Category Archives: Dance

“Flip” Is Charlotte Ballet’s New Lab and Launching Pad

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By Perry Tannenbaum

Whenever you see a Charlotte Ballet performance at Knight Theater or the mighty Belk, you’re going to see talent, grace, athleticism, imagination, and dancers in abundance. At the McBride-Bonnefoux Center for Dance, however, only the first three of those wondrous plenitudes are guaranteed. Formality is loosened. Scale is often reduced. And over the past few years, Charlotte Ballet’s season has concluded with evenings of homegrown choreographies by members of the troupe, many of them new to the art.

The title of these venturous, experimental evenings has evolved from Choreographic Lab, when Hope Muir established them in 2018, to the current Flip – as in flipping the script – when Alejandro Cerrudo took over as artistic director. Moving from the big venues to the double-studio layout of the McBride-Bonnefoux, one studio accommodating the audience and the adjacent studio (partition opened) serving as the dancers’ stage, you feel like you’ve abandoned Broadway for a black box.

But without sacrificing the swank factor: the façade and lobby of the Center for Dance are more like a modern museum than a ballet school. So there’s an elegant patina layered onto the funky ambiance of briefer, smaller budget pieces, often reduced to solo performances or pas-de-deuxs. You might expect two or three pieces at most before an intermission at the Knight or Belk Theater. This year at Flip, there were nine, with five more in the lineup after the break.

So you can conclude that, among the 20 dancers in the Charlotte Ballet troupe, 70% can now affix the profession of choreographer to their résumés. Not quite. At this year’s Flip, members of the secondary Charlotte Ballet II troupe also participated in performing and choreographing the program. Six of the eight CB2 members profiled at the charlotteballet.org website danced in the program, with David Anthony Scheuerman-Saucedo also among the choreographers.

What happens behind the scenes must be a fascinating process, as the dancers choreograph for their comrades, teaming up by preference, negotiation, or random assignment. Two lighting designers, Jenni Propst and Rick Moll, split the 14 pieces between them, another negotiation or lottery.

Normally, two solo dances would be two too many for me. But at Flip, Raven Barkley’s “Groove” and Clay Houston’s “Nuit tombante” both transcended the norm. Set to Jackie Wilson’s cover of “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher & Higher,” Barkley’s choreography put little demand on her athleticism and was hardly unique. She was: lithe and charismatic in a vivid red dress.

In a sense, Houston’s piece wasn’t a solo at all. When night fell, he not only switched soundtracks, he also switched genders, discarding a wig and assorted paraphernalia and becoming more himself. At first, the transformation hit me as surprising and comical, but the mood – and the choreography – deepened and became touching.

Between these two solos, two of the best duets were programmed: Anna Owens’ “That’s all” and Adriana Wagenveld’s “Tethered.” Owens’ piece, set to a couple of non-Tiny Tim versions of “Tip Toe Thru the Tulips,” actually offered a rather comical reason for all the tiptoeing. At the climax, Owens in the female role gets Oliver Oguma to assist her in reaching a tulip that dangles temptingly from above. That’s when the “That’s all” came into play, as Owens departed instantly afterwards, without according Oguma the thanks he deserved.

Oguma, in the comical spirit of the music, looked more bewildered than pissed by the brush-off.

Wagenveld spliced two favorite Sebastian Plano tracks together for her soundtrack, recruiting her sister from CB2, Serafina Wagenveld, to join her in the project. Fortunately, Adriana’s tethering concept isn’t carried out literally. Though neither of their bios suggests that the siblings are twins, the matching costumes for the piece only encouraged that conjecture.

At times, Plano’s minimalist style seemed mated with the Wagenvelds’ walk-like-an-Egyptian grace and their stolid serenity. The sisters’ intertwinings, beautifully timed and carefully composed, might also take on a hieroglyphic look. Their costumes were sleek and timeless, sheer taupe tops with tight half-sleeves – think nylons – over flowing white slacks.

Two other duets stood out for me. Rees Launer’s “Kinetikos” was appropriately pulsating and percussive in opening the evening, set to a mashup of a couple of Aphex Twin tracks for Scheuerman-Saucedo and Serafina Wagenveld, growing more lyrical and nostalgic when the music transitioned to an Emile Mosseri piece. Most unique of all, perhaps, was Isaac Aoki’s “Topaz,” set for himself and Remi Okamoto to Mark Izu’s “Mermaid in a Silent Sea.”

With Aoki’s videography, we were taken more explicitly to desert lands in “Topaz” than we were by “Tethered.” The torrid climate fit hauntingly with the plodding tempo of the music, caravan-like when the whining Japanese shakuhachi dominated. Or the flute. Or the bass clarinet. The loneliness of the dark-clad Asians contrasted starkly with the sun-drenched hilly terrain, justifying that whining sound. Unlike “Tethered,” there was little connection at first between the two dancers. The piece was the antithesis of festive – until the tabla began to bubble underneath, gradually emerging and quickening the pace.

Of the remaining pieces, I found that the love-triangle narrative shape of Scheuerman-Saucedo’s “you and me and me and you” overcame my misgivings about listening to yet another setting to Jules Massenet’s “Meditation from Thaïs.” Although Part 1 of Mario Gonzalez’ “Fever Dream” struck me as a generic piece for four dancers, never once reminding me of Geppetto’s search for Pinocchio (let alone “Chapter 35”), Part 2, “25%,” enabled Stephen Myers to deliver one of the most vivacious solos of the evening, set to “Orchestra” by Labrinth.

Both his costume and charisma rivaled Raven’s. Nor was “Chapter 35” a waste, for it prodded me to investigate the insane “Big Hammer” video by James Blake. A cinematic masterwork!

You may disagree, but discovering new music is a key part of the adventure that Charlotte Ballet’s labs or Flips has to offer me. That was not the case with the closing offering of the evening, Maurice Mouzon Jr.’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” set to the Nina Simone recording. It’s been done before – and before that.

Mouzon’s setting, for four dancers, doesn’t stop at the threat of separation. It crosses over into the agony of it when it happens. So two couples is the right choreographic choice, for Mouzon allows ample opportunities for the two women, Barkley and Adriana Wagenveld, and the two men, Launer and Luke Csordas, to suffer and commiserate with one another in alternating segments.

Nor does Mouzon send the women off, an annoying choreographic tic, when the spotlight shifts to the men. Instead, he freezes them in a sad attitude while Moll dims their light. Why should they be out of sight if they’re not out of mind? Since the Simone track peters out in pitiful pleas, seemingly repeated after being irrevocably denied, Mouzon can only offer us a wan hope of reconciliation.

Hugged from the rear by their partners, their legs bent and suspended in air, Barkley and Wagenveld reached across the void between them and embraced with their arms fully extended, forming a poignant bridge. What a wonderful closing tableau.

Newsflash: Printedprograms for Flip and Charlotte Ballet’s previous show, One Thousand Pieces back in early May, contained announcements of the company’s 2026-27 season and a slate of touring engagements, an exciting new dimension for the troupe. A couple of new developments since Flip concluded its run on June 20.

The company has already appeared at the American Dance Festival in Durham for the first time since 2017, bringing with them a work by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin once again later in June. Then, less than a week ago, they fulfilled their promise to add to their announced touring dates.

Newly augmented, here’s the slate:

  • Sept. 25-26, 2026: Ballet Bend – Fall Dance Festival (Bend, OR)
  • Oct. 29-30, 2026: Brooks Center for the Performing Arts at Clemson University (Clemson, SC)
  • Nov. 7, 2026: Dance Cleveland (Cleveland, OH)
  • Jan. 27-31, 2027: The Joyce Theater (New York, NY)

The 2027 rendezvous at The Joyce Theater will be the first time Cerrudo has brought them there during his tenure. Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, who died in the spring of 2025 at age 82, was still the artistic director when the company last wowed New York audiences at The Joyce in 2004. Ten years later, he would rebrand his troupe, but back then, they were known as the North Carolina Dance Theatre.

Menotti Homecoming and Two Spectacular Dance Companies Spark Spoleto

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Review: Martha Graham Dance Company and Scottish Ballet at Spoleto Festival USA

By Perry Tannenbaum

Opera at Spoleto Festival USA is not especially grand this year, with just two one-acts on the 2026 roster, but there are celebrations galore: nods to the nation’s semi-quincentennial, Miles Davis’s and John Coltrane’s 100th birthdays, and the Martha Graham Dance Company’s centennial. And with the return of Spoleto founder Gian Carlo Menotti to the opera lineup – as a librettist and composer – after a hiatus of 15 years, the opera lineup made up in charm and inventiveness for what was lacking in length.

From the standpoints of technical excellence, choreographic creativity, and musical inspiration – including another serving of Menotti, his rarely performed Errand Into the Maze – the Martha Graham celebration was a triple treat. If anything, the other two works on the program, Graham’s Chronicle and Jamar Roberts’ We the People, had even broader historical significance than the Menotti score.

All of the music, not only Menotti’s, was stellar, helping the company to meet the moment. After Graham Dance rejected Adolf Hitler’s invitation to perform at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, the all-female Chronicle spewed forth as a more extended and pointed response. Leslie Andrea Williams, with the assistance of three other women attending her outsized black dress, carefully sat herself down centerstage.

Patience sitting at her monument, but not exactly smiling. Technical difficulties obliged officials to announce a delay, and Williams, assisted by her entourage, to abandon her vigil and return. When the piece finally began with its first segment, “Spectre – 1914,” we could discover the reason for Williams’ careful, stealthy entrance. The underside of her outsized black dress was a fiery red, destined to be fanned into flames by Williams’ movements, taking flight via her arms.

After the three parts of Williams’ solo, “Drums-Red Shroud-Lament,” Graham’s costume designs became more conventional, though barely less outré. Laurel Dalley Smith soloed in the middle segment, “Steps in the Street,” which depicted “Devastation-Homelessness-Exile,” with an ensemble of nine other women. And Williams, in a more liberating costume, returned with Smith to front the two parts of the “Prelude to Action” finale, “Unity-Pledge to the Future.”

Compared to Menotti’s fantasia, Wallingford Riegger’s score for Chronicle was more formal and ornate – appropriately stately and declamatory. But it would be hard for me to dispute that the Errand piece, loosely retelling the myth of Theseus in the labyrinth confronting the Minotaur, wasn’t the most fascinating dance of the evening, with Xin Ying dancing the remade female protagonist and Ethan Palma portraying the beast of fear.

Scenery by Isamu Noguchi was stark and memorable: a long rope winding its way lazily and maze-ily forward from an upstage V-shaped wooden sculpture, representing either “the crotch of a tree or the pelvic bones of a woman,” according to the Graham Dance Company website. So the absorbing journey was either a heroic adventure or a dark inward probe.

The Graham site traces We the People back to Agnes de Mille, though the new score by Rhiannon Giddens, denim-colored costumes by Karen Young, and the martial-artsy touches in Roberts’ choreography signal a comprehensive makeover. With the delayed start of Chronicle and an overlong intermission, Giddens threatened to compete with Giddens, as Michael Abels’ Rhapsody on “Omar” (the Pulitzer Prize-winning opera he wrote with Giddens) was about to receive its world premiere on the other side of town.

So my response to We the People, remade to reflect American life in 2024, was not as stress-free as I would have liked. Yet even if viewing conditions had been ideal, the Graham program would not have rivaled the US premiere of Scottish Ballet’s Mary, Queen of Scots as the most spectacular event at Spoleto so far, likely to remain its artistic pinnacle.

Spoleto Festival USA 2026 Scottish Ballet
CHARLESTON, SC – MAY 28, 2026 – Spoleto Festival USA 2026 Scottish Ballet

The original score by Mikael Karlsson and Michael P Atkinson is nearly as breathtaking as the costumes and scenery by Soutra Gilmour. But the co-creation by choreographer Sophie Laplane and director James Bonas lifts Queen of Scots to its heights, in a staging that hoisted the three walls of the set to the rafters at Gaillard Center. With the inrush of dancers below – royals, courtiers, spies, and guardsmen – it appeared that an epic Rembrandt painting was materializing before our eyes.

Queen Elizabeth is intertwined with Mary throughout the Laplane/Bonas scenario, as the soon-to-die Virgin Queen recollects their lifelong rivalry. This aging and decrepit Elizabeth is danced by Charlotta Öfverholm, who often lurks unseen as Mary’s story unfolds, like a Gothic horror Tinkerbell. We see Roseanna Leney as the future Queen Mary emerge from the loins of Catherine de’ Medici, a metallic dress worn by Madeline Squire that could become a cage.

Dressed in a chic black dress, Leney contrasted dramatically with towering redhead Harvey Littlefield as Younger Elizabeth, dressed in gleaming white, striding as majestically as a heron. Littlefield’s deliberate gait made for an untouchable Liz, while the lithe Leney cycled through at least three men as the flapper-like Mary, accompanied by four other Marys when obliged to flee France.

Arguably, the essence of the Laplane/Bonas concept was Kayla-Maree Tarantolo as the Jester, who moonlighted as Death. The staging weaved between humor or beauty and brutality as the Jester, only lacking a wand to be a second Tinkerbell, brought on one death after another.

Three moments were most indelible. Mary “transforms,” according to the printed scenario, when the last of her lovers, Nicol Edmonds as Darnley, “is consumed.” Leney was joined by a group of other dancers – maybe the other Marys? – who lined up in front of her and, facing the upstage scrim, became a monstrous shadow insect who devoured Darnley.

Shortly afterwards, the pregnant Mary gave birth, a rather hilarious process. When she was showing, a large white ovoid covered her abdomen, which morphed into a large egg or a delicate white balloon, depending on the fate of the fetus. The sturdier egg could be labelled “James” prior to birth. The lad moved horizontally across the stage, obscured momentarily like luggage being scanned at an airport, and emerging as Squire in an all-white costume, still labelled James.

The most stunning effect was saved for the last blackout. With Laplane/Bonas’s narrative framework, elder Elizabeth could die at the same moment that her recollections of Queen Mary ended – with the sound of three vicious chops of an axe resounding through the hall as the queens perished. Our last glimpse of Leney could stay with you for a lifetime.

Although family-friendly Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer ran over the Memorial Day weekend at Spoleto, serious non-puppet, non-animation theatre is backloaded into the schedule. George + George ran as a work-in-progress during the middle week, and Patrick Page’s All the Devils Are Here, originally slated for the 2025 fest, runs during the final weekend.

So the best theatre at Spoleto this year will likely remain director Daisy Evans’ remarkable reclamation of festival founder Gian Carlo Menotti’s 1939 radio opera, The Old Maid and the Thief, for the Dock Street Theatre stage. The old-timey Dock seemed like the perfect place for this retro comedy, not so much adapted for the stage as quaintly preserved there.

Walt Spangler’s set design is a hybrid radio studio and rudimentary theatre space, with Timothy Myers and his Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra upstage from the diminutive cast of four singers. Flanking our players, who are never saddled by microphones, are spaces for Foley operator, Amelia Hawke, and for our emcee, Patti O’Furniture.

Any excuse for including Charleston’s own extraordinary female impersonator, O’Furniture, in a show is good enough for me. His talents are multifold: aside from announcing and helping with scene shifts, aiding the two ninja supernumeraries, he can be the scenery, most memorably when, assisted by the end of a brass bed, he holds up two flashlights and becomes the grille of a luxury car.

Other players strive to snatch the spotlight from O’Furniture, often succeeding. We initially empathize with mezzo soprano Katharine Goeldner as the old maid, Miss Todd, playing  her as decidedly more maidenly than elderly. When Efraín Solís, as Bob, a drifter, comes knocking at Miss Todd’s invisible front door asking for a handout, Goeldner is immediately smitten, willing to open up in more ways than one.

Helped by her maid, Laetitia, Miss Todd entices Bob to linger awhile, with free room and board.

Is soprano Rachel Blaustein as Miss Todd’s maid also smitten before Bob takes off his shirt? Can’t remember. At any rate, it’s unseemly for Miss Todd to be asking a vagabond to be her guest, so Laetitia is quickly involved. Secretly competing.

Bob’s sexual leanings may run parallel to his creator’s, but Menotti’s libretto only offers a faint hint. The drifter’s failure to show his appreciation of his benefactress by making a move on her gradually wakes up Miss Todd’s sleeping passions to the point of desperation. She becomes the thief in Menotti’s title, eventually knocking off a liquor store in the middle of the night.

All this while, there are newspaper and radio reports that a notorious escaped criminal is on the loose and on a thieving rampage. This romanticizes Bob to his hostess, further inflaming her and Laetitia. But augmenting these media bulletins is mezzo soprano Chrystal E. Williams as the neighborhood snoop and gossip, Miss Pinkerton, whose visits at Miss Todd’s become progressively less welcome as the ballyhooed criminal rampage rages on. The strait-laced chatterer becomes a nemesis.

Of course, Bob is perfectly innocent. It becomes progressively more unlikely that the drifter would trouble himself to leave Miss Todd’s for a criminal caper when he’s living in the lap of luxury! That need was clearly Miss Todd’s.

Throwing a veil over Menotti’s denouement, I’ll leave it to opera companies and producers to seek out The Old Maid and the Thief, so they can deliver the goods to audiences that have missed out for nearly 90 years. Evans’ way of doing it could conceivably be improved upon, but it should remain the model.

Amid Multiple Celebrations – and a Shoutout to NC – Spoleto USA Regains Its Giddiness and Swagger

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Review: Opening Weekend at Spoleto Festival USA 2026

By Perry Tannenbaum

Spoleto 2026 Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5
CHARLESTON, SC – MAY 23, 2026 – Spoleto 2026 Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 with the .Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra and maestro Timothy Myers.

May 26, 2026, Charleston, SC – The semi-quincentennial edition of Spoleto Festival USA has begun in Charleston with a roar, a momentum, and a dizzy effervescence that I’ve never seen before in my 33 years of covering America’s preeminent performing arts festival. Performing together, Renée Fleming and Béla Fleck led the parade of international stars converging on the Holy City for the opening weekend of the annual 17-day festival.

In this procession were the Martha Graham Dance Company, celebrating their centennial; rising jazz-rockstar Mali Obomsawin; and cellist Zuill Bailey with a new concerto written for him, Rhapsody on “Omar,” by Michael Abels. That opera, with libretto by co-composer Rhiannon Giddens, premiered at Spoleto in 2022 and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. So the climax of Abels’ final movement, “O People of North Carolina,” reprised Giddens’ shoutout to the Tarheel State.

Another Tarheel tribute follows shortly: Terence Blanchard + The E-Collective’s Miles Davis & John Coltrane at 100. Coltrane, of course, hailed from Hamlet, NC, ascending to jazz fame as a member of the first Miles Davis Quintet – and beyond in the landmark Kind of Blue album and with his own legendary quartet, peaking in A Love Supreme. We didn’t expect anything less than a sellout for The Fiddle and the Drum, the Fleming-Fleck tribute to Appalachian folk traditions and the nation’s 250th anniversary. Besides, we saw the Fleming gala with the Charlotte Symphony less than three years ago, so it seemed greedy to grab another pair of reviewer freebies. Our virtue vis-à-vis la Renée, however, did not reward us with reviewer seats at Charleston Music Hall for the Blanchard tributes.

Spoleto 2026 Dido and Aeneas dance opera.
CHARLESTON, SC – MAY 22, 2026 = Spoleto 2026 Dido and Aeneas dance opera.

The Abels-Bailey concert seemed to be a sellout as well. So did the charming Gian Carlo operetta, The Old Maid and the Thief at Dock Street Theatre, at its second performance on Memorial Day. All of this frenzied ticket-buying, the likes of which I haven’t seen in many years, caught the Spoleto box office off stride. This was keenly evident at the first event we attended, Opera Queensland’s ultra-lavish production of Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, replete with flying acrobatics and aerial silks. Outside at Will Call, we were expecting to receive our tickets in a prepared envelope as in previous years, only this time they would be issued one event at a time.

The plan changed. Our names triggered a protracted computer search for our tickets, which led to our tickets getting printed out on the spot. But these weren’t merely tickets for now or for today’s events. While people waited behind us and the line steadily grew, piling onto our embarrassment, tickets came spewing out of the printer that seemed to cover the remainder of our 12-day sojourn at Spoleto. Then two or three Spoleto employees had to set about folding this perforated ribbon of tickets into pairs and packing them into a pocketable envelope.

Inside the Sottile Theatre, we saw and heard more. Acquaintances of ours from Charlotte told us about their tribulations, which included not receiving the tickets that were purportedly mailed to them and then being sent to the Charleston Visitor Center to extend their pickup adventure. Curtain time was still at least 15 minutes away, but the size of the crowd seemed slightly anemic for an opening night. When magic time came, there was still a steady inrush of ticketholders, definitely more than the usual trickle of latecomers, yet not quite as populous or herd-like as large groups who might have been bused. We could only imagine what their ticket tales may have been. Whispers of a bumpy transition to digital ticketing were heard a couple of days later.

If you’re booked for as many events as we are at Spoleto, snafus, delays, and recalculations are occasionally part of the experience. A technical glitch at the Martha Graham centennial delayed its start for more than 15 minutes, and the intermission felt like it was dragging, imperiling the half-hour cushion we had left for driving from Festival Hall to the Gaillard Center and the Abels premiere. A quick glance at the festival program book disclosed that the Abels premiere, as hoped, would be preceded by a musical aperitif, in this case, Hector Berlioz’ Beatrice and Benedict Overture. So seeing the Martha Graham celebration to its end would only mean sacrificing the Berlioz at most.

Two amazing parking-spot finds helped validate my assumption. I dropped my wife Sue off near the rear entrance to the Gaillard and miraculously found parking out front on Calhoun Street. She was able to be seated for the Berlioz while I was obliged to stand at the rear of the hall. Of course, there were people in the Martha Graham crowd who had made the opposite calculation from ours, leaving before the final “We the People” piece – or, more awkwardly, in the middle – with music by Giddens!

Gifted with an aisle seat, my pathway to joining the crowd was simple and direct. Others in the queues at the rear were counterintuitively shy, holding back until I took up the lead, since they needed to act more expeditiously to squeeze themselves into a full house while trying the patience of those already seated and settled.

My assumption that Spoleto’s conducting fellow at the Gaillard podium for the Berlioz, Mariana Corichi Gomez, is a woman was shaken when her ponytail disappeared and music director Timothy Myers took her place for the remainder of the concert. The gender switch escaped me as I hurried down the aisle to my seat. The stubble on Myers face was likely visible enough when he looked at Bailey, but my attention, like everyone else’s, was riveted to the guest cellist – not only because he is reputed as a handsome and charismatic performer, but because of the extreme demands of Abels’ Rhapsody.

More reminiscent of Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations than the typical concerto, Rhapsody is hardly a dialogue between cello and orchestra. Rather, it’s an extended series of accompanied episodes of ardent lyricism and cadenza dazzle with some merciful orchestral interludes that allowed Bailey to regather his strength and focus. Quickly, the memory of Gautier Capuçon’s amazing performance with the Czech Philharmonic came to mind, shaping my expectations. Since three of the four Omar Rhapsody movements have multiple episodes (3., for example, is marked “The Whirlwind / His Mercy / Psalm 23,” and the concluding movement has the Carolina shoutout flanked by “Tell Your Story” and “Oroborus”), I gradually reached the conclusion that Myers, Bailey, and the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra were playing the four movements attaca, without pause.

Modern composers, after all, tend to be taciturn in comparison with their ancestors. Compound that gnomic tendency with the minimalist practice of numbing repetitiveness, and you reach the presumption that new classical works will have little to say and be over quickly. Whether or not Abels’ first movement, “Futa Toro / Middle Passage,” actually timed out as longer than Tchaikovsky’s full Rococo, I had fallen into the error of presuming that Piotor Ilych had provided the template. Two or three times, I was confident that Bailey had transitioned into “Julie’s Aria,” Abels’ second movement – and had moved beyond!

We can therefore excuse the audience for breaking into an appreciative ovation when Bailey raised his bow for the first time. They were witnessing an unprecedented outpouring of catchy, contemporary, and contemplative sound along with me. With three more movements to follow! Hopefully, Abels’ magnificent eye-opener, commissioned by Spoleto Festival USA, will be allowed to tour with Bailey as Omar did, giving North Carolina a shot at seeing it live.

As thoroughly as my tardiness shielded me from a fair hearing of the Berlioz overture (and recognition of Gomez’s departure), Bailey’s dominance kept me in the dark in assessing Myers and his orchestra. After intermission, there would be Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 to shed conclusive light.

What a treat! From the first notes, it was obvious that this performance would not pale in comparison with the stunning Tchaikovsky Fifth that Kwamé Ryan delivered with the Charlotte Symphony just three months ago. To say that the Spoleto Orchestra made no missteps would be discounting their flair and confidence. No doubt about it, Spoleto ranks among the most elite youth orchestras on the planet, a yearly spring benchmark for the youth ensembles that flower internationally at music festivals across America and Europe. Make no mistake about Myers, either: this Tchaikovsky 5 reaffirmed that he is also top-tier.

Still to come on the Festival slate is most of the Live at the Cistern series, outdoors under the College of Charleston live oaks, including Mountain Goats, Indigo Girls, Pedrito Martinez Group, Molly Tuttle, Emmylou Harris, Colin Meloy, and Brandi Carlile. Maybe then, audiences will start trending younger than we’ve seen so far.

Aside from the giddiness of Spoleto at its best, the audacious cutting edge still rears its head occasionally. And bites. That was what happened with Mali Obomsawin on our first night in Charleston. The Odanak First Nation artist started out mainstream enough on her upright bass, prefacing “Lineage” softly before the remainder of her pianoless quintet sounded like the classic ECM new age albums led by John Abercrombie, Pat Metheny, or Jan Garbarek back in another century. But then tenor saxophonist Yuma Uesaka exploded into “Reverse Wawasint8da,” with alto sax player Alfredo Colón barely less raucous afterwards. People began gathering their stuff, standing up, and retreating from the hall, not worrying about disturbing their neighbors. When something like that happens, you can be sure you’re at Spoleto!

Cerrudo’s “One Thousand Pieces” Celebrates Glass With Glass

Review: One Thousand Pieces at Knight Theater

By Perry Tannenbaum

May 7, 2026, Charlotte, NC – Amid the war and surging gasoline prices, you’ve probably heard: it’s time to celebrate! Our semi-quincentennial is just around the corner, and when Charlotte Ballet artistic director Alejandro Cerrudo went about crafting his troupe’s 2025-26 season, he had no idea that his quite appropriate celebration – and his first evening-length choreography to be presented in the Queen City – would be clouded by blood, smoke, anguish, and official federal lies and hypocrisies. Or maybe he had a brilliant premonition about the eerie July 4th now looming before us, to be glorified by a leader who openly flouts the US Constitution. For Cerrudo’s One Thousand Pieces, first unveiled in Chicago when the Spanish-American artist was the resident choreographer at the prestigious Hubbard Street Dance in 2012,is unexpectedly dark, monochromatic, and hypnotic.

Credit the darkness and monochromaticity to Thomas Mika’s costume design, and to the dark background of his scenic design, which, at its liveliest, obscures or reflects the 24 dancers shuttling on and offstage, with numerous 8-foot-tall mirrored windows sliding along the floor. Redeployed after a curtain drop, three of these windows are suspended in air, gently swaying and revolving. All of this moving glass is eminently suited to the minimalist music of Philip Glass, whose famously repetitive arpeggios produce the hypnotic effect, though Cerrudo has curated his choices discerningly into a delicious mixtape of what sounded like a couple of dozen different Glassworks.

But it wasn’t a tape. We were treated to the Charlotte Symphony performing live, led by resident conductor Christopher James Lee, who mirrored Cerrudo’s enthusiasm for Glass through the zest of his players. Whether or not Glass grabs you, his music definitely attacks in Lee’s hands. Nor was the texture unflaggingly orchestral as guest pianist Phillip Bush fronted a string quartet of Symphony worthies, including first violinist Kari Giles, second violinist Kathleen Jarrell, violist Benjamin Geller, and cellist Jon Lewis.

Glass will be celebrating his 90th birthday next January, so One Thousand Pieces is nearly as appropriate as a celebration of his music as it is of America. Maybe more so, depending on how successfully you feel Cerrudo’s choreography evokes his original inspiration, Marc Chagall’s America Windows. The 2012 debut of One Thousand Pieces coincided with the 25th anniversary of Chagall’s work, unveiled a year after America’s bicentennial as a gift to the Art Institute of Chicago. Though there is dispute about exactly how to interpret the windows, AIC’s official description says that the three window panels, measuring a total of 258 square feet, “merge symbols of US history, the Chicago skyline, and the arts; read from left to right, the panels represent music, painting, literature, architecture, theater, and dance.”

If Cerrudo’s choreography seems surprisingly dark, so do Chagall’s Windows, notwithstanding their Chicago skyline, New York’s Statue of Liberty, assorted birds, musical instruments, and flying people. It was a must-see for me and my wife, Sue, when we visited Chicago, coincidentally in 2012.We were not disappointed, but we were certainly not overwhelmed. In terms of brightness, cheer, and scale, Claude Monet’s epic Water Lilies painting at MOMA is brighter-hued and marginally larger, while each of Chagall’s two murals at opposite ends of the Met Opera lobby, one in rosy red and the other in sunny yellow, is more than four times the size of his America, visible across the Lincoln Center campus from distant Columbus Avenue.

Celebrating a stained-glass masterwork with music by Philip Glass seems like a natural impulse, no matter how dark the original and the tribute may be. Yet there are unforgettable moments of whimsy, joy, and wonder lurking within Cerrudo’s staging and choreography that break free of the prevalent darkness and monochrome.The first of these comes promptly at curtain rise when the lower lip of the curtain lifts one of the dancers off the floor. He lets go before Charlotte Ballet needs to worry about hiking their insurance payments, destined to reappear from an even loftier perch between Scene 1 and Scene 2 before intermission. Lowered from the ceiling of the orchestra section of the hall, he will tell us a brief tale of eternal love – wearing a harness that enables him to float without worry.

The last curtain rise before intermission revealed Cerrudo’s most joyous scene as three sections of streaming mists formed behind the dancers, lit in multiple shades of green, blue, purple, and white, merging and remixing in midair as they fell to the floor. Matching this sudden shower of color, the style of the choreography also perked up. Until now, the default mode of partnering lowered the dancers’ bodies toward the floor as they tugged at each other or slinged one another, without jumps or lifts. Adding the water to the stage floor, Cerrudo certainly didn’t risk sending his dancers airborne over the damp, but he freed his troupers to frolic in the water, sending gleaming dewdrops merrily into the air as they splashed around the floor. Occasional kicking motions jubilantly affirmed that there was nothing incidental or accidental about the waterdrops flying across the stage.

It could have been my imagination, but Glass’s music grew jazzier here, especially when played by Bush and his quintet. The catchy curlicues of melody that erupted here were certainly not a mirage.

“Boundless” Celebrates Connection After Fretting Over It

Review: Boundless at the McBride-Bonnefoux Center for Dance

By Perry Tannenbaum

Loud woolen plaids are back in action – on the loose with louder goofball leggings. And the eternal question, pointedly asked, rings out again at The Patricia McBride & Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux Center for Dance: “Do you, do you, do you, do you wanna dance?”

Like Breaking Boundaries two seasons ago, Charlotte Ballet’s Boundless is a non-stop evening in three parts, showcasing three artforms. If you missed Boundaries in fall 2023, you should definitely repent by picking up tickets, heading out to 701 North Tryon, and checking out what all the shouting was about (through March 21).

On the other hand, if you’ve already tasted that Breaking Boundaries brew, you’ll find that most of the barrels have been refilled. The world premiere choreography this time around is Nicole Vaughan-Diaz’s On Three, after which you’ll leave the Center for Dance at intermission and decamp in the lobby, where four different instrumental duos will be entertaining during the 14 non-educational performances.

A staircase dramatizes the musicians, enclosing them as it winds upwards to an urbane, dimly lit balcony above. Scaling the wall with the stairs is a fine exhibit of action photos by Quinn Wharton, showcasing current members of the Charlotte Ballet troupe. Across from that display, a horizontal display of more Wharton photos on the eastern wall faces that diagonal rise. And there’s also a video installation by Tobin Del Cuore.

Completing the clubby feel of intermission, festive audience members line up for food and drink, so they can be toting a soda or a highball while viewing the exhibits or claiming one of the precious few cocktail tables downstairs as they nibble to the music and schmooze. On the night we went, it was Jonah Bechtler on keys and Noah Kibonge on soprano sax, pumping out jazz standards such as Bobby Timmons’ “Moanin’.”

As in 2023, the transition inside the studio for Ohad Naharin’s garishly colorful Kamuyot made all the charming diversions of the intermission pragmatic. The grandstand of seats facing the permanent studio space was folded back and collapsed into the wall behind where we had sat. Unassigned general-admission style seating was set up on each of the four sides of the performance space, two rows deep.

There’s only one hard-and-fast rule to the seating. Don’t sit in the seats reserved for the dancers.

If your first impulse is to sit in one of the four front rows, be aware that one or more of the 15 dancers will be asking you to join them on the floor. Cool with that? Great. You can even multiply your interactions with the dancers by sitting next to one of their reserved seats, for over the course of Kamuyot, multiple dancers settle into each of these spots.

Not so eager, shy, or on the fence? Row 2 figures to be your best bet. If your defenses are defeated, you can still catch a dancer’s attention and snag an invite. Or just hold hands for a moment of connection as I did.

Over the space of 28 months, my memories of Kamuyot had faded somewhat, so there were pleasurable reminders of buried treasure in my memory bank: the loud plaids, the Israeli choreographer’s affection for “The Theme from Hawaii Five-O,” his signature “gaga” dance moves, and my own experience of getting out there on the floor with the dancers. What couldn’t be forgotten were those broken boundaries.

So in a curious way, a divide reared up between those of us who vaguely or precisely knew what was coming and those who were seeing it for the first time. Simultaneously, I felt as if a barrier had fallen between me and those who had seen Kamuyot before. We found ourselves discussing that experience more readily.

Resolved to be less of a participant this time, I found through this less visceral approach that Naharin’s structure emerged more boldly. The scheme is an evolution from solos and pairs to ensemble sections, from solitude and loneliness and antagonism to community. One female dancer writhes laboriously across the performing floor early in the piece, eventually drawing the attention of two men who soon engage in a one-sided shadowboxing bout.

Even at the apex of this progression, when a single dancer would initiate a sequence, and he or she drew a crowd of imitators forming a fresh ensemble, you could count on a single outlier to carve her or his way through the heart of the group – usually exiting the hall without taking a seat. The hyperactive mass and the contemplative individual are repeatedly juxtaposed. Feel free to identify with either the celebratory or meditative aspect of Naharin’s spectacle – by diving in, holding back, or simply weighing these options.

Kudos to anyone who instantly grasps the meaning of Vaughan-Diaz’s deceptively simple title. On Three signifies the pact that two or more people make to synchronize their actions and begin at the same time. Bandleaders and chorus masters know the drill. Rock-scissors-paper-match competitors instinctively adopt it. Synchronicity, trust, and fair play are wrapped up in the ritual.

Yet that connection between intent and Vaughan-Diaz’s choreography remained opaque for me as her piece began. Entrances by the 10 dancers, circling a perpendicular setup of chairs, were markedly dilatory and unsynchronized, though there was some similarity in their pacing and dolefulness in designer Aaron Muhl’s dim lighting.

Flickers of intent began to spark once all the dancers were seated. One of the women, in a Kerri Martinsen costume a bit less drab than the others, sauntered over toward another chair where a guy sat. No hello, no eye contact, she just lay down in front of the guy, knees up. A triggering soon occurred after what my count of three would have been, and there was extended interaction and even some contact between the woman and the man.

None of it was particularly human, let alone intimate. When the man escorted the woman back to her seat and placed her in it, he seemed to have been humoring her. So the bigger surprise for me was when, moments later, the guy sidled over to the woman’s chair and assumed the same recumbent position she had modeled before. Something had happened between them, for they now reprised their relationship with a new dance episode in the same rudimentary and mechanical style as before.

Afterwards, the piece was largely pairs and chairs, different dancers coupling once the ensemble had removed, returned, or rearranged the chairs. The shape of the piece seemed to evolve from primal separateness toward ritual and trust as more of the dancing was done by more of the ensemble, but I’d doubt many in my audience perceived an arrival at the satisfying destination Vaughan-Diaz describes in her video:

“It’s the eye contact you make before being caught in a fall. It’s this agreement before you do something that cannot be done alone.”

Pretty disturbing, then, that Vaughan-Diaz imagines the “one, two, shoot” ritual of children playing odds-and-evens needs to be rediscovered by adults. Or that it’s in danger of being forgotten. Deliciously timely and dystopian for anyone seriously alarmed by our divisions.

Charlotte Ballet’s “Whispers, Echoes, Voices” Is Excitingly Sensual, Primal, and Imaginative

Review: Whispers, Echoes, Voices at Knight Theater

By Perry Tannenbaum

October 30, 2025, Charlotte, NC – Over and over again, as I drove home after opening night of Charlotte Ballet’s Whispers, Echoes, Voices – capped by the world premiere of resident choreographer Mthuthuzeli November’s As I Am, I found myself asking, “What Did I Just See?” That is not an unusual question for me to ask after a stellar evening of modern dance, for the art is usually abstract and chameleonic in the extreme, but on the eve of Halloween, the urgency of the question felt compounded. Exponentially.

Sitting in the fifth row, near many young people who were experiencing such vibrant abstractions for the first time, I couldn’t help but hear their exclamations and enthusiasms during the two intermissions that punctuated the program. “Amazing!!” was the most repeated outcry but not the only one, and the cumulative enthusiasm was at a you’ve-got-to-come-see-this pitch I rarely hear. But beyond the fevered response and what had caused it – for the standing ovation after November’s triumph was instant, electric, and virtually unanimous – there was a fundamental question that was not abstract. At the climax of As I Am, when a deluge rained down on soloist Maurice Mouzon Jr., out of the sky and into an opening at the top of the moody cave designed by Celia Castaldo, what had I seen? Literally.

At first blush, it seemed obvious that it was water. It looked like water, it glowed like water, it photographed like water, and it bounced like water. But as Mouzon’s primitive countrymen returned to the cave and helped him off the ground, evidence mounted quickly that it had been something else. Mouzon’s back was newly caked with the stuff and had to be wiped off. None of the barefoot ensemble of ten dancers sloshed or slipped on the stage afterwards, including the vatic priestess in her reindeer crown, and when we rose to applaud all this mystic magnificence, the stage was completely dry, without a single drainage hole in sight. Since a deluge of sand would be dangerous to the performers – and us! – my conclusion, confirmed by CharBallet the next day, was that we had seen rice.

What we had also seen, no question, was the premiere of Charlotte Ballet’s most exciting and primal original since Salvatore Aiello’s Rite of Spring.True, November’s companion soundtrack, which he composed, did not rival Stravinsky, but it was no less evocative… and obviously, more of a piece with the choreography. Here were the whispers and voices referenced by the program’s title, with plenty of pulsing and primitive percussion layered on.

After reading a review of the dress rehearsal performance, two further questions arose in my mind. How many people in the audience, contrary to the evidence before their eyes, had gone home thinking they had seen water onstage at the Knight? Was that more than the number of people who, not scrutinizing the program, didn’t realize that tonight the ensemble for As I Am was all-male, and that two of three remaining performances will be all-female? Costumes in CharBallet’s publicity photos confirms what they’ll miss. In all, four soloists will dance November’s new work, including Raven Barkley, Remi Okamoto, and the opening night priestess, Isaac Aoki.

The evening began far more elegantly and wittily with a reprise of Jiří Kylián’s Petite Mort, an international staple premiered by Nederlands Dans in 1991 and unveiled at the Knight in March 2024. It’s good to keep in mind that Kylian’s piece is more about what the title implies, “the ecstasy of sexual intercourse,” than about the two slow movements from famed Mozart piano concertos, No. 23 and No. 21 (Elvira Madigan), he sets to dance in a series of ensembles and six pas de deux. There’s a definite uptick in the quality of what we see this time at the Knight, only partially because Kylián’s explanatory notes are printed in the program beneath the credits, cluing us in to the sensuality at the core of the choreographer’s concept and the precise satire he intends with the sabers wielded by the men.

You knew that sabres were sharp and pointy, but did you realize that, by accurately kicking their handles, they will roll around the floor in a perfect circle? Mastering that trick along with the close brushes that the blades, straight or curved, make with the females onstage during Petite Mort – these can account for a bit of fear and hesitancy among all the dancers. So another reason the revival scores better than the initial thrust two seasons ago is that the dancers are handling the hardware with more confidence and élan. A complete delight this time around, with all its suggestive episodes more sensuously sketched.

In the middle of the two rousing spectacles, Crystal Pite’s dimly lit Solo Echo, set to cello sonatas by Brahms, stood out in quiescent relief. Or it did during its early moments. Flakier stuff came down in the darkness as Pite’s piece began, partially illuminated by a vertical rack of lights from the wings. That horizontal lighting, designed by Tom Visser, gradually descended from the flyloft, stopping in midair just above the dancers’ heads. Slow-paced choreography, frequently for just a couple of the seven dancers, dressed drably in costumes by Joke Visser and the choreographer, added to the hypnotic spell. Confession: I briefly fought the impulse to doze off during this monochromatic dreariness.

But then the pace quickened and Pite deployed her complete ensemble in more feverish action – while the whole upstage brightened into a skyscape depicting a glorious snowy night. More importantly, Pite’s echo concept crystallized as six of the seven tightly intertwined, one on top of another, in a vertically mirroring pose above the recumbent Mouzon, once again garnering special attention. In this blizzard, the ensemble might split apart slowly like the folds of an accordion. Or they might break apart, scurry around chaotically, and make wretched attempts to form a moving circle. Often, however, one of the dancers stood isolated from the ensemble. He or she could be viewed as an outsider, but also as the solo mind generating the echoes.

Dimming the Lights, Cerrudo Delights With Three Dance Originals

Review: Charlotte Ballet’s A Realm of Existence

By Perry Tannenbaum

March 6, 2025, Charlotte, NC – Past and present eras of Charlotte Ballet intertwined at Knight Theater in their latest program, A Realm of Existence, named after none of the choreography below. Three of the four pieces were by artistic director Alejandro Cerrudo, including Dos y Dos y Dos, his first world premiere with the company since he was designated to lead it in 2022. After a break, Pacopepepluto lightened the mood with settings for three Dean Martin hits, and Cloudless cast an intimate, almost erotic aura before the second intermission. Hearkening back to the preceding Hope Muir stint as artistic director, nine dancers performed the surreal scenario of Johan Inger’s Walking Mad. It was the first piece performed at Knight Theater under Muir’s leadership in 2017, reprised there by Muir in 2019.

For a piece that emphasized pairs, Dos y Dos y Dos was strikingly touchless – and for that reason, perhaps most fascinating in its interstitial moments between the various couplings. The first ensemble reacted to one another in waves, like coils of a Slinky toy or a row of dominoes, creating the push-pull of gravity between them out of thin air. The intriguing style carried over into the pas de deux – not religiously since there was minimal contact – but wasn’t as unique for me in that idiom. While the variety of the ensembles grabbed me more, the variety of music for the couples – composed by Marek Hunhap, Jean Michel Blais, and Frederic Chopin – brought fresh vibes to their dreaminess.

Absent any props, scenery, or flashy costuming, Cerrudo placed strong emphases on form and flow in his new work. Lighting by Michael Korsch is important in this piece – but not expensive. Dim lighting has been almost a trademark of Cerrudo’s tenure, certainly CharBallet’s settled style in recent non-Nutcracker production photos. PR photos of A Realm of Existence couldn’t be anything other than dimly lit. But as Pacopepepluto quickly made clear, a dimly lit mood needn’t always chime with a Chopin Nocturne.

“Memories Are Made of This,” the first of Cerrudo’s three solo pieces (the “Paco” piece?), showcased a true gem of bad Dean Martin imitation by Joe Scalissi – or a treasure since neither Spotify nor Apple Music have a clue about Scalissi, Joe or otherwise. You could hardly imagine a better dance track for mocking Martin’s schmaltzy style, Cerrudo’s moves prodding Mouzon into projecting the antithesis of suavity.

Apparently, gems like Scalissi’s are very rare indeed, so Mario Gonzalez had to content himself with an authentic Martin cut, the exponentially schmaltzier and creepier “In the Chapel in the Moonlight,” so he drew more laughs than Mouzon’s antics anyhow. How did Cerrudo top himself after that for Rees Launer? With Dino’s most beloved – and outright silliest – hit, “That’s Amore,” complete with its original chart-topping chorus and accordions.

Packaging moon, stars, and an underfoot cloud, this was clearly the “Pluto” segment. There was so much intrinsic merriment in that track for Launer to build on with his discordantly spasmodic movements, and the choreographer mischievously brought back Gonzalez and Mouzon for comedic cameos as lagniappe. That really was amore, especially for the gals in the audience since the guys were hardly wearing a stitch.

Flipping the customary script, Cerrudo had objectified his men more than he would the women in Cloudless, Anna Owens, and Adriana Wagenveld on opening night. Branimira Ivanova’s costumes for this pas de deux were more for a dance studio than a runway. That enabled Owen and Wagenveld to build their chemistry, intimacy, and heat from scratch, a steeper climb without flashy lights and glam dresses. With the gentle music of Nils Frahm simmering in the background, there was actually a bit of tension for me, wondering how far the intimacy would go – and whether it would upset the giggling church ladies sitting behind us. The work out costuming helped to widen Cerrudo’s latitude.

As for Walking Mad, I’ve written about it before, here and elsewhere. So I’m dispensing with yet another description of the piece and developing a theory about Inger’s intent – after noting those same church ladies’ surprise and delight in seeing it for the first time. No doubt the wooden wall, nearly as versatile as the dancers who play with it, is in permanent storage somewhere in town now that this crowd favorite has been performed three times. This wall plays such a big part in the action that what it is can quickly elude our consideration.

It’s a wall that separates the insiders partying behind it from the outsiders who can’t seem to forget their worries and merge with the mindless, monotonous fun. That’s fairly obvious when a crowd of partyers with conical hats spill out from the sides of the wall and briefly join the lonely, trembling folks on our side – especially since they’re almost always engulfed by the hypnotic repetitions of Ravel’s Bolero. But there’s also a night-and-day monotony to Inger’s scheme, for the first dancer we see, seeking to toss away his workday attire and join the festivities, is wearing a bowler hat.

A group of male dancers will parade funereally across the stage later in the piece, all wearing similar Magritte bowler hats. It’s a broad hint that our days are as repetitious and monotonous as our nights, only more formal and mindful. That’s where the fears and trembling of the outsiders come from. Notwithstanding the surprised gasps and giggles from the crowd, this may not have been the best realm of existence.

“Beyond the Surface” Amazes and Parties-Down

Review: Beyond the Surface at McBride-Bonnefoux Center

By Perry Tannenbaum

The new Charlotte Ballet season is off to a blazing beginning. Presenting Beyond the Surface at the McBride-Bonnefoux Center for Dance through October 26, the troupe looked fresher and younger than ever. But the choreography was far, far younger: two world premiere hatchlings that emerged from their shells last Thursday from Omar Román de Jesús and Mthuthuzeli November, and a third Charlotte Ballet commission by Jennifer Archibald that had its premiere less than two years ago in the same studio.

On that auspicious occasion, Archibald’s fledgling was at the top of the Innovative Works program, sparking hopes that the pieces that followed would reach the same high level. This year, HdrM is nestled in the middle of the program – and my 2023 hopes were already realized again in 2024 with the premiere of De Jesús’s Balúm.

Yes, the first dance of the night easily merited a climactic spot in any evening of premieres: beautiful, complex, mysterious, symbolic, intricate, moving, epic, and surreal. Music by OKRAA, Ola de Luz, was relentlessly propulsive, with random noises at random intervals littered around the main core, a minimalist loop with a harp-like timbre. Once that core cleared the noisy interference, like a spiraling starship navigating through a belt of asteroids, a sudden hypnotic calm and spaciousness prevailed – and the wonder of this dance multiplied, lending it an uncanny glow.

De Jesús has indicated that he is exploring our interactions with the air that engulfs us, from the moment we are born until we take our last breaths. Or maybe that emergence from the noise field near the beginning of the piece is an expulsion from the womb, our birth after a pre-natal prelude. The Puertorriqueño choreographer also has a hand in scenic design and Branimira Ivanova’s costume designs, for she has some specific prompts to execute in fashioning the dancers’ outfits and props.

The most notable of these are black: Two umbrellas that conjure up the surrealism of René Magritte and the fearfully magnificent ambiguity worn by Rees Launer. One of the umbrellas starts upstage center, held by one of the dancers seated on a bench, and it gets passed from dancer to dancer during the action, frequently cycling back to its starting position. The other is held stolidly by a woman on a side bench who resolutely faces away from the action until the stunningly gorgeous denouement – when we get to see the air!

At various moments when Launer grips our attention, we can have different conjectures about what his stern character represents. A raging fire-and-brimstone preacher? a demon? a witch? the Angel of Death? Launer will be a member of two of the three ensembles that get to present Balúm during its current 16-performance run. Another standout in the opening weekend’s seven-member ensemble, Maurice Mouzon Jr., will be in all the performances of this piece.

The liquefied movement of the dancers – along with some robotic intertwining – was juxtaposed with no-less-idiomatic lifts that were more horizontal than vertical. Like chapter markers at the end of episodes, the ensemble would gather and swirl around the stage in an evocative oval parade. Autumn leaves swirling in the wind. Often two or three subgroups performed simultaneously before an ensemble swirl would resolve the dissonance.

What amazed me most was that synchronized entrances and overlapping actions were so precise when there were seemingly no musical cues to give the dancers a toehold. If you’ve heard music by Philip Glass, you know that minimalism is not particularly danceable music. Musicians playing it and maestros conducting it must concentrate intently on the score to keep their bearings amid the repetitiveness. I’m still gobsmacked by how this Charlotte Ballet team pulled this off.

Following Balúm, a piece so untethered from every aspect of its music except for OKRAA’s tempo, Archibald’s HdrM struck me from an altered perspective. Archibald’s ability to mesh expressive movement to a soundtrack of musical compositions by Ludwig Ronquist, Heilung, and Federico Albanese stood out more boldly than ever after the more abstract and surreal De Jesús piece – though these intimate bonds in HdrM could be broken by abrupt mechanical disconnects from the score.

Two other conflicting factors came into play. Most welcome was the opportunity to see the Canadian-born choreographer’s work reprised by three of the eight dancers who performed at the 2023 premiere, Raven Barkley, Luke Csordas, and Shaina Wire. The piece looked more natural and “lived-in” twenty months later, so its internal contrasts were sharper and its sensual moments more relaxed. Barkley, in particular, stood forth dramatically, as sensual, captivating, and devastating as we’ve ever seen her. Nor can you fail to notice the ‘do.

Here, more than in any other dance of the evening, the ensemble bought into the “Unfiltered” theme of CharBallet’s 2024-25 season with their spirited, lyrical work. My only worry was off the dance floor and in the program booklet, where Archibald’s useful explanatory remarks where no longer in print. There in 2023, she was concerned with environmental psychology and posed a pointed question: “Is there a social responsibility to humanize architecture?”

Just asking that question helps us to connect with Archibald’s struggling language of movement. It also hints at the likelihood that Kerri Martinsen’s drab costumes are intended as institutional, such as clothing worn in hospitals, prisons, or mental wards. Aside from the contrast between lithe and mechanical movement, HdrM holds our gaze with a nice balance of ensemble, individual, and pair segments that flow naturally into one another.

Like many finales we’ve seen before from CharBallet, November’s Vibes and Variations is the most celebratory and carefree piece of the night. After last year’s From Africa With Love, it’s also the second consecutive November premiere to kick off a season at the McBride-Bonnefoux Center. Where Africa was surprisingly serene and monochromatic, preoccupied with mauve-colored ostriches from his South African homeland and their exquisite fragility, Vibes seems to wander westward to South America, to samba, tango, and carnivale.

Ivanova’s costumes burst with pastel cotton-candy colors and outré pleating, what my late mom in her saltiest Yiddish would call ongepochket, crassly over-decorated. The bulges on the men’s costumes give them seahorse legs and the frilly women look like spinning tops in a color scheme that matches the men’s harlequin-like rigs. The music starts off rather quietly with Gaby Moreno singing the first vocal on the program, her cover of “Cucurrucucu Paloma” over a simple acoustic guitar accompaniment, smoldering with bossa nova intimacy and sadness.

Things intensify as the 15-person ensemble digs into the Bang on a Can All-Stars’ version of David Lang’s strangely percussive – and minimalist – “cheating, lying, stealing.” But the most intense partying launches when we arrive at beatmaker Jamie xx and MC Moose performing the brash, irresistibly mindless “Gosh.” Catching my eye most compellingly were Csordas and Fuki Takahashi, each of whom will be in two of the three rotating ensembles performing November’s piece throughout its current run.

If I have to predict who will land the title role in Carmen next spring when artistic director Alejandro Cerrudo and CharBallet unveil their Vegas-showgirl update, my guesses would be Takahashi or Barkley. Since that Charlotte premiere will be running for two weekends, both temptresses could take turns at it.

Breathtaking Perfection Makes Charlotte Ballet’s “Swan Lake” Premiere a Dazzler

Review: Swan Lake at Knight Theater

By Perry Tannenbaum

May 3, 2024, Charlotte, NC – For generations, budding ballerinas around the globe have aspired to be a member of the gaggle who dance to the primeval strains of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. The best of them dare to dream of dancing the roles of Odette, Queen of the Swans, and her evil, seductive doppelganger, Odile. Yet more than 50 years elapsed in the life of Charlotte Ballet before the company brought Odile, Odette, and Swan Lake to the Queen City. To many, including millions of those budding ballerinas, Swan Lake and ballet are synonymous. So in a town that has a reputation of resisting the new and clinging blindly to proven classics, you have to wonder why this premiere – a quite glorious one at Knight Theater – has taken so long to happen.

Although scenery, costumes, and props are on loan from the ballet troupes of Cincinnati, Arizona, and Atlanta, the mélange is quite impressive. Choreography by Ib Anderson, based on the definitive 1895 overhaul by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, and the work of CharBallet dancers, Charlotte Ballet II, members of the pre-professional program, and students of the Ballet Academy are more than enough to stamp this marvel as homegrown. Extra freshness and vivacity rose from the orchestra pit as the Charlotte Symphony, directed by Gavriel Heine, performed the full score for the first time – with the ardor of an orchestra that has been waiting over 90 years for a living, breathing ballet corps to partner with on this mammoth venture.

Those little-girl aspirations are freshly recalled by the glittery merch in the Knight lobby, so the anticipation in the audience before curtain-rise was akin to the excitement that greets the CharBallet-Symphony collaboration each December as Belk Theater fills up for The Nutcracker. Even after opening night, you are at a special event. While the Cincinnati scenery can be improved upon (rather easily, I’m afraid); especially in and around Prince Siegfried’s castle; the courtiers, the servers, and the ladies in waiting regally create a teeming spectacle that fulfills expectations in Act 1. Oliver Oguma, the first of three leading men who will rotate during the 12-performance run, is a soulful Prince Siegfried with a bonus of brawn. Some heavy lifting lies ahead, but before lifting Odile up high Oguma had to be able to shine solo in the opening scene, where he basically rejects every eligible maid in the kingdom. The Queen Mother is royally chagrined – a triumphant comeback for Ayisha McMillan Cravotta, more beautiful than ever.

Anderson discreetly subtracts some courtiers from the Petipa scenario, but there’s enough dazzle remaining for them not to be terribly missed. The dozen courtiers beguile us in varying configurations, and the pas de trois sequence with Bridget Fox, Humberto Ramazzina, and Samantha Riester is endearing elegance and charm. Dancing the Page’s solos, Academy student Russell Abel struck me as a prodigy, able to leap and land squarely on the beat. Yet as the act climaxed, viewers who are accustomed to seeing Prince Siegfried flanked by noble chums might feel that Oguma gradually becomes excessively forlorn in spite of all his solo exploits.

Yet it’s justified to view the sparsity of plot and companionship in the opening scene as a perfect way to magnify the éclat of Act 2, where the evil sorcerer Von Rothbart and his enchanted flock finally take the stage – a bevy of 24 Cygnets and Swans plus one sublime Queen. You might even be tempted to laugh at the triteness of the choreography that precedes Odette’s first entrance – until you realize that Ivanov and Swan Lake likely fashioned the familiar template that Hollywood, Broadway, TV, and Vegas have turned to ever after in innumerable dancing build-ups to the entrances of their stars. James Kopecky, in a spectacularly hideous bird costume of his own – with poles to extend his wingspan – is magnificently malign in his various poses and flourishes, adding magic and menace to the big moment.

Evelyn Robinson was more than equal to it. She was divine perfection: fearlessness, symmetry, balance, musicality, and supple flow were all absolute to an inhuman degree. Only the little expressive flutters of her head and face subtly reassured us that a tortured soul hovered above her pluperfect point work. Later, when Robinson invaded Prince Siegfried’s surprisingly drab ballroom as Odile, you kind of wondered whether she would dramatically vary or eclipse what has gone before. Seemingly responding to more spellbinding sorcerer gestures from Kopecky, a bit like a taunting pro wrestling baddie in his taunts, Robinson softened ever so slightly. Her seductiveness trickled naturally from her added liquidity, and her expressions became more worldly and knowing, like a Vogue supermodel shoot. Or Melania.

In sum, Robinson was all I could hope for and occasionally more. But the swans! I hadn’t even begun to imagine what they can be in live performance. Whether it was the composer’s masterstroke in the original 1877 score premiered by the Bolshoi or the brainchild of ballet specialist Riccardo Drigo, who revised the score for its successful 1895 resuscitation in St. Petersburg, the music hushes so much that the en pointe work of flock is clearly audible – not only audible but a chief element of the music’s fluttery percussion. Over the course of the 2 hour 17 minute epic, it wasn’t only principal harpist Andrea Mumm who excelled. Concertmaster Calin Ovidiu Lupanu came to the fore with some fine solo work in Act 3 and acting principal oboist Erica Cice was gold all evening long on the haunting big tune.

What floored me most, after watching Charlotte Ballet ever since it arrived here (from Winston-Salem) as North Carolina Dance Theatre in 1990, was the unprecedented synchronicity of this bevy of fluttering Swans. For decades, the individuality of each NC or Charlotte dancer was the company’s trademark. Let Miami and what’s-his-name do synchronicity! Yet here in an instant, the phenomenon of a perfectly calibrated ensemble of 24 women, dancing on point to the same heartbeat, had arrived in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was eerie and breathtaking. Historic.

Will CharBallet fully possess Swan Lake in the future with their own scenery, props, and costumes? Hope so. This is one you’ll want to see again.

Baran Dance’s “Homegrown” Feeds on Edgy Sunshine

Preview: Homegrown at Parr Center

Perry Tannenbaum

Is Audrey Baran the lead dancer at Baran Dance or is she the lead choreographer? Yes! 

As an evening at Parr Center during Baran Dance’s Homegrown show this weekend will confirm, Baran is still the throbbing heart of her company’s performances and choreography. But after 12 years at the forefront, Baran admits she’s withdrawing — a little.

“It’s been nice for me to relinquish some of the creative work and also to lean into that mentorship role that Baran Dance is really focused on,” she explains. “For a while, when I was the only choreographer in the company, I was performing so much in my own work, which is really hard to do. So I’m leaning into being just solely the choreographer for the pieces that I make and then being a dancer in other people’s work.”

Of the eight pieces on the bill for Homegrown, scheduled for June 1-2, Baran has choreographed three, the leadoff piece, “Tumbleweeds,” and the two closers, “Blood of Fools” and “Night Vision.” Among the remaining five pieces in-between, Baran will be onstage at Central Piedmont Community College’s Parr Center dancing in another three, Carolina Quirós Otárola’s “Regresar,” Ashley L. Tate’s “Carry the Weight,” and “Ouroboros” by Rahquelah Conyers and Lydia Heidt.

For Baran to say that she is “a dancer” in these latter works is shameless modesty, grossly understating her enduring energy, her luminous grace and her expressive charisma on the floor. Nor is the originality of Homegrown limited to the performances and the choreography we will see; all of the music is also original and homegrown.

Although rehearsals for Homegrown began early in January, planning for the Baran Dance season began in early fall with all the musicians on board.

“Yeah, it’s been a lot of work, a lot of artists going into it,” Baran admits. “The musicians all were asked to create new music. And so we had most of the music or at least a rough draft from them before we started choreographing. But there was certainly a lot of conversation and back and forth with each choreographer and their respective musician about tweaking the music and — maybe the choreographers had ideas — just talking about what the music means to the musician or the band and then what the dance means to the dancers and the choreographers.”

Baran Dance is a resident company of Open Door Studios, where half of Homegrown was workshopped on Cinco de Mayo (with drinks and snacks on the side). BD2, a youth company for high school students, was layered onto the main company in 2015, and BDU, an intern program for college students, began in 2022. 

Read more: Open Door Studios Makes a New Charlotte Home Inside Eastway Crossing

The network of local colleges connected with Baran Dance includes Winthrop University and Central Piedmont Community College, while UNC Charlotte, where Baran is a visiting professor, supplies the steadiest stream.

Ties to the musical community begin close to home, as Baran’s husband Mark plays with local indie-rock foursome Moa. So why wouldn’t Moa lead singer Lindsey Ryan wish to contribute her original music to Homegrown? “Pleiades” will also showcase choreography by two company members, Lauren Bickerstaff and Kate Micham.

“I’ve known Lindsey for years and years and years,” Audrey says. “Her voice is just beautiful and ethereal, and she plays a lot of solo piano, and it’s very minimal in a lot of ways.”

Baran says that “Pleiades” is definitely the most feminist piece on the program, inspired by female friendships. A bold claim when you’re talking about a company whose dancers and choreographers are overwhelmingly female.

“Male dancers are just not easy to come by, especially in Charlotte,” Baran shrugs. “So we definitely have a feminist-leaning aesthetic, and I think choreographers coming in know that and see that. But also it doesn’t matter because, as far as partnering or roles that people might play in a piece, women partner women.”

The heaviest lifting will likely surface in the aptly-titled Carry the Weight, a collaboration between longtime musical associate Derrick J. Hines, or DJHayche4Now, and Ashley Tate, a newer colleague of Baran’s now in her second year at UNC Charlotte. 

Perhaps what Baran enjoys most about watching the piece — and dancing in it — is the different way it moves.

Baran also knew Otárola, who’s originally from Costa Rica, for years before she joined the company as a dancer in 2021.

“Carolina is also an aerialist and a circus performer, so her work is very heavy with partnering, with contact,” says Baran. “She really loves using props and posing new challenges to dancers, which I love.”

The midsection of Ortiz’s music, clocking in overall at more than 10 minutes, peels away the guitar and electronic accompaniment from the vocals to leave us with a purely yearning a capella. Through duetting or maybe sleek studio overdubbing, there’s a strong sense of female bonding. Emerging from beneath a blue fabric, Baran dances the memorable duet with Heidt.

Baran’s most impactful piece is the

Balancing this bitter mourning, Baran has programmed a celebration of youth. The most youthful Homegrown work, “Continuum,” turns out to be a family project. Guest artist Gray Laxton choreographed the piece and their twin brother Jacob created the music. 

The twins’ sister, Mikaela Laxton, is in the main company, but since she’ll be a member of a wedding party this weekend, won’t be able to perform. Meanwhile, she’s been the rehearsal director.

The Laxtons paired up to pitch Baran on ways they could combine and contribute, so she opened the door at Open Door for a youth segment in Homegrown.

“I thought this would be a great chance for them to work with some of our younger dancers,” Baran recalls. “So that piece has dancers from our apprentice company, BD2, and some of our [BDU] interns as well.”

After graduating Central Academy of Technology and the Arts in 2021, Gray Laxton relocated to the Big Apple, pursuing a double degree — BFA in choreography and a BA in graphic design — at Marymount Manhattan College. Brother Jacob’s soundtrack is cool, polished and deftly multi-tracked. We’ll hear synthesized beats and instruments, episodes of rock and turbulence, and sprinklings of squawking birds and ocean waves.

If Gray’s choreography and the dancers’ work are equal to the music, “Continuum” will be a winner, interns or not.