Pioneer Works Presents The Woods By San Fermin & BalletCollective
NEW YORK, NY, MAY 28, 2025—Pioneer Works is pleased to announce The Woods, an immersive concert experience created by composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone of the Brooklyn-based band San Fermin and choreographer and director Troy Schumacher, Founder and Artistic Director of BalletCollective. With two performances scheduled over back-to-back evenings at Pioneer Works in its historic three-story space, The Woods celebrates the alchemical power of music and dance to transform fear and loss into life-affirming moments of community.
The Woods marks the latest collaboration between Ludwig-Leone and Schumacher, who have been creative partners since their work on the ballet The Impulse Wants Company (2013). Since then, they have created eight pieces together, most recently The Night Falls (2023), a work of musical theater that merges the worlds of opera and dance, named one of The New York Times’ Best Dance Performances of 2023.
The Woods features a cast of seventeen dancers and singers who move freely across multiple stages and amongst the audience, transforming the set into a living, breathing entity. The band, dispersed throughout the space, places the audience in the heart of the music-making. Viewers are encouraged to follow their curiosity to experience the performance as they discover it. Conceived in this spirit of immersion and participation, or in the words of San Fermin, ‘all together and all alone,’ The Woods is designed to create an interactive and ever-changing spectacle.
About the show, Schumacher and Ludwig-Leone said, “So many of our collaborations in the past have been about how a community finds itself, uncovers its common ground, and weathers what unfolds, together. What is so galvanizing for us about The Woods is that the audience becomes a part of that community, converging with the artists into one living, breathing force to discover what is to come.”
Expanding upon San Fermin’s extensive catalog, the performance borrows elements from live rock music, musical theate,r and contemporary dance. It unfolds across a space conceived of and designed by EMMY-winner Jason Ardizzone-West, in which root-like structures descend from the rafters above a multi-level performance space. Costumes by CFDA Award-winning fashion designer Elena Velez conjure a mythic dreamscape where fantasy and reality blur over the course of the 75 minute show.
More than just a naturally evocative setting, the woods are reimagined in this production as a gathering place for wayward souls, those searching for and awaiting an opportunity for change. Everyone who enters the performance space is invited to explore their own emotional and psychological landscape and, as the sun sets, be drawn deeper into a magical and sometimes perilous realm. San Fermin’s music lends itself to this expansive staging and theatrical interpretation, prompting us to question the role and power of storytelling and songwriting in a constantly shifting, sometimes terrifying reality.
"At Pioneer Works we love to explore collaboration and space between creative mediums, which is why we are excited for the opportunity to present The Woods by San Fermin and BalletCollective,” said Justin Frye, Music Director, Pioneer Works. “This piece is developing as a wonderful representation of the way a space like ours can collaborate with a composer, choreographer, ensemble, and troupe to present a distinctive live performance that explores a uniquely even-weighted relationship between music, dance, and visual art, in a purposeful site-specific environment."
Pioneer Works Presents The Woods by San Fermin & BalletCollective. The performance is made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. The creation of The Woods was made possible, in part, through a leadership gift from Stephen Kroll Reidy.
About BalletCollective
Founded in 2010 by Troy Schumacher, BalletCollective creates and performs forward-thinking works that reflect the world we live in. BalletCollective commissions emerging, established and acclaimed choreographers, composers, writers and visual artists to collaborate on ballet-based works. Each BalletCollective project takes as its source a contemporary work of art in any medium chosen or commissioned by its choreographer and composer. From this starting point, the choreographer and composer collaborate to make a work that interprets, explores, or responds to its source. The result of the collaboration is performed live.
By its nature, BalletCollective consists of a rotating group of artists and collaborators, and with each new “Collective” new ideas, new challenges, and, ultimately, new forms of expression emerge. BalletCollective exclusively performs original, commissioned work made using The BalletCollective Process and has partnered with a roster of more than 310 acclaimed artists, architects, authors, choreographers, composers, musicians, designers, and dancers to make 20+ works to date, including two-full length pieces, The Nutcracker at Wethersfield (2020) and The Night Falls (2023). The Night Falls was named a "Best Performance of 2023" by The New York Times.
About San Fermin
Founded in 2013, San Fermin rose to early acclaim on the strength of their self-titled debut, which bandleader Ellis Ludwig-Leone had initially envisioned as a one-off featuring more than 20 collaborators. NPR hailed the album as “one of the year's most surprising, ambitious, evocative and moving records,” while Pitchfork called breakout single “Sonsick” “deliriously infectious.” Buoyed by the record’s success, Ludwig-Leone put together a full-time band and hit the road, performing everywhere from the Tiny Desk to Lollapalooza and sharing bills with the likes of alt-J, Courtney Barnett, The National, and St. Vincent. In the years to come, the group would go on to release four similarly lauded albums, playing on television and music festivals around the world. Their records have reached the top ten on the Billboard Heatseekers charts and have amassed over 100 million streams.
San Fermin’s ambitious scope has taken them across a variety of genres, attracting an eclectic group of collaborators that reflect Ludwig-Leone’s own wide-ranging musical background. Prominent indie musicians (Wye Oak, Thao, The Districts), contemporary classical luminaries (Nico Muhly, Attacca Quartet, Lavinia Meijer), folk artists (Sam Amidon), and notable featured vocalists (Lucius, Samia), have lent their efforts to the breadth of San Fermin’s studio albums, belying Ludwig-Leone’s restless musical imagination and desire for constant reinvention and collaboration.
About Troy Schumacher
Troy Schumacher is an American choreographer, dancer, and director living in New York, NY. His athletic aesthetic draws upon the artists he collaborates with to produce fresh, unexpected results. He is a soloist dancer with New York City Ballet and the founder and Artistic Director of BalletCollective. He has been dubbed a “visionary artist” by T Magazine and is “one of his generation’s most acclaimed choreographers” (PBS). His work has been featured on The New York Times’ Annual “Best Of” list and on the “Highbrow/Brilliant” quadrant of New York magazine’s Approval Matrix multiple times.
Schumacher’s work has been presented by New York City Ballet, Martha Graham Dance Company, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center, Performa, Danspace Project, Guggenheim Works & Process, Guggenheim Bilbao, Peak Performances, the Joyce Theater, the Savannah Music Festival, and NYU Skirball Center, among others. He has collaborated with many internationally famous artists including Jeff Koons, Karen Russell, Zaria Forman, Thom Browne, Ken Liu, Ellis Ludwig-Leone, Maddie Ziegler, and David Salle, in addition to famous ballet dancers, Broadway and opera performers, and super models. In addition to live performances, Schumacher has choreographed numerous art, fashion and commercial shoots, including works for Google, Sony PlayStation, Capezio, HP, Aritzia, CR Fashion Book, Tom Ford, and The New York Times.
About Ellis Ludwig-Leone
Ellis Ludwig-Leone writes music distinguished by its narrative sweep and attention to subtle shifts in emotional valence. Lauded by The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino for his “knack for simultaneously expressing beauty and crisis,” Ludwig-Leone writes works that combine lush, naturalistic textures with moments of thorny complexity to walk the line between wonder and dread. Since coming to international attention as the songwriter behind the celebrated indie band San Fermin—with whom he has released five records, three EPs, and two live albums while touring extensively—Ludwig-Leone has enjoyed a musical double life as a composer of works for the concert hall and stage.
Together with his bandmate Allen Tate, Ludwig-Leone is a founding partner of Better Company Records, a Brooklyn-based label with an eclectic roster and an emphasis on collaboration. Headquartered out of Better Company Studios in Fort Greene, the label has seen over 150 releases from more than 50 artists since it was founded in 2020.
Ludwig-Leone is the recipient of the 2024 Ellis-Beauregard Composer Award, awarded to one composer each year, and is a recipient of residencies from MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Banff Centre for the Arts. He has been the composer-in-residence for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, and his concert works have been recorded for Sony Classical, New Amsterdam, and Better Company Records. He has composed for a wide range of ensembles and soloists, including ACME, ADAM Quartet, Alabama Symphony Orchestra, Attacca Quartet, BalletCollective, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, The Crossing, Decoda, Grand Rapids Ballet, Het Gelders Orkest, Indianapolis Symphony, International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet, NOW Ensemble, The Knights, New York City Ballet, Orchester im Treppenhaus, Sandbox Percussion, yarn/wire, vocalist Eliza Bagg, harpist Lavinia Meijer, violist Nadia Sirota, pianist Simone Dinnerstein, and more.
About Pioneer Works
Pioneer Works (PW) is an artist and scientist-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit cultural center in Red Hook, Brooklyn that fosters innovative thinking through the visual and performing arts, technology, music, and science. PW provides visual and performing artists, musicians, scientists, technologists, community organizers, and educators the resources and platform they need to expand their practices. PW’s approach encourages experimentation and empowers curious minds across diverse communities, knowledge bases, and frames of reference; in so doing, PW aims to accelerate culture through the free exchange of ideas and information for all.
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