After success in the West End with her solo shows Metamorphosis and Incantation, American dancer, choreographer and entrepreneur Maria Caruso returns to the capital with Counterpoint of Chaos at the end of May.
The show is a solo dance-theatre work that explores the evolving relationship between a woman and artificial intelligence, examining how technology shapes identity, creativity, and what it means to remain human.
Maria joined me on a Zoom call to tell me more about her process, her work, and what to expect from Counterpoint of Chaos.
To find out more about the show, go to https://lwtheatres.co.uk/whats-on/counterpoint-of-chaos/.
You’ve spoken before about balancing intense physical training with preparing for a new work. Can you expand a bit on that?
Maria Caruso: My husband and I are climbing Kilimanjaro in July, so he’s in full training mode. But I told him that before this show, my body and my mind need to prepare for a different challenge: Counterpoint of Chaos.
I already have a fragile spine, so carrying heavy packs and pushing physically isn’t always the right thing for me before performing.
This week has been about balancing everything: rehearsals, filming commercials, and preparing for the show while he’s out hiking mountains. It’s funny because I feel like I’m climbing artistic mountains at the same time.
Early mornings have become very normal for me again. When I was younger, I used to teach 6am Pilates and conditioning classes every day, so that discipline is still in my body.
Let’s go back to your training and artistic background. How did your dance journey begin?
Maria Caruso: My path was unusual. I started in a recreational programme at the YMCA. I was an only child, and my parents divorced and remarried each other three times. There was a lot of instability, and around the third divorce, I realised I needed structure. Dance became that structure for me.
When I was 12, my mother took me to study with Lubov Kawamoto, and that changed everything. Suddenly, I understood that dance wasn’t just recreation. It had vocabulary, discipline and language.
I entered university at 15 at La Roche University, which is now the programme I chair, graduated high school at 16, and later continued at Florida State University.
But during that period, I struggled a lot with body image. In the 1990s, there was a very narrow expectation of what a dancer should look like. As my body developed, people kept telling me there was “a problem”.
Directors suggested I work on my weight, even consider breast reduction surgery. I was 16, and my parents said we are absolutely not going to agree to a breast reduction that young. It was devastating because I didn’t feel there was anything wrong with me. I was simply curvier than what the ballet world expected at that time.
One professor suggested I audition for the Dance Theatre of Harlem summer programme. I remember thinking, “I don’t know if I belong there”; there were only two white women in the company. But when I arrived, it completely changed my life.
For the first time, I was surrounded by dancers with different body types who were celebrated for their artistry and technique. I finally felt at home. Arthur Mitchell created a space where the aesthetic was on the technique, not the conformity of the body.
That experience really shaped me. I realised dance could hold multiple identities at once. I loved ballet, I loved jazz, I loved Martha Graham – I learned so much in my 40s dancing her Limitation, Paul Taylor and Merce Cunningham.
In the 1990s, people wanted artists to fit into silos: ballet dancer, modern dancer, musical theatre performer. I didn’t fit any one category, so I decided to create my own space. That became Bodiography.
I have to tell you that I did a ballet about my parents in 2006, which I showed last weekend for Bodiography, and they came and sat together for the first time in 25 years, because they are friends again.
They got to watch it, and my husband said they were both crying. They had no idea 20 years ago that this ballet was about them because they were so absorbed in themselves.
So, being trained in all these different genres and having that information in my body, I have such a respect and reverence for every artist that came before me, like Sylvie Guillem in classical ballet. I feel I have an obligation to a solid legacy.
London audiences first encountered your work through productions including Metamorphosis (2022) and Incarnation (2024).
How do you look back on those shows now – they can be quite difficult to approach as a new viewer?
Maria Caruso: Incarnation was a huge risk. I knew that going in. My husband is British, and he always says the piece makes him uncomfortable because it’s so emotionally exposed.
It deals with miscarriage, trauma and grief in a very direct way, and I think audiences in dance are sometimes less accustomed to that kind of vulnerability than theatre audiences are.
I felt compelled to make it because when I experienced a miscarriage, I felt incredibly alone. I remember sitting in my bathroom crying and saying to my mother, “I just need to talk about this.” I didn’t want reassurance. I needed acknowledgement. Creating Incarnation became a way to give voice to the experiences women often carry silently.
Presenting it in London was bold, especially at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Nobody had really contextualised the work beforehand, so audiences came expecting “a dance show” and instead encountered something deeply personal and intense. But touring it internationally changed my understanding of the piece.
In Brazil, Italy and Israel, people connected to it in profoundly emotional ways. Young men came up to me in tears after performances. Audiences who had experienced trauma recognised themselves in it.
So while it may not have been an obvious West End success in the commercial sense, I believe it reached exactly the people it needed to reach. I don’t regret taking that risk at all.
Metamorphosis was far more accessible, but I think Drury Lane was exactly the right space for Incarnation. If I hadn’t done it there, do I think it would have gone to all the right places in the world where it was transformational? No, I don’t.
I’m a great believer in following the light. God’s light is what I strive to follow. I am a very spiritual person, and I felt driven to do it. I don’t have any regrets. I was the first to do a solo dance show at Drury Lane.
I love that we are having this conversation. I haven’t been interviewed in England about my shows before, aiming at a UK audience. So I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it.
Your new work, Counterpoint of Chaos, explores artificial intelligence. What drew you to that subject?
Maria Caruso: I became fascinated by how divided people are around AI – I can be very annoyed with it! Some embrace it completely, others want nothing to do with it, especially in the arts.
My composer, Ryan Onestak, was very resistant to it at first because composers are understandably frustrated. Suddenly, anyone can generate music with a programme, while trained musicians have spent decades mastering their craft.
What interested me was not AI as technology, but our emotional relationship with it. In the piece, I play a woman who becomes increasingly consumed by her interactions with an AI assistant called ‘Ginny’. The relationship becomes strangely intimate and destabilising.
But it isn’t about me, just about my experience. AI isn’t terrible in some fields. My husband is a scientist, and in science, if AI can cure cancer faster, who wouldn’t want that?
What’s interesting is that I’ve genuinely used AI during the creative process: I don’t use it to choreograph my work or to inform the structure of the piece. I use it almost as a translator.
I would describe emotional landscapes or musical textures, samples of music that I am moved by, and AI would generate terminology that helped me communicate more clearly with my composer.
I found myself learning musical language I’d never known before. Ryan thought I had done a lot of research, but I had to admit I had used AI!
But somewhere along the way, the process became personal. My husband says I’m obsessed with AI. I realised I was becoming emotionally invested in this interface in a way that mirrored the themes of the work itself. I get frustrated when ‘Ginny’ doesn’t understand what I’m saying. You can get so involved with AI that you lose sight of who you are.
That’s really what Counterpoint of Chaos is about. AI itself is not inherently evil or miraculous. Like any technology, it depends on how humans choose to engage with it. The danger is not the machine taking over.
It’s losing sight of the humanity within the relationship. We used to be fearful of computers – it just takes time for humanity to understand it or get involved with it in their own way.
When you are doing a premiere, you never know if it is going to be a disaster. I hope I am doing the right thing. I’m using the music. I’m using a lot of the texts that ‘Ginny’ did.
So the show will have a takeaway for the audience about AI. It can completely overtake humanity, but it doesn’t have to: we have a choice.
I hope Counterpoint of Chaos gives people a pause to think about how we interface with new things.
Counterpoint of Chaos is at His Majesty’s Theatre on 31 May 2026 – see https://lwtheatres.co.uk/whats-on/counterpoint-of-chaos/ for details and tickets.
Photo credit: Jay Kuntz
Read my review of Incarnation.