Check Out This New Music Video Starring Boston Ballet Dancers
Local artist Josh Knowles teamed up with dancers Lia Cirio and Paul Craig for his new single, "Same."
Boston Ballet has been branching out in a big way lately, whether that means bringing Degas paintings to life with the MFA, or teaming up with Keytar Bear to promote the The Nutcracker. So we were thrilled to see two of the renowned company’s stars join forces with a standout in the local music scene this week.
In another extremely cool crossover, Boston Ballet dancers Lia Cirio and Paul Craig are featured in a newly released music video for a song by Boston musician Josh Knowles, violinist for the local indie/rock/folk staple Nemes.
In the video, which was shot at the Kulton Ballet dance studio in Watertown, Craig and Cirio perform a dance routine together to Knowles’ new single, “Same.”
Knowles tells me the duo helped bring his vision for the piece, a slow-rolling love song with a heart-wrenching violin hook, to life. “When the song was finished and written, it was always in the back of my mind to have some kind of collaboration with ballet. I had this image in my head of two dancers silhouetted against a white backdrop,” he says. “It all really came together pretty magically.”
While the music video is not an official Boston Ballet production, it certainly has the institution’s fingerprints all over it. The choreography comes from Yury Yanowsky, a Boston Ballet principal dancer who retired in 2016, and it was filmed by Ernesto Galan, Boston Ballet’s video producer.
It’s a collaboration years in the making. Knowles, who manages to fit in both in rock venues and arty spaces like the Gardner museum, was once part of the on-stage quartet for the Boston Ballet show Cacti, and has also performed with Cirio’s dance company, Cirio Collective.
“I’ve been in the arts and the indie, DIY rock scenes in Boston for almost a decade now, and I feel like there’s always this underlying potential for these things to happen,” Knowles says. “I love any chance I get to bring that potential to fruition. Boston is a melting pot of so much talent and it’s cool when it can be utilized.”
