Emma Portner

“The dream is for almost the entire dance cast to be able to virtuosically play an instrument, while dancing at an extremely high level.”

Emma Portner arrives at Orsolina28 Art Foundation for the initial development phase of her first full-length evening work.

“Arrangements - All the Ways You Accompanied Me” begins with a simple premise: to rigorously investigate the boundary between dancer and musician and to imagine a stage where each performer is as virtuosic with an instrument as they are with their body. The work considers the figure who holds a pedal down for someone else; the one who turns away from the instrument yet remains responsible for its sound; the one who releases their composition into another’s hands; the one who sustains what they did not initiate and the one who plays what they did not write.

An arrangement refers not only to musical composition, but to the structures that organize collective life: contracts, marriages, hierarchies, economies, inheritances, rehearsals, birth orders. In the studio, six performers thread their bodies through shared instruments, inhabiting a system in which authorship, responsibility, and expression continuously shift.

Music is not presented as beauty alone, but as a social question: how do we coexist within a shared structure? Who sustains it? Who yields? What must be compressed, negotiated, or sacrificed for harmony to occur… if it occurs at all?

Produced by Kammerballetten, the work will premiere in May 2027 at Theater Republique in Copenhagen.

Emma Portner

Emma Portner is a Canadian dancer, choreographer, actor, and director recognized internationally for her distinctive movement language and interdisciplinary practice. Her early training included summer intensives at the National Ballet of Canada before relocating to New York City to study at The Ailey School. She became the youngest woman in history to choreograph a musical on London’s West End with Bat Out of Hell. Before the age of twenty, she had garnered millions of international views through dance on film and collaborated with major recording artists including Maggie Rogers, Blood Orange, FKA Twigs, and Sylvan Esso. Her choreographic work spans opera houses, ballet companies, film, and commercial platforms. Collaborations include Apple, Netflix, Vogue, Adidas, The Norwegian National Ballet, The National Ballet of Canada, Sony Studios, and Guggenheim Museum, among others. She has presented work at Jacob’s Pillow, New York City Center, and Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The New York Times described her work as “beguiling,” and Paper Magazine named her one of its “100 People to Watch.” Recent stage works include Bathtub Ballet (Royal Swedish Opera), islands (National Ballet of Canada), Forever, Maybe(GöteborgsOperans Danskompani), Megahertz (Bayerisches Staatsballett), and her first full-length solo All my Solos were prayers. Portner also appeared in Ghostbusters: Afterlife and A24’s I Saw the TV Glow (2024).