"Holiday Season with Ballet Stars": Miami Ended the Year with One of Its Most Memorable Dance Performances

The end of the year brought to Miami one of the most memorable dance spectacles in the city's history.

For two consecutive nights, the Adrianne Arsht Center was the place where a program featuring some of the most recognized stars of international classical dance alongside new talents took place. This unparalleled show, lasting an hour and a half, was a summary of the best of classical and modern dance history.

Organized by the Ballet Support Foundation, an NGO created by former dancer Lola Koch to help dancers in need, "Holiday Season with Ballet Stars" was an extraordinary opportunity to enjoy the pinnacle of world ballet. It allowed the audience to feel the unstoppable passion of dance and witness firsthand the boundless joy that ballet can still bring.

The idea was risky from its inception: Koch chose to bring to Miami, a city known for beaches and bars, a cultural show that had never been seen here. In just nine months, Koch managed to gather some of the best dancers from the world's leading companies and bring them together for a two-night program featuring some of the most memorable choreographies of the past two centuries. And she succeeded... all made by herself.

The program, the same on both nights, opened with one of the most melancholic and tragic love stories of 20th-century ballet: "Manon", the celebrated choreography by Kenneth MacMillan that internationalized the Royal Ballet. However, this time, the English ballet school gave way to the French: two stars from the Paris Opera Ballet, Ludmila Pagliero and Mathieu Ganio, danced with extraordinary seduction, charm, technique, and grace in the meeting of the two lovers in the first-act pas de deux.

In a meticulously crafted program, they returned to close the first act with another pas de deux that seemed to conclude the cycle of lovers and love initiated by MacMillan´s Manon. It was one of the most memorable moments of the two nights when they danced the charming seduction game of "Le Parc," the extraordinary choreography by Angelin Preljocaj. The intensity, emotion, and virtuosity they displayed made it hard to resist applause or even tears.

The night was also a review of the great (and also the new) choreographers—and masters—of the American ballet school, those who reformed it and those who are its main voices today, from Balanchine and Martha Graham to Alexei Ratmansky and Justin Peck. Xin Ying and Lloyd Knight, principal dancers of the Martha Graham Contemporary Ballet Dance Company, exquisitely interpreted the style and characteristic movements with which Graham revolutionized U.S. dance in the mid-20th century. "Rebirth," "Conversation of Lovers," and "Lucifer" were a sum of the innovative physical vocabulary that has permeated the company since its foundation.

Ratmansky's pas de deux from "Summer" was another highlight of the night: the wonderful blend of classical and modern dance achieved by the choreography, combined with the extraordinary technique of Christine Schevchenko and Aran Bell, created an unparalleled space of contemplation, joy, and energy that continued long after they finished dancing.

A pleasant discovery for the Miami audience was also the choreography of Jason Kittelberger, a New Yorker who promises, if not already, to be one of the most lucid minds to bring a modern feel to contemporary dance. Whether in "Ashes-14," the choreography he shared with his partner, Royal Ballet's principal dancer Natalia Osipova, or "Her Dream," a piece he composed for her, Kittelberger's exploration of dance delves into universal themes such as heartbreak, breakup, and outcomes, as well as expressing the soul's most hidden and dreamlike feelings.

Three proposals from younger dancers, "Until We Find Our Place," "Upon Arrival" from the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, and "Reflection" from students of the Joffrey Ballet School in New York, were moments of hallucination and hope due to the vigor, intensity, and passion displayed by their dancers.

There were also the more classic moments to satisfy basic tastes: the pas de deux from "Swan Lake" and "The Nutcracker," which, for an audience unaccustomed to a broader repertoire, garnered the most applause.

It was two nights that should have filled the Adrienne Arsht Center to the last seat, but there were, however, numerous empty chairs. A real shame for a city that laments not having cultural spaces of this kind and, when it does, doesn't know how to take advantage of them or passes them by. However, there is no doubt that these shows will become part of the city's cultural history and undoubtedly made the lives of those who attended better, even if just for a while because "Holiday Season with Ballet Stars" was a concert of beautiful bodies, a triumphal march of music and muscles, an exaltation of spirit, movement, and sensuality—a hymn to the human condition.