With Its Dance Reflections Initiative, Van Cleef & Arpels Nurtures an Art Form That Sits Close to the Maison’s Heart

At Van Cleef & Arpels, dance has long been a leitmotif. For one, there are the precious ballerina clips that the French heritage maison has been creating since the early 1940s. First presented in New York City, each clip captures a dancer’s movement in golds; tutus, headdresses and sometimes a post-performance bouquet of flowers imagined in coloured gems and diamonds. Collected widely, ballerina clips have made auction records and broken high estimates. Indeed, in New York last December, a 1955 yellow gold iteration set with white diamonds of various cuts more than doubled its Christie’s high estimate of $150,000.

And at Van Cleef & Arpels, dance is a leitmotif that extends beyond jewellery creation. From classical ballets that first premiered many decades ago, to fresh commissions, the art form features throughout the maison’s past and present.

In 1912, French jeweller Louis Arpels joined the company that Alfred Van Cleef, the son of a Dutch diamond cutter, and his older brother Charles, had founded in 1906, working alongside Charles and their brother Julien, who had joined the maison in 1908. Opening a first boutique at 22 Place Vendôme, the address placed it opposite the Ritz and within walking distance from the Palais Garnier, where Louis soon became a regular, following a programme of dance performances.

An interest in dance was passed down the family tree and most notably to Claude Arpels. In charge of the family firm’s stateside expansion, in 1966 Claude Arpels met important Georgian-American choreographer George Balanchine, the co-founder of the New York City Ballet, at the Van Cleef & Arpels Fifth Avenue showroom. The encounter eventually gave shape to Jewels, a ballet in three acts: Emeralds, Rubies and Diamonds, set to scores by Fauré, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky respectively. Jewels is put on stages to this day, including at the Royal Ballet in London, a venue partnered with Van Cleef & Arpels.

Today, Serge Laurent is the director of dance and cultural programmes at Van Cleef & Arpels. In his role, Laurent guides Dance Reflections, an initiative ambitious in its programming and that offers a global reach. Founded in 2020, Dance Reflections partners with dance companies and major institutions; its support underpins the staging of both new productions and repertoire pieces. ‘We now have 60 different partners from 17 different countries,’ says Laurent.

At The Watermill Center, a sprawling site on Long Island’s East End, billed as an interdisciplinary laboratory for the arts and humanities and founded by director and playwright Robert Wilson in 1992, Dance Reflections supports a residency and partners an annual gala; elsewhere it is involved with the Berliner Festspiele in Berlin and London’s Sadler’s Wells. Its reach extends as far as Senegal – working with the École des Sables, centre for traditional and contemporary African dance, and the Dance Biennial in Africa, as well as Singapore’s national performing arts centre, Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay.

The initiative’s major event or, as Laurent refers to it, ‘the showcase’ is the Dance Reflections Festival. Held annually, it made its debut in 2022 in London, and has since touched down in Kyoto and Saitama, Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Seoul. New York first hosted the Dance Reflections festival in 2023; the city was also the location of this year’s event, which saw a programme of 20 performances across various venues. Among them were the Guggenheim New York – the Early Works series by seminal postmodern American dancer and choreographer Lucinda Childs was danced in the museum’s famous rotunda – and the Park Avenue Armory. Merce Cunningham’s piece Biped, which first premiered in 1999 and places dance alongside technology in the form of motion-capture digital projections, was on stage at the New York City Center. ‘What I want to show is the diversity of dance, of creation,’ says Laurent.

(La)Horde, a French dance collective made up of co-directors Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer and Arthur Harel, has garnered widespread acclaim for its blend of styles and references, and staged its 2023 work Age of Content, which incorporates movements inspired by video games and social media, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It had been a long-held dream for the trio, who in 2019 were named the artistic directors of the National Ballet of Marseille, to perform at the storied 19th-century venue. ‘We are very proud to be a part of that legacy,’ says Brutti, referencing Pina Bausch and Philip Glass, who have previously performed on the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s stage. ‘It’s like being books on a shelf with all the heroes that have been on these stages before.’