About the Production
Three choreographies – three visions for a contemporary ballet. Visionary Dances brings together dance artists who have each found an individual approach to the academic dance and have taken classical ballet into new dimensions.
While Twyla Tharp was one of the first to unite the classical and modern worlds and whose In the Upper Room celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2026, Justin Peck and Wayne McGregor are currently among the most important and sought-after choreographers.
The ballet evening will open with Justin Peck's Heatscape. The resident choreographer of the New York City Ballet is one of the most sought-after and acclaimed choreographers of his generation. For Heatscape, he was inspired by the various temperatures of human relationships, but also by the hot, energetic and street art-filled streets of Miami. Together with the artist Shepard Fairey, who is responsible for the stage design, Peck merges ballet and guerrilla art.
Yugen* evokes a changing beauty through simple means. This term, derived from Japanese aesthetics, stands for the work, which explores that mysterious, deep grace through the relationships of eleven bodies on stage. Inspired by Leonard Bernstein's evocative Chichester Psalms, Wayne McGregor worked with ceramicist and writer Edmund de Waal to create a pure aesthetic on stage.
The New York Times declared Twyla Tharp's 1986 work In the Upper Room to be "one of the greatest ballets of all time". Tharp, one of the most important contemporary choreographers, expands the boundaries of ballet and modern dance in equal measure with her works. Set to the driving commissioned composition by Philip Glass, In the Upper Room builds a bridge between the genres and unites a diverse spectrum of movement: classical vocabulary meets athleticism, pointe shoe meets sneaker, raw power meets extraordinary grace.
