Twenty Years of Los Angeles Ballet

The ballet community in Los Angeles, quite large and scattered, is fond of opining that they live in a “tough town for ballet.” Indeed, Los Angeles is one of the few major American cities without a correspondingly prestigious ballet company, a cultural graveyard where companies have risen and fallen over the decades. LA’s most prominent performing arts venue, the Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, with excellent dimensions for dance, continues to host guest companies from around the world, but hasn’t bothered to berth a resident ballet company. Yet, Los Angeles Ballet, founded in 2006 by Thordal Christensen and Colleen Neary, continues to rotate through the theatres of La La Land.

Performance

Los Angeles Ballet: “Twenty Years of Los Angeles Ballet”

Place

The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Los Angeles, California, January 29, 2026

Words

Robert Steven Mack

Los Angeles Ballet in Melissa Barak's “Wavelength.” Photograph by Cheryl Mann

Their winter program “Twenty Years of Los Angeles Ballet,” performed at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on January 29-31, showcased a company brimming at least with the vitality necessary to foster an appreciation for ballet in the City of Angels. The works on the program included George Balanchine’s “Rubies,” Hans Van Manen’s “Frank Bridge Variations,” and Melissa Barak’s world premiere of "Wavelengths." The order of ballet seems designed to evoke some continuity amidst the leadership change of recent years. In 2023, the board made waves in the ballet community by tapping the former New York City Ballet dancer, Melissa Barak, who was then helming her own Barak Ballet, to take the company in a more youthful direction. The past several seasons have seen the company morph quickly from a “Balanchine company” to a mixed repertoire, contemporary ballet outfit.

The evening on January 31 seemed to embody that shift, opening with George Balanchine’s “Rubies,” staged by Darla Hoover. LAB approached Balanchine’s angular masterpiece to Igor Stravinsky’s “Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra” with stylistic candor. Unsurprisingly, the dancers seemed at home in this neoclassical repertoire, staring down the audience with syncopated musicality and exaggerated arms. Part of his full-length neoclassical masterpiece, “Jewels,” Balanchine intended “Rubies” to embody the American aspect of his modernist and popular influences, with its jazzy rhythms, flexed hands and feet, and turned in retiré positions, evoking a certain New York sense of time and place.

As the Tall Girl, Aviva Gelfer-Mundl flirted with the audience as the four men in the corps, Marco Biella, Bryce Broedell, Jacob Soltero, and Theo Swank manipulated her legs into impossibly high extensions, stopping with each position to pose, as if for a high fashion photoshoot. The pas de deux couple, Sarah-Ashley Chicola and Evan Gorbell, capably tackled Balanchine’s demanding, off-kilter partnering. It's perhaps wishful thinking for a dancer to recreate the particular breezy, nonchalance of Edward Villella, of the original 1967 cast, the ex-boxer turned ballet dancer, whose jocular style Balanchine used to channel the everyday New Yorker. That particular artifact seems best preserved on YouTube. But Gorbell brought an effective level of punch to the various equestrian trotting jumps Balanchine infused his solo with, evoking perhaps the perky horse carriages of Central Park. Nonetheless, one couldn’t help feeling a little cramped for the dancers within the smooth walls of LA’s Wallis Center, a relatively small stage to let loose an explosive Balanchine work. Perhaps in a bigger space, the dancers would have felt freer to embody the quality of abandon that one looks for in a Balanchine piece.

Julianne Kinasiewicz in “Rubies” by George Balanchine. Photograph by Cheryl Mann

More at home on the intimate stage was Van Manen’s “Frank Bridge Variations,” a contemporary work danced entirely on flat shoes to Benjamin Britten’s “Variation on a theme of Frank Bridge.” Van Manen’s tribute to Britten's composition, which is itself a tribute to his tutor and mentor, the English composer Frank Bridge, is a quiet rendering of minimalism. As if paying respects to the late Van Manen himself, who died only this past December, ten dancers in dark, earth-toned unitards, march and rotate in strict funerary patterns. One could almost feel the dancers reverence for the late Dutch pioneer of contemporary ballet.

There was something so simply put about the way the dancers walk amongst each other only to leave two left on stage, Lilly Fife and John Dekle. Fife and Dekle were followed by Brigitte Edwards and Marco Biella, infused their partnering and solos with restrained lyricism, a study in emotion without emoting. Biella, supporting Edwards sumptuous extensions. Here the evening rose to the level of true art, where meaning became apparent in the most elemental of movements—Biella and Edwards interweaving, coming apart, and back together, until at last she jumps into his arms, and they walk off together. All of this was made more meaningful knowing that Van Manen no longer is among us. Yet, here he is, the dancers seemed to understand, speaking to us still, from these simplest of movements, about relationships, connection, and distance.

Brigitte Edwards and Marco Biella in Hans Van Manen's “Frank Bridge Variations.” Photograph by Cheryl Mann

Barak’s world premiere, “Wavelength,” her third ballet for LAB since taking the helm, was a percussive awakening. Barak choreographed to a new composition from David Lawrence, with driving ear-worm rhythms, and made the dancers up in kaleidoscopic unitards and tasseled skirts by Chloée O'Hayon-Crosby and Etro’s Marco De Vincenzo. All this seemed to turn Van Manen’s restraint on its head. At one moment, eschewing a clear through-line, the ensemble performs communal step-touching in the back while in the next, Paige Wilkey and Nick Sedano reprise a standout adagio pas de deux, contrasting whiskey-laced whimsy with balletic lines. Other times, the corps seemed to embody the ticking mechanism of a clock. Set to driving contemporary strings, Barak interspersed eye-splitting showcases of caffeinated partnering with sprightly leaps by yellow-clad Marcos Ramirez and Jacob Soltero. The audience clapped happily for this study of all-at-once experience, but the ballet struck me as misplaced following Van Manen’s simpler musings.

Overall, “Twenty Years” was a strong, eclectic showing for a company that has both promise and room to grow as an organization that befits a major cultural hub. I suspect that significant fundraising help from the Hollywood community would be much appreciated but not necessarily forthcoming. The shift from a West Coast Balanchine tributary to a mixed repertoire ballet company may seem like a good start, but whether it will be enough to secure LAB’s future remains to be seen. I propose that the test be whether for its thirtieth anniversary program, the company nest in Los Angeles’ more prestigious Music Center, and spread its “Rubies” on the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion's larger stage.

Robert Steven Mack

Robert Steven Mack is a company artist with City Ballet of San Diego and an award-winning filmmaker. His writing has appeared in The New Criterion, Law and Liberty, American Purpose, and Arts Fuse. Robert received his Master of Public Affairs from Indiana University, Bloomington, from which he also holds a BA in History and a BS in Ballet Performance from the Jacobs School of Music.

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