Aszure Barton and Artists "Busk" at Atlanta's Ferst Center

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• The dancers of Aszure Barton and Artists perform in her work "Busk" this Friday at Ferst Center.

Aszure Barton—one of the most consistently commissioned choreographers in New York—will bring her work to Atlanta for the first time this Friday at the Ferst Center. Her company—Aszure Barton and Artists—is undertaking a rare US tour. We caught up with the artist to ask about the work she'll be bringing to town, her much-touted patronage by the great Mikhail Baryshnikov, and how she keeps grounded amidst all the clamor of success.

Can you tell us about the program we'll be seeing here in Atlanta?
Sure. There are two works on the program: "Busk" and "Blue Soup." The seed for "Busk" was planted in 2009 in residencies we did in Santa Barbara and Banff. The reason I chose the word “Busk” is that it's a very strong word, and I was thinking about myself as a choreographer, my place in society. It comes from the word “buscar” which is the root of the word busk and means to search. It refers to searching for and discovering the meaning of being a performer while on stage. Though there's a lot of humor in the work, it is a darker piece in terms of the structure of its space. It's moody and intense. Something that's integral to the work is constant change. Even to this day, in full bloom, the piece has a lot of structure, but there's a lot of freedom within the structure to have the work change and evolve. It's set to beautiful music by Russian composer and violist Lev Zhurbin. It works really well opposite the first half of the program "Blue Soup." It's vibrant with very bright energy, super-colorful. It really plays with the individual personalities and idiosyncracies of the dancers. Musically, "Blue Soup" is super-eclectic. There's a lot of percussion sound. The sound ranges from Japanese kodo to Hungarian music to Italian to African to American, so it's a wide range. "Blue Soup" is really a compilation of work, sort of an autobiography of yours truly, works that I've loved along the way.