Set to six choral dances from the second act of Benjamin Britten’s opera Gloriana, which premiered at London’s Covent Garden in June 1953 in honor of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, Choral Dances is a gentle, majestic work about community and nature. Though the work contains echoes of Alvin Ailey’s earlier works, including the postures and groupings of Revelations, in Choral Dances he creates a stylized but universalized folk vocabulary expressive of the most basic emotions—joy, peace, and strife. At its premiere, a live chorus sang the score.