within the same musical world and they have a blast.
Chamber Dance Project’s June season runs June 24-27, 2026 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company: 641 D St NW, Washington, DC 20004. June 24, 25, 26, and 27 evening performances at 7:30 pm; June 27 matinee performance at 1:30 pm, followed by an onstage workshop. An open rehearsal will be held June 12 at BalletNova, 3443 Carlin Springs Rd, Falls Church, VA 22041. For more information and to purchase tickets, please go online.
