FIVE REASONS TO KEEP
YOUR DANCING SHOES HANDY

A season with remarkably little overlap

If you like your dance seasons varied, The Music Center is making it difficult to pick a favorite for 2026–2027. The 24th season of Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at The Music Center ranges from Jerome Robbins and The Sleeping Beauty to Sinéad O’Connor, Alvin Ailey and a Spanish Don Quixote. Better still, three of the five engagements are Los Angeles, West Coast or North American premieres.

Ballet Festival: Jerome Robbins (Steven Pisano)

It begins October 23–25 at the Ahmanson Theatre with Ballet Festival: Jerome Robbins, curated by Tiler Peck. This isn’t a touring company dropping in with a standard repertory program. Peck has assembled dancers from New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet and other companies for three different programs devoted to Robbins, all performed to live chamber music. The Los Angeles engagement is the festival’s only U.S. appearance during the 2026–2027 season.

There’s also a bit of dance history in the making. In Suite of Dances, Peck becomes the first woman to take on the role Robbins originally created for Mikhail Baryshnikov. She performs it on October 25, while Roman Mejia dances it the previous evening. Other works across the weekend include Four Bagatelles, Concertino, Other Dances, In the Night and excerpts from Dances at a Gathering. With three programs rather than one repeated bill, balletomanes have a legitimate excuse to attend the entire weekend.

The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad O’Connor (Kate Garner)

Things change radically in January. Sonya Tayeh, whose choreography for Moulin Rouge! The Musical won a Tony, brings The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad O’Connor to the Ahmanson for its L.A. premiere January 15–17. Tayeh directs and choreographs a cast of 10 women whose combined experience totals approximately 500 years, using O’Connor’s recorded music as the basis for a work concerned with resilience, rebellion and female expression. That collision of Tayeh’s movement vocabulary, O’Connor’s unmistakable voice and ten performers with decades of experience behind them may be the season’s wild card.

Xavier Mack (Andrew Eccles)

Spring brings a familiar visitor. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater returns to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion March 31–April 4 for the fourth year of its exclusive Southern California residency at The Music Center. The complete repertory has yet to be announced, but the engagement will mix classic and contemporary works and, yes, Revelations will be there.

Gayeon Jung (Carolyn McCabe)

The Joffrey Ballet supplies the season’s grand-scale classic with the West Coast premiere of Christopher Wheeldon’s The Sleeping Beauty, June 24–27 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Performed with a live orchestra, Wheeldon’s choreography unfolds amid Jérôme Kaplan’s sets and costumes, Mary Louise Geiger’s lighting and Daniel Brodie’s projections, set to Tchaikovsky’s magnificent score.

Don Quixote (Alba Muriel)

The season saves its longest-awaited return for last. Spain’s Compañía Nacional de Danza hasn’t appeared at The Music Center since 2007. It comes back July 15–18 with the North American premiere of Don Quixote, choreographed by José Carlos Martínez after Marius Petipa and Alexander Gorsky, with Ludwig Minkus’s score performed live. Martínez has revisited the ballet’s Spanish elements, while Mayte Chico contributes additional choreography for the bolero and fandango. After a 20-year absence, a Spanish company bringing a Spanish-inflected Don Quixote back to Los Angeles sounds like a particularly satisfying way to close the season.

What makes the lineup appealing is how little the five engagements resemble one another. Robbins gets a festival assembled from dancers across major companies; Tayeh responds to O’Connor with an ensemble of veteran women; Ailey brings both repertory and Revelations; Wheeldon reimagines a cornerstone of classical ballet; and Compañía Nacional de Danza returns after two decades with its own approach to Don Quixote. From October through July, The Music Center is giving Los Angeles five very different arguments for what dance can be.

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Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at The Music Center
Ahmanson Theatre and Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles
October 23, 2026–July 18, 2027
for tickets and complete schedules, call 213.972.0711 or visit The Music Center

for more shows, visit Theatre in LA

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