Robbie Fairchild is choreographing and directing for the first time. The dancer-actor's debut behind the creative table comes with "Lord Chamberlain's Men," a project whose title invokes Shakespeare's own acting company — the troupe that carried his plays across Elizabethan England.

The production also points at Shakespeare's sonnets, where the poet addresses a "lovely boy" — the young man to whom the majority of the verses are dedicated. It is this figure that Fairchild's project circles, pairing the dancer-actor's stage history with material long associated with the playwright's most enigmatic addressee.

Fairchild is best known as a performer, not a maker. His move into choreographing and directing marks a shift in career: from interpreting movement created by others to authoring it himself, and from taking direction to giving it. That he has chosen to do so with a Shakespeare-inflected work rather than a conventional dance piece signals the range he is claiming.

The title "Lord Chamberlain's Men" carries weight. Shakespeare wrote for that company, and its name binds the playwright's output to a specific ensemble of actor-shareholders. By adopting it, Fairchild's project positions itself within a lineage of performance rooted in the writer's own theatrical household.

Little else about the production — cast, venue, dates — has been disclosed so far. What is confirmed is the fact of the debut itself: Fairchild, dancer and actor, is now choreographer and director, and his first outing bears Shakespeare's name and Shakespeare's "lovely boy" at its center. Further details will determine how the piece translates verse written for the page and the Elizabethan stage into the vocabulary of dance.