'Sleeping Beauty' and premieres on Indianapolis Ballet's 2025-26 season
Indianapolis Ballet's 2025-26 season will be marked by another major collaboration with the Indianapolis Symphony as well as several premieres.
In September, the company will perform George Balanchine's "Concerto Barocco" for the first time, and dancers will present world premieres of more works with original choreography. In the spring, the ballet will program "The Sleeping Beauty" at Clowes Memorial Hall as the third installment of its running collaboration with the orchestra.
The new season also will showcase the talents of students who attend the Indianapolis School of Ballet, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary.
Current season subscribers can renew their tickets now, and new subscription sales begin June 11. Individual tickets go on sale Aug. 4. Visit indyballet.org to buy and for more information.
Here's Indianapolis Ballet's 2025-26 season. Performances are at the Tobias Theatre at Newfields, 4000 Michigan Road, unless otherwise noted.
Aug. 14-23. District Theatre, 627 Massachusetts Ave.
The company will return to the IndyFringe festival to perform a concert that folds in classical ballet, jazz and more with choreography by Founding Artistic Director Victoria Lyras, Assistant Artistic Director Kristin Young Toner and dancers.
Sept. 19-21
The performance will celebrate legendary choreographer George Balanchine with "The Four Temperaments," "Concerto Barocco" and a world premiere by the ballet's artistic team.
Oct. 30-Nov. 2. The District Theatre
The program will combine classical form and contemporary expression to show a current portrait of the art form.
Dec. 18-23. Clowes Memorial Hall at Butler University, 4602 Sunset Ave.
Indy Ballet continues its tradition of performing the classic tale about Clara's Christmas Eve journey that includes the Land of the Sweets, the Sugar Plum Fairy and waltzing flowers.
Dec. 27-30
The one-hour version introduces kids and first-time ballet patrons to the iconic work.
100+ free concerts: Where to find the live shows around central Indiana during summer 2025
Jan. 30-Feb. 1, 2026
On this program full of contrasts are the gentle moments of Balanchine's "Serenade" and the intense "Boléro" with music by Maurice Ravel. The Indianapolis School of Ballet's Dance of the Hours will honor the school's 20th anniversary as well.
March 6-7, 2026, Clowes Memorial Hall
The ballet will team up with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra to perform the masterwork fairytale about Princess Aurora's journey from a curse to a kiss.
April 17-19, 2026
The work pairs Felix Mendelssohn's score with the William Shakespeare comedy about a night of mischief, confusion and young love.
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Indianapolis Star
2 days ago
- Indianapolis Star
'Sleeping Beauty' and premieres on Indianapolis Ballet's 2025-26 season
Indianapolis Ballet's 2025-26 season will be marked by another major collaboration with the Indianapolis Symphony as well as several premieres. In September, the company will perform George Balanchine's "Concerto Barocco" for the first time, and dancers will present world premieres of more works with original choreography. In the spring, the ballet will program "The Sleeping Beauty" at Clowes Memorial Hall as the third installment of its running collaboration with the orchestra. The new season also will showcase the talents of students who attend the Indianapolis School of Ballet, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Current season subscribers can renew their tickets now, and new subscription sales begin June 11. Individual tickets go on sale Aug. 4. Visit to buy and for more information. Here's Indianapolis Ballet's 2025-26 season. Performances are at the Tobias Theatre at Newfields, 4000 Michigan Road, unless otherwise noted. Aug. 14-23. District Theatre, 627 Massachusetts Ave. The company will return to the IndyFringe festival to perform a concert that folds in classical ballet, jazz and more with choreography by Founding Artistic Director Victoria Lyras, Assistant Artistic Director Kristin Young Toner and dancers. Sept. 19-21 The performance will celebrate legendary choreographer George Balanchine with "The Four Temperaments," "Concerto Barocco" and a world premiere by the ballet's artistic team. Oct. 30-Nov. 2. The District Theatre The program will combine classical form and contemporary expression to show a current portrait of the art form. Dec. 18-23. Clowes Memorial Hall at Butler University, 4602 Sunset Ave. Indy Ballet continues its tradition of performing the classic tale about Clara's Christmas Eve journey that includes the Land of the Sweets, the Sugar Plum Fairy and waltzing flowers. Dec. 27-30 The one-hour version introduces kids and first-time ballet patrons to the iconic work. 100+ free concerts: Where to find the live shows around central Indiana during summer 2025 Jan. 30-Feb. 1, 2026 On this program full of contrasts are the gentle moments of Balanchine's "Serenade" and the intense "Boléro" with music by Maurice Ravel. The Indianapolis School of Ballet's Dance of the Hours will honor the school's 20th anniversary as well. March 6-7, 2026, Clowes Memorial Hall The ballet will team up with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra to perform the masterwork fairytale about Princess Aurora's journey from a curse to a kiss. April 17-19, 2026 The work pairs Felix Mendelssohn's score with the William Shakespeare comedy about a night of mischief, confusion and young love. The IndianapoLIST newsletter has the best shows, art and eats — and the stories behind them
New York Times
26-05-2025
- New York Times
There Are Problems for Sure. But ‘Étoile' Has Humor and Heart.
Like the art of ballet, 'Étoile,' a television show about ballet, has its ups and downs. Sometimes you want to toss confetti in the air to celebrate how deftly it dives into the intelligence and humor of ballet culture. It lives largely in the world of comedy, which is rare for a ballet story. Yet it also shows a commitment to world-class dance, with snippets from classic works like George Balanchine's 'Rubies.' And it arrives with a narrative miracle — nary an eating disorder in sight. But then comes a scene, or sadly a dance, that makes you want to throw that confetti in the trash. The first time the show seesaws between paradise and purgatory happens in its first five minutes. 'Étoile,' on Amazon Prime Video, begins on a poignant note as a young girl, alone in a dark studio, follows along to a ballet class saved on a smartphone. A cleaning woman appears in the doorway to let her know that she has only one more floor to get through. This is the dancer's mother, who has been secretly recording company class for her. 'I've barely gotten to frappés,' young SuSu (LaMay Zhang) says to her mom. With a heavy heart, SuSu fast forwards to petit allegro, and an overhead shot pulls back, rendering her tinier and tinier as her feet cross back and forth in springy jumps. Blondie's 'Heart of Glass,' its beat echoing her rhythm, takes over, and we're dropped into a pulsating nightclub. There, a tipsy and inane conversation about Tchaikovsky and Aaron Copland ensues: Who would win in a fight? (Who cares?) And that generates a new topic: famous composers who had syphilis. SuSu, come back! (She does eventually. And her part gets better and better especially after Cheyenne, the leading French ballerina, sees in a studio 'this little girl who appears only at night like a fairy' and takes her under her wing.) Scenes like the one in the nightclub are deflating, especially for a series created by the imaginative husband-and-wife team of Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino. In previous Sherman-Palladino creations like 'Gilmore Girls' and 'The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,' actors weave gestures and words to give them an eccentric, choreographic flair, employing dialogue so muscularly arranged that when it really takes off, it swings. Characters are sometimes cartoonish, but rhythm gives them life. The best scenes almost always remind me of a dance. (And that doesn't even include the gem 'Bunheads,' the wonderful, short-lived comedy from 2012 about a ballet school.) As for 'Étoile," it is anchored more by a setup than a plot. Two directors of ballet companies, Geneviève (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in Paris and Jack (Luke Kirby) in New York, decide to swap talent, partly as a way to sell tickets. Ballet, as Geneviève says, was dealt a huge blow by 'the mighty reign of king Covid.' That's true. And 'Étoile' often pops with observant, real-world details. Jokes, like fresh musical accents, are slipped in nimbly. When Jack finds out that the theater's expensive etched Champagne flutes are being pocketed by wealthy donors, he demands that all further etching be stopped. 'But they won't match!' one employee says, his voice raised to tinny heights. 'What are we, Cleveland?' 'Étoile' takes on a lot — the impossible business of running a dance company in 2025, smarmy donors, institutional infighting and more — but it can also live in the weeds, where there's space to crack a joke about regional ballet. There are also real-world dance people, including Tiler Peck, the virtuosic, self-assured New York City Ballet principal, who plays the fictional Eva, a dancer who loses her focus during a performance of 'Swan Lake' and now must be shadowed by Dr. Speer, a whispering therapist in charge of getting her back onstage. Peck is a riot. She never drops the act. In Season 2 (the show has already been renewed), she could carry an episode. In the main character department, though, there are problems. Jack and Geneviève are better served in scenes that keep them apart; their banter feels forced. The New York company's aging artistic director, Nicholas (David Haig), with his affected, wistful voice as he gasses on about the old days, is perplexing: No part of him is funny or endearing. And then there's the next generation. Tobias (Gideon Glick) is a young, innovative choreographer who lacks social skills and, as far as I can tell, lasting talent, though he is considered a boy genius. (This, of course, happens in life.) Tobias wears headphones, listens to metal at full blast and has tantrums. His biggest meltdown happens during the premiere of a new ballet: He stops the performance and remakes the dance in real time in front of the audience. Like most of the contemporary ballet on the show, Tobias's creation is anything but inventive. (Much of it is by Marguerite Derricks, but there are also contributions by Christopher Wheeldon.) After the new version is finally performed — complete with portable ballet barres in a derivative William Forsythe touch — Tobias dashes onto the stage for a passionate kiss with his lead dancer. This was unforgivable. 'Étoile' went Hallmark. But the show has something crucial going for it: The guiding star that is Cheyenne (Lou de Laâge), the French étoile traded against her will from the Paris company to the New York one. She's a bulldozer, a climate activist-ballerina who has been sent away, to her horror. 'They're going to make me do 'Stars and Stripes,'' she says, referring to Balanchine's patriotic 1958 ballet. She rejects dance partners without even bothering to swipe left. 'You think I don't know what I need?' she asks Jack. 'You think I am a baby ballerina new to the world, stumbling around, stuffing lamb's wool into my shoes to stop the pain? There is no stopping the pain.' De Laâge, chin lifted like the Degas ballerina, is a tender tornado. The best part of 'Étoile' is how ruthlessly serious Cheyenne is about ballet. Wise and irritable with an inability to lie, Cheyenne possesses the vulnerability that comes from passion. She may be Parisian, but she also seems like a real New Yorker and is reminiscent of another City Ballet principal, Sara Mearns, who isn't in 'Étoile' but whose spirit seems to be part of the moral fiber of the series. Cheyenne, who sometimes appears to be styled like Mearns with her loose hair and baggy clothes, shares with her a raw, absolute dedication to ballet's expressive truth. 'Étoile' has no connection to the ballet horror of 'Black Swan' or, worse, the backbiting, eating disorders and sexual abuse found in 'Tiny Pretty Things' and 'Flesh and Bone.' While it makes reference to 'Fame,' the Alan Parker film, and 'Ballet,' the Frederick Wiseman documentary about American Ballet Theater — even lifting dialogue from both — 'Étoile' shows, at its base, a kind of fortitude that reminds me of 'Billy Elliot.' For Billy, as for Cheyenne, dancing is breathing. During a performance of 'The Nutcracker,' Cheyenne, who never slips, slips. When the idea is floated that she could become the company's next artistic director, she suddenly has the possibility of a new beginning, a path that she has already embarked on, as SuSu's biggest champion. That doesn't happen, and Cheyenne (her dance double is Constance Devernay) throws herself into a new creation by Wheeldon, playing himself. The solo, 'I Married Myself,' set to music by the pop and rock duo Sparks, shows that Cheyenne is, for better or worse, married to her art. Unfortunately, it is a slight and melodramatic work that begins with the dancer's back to the audience as she stretches her arms behind like tentacles. She darts about the stage — it almost has the feel of a floor exercise in gymnastics — and gets stuck in a burst of stationary speedskating. She hugs herself from behind. And when it's over, Cheyenne races off the stage crying and after a tirade — 'I don't want to be hollow!' — falls into Jack's arms. It's all very Luke and Lorelai in 'Gilmore Girls' (surprisingly not in a terrible way), but that's not the point. Ballet doesn't make Cheyenne feel hollow, it makes her feel too much. 'I Married Myself' is a dance of futile agitation, but Cheyenne's turbulence is real. In an earlier episode, during an onstage interview with Isaac Mizrahi (great choice), she gives a defense of ballet that gets to the heart of 'Étoile'; that defense is part of why Sherman-Palladino, a former dancer, wanted to make the show in the first place. Dancing, Cheyenne says, got into her brain, 'like a song that won't leave.' 'People today want to fight,' she continues. 'They want to be angry. OK. But how do we express that anger? How do we turn it into something better? How do we create hope when no one listens? Maybe they watch, maybe you dance, you feel, you change the story. Dance can do that. Dance lets you float above it all. It lets you play in the clouds.' Throughout his life, Balanchine referred to himself as a cloud in trousers, a line taken from the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. To the critic Arlene Croce, this meant Balanchine was 'a creator of airy ephemera.' That airy ephemera is vital, not just to see on a stage but to have in one's life, and to know the reference is to understand the best parts of the show. 'When I dance,' Cheyenne says, 'I want the audience to play with me, to dance in the clouds, to feel what I feel. To hear my song.'
Boston Globe
18-05-2025
- Boston Globe
Alla Osipenko, prima ballerina who chafed at Soviet grip, dies at 92
She was tall and willowy and embodied a new and evocative quality in Russian ballet, which reflected ballet's evolution in the West - particularly under George Balanchine and his New York City Ballet. Advertisement The Soviet ballet repertory had been dominated by interpretations of 19th-century ballets based on fairy tales, as well as newly choreographed story ballets that usually conveyed an implicit political message. She was 'the most sensuous of ballerinas,' dance and theater critic Clive Barnes wrote in 1970 in the New York Times. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The French ballerina Violette Verdy, Ms. Osipenko's contemporary and later a leading dancer for Balanchine, said that Ms. Osipenko employed 'the classical technique in a completely personal way to create shapes and emotions that one didn't expect.' In 1956, Ms. Osipenko became the first of the new Kirov luminaries to receive acclaim in Europe. Dancing in Paris as a guest with Moscow's Stanislavsky-Nemirovich Danchenko troupe, she won the city's Pavlova Prize, named for the internationally idolized ballerina Anna Pavlova who died in 1931. Advertisement When the Kirov (now known, as before the Russian Revolution, as the Mariinsky Ballet) made its European debut in 1961 in Paris and London, she danced hallowed classical roles in 'Swan Lake' and 'La Bayadère' as well as Yuri Grigorovich's 'The Stone Flower,' which she had premiered in Leningrad in 1957. Then, at the height of her career, obstacles emerged. 'Your tongue is your enemy,' she recounted being told by elders when she was young. At the Kirov, her sometimes intemperate remarks and defiance of Soviet norms left her at odds with the Kremlin and its representatives in Leningrad. She turned down an invitation to join the Communist Party and rankled at being lectured on morality by party representatives after an affair in Paris with the French dancer Attilio Labis while she was married to a Kirov dancer, Anatoly Nisnevich. She was not allowed to accompany the Kirov when it made its US debut in September 1961 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. For most of the next decade, Ms. Osipenko battled the Kirov and the Soviet political establishment to keep the status she had achieved. Visiting Leningrad in 1967, Barnes wrote in the magazine 'Dance and Dancers' that Ms. Osipenko was 'probably the grandest of the Kirov ballerinas,' but noted 'she does not now enjoy great opportunities to show her qualities.' She was largely blackballed from the Kirov's top international tours but - as a replacement for another ballerina who was sidelined by Soviet authorities for an affair with an Australian - she returned triumphantly to London for a long season with the Kirov in the summer of 1970. The following year, Ms. Osipenko resigned from the Kirov. Advertisement Ms. Osipenko danced for years with the small, experimental companies led by Leonid Jacobson and Boris Eifman - and was allowed an aesthetic range that was much less inhibited than the world of classical ballet. In Eifman's 'Two Voices' in 1978, she and Markovsky danced to the rock music of Pink Floyd. Culture writer Gennady Smakov, in his 1984 book 'The Great Russian Dancers,' wrote that 'the more abstract the choreography, the more the various facets of her personality broke through it.' Neither Jacobson's nor Eifman's troupes, however, were permitted to stage foreign tours. Her final appearance on the ballet stage was in Eifman's 'Requiem' in 1981 in the Soviet Union. In 1995, she came to the United States to teach and coach with the Hartford Ballet and its school in Connecticut for five years. She also began acting in avant-garde Russian films, most notably in Alexander Sokurov's 2002 'Russian Ark,' an evocation of the past and present of St. Petersburg's Hermitage palace and museum, in which she played an eccentric gadfly haunting the Rembrandt gallery. In 2007, she joined the coaching staff of St. Petersburg's Mikhailovsky Theatre - an association that continued for the rest of her life. Alla Yevgenyevna Osipenko was born in Leningrad on June 16, 1932. Her mother, the daughter of a family that was prominent before the Russian Revolution toppled czarist rule in 1917, worked as a typist. Her father was a police detective, who in 1937 was arrested for a drunken rant against the Soviet state and was sentenced to five years in prison. Advertisement In June 1941, soon after Ms. Osipenko was accepted into the state ballet academy in Leningrad, Nazi forces invaded the Soviet Union. Ms. Osipenko was evacuated to Perm, on the Russian steppes, with the Kirov and the Rossi Street ballet school. Her collaboration with contemporary choreographers began while she was still a student. After she returned to Leningrad in 1944, famed Russian dancer Vakhtang Chabukiani choreographed a piece for her and two other dancers from the school. Jacobson created a duet, 'Meditation,' in which she danced the female lead. After joining the Kirov's corps de ballet, Ms. Osipenko was the Lilac Fairy in 'The Sleeping Beauty' in March 1952, choreographed by Kirov director Konstantin Sergeyev. One evening after a dress rehearsal, she slipped on the icy sidewalk as she got off a bus, tearing the membrane connecting the tibia and fibula bones in her right leg. She was told by doctors that she would never dance again, but was able to resume her career months later. In April 1957, Ms. Osipenko created a sensation in Grigorovich's three-act ballet 'The Stone Flower' when she wore a figure-revealing unitard rather than a tutu or skirt - something not seen on the Soviet ballet stage since the early days of the Stalinist regime. To Soviet ballet audiences, the future had arrived. Four years later, on the closing night of the Kirov's Paris debut, Ms. Osipenko danced 'Swan Lake' with young Nureyev. The next day at Le Bourget airport, Nureyev defected as the Kirov prepared to fly to London. Nureyev was subsequently convicted in absentia for treason in 1962. Ms. Osipenko testified in his defense, arguing that he had no premeditated plan to defect. She claimed that he was terrified by the KGB's insistence that he cut short the Kirov tour and return home, where he feared his career would now be finished. Ms. Osipenko's support of Nureyev further eroded her standing with the Soviet political establishment. Advertisement Ms. Osipenko was married four times: to art student Georgi Paysist, then to Nisnevich, film star Gennady Voropayev and Kirov dancer John Markovsky. All four marriages ended in divorce; the love of her life, she said, was film director Vladimir Naumov. She leaves a grandson and great-granddaughter. Her son, Ivan Voropayev, died in 1997. Ms. Osipenko often flashed a dry and whimsical wit. During a recreational therapy session in Hartford, in which she and others tossed a rubber ball back and forth, the physical therapist exclaimed: 'How beautiful your movements are! How graceful you are!' 'It's practically my profession,' Ms. Osipenko replied.
