Full Throttle Dancing

Philadelphia Ballet’s artistic director Ángel Corella made a daring program decision with this triple bill, called “Dance at High Velocity.” Just one week after its rousing “Stars and Stripes” season opener the company had stamina to match. “Chroma,” a 2006 Royal Ballet commission by Sir Wayne McGregor CBE, which Philadelphia Ballet premiered in 2015, opened the program. Two other equally demanding works followed. Christopher Wheeldon’s “DGV: Danse à Grande Vitesse,” with Michael Nyman’s 1993 composition “DGV,” inspired the program’s title, “Dance at Great Velocity.” Both required long intermissions for scenery changes. Twyla Tharp’s “In The Upper Room” to Philip Glass’s 1986 composition. The company only has one or two contemporary programs annually, and that’s too bad. Even though these works are already decades old, they look fresh. These dancers eat up the floor with contemporary choreography and flawlessly closed the evening in high spirits.

Performance

Philadelphia Ballet: “Chroma,” by Wayne McGregor / Christopher Wheeldon’s “MGV: Danse à Grande Vitesse” / Twyla Tharp’s “In the Upper Room”

Place

Academy of Music, Philadelphia, PA, October 15, 2026

Words

Merilyn Jackson

Thays Golz and Jorge Garcia Alonso in “Chroma” by Wayne McGregor. Photograph by Alexander Iziliaev

Since conductor Beatrice Jona Affron left for New York City Ballet after some 30 years on our podium, the company has invited guest conductors. For this run, Ming Luke took the podium to a warm welcome.

Luke gave Joby Talbot’s and Jack White III’s (of the White Stripes) score a thrumming, resonant reading. Percussion instruments for MacGregor’s “Chroma” and Wheeldon’s “DGV” were set up in the balconies on either side of the stage, enveloping the audience in an intimate hearing of the live music. Precisely amped, the vibraphone and marimba sounded like they were in the pit as well. I asked Luke later about the amping and he confirmed, especially for “DGV,” “the score specifically asks that certain instruments are amplified” he said. “Two violins, a cello and an electric bass are amplified, as well as a trio of saxophones, just for the flexibility.”

Architectural designer, John Pawson designed “Chroma’s” stark white set with a rectangular cutout in the large backdrop which acted as a step for the dancers to enter the stage. Within it, Lucy Carter’s lighting played a spectrum of colors that washed over the mauve shades of the dancers gauzy shifts (by Moritz Junge) changing shades that synched with the music’s chromatics. The whiter shades of pale in the set and costumes matched Talbot’s and White’s music rigorous, yet liquid plinkiness, with loud tympani and abrupt endings to its phrases. Lighting blackouts and foggy mists signaled new sections of the dance.

Thay Golz and Jorge Garcia Alonzo kicked it off with a dynamic duet of arabesques penchés, repeatedly seesawing. It blacks out into a solo by Nayara Lopes, and back to Zechang Liang skirting around the couple. Lopes and Liang create an architectural moment when she flings herself onto him, arms elbowed up behind his shoulders, he grasping the backs of her outstretched legs. Abrupt movements end in perpendicular stances and runs into the wings or back through the cutout. Bendy, upward throat scoops make the women look like storks. Taken by their necks and ankles the men bend them sinuously. They sling the women between them, and slide them backwards along a soft-slippered demi-toe.

As ever, Liang, Ashton Roxander, and Jack Thomas, all principals, danced powerfully. My eyes kept returning to Cory Ogdahl (corps de ballet) and Jorge Garcia Alonso (soloist)—unfamiliar to me, but I’m interested to see how they’ll come up in the ranks.

Yuka Iseda and Jorge Garcia Alonso in “DGV: Danse à Grande Vitesse” by Christopher Wheeldon. Photograph by Alexander Iziliaev

yman wrote his 1993 “DGV” to commemorate the French hi-speed rail line that runs between Lyon and Paris. Wheeldon riffs on Nyman’s full title, “Musique à Grande Vitesse.” The five movements suggest the drama of a night train journey. Jean-Marc Puissant’s stained-glass colored costumes look futuristic against his moonscape of five metallic mesh waves in ascending heights. Jennifer Tipton’s lighting used a single large spot that rose imperceptibly like the moon until it reached its peak. Upstage right seven dancers form a vee, each dropping and rising by turns, like pistons as Dayesi Torriente and Sterling Baca take the first charged duet.

Periodically, men spike their legs out between the women’s who stand rigid as bolts. In lifts, the women put toe to toe, knees outspread, creating diamond shapes with their legs as the men rock them side to side. Other geometric imagery, legs spread in a vee and then tripoded with an arm to the floor; chevrons come to mind in the blur of a bent-knee lift.

Mayara Pineiro with Nicholas Patterson in “In the Upper Room” by Twyla Tharp. Photograph by Alexander Iziliaev

Minimalism, a term attributed to Nyman, reigned in the Philip Glass score in the final piece, “In the Upper Room” by Twyla Tharp. Staged with knife sharp sequences, mercurial exits, entrances, pairings, and costume changes in red, black and white by Norma Kamali, Tharp’s splash and flash choreography met the score’s momentum.

Tharp called some squads “Stompers” in white sneakers, and “Ballet,” in red pointe shoes. Jacqueline Callahan stood out in six sections of its nine sections. It was hers and Pau Pujol’s night. Pujol’s uncontained delight infected cast and audience. I thought of Daniel Nagrin and his enthusiasm for expressiveness, palpable throughout.

Pujol, Baca and Maestre burst from the backdrop in bent legged, one foot-forward leaps, one arm elbowed out high, dancing with Pineiro, Callahan, and Alexandra Heier. Baca and Pujol lift Pineiro and Alexandra Heier in quarter-to-three splits. As the audience leapt to its feet, Corella came onstage carrying a laurel wreath. Handing it to Pujol, he announced his promotion to principal dancer. Sharing the joy onstage, no one seemed to want to leave.

Merilyn Jackson

Merilyn Jackson has written on dance for the Philadelphia Inquirer since 1996 and writes on dance, theater, food, travel and Eastern European culture and Latin American fiction for publications including the New York Times, the Warsaw Voice, the Arizona Republic, Phoenix New Times, MIT’s Technology Review, Arizona Highways, Dance Magazine, Pointe and Dance Teacher, and Broad Street Review. She also writes for tanz magazin and Ballet Review. She was awarded an NEA Critics Fellowship in 2005 to Duke University and a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship for her novel-in-progress, Solitary Host.

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