In New York, Van Cleef Becomes the ‘Fairy Godmother’ of Dance

Last fall, the New York City dance scene was taken over by a jeweler: Van Cleef & Arpels.

The company’s Dance Reflections, a festival of contemporary dance, lasted from October to December and sprawled across the city’s theaters. Lavishly advertised and well attended, it made a big enough splash that the ripples can still be felt.

“Dance Reflections is the best thing to happen to the New York dance scene in the last 25 years,” said Jay Wegman, the executive director of NYU Skirball, a principal site for the festival.

The big splash might have been anticipated from reports of previous iterations in London, Los Angeles and Hong Kong. More surprising, perhaps, were the ripples — Dance Reflections’ continuing sponsorship of performances through the spring of 2024 at Skirball, New York City Center and the Joyce Theater. This fall, it will also fund L’Alliance New York’s Crossing the Line Festival, a large-scale premiere by Kyle Abraham at the Park Avenue Armory and a 30th-anniversary revival of Bill T. Jones’s contentious “Still/Here” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Dance Reflections, which Van Cleef started in 2020, is on one level a roving festival; in October, it arrives in Japan, and will return to London next year. But these events are only the most visible aspect of what has quickly become a global force in contemporary dance. Dance Reflections supports residencies, workshops, revivals, new productions and touring through a snowballing network of partnerships with theaters, festivals and dance companies in 16 countries — so far. At a time when funding for dance has been shrinking, even in Europe, this project keeps expanding.

Even more unusually, this deep-pocketed corporate patronage program is directed not by a marketing team, but by a curator dedicated to dance. Serge Laurent, the director of Van Cleef’s dance and culture program, comes from the world of contemporary art. He was a curator for the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art and the Pompidou Center in Paris, where he was in charge of live performances for 20 years.

“Essentially, I do the same job that I did before,” Laurent said during a recent planning visit to New York. Now, however, he has more resources and fewer limits on the scope of his ambition. “I want,” he said, “to approach the dance ecosystem on a worldwide scale.”

The connection between Van Cleef and dance goes back a lot further than four years. Nicolas Bos, the jeweler’s president and chief executive, cited the Arpels family’s love of dance and the influence of dance on decorative arts in the 1920s and ’30s, the early years of the brand. He noted ballerina-shaped clips that the company introduced in the 1940s and the friendship between Claude Arpels and George Balanchine, which helped inspire Balanchine’s landmark ballet “Jewels” in 1967.

“The dance influenced the jewelry, and the jewelry influenced the dance,” Bos said. Until recently, the dance side of the exchange was limited to ballet, but a slight shift began in 2012 with the company’s sponsorship of Benjamin Millepied’s L.A. Dance Project and, since 2015, its own prize, the Fedora, which rewards inventiveness in contemporary ballet.

Bos, whose earliest exposure to dance was contemporary choreography, saw a need to support not just the creation of new works of contemporary dance, but also the performance and touring of older pieces, a repertory. He floated the idea to Laurent, who responded, Bos recalled, “If you want, I can do that with you.”

“If Van Cleef had come to me with some business strategy to give money,” Laurent said, “I would have said, ‘Find someone else.’ But nobody tells me, ‘Serge, you have to do this or that because it’s good for the business.’ I’m not a bank. I’m a curator who is now more able to do my job.”

Bos credited the quick rise of Dance Reflections to Laurent’s connections: “He had the respect of the dancers, so we didn’t have to explain that we are not trying to sell more jewelry by putting it on their necks.”

Laurent said that French artists are “very suspicious” of private money because of the country’s robust state funding of the arts. “But because Van Cleef is a maison of creation with a strong connection to dance,” he added, “we were received with no suspicion.”

The name Dance Reflections is meant to have multiple meanings: mirrorings, thoughts, what jewelry does to light. When British presenters told Laurent the name didn’t work, he answered, “It’s OK, because we’re French.”

Whatever the name, this was something new in dance. “We didn’t realize that we were inventing a model,” Laurent said. From his time as curator in a public institution, he knew the difficulty of finding money to support production. “And then if you find money to produce, it’s hard to present and tour,” he said. “So we sponsor creation, and I also tell theaters I can help present the work. It’s not complicated.”

This work is continuous. The festivals, Laurent said, are a periodic way to attract bigger crowds, with splashy events that build momentum and bring local dance communities together. The London edition, Bos said, was the first time that the Royal Opera House, Sadler’s Wells and the Tate Modern had ever collaborated.

The situation was similar in New York. It is rare for so many major theaters to join forces. “Only the French could bring us together like that,” said Amy Cassello, BAM’s artistic director. “It’s been a long time since we’ve been able to have a footprint like that.”

It wasn’t just the scale. This was a festival with the funder’s name (and its luxury-brand associations) in the title, rather than on the bottom of programs and posters. And the posters were everywhere. Linda Shelton, the Joyce’s executive director, recalled walking down Fifth Avenue and seeing an ad at every bus stop; that kind of publicity went way beyond what her theater could usually afford. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said. “And all the opening night parties had real Champagne.”

The festival selections mostly included artists and productions that the theaters already had in mind. At least one was an artist new to Laurent. “Serge is not the type to say you need to do this or that,” Wegman said. “It’s always a partnership.”

Still, Wegman and other New York presenters attested to the large and continuing impact of Dance Reflections’ funding. “Serge is my fairy godmother,” Wegman said, noting that Dance Reflections has become Skirball’s biggest financial supporter.

When Laurent explained to Wegman what Dance Reflections was prepared to cover — artist fees, transportation, visas, housing and more, with no share of the box office revenue — Wegman couldn’t believe it. And when Laurent found out that Skirball was later planning to present the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s “The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988,” he immediately offered support. “We didn’t even ask,” Wegman said.

“Serge assumes you’re going to have a shortfall,” Shelton said. “He asks how much it is, and then he covers it, no questions asked.”

The rise of Dance Reflections has coincided with a struggle to rebuild audience attendance after the pandemic lockdown and a recent shift in foundation funding away from the arts and toward social justice. Among other costs, the price of artist visas has gone up. The program is answering a need.

Is its influence too great? Laurent’s support follows his taste. A majority of the artists are French or at least Western European, though he reveres American postmodernists who emerged in the 1960s, like Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown. “The flavor of French dance comes mainly from that,” he said.

Dance Reflections has presented Childs’s work and has funded the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s first commissions by a choreographer other than its late founder. The revival of Jones’s “Still/Here” follows the mission of supporting contemporary classics, but other than Kyle Abraham, younger Americans are so far absent from Laurent’s roster.

Nevertheless, Cassello said, “it’s not undue influence because it’s what we were already doing.” She expressed the hope that other corporations might follow Van Cleef’s example. Janet Wong, the associate artistic director of New York Live Arts, half-jokingly asked, “Where’s Tiffany?”

“I didn’t expect to have such an impact on the New York dance scene,” Laurent said. “I’m glad to hear it, but at the same time, I don’t want to bear such a responsibility.” If you bring up money, Laurent tends to change the subject. While others call him an old-fashioned impresario, he prefers to think of himself as a facilitator, mediator or connector.

Bos, who recently became the chief executive of Richemont, the holding company that owns Van Cleef, Cartier and many other luxury brands, said that Van Cleef’s commitment to dance is bound to continue because it is part of the brand’s identity. And Dance Reflections, he noted, is flexible: “If we have resources, we can go big one year, but if it’s more difficult the next year, we can scale back.”

Laurent, for his part, talked only of expansion, excitedly discussing plans involving China, Korea and Brazil. “Because of jet lag, I couldn’t sleep,” he said the morning before a site visit for a big yet-to-be-announced production in New York. “And the whole time I was just thinking: What’s the next step?”