End of the World Ballet

It’s always a thrill when artists reach beyond their mediums—when a musician scores not just notes but emotional terrain, when a dancer reclaims the stage not for the spotlight but for something closer to catharsis. End of the World, the new ballet music video accompanying multi-instrumentalist Zach Tabori’s single, is one of those rare, alchemical collisions. It doesn’t simply merge music and dance—it lets both unravel, together, in a tightly wound elegy of sorrow, loss, and tentative hope.

“End of the World” is the last track off Tabori’s upcoming album Attack of the Clout Chasers, and its standalone release comes with a visual statement as arresting as the song itself. Directed and choreographed by Stephanie Gotch and featuring additional choreography and performances by former ABT soloist Gabe Stone Shayer, as well as New York City Ballet principal Indiana Woodward, and ABT’s Zimmi Coker, the piece flickers between classical form and modern grief like candlelight in a crumbling cathedral.

At its core is Shayer’s return—not just to ballet, but to purpose. After 12 years with American Ballet Theatre and a searing op-ed for The New York Times detailing the systemic racial barriers in the ballet world, Shayer stepped back. End of the World is his reemergence, not with fanfare, but with vulnerability. “In the case of this piece, I was presented with the music to work with and suddenly I could feel myself coming back,” Shayer shares. “Through Zach Tabori’s melancholic tone. It felt like a symbiotic narrative about what I’ve gone through.”

There’s a quiet electricity in that kind of collaboration—when a dancer’s reclamation of movement meets a musician’s existential coda. Tabori, known for his maximalist range (his 8-part orchestral work ICE AS FROZEN WATER being one stunning example), steps into more intimate territory here. He composed, produced, and orchestrated the song with lush input from veterans like Suzie Katayama (Madonna, Prince, Björk) and string players Charlie Bisharat, Joel Derouin, Zach Dellinger, Cameron Stone, and Tim Eckert. The result is a track that doesn’t beg for a spotlight—it aches for one.

And so the dancers respond. Filmed with unvarnished elegance, the piece explores that overwhelming sense that everything might be ending—personally, globally, cosmically. And yet, it does what only ballet can do when at its most raw: it makes endings feel almost… sacred. Shayer and Woodward, childhood friends, move with an unspoken familiarity that reads less like choreography and more like muscle memory. Coker, a longtime friend and colleague of Shayer’s from ABT, adds another layer of shared history to the trio’s performance. It’s intimate, but never insular. Their pain opens outward.

Tabori himself articulates the impulse with a clarity both reverent and irreverent: “My favorite piece of music of all time is The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky—technically, it is a ballet. Ballet to me is the original music video. If you wanted to explain to an audience visually how an instrumental piece should make them feel, you would use dance as a medium.”

And he’s right. In End of the World, the centuries-old language of ballet is not a relic—it’s a vessel. The piece speaks fluently in the tension between discipline and dissolution, between tradition and the need to break from it.

There’s a line between art that gestures at emotion and art that is simply the raw material of it. This piece—this collaboration—feels like the latter. End of the World isn’t just a return. It’s a reckoning.

Written by BJ Panda Bear