BALANCHINE IN A BOX

ACB proves intimacy can be
both an asset and a liability

Sarah Bukowski and Maté Szentes (photo by Mark Harris)

George Balanchine said he needed nothing but a stage, some light, and dancers. He also had the New York City Ballet, a full orchestra, and the State Theater. He had, more to the point, spent forty years teaching Americans what ballet could look like when it moved at the speed of jazz, married European classicism to vernacular energy, and stopped apologizing for being entertainment. In Spectacular Balanchine!, American Contemporary Ballet takes Balanchine at his word. What he left out of that formulation, they do not have.

The company performs in a converted office space in the Bank of America building downtown, with no sets, no wings, and no proscenium. Nine musicians in the corner. Folding chairs, close enough to hear the pointe shoes land. On a warm June night, the proximity was the point and the tax.

A live band at close range beats a recorded full orchestra, and this nine-piece ensemble knew it, working through Hershy Kay’s arrangements of Who Cares? (George Gershwin), Western Symphony (Stephen Foster), Stars and Stripes (John Philip Sousa), Union Jack Wrens (George Frideric Handel). Who Cares? came first: the band swung and the dancers swung with it, finding the social ease the choreography needs rather than just hitting the steps.

Taylor Berwick (photo by Caleb Thal)

What the room does for the dancing is harder to dismiss. When Cecelia Johnson and Pierson Hall hit the Stars and Stripes grand pas de deux, you were not watching athleticism from a seat. You were next to it. Hall’s partnering was clean and unshowy. Johnson was commanding and exact. The force of their work at that range is not something a proscenium produces.

Balanchine repetiteur Zippora Karz staged all four works. She danced these ballets for Balanchine, and what she carries is not historical knowledge but physical memory. It shows where it matters: where a phrase breathes, where the wit lives inside the precision. The “Union Jack Wrens,” led by Madeline Houk, made that clearest. The section’s military precision arrived with wit rather than duty. That distinction is the whole game.

The costumes borrowed from Pacific Northwest Ballet were among the evening’s pleasures. The Stars and Stripes and Who Cares? designs are Barbara Karinska‘s, and they show why Balanchine trusted her for three decades at NYCB. A Russian émigré with extraordinary technical gifts, Karinska reinvented the ballet tutu, layering silk and netting into something that moved with the dancing rather than against it. Balanchine once said she understood his work as well as he did. On ACB’s dancers, that authority held. Ruoxuan Li‘s adaptations for Western Symphony and the Union Jack Wrens, built from Karinska’s and Rouben Ter-Arutunian‘s originals, kept pace. Without sets, the costumes carried the visual argument for the entire evening. They were up to it.

Taylor Berwick and Maté Szentes (photo by Caleb Thal)

Western Symphony was the evening’s soft spot. Kate Huntington and Maté Szentes are capable dancers and the Adagio does not ask much more than that, which is its own problem. Balanchine built his ensemble geometry for large companies, and a small corps does not fill the logic. ACB knows where the gaps are. That awareness does not close them.

The room cannot provide what sets would. Balanchine’s Americana works were made for a grandeur this office space does not have and cannot fake. The company trades size for intensity. On the evidence of Johnson and Hall, that trade occasionally pays at full value. More often it covers the debt without retiring it.

The heat did not help. No air conditioning, doors sealed through intermission, a full house in folding chairs absorbing two hours of accumulated warmth. By the Stars and Stripes, the audience had its own endurance test running. Johnson and Hall passed theirs.

ACB is putting Balanchine in rooms where he has never been. What they cannot bring with them, the proximity partly answers. Bring a fan.

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photos by Caleb Thal

Spectacular Balanchine!
American Contemporary Ballet
Bank of America Plaza, 333 S. Hope St., Los Angeles, CA 90071 in Los Angeles
reviewed on June 5
ends on June 20, 2026
for tickets ($65–$140), visit ACB Dances

for more shows, visit Theatre in LA

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Cast (June 5)

Who Cares? Sweet and Lowdown
Sarah Bukowski* and Kristin Steckmann*
with Hannah Barr, Tatiana Burns, Ruthie Dalby, Victoria Manning Long, Vanessa Meikle, Ellie Renner, Quincey Smith*, Sofie Treibitz

Who Cares? Concert Suite
Fascinating Girl — Taylor Berwick | Jumping Girl — Annette Cherkasov | Turning Girl — Madeline Houk
Male Soloist — Maté Szentes

Western Symphony
Kate Huntington and Maté Szentes
with Victoria Manning Long, Vanessa Meikle, Quincey Smith*, Kristin Steckmann*

Stars and Stripes
Liberty Bell — Cecelia Johnson | El Capitan — Pierson Hall

Union Jack Wrens
Madeline Houk
with Hannah Barr, Ruthie Dalby, Victoria Manning Long, Vanessa Meikle, Ellie Renner, Quincey Smith*, Kristin Steckmann*, Sofie Treibitz

* Final performances. These dancers are retiring at the end of the 25/26 season.