Toward a More Perfect Union

It is a strange time to be celebrating our nation’s milestone birthday, our semiquincentennial. It is a strange time to ask of our artists that they bend their creative energies towards this celebration when their livelihoods are more imperiled than ever, when often their very identities are under threat. It is a strange time to look back, to celebrate a history that is every moment subject to foreclosure by those who would cut away its complexities and its horror, who would dishonor its victims by sweeping their stories aside and spotlighting stories that serve only the myth of a country we have still not yet become, locked as we are in conflict and polarization: land of the free.

Performance

Charlottesville Ballet and Opera on the James: “America250, Voices of Virginia”

Place

The Paramount Theater, Charlottesville, Virginia, March 14, 2026

Words

Lea Marshall

Ensemble in Keith Lee's “Amazing Grace,” part of “America250, Voices of Virginia.” Photograph by Brianna Copeland

But artists have always had the power to hold up mirrors for us: they can show us who we really are. They can tell the truth when others cannot. Here in Virginia, in two towns still struggling to reconcile the soaring ideals of our nation’s founding with a history of racism and exclusion, a group of artists answered the call to commemorate America’s 250th birthday. The Charlottesville Ballet and Lynchburg’s Opera on the James together built an ambitious, multi-disciplinary concert honoring the 250-year arc of American democracy through music, dance, poetry, and visual art. Sixteen vignettes foregrounded Virginia voices from 1776 to the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, and into the present, in a celebratory evening both thought-provoking and artistically satisfying.

The evening opened, of course, with the national anthem sung generously in the rich voices of artists from Opera on the James: Allen Adair, baritone; Chris Alfonso, tenor; Crystal Glenn, soprano; and Hannah Hall, mezzo-soprano. And while many of the vignettes featured American flags, red, white and blue, and other familiar patriotic tunes, the work’s depth and richness unfolded gradually as it honored American voices and histories many may never have known or heard about.

Take, for example, the composer Amy Beach (1867–1944), the first successful female American composer of large-scale works, whose soulful Romance for Violin and Piano, Op. 23, was performed with velvety ease by violinist Virgil Moore and pianist Thomas Getty. Beach, a child prodigy, muted her performing career during her marriage to conform to the social constraints placed on women at the time, but after her husband’s death in 1910, she resumed touring and performing across the US and Europe. Though no voice or dancing accompanied this work, the Romance evoked a sense of longing as a keystone for the evening’s exploration of American history.

Isaac Lee in “Goodbye to War,” part of “America250, Voices of Virginia.” Photograph by Brianna Copeland

In a section titled “New View at the Old Crossroad,” Charlotte Ballet resident choreographer Keith Lee, in collaboration with CB co-founder Emily Hartka and Humanities Scholar & Project Consultant Dr. Nina Salmon, offered an homage to the Black poet Anne Spencer (1882–1975) and her husband Edward Alexander Spencer, who hosted many seminal figures in Black history at their home on Pierce Street in Lynchburg, including W.E.B. DuBois, Thurgood Marshall, Maya Angelou, and Dr. King himself. The work included a video reenactment of Anne Spencer writing poems at home, photographs of her with family and visitors at the house and of historic markers recently placed, and a tender duet danced with delicacy and abandon by Simone Ayres as Anne Spencer and Luigie Barrera as Edward Spencer. The music for violin and piano, “Adoration,” was composed by Florence Price (1887-1953), the first Black woman to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra. Keith Lee himself lives as a “first:” in 1969 he became the first Black soloist with American Ballet Theatre, later dancing with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

The evening grew increasingly dense with information and ideas. Hannah Hall sang Irving Berlin’s 1938 “God Bless America” in her lush mezzo-soprano, while projected behind her was a series of 21 paintings courtesy of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture from the “Landscapes of Virginia” exhibit. The “Children’s Peace March” (2023) choreographed by Lee, featured 27 students from Charlottesville Ballet Academy dancing arm-in-arm and marching with uplifted hands to a 2023 composition, “Peace,” by contemporary composer Jasmine Arielle Barnes, with words from Harlem Renaissance poet Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880–1966), sung with gentleness and clarity by soprano Crystal Glenn.

Luigie Barrera in “New View at the Old Crossroad” by Keith Lee. Photograph by Brianna Copeland

Other highlights included the swing-inflected gem, “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” (2025) for three dancers in white gloves and bright purple dresses and the bugle boy in khaki (costumes by Ty Cooper Grace), and “The Ragtime Dance” (premiere), a sprightly piece for 12 pre-professional students and trainees, choreographed by Mary Hein to Scott Joplin’s 1902 tune of the same title. Charlottesville Ballet’s company artists appeared to advantage in the bravura finale, “A Military Fanfare” (2024), also choreographed by Hein to a selection of familiar military tunes. Preceding the finale, in “I Dream A World,” Allen Adair’s sensitive baritone brought to life the words of Langston Hughes’s 1941 poem, set to music by Damien Sneed (2021): “I dream a world where all/ Will know sweet freedom's way,/ Where greed no longer saps the soul/ Nor avarice blights our day.”

In this time when the simple facts of Black history, women’s history, and indigenous history (notably absent from this project) produce social and political seizures of deflection and denial, if not outright suppression, a work of this scale and depth represents a significant investment in the power of art to model collective transformation in American life. Ballet and classical music emerged from European traditions and spread through cultural hegemony. This performance offered a crucial lesson in how such classical forms can evolve into modes of record-keeping, in bodies and song, for stories that paint a more complete picture of our strange and struggling nation.

Lea Marshall

Lea Marshall has been writing about dance for over 20 years. Her work has appeared in Imagining: A Gibney Journal, The Atlantic, Dance Magazine, Dance Teacher, Dance International, WomenArts, Richmond’s Style Weekly, and Charlottesville’s C-ville Weekly. Marshall has worked as a producer and arts administrator since 1999, serving as co-founder and Executive Director of Ground Zero Dance for 13 years, and as producer/associate chair of Virginia Commonwealth University’s (VCU) Department of Dance + Choreography for 17 years. She currently serves as Director of Research for VCU’s School of the Arts, and on the board of the American College Dance Association.

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