Ballet & Dance in Greater Boston
Fri Oct 23 – Sat Oct 24
Fri Oct 23 · 8pm / Sat Oct 24 · 2pm & 8pm
The Australian contemporary-circus company opens Vivo's dance season with Ten Thousand Hours — the number a skill supposedly takes to master, turned into an hour of astonishing acrobatics about practice, persistence and failure. Human bodies doing impossible things, staged with the discipline of dance.
Fri Oct 9 – Sat Oct 10 · 7pm/2pm
Fri Oct 9 · 7pm / Sat Oct 10 · 2pm
The touring Grand Kyiv Ballet dances Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake reimagined with an illuminated projection design — the corps in glowing costume against animated light. Two evenings at the Colonial; unrelated to Boston Ballet, whose season stays at the Citizens Opera House.
Thu Oct 15 – Sun Oct 18
Thu Oct 15 · 7:30pm / Fri Oct 16 · 7:30pm / Sat Oct 17 · 1pm & 7:30pm / Sun Oct 18 · 1pm
Six world premieres made on the Conservatory's contemporary dance majors, by guest choreographers Igal Perry, Sean Curran, Germaul Barnes and Moscelyne ParkeHarrison and by faculty members Junichi Fukuda and Emily Jerant-Hendrickson. Sophomores, juniors and seniors dance. The Conservatory has selected it for its Center Stage collection, the small group of productions it promotes each season.
Sat Oct 17 – Sun Oct 18
Detritus dance performs Conversations: Above and Beneath, a roaming, site-responsive dance installation modelled on Margaret Fuller Ossoli's “Conversations,” the 1839–1844 gatherings of Boston women denied formal education. It traces writer Fuller, poet Maria White Lowell, actor Charlotte Cushman, sculptor Edmonia Lewis and historian Hannah Adams, with stops at gravesites, the Hygeia Statue and Hazel Dell. The queer, women-led company was founded in 2021 by Caroline Bradbury and Claire Lane.
Wed Oct 21 · 1:30pm
The Khmer Urban Ballet's original work follows a Cambodian-American family of refugees and their descendants through intergenerational trauma and a separation forced by deportation. Across seven scenes that set traditional music beside contemporary, the dancers draw on their own experiences and memories of forced displacement, migration and healing. The performance runs 45 minutes and is followed by a question-and-answer session with the artists.
Thu Oct 22 · 2:30pm
Dancers of Lowell's Khmer Urban Ballet perform seven poetic scenes tracing a Cambodian-American family through separation, migration and deportation after years of genocide and war. The piece opens with kbach, the fundamental gestures of classical Cambodian dance, which the dancers slowly turn into a symbolic tree. Peter Veth wrote the story and Chummeng Soun staged it, to music by Him Sophy and Cambodian Living Arts.
Fri Oct 23 – Sun Oct 25
Fourth Dimension Tap Company presents a concert-tap programme over three performances in the Roberts Studio Theatre. The company is an independent Boston ensemble renting the BCA's studio house; the box office listing carries dates and ticketing but no programme detail.
Sat Nov 7 · 8:00pm
Compagnie Hervé Koubi opens The Platform, Global Arts Live's new venue, with the Boston premiere of Sol Invictus, named for the “invincible sun” deity of ancient Rome. Koubi's choreography mixes contemporary dance, capoeira and urban dance, set here to a score by Mikael Karlsson with excerpts by Steve Reich and Maxime Bodson. The New Yorker wrote that his dancers “could be mistaken for gods.”
Fri Nov 13 – Sat Nov 14 · 8:00pm
Fri Nov 13 / Sat Nov 14 · 8:00pm
Jean Appolon Expressions, the Boston company of Haitian-born choreographer Jean Appolon, gives the world premiere of Pouvwa (Power), an immersive evening built from Haitian folkloric dance, Afro-electronica, live drumming and visual installations. The piece takes up the misuse of power and how it might be used for the common good. It was made with support from the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project.
Sat Nov 14 – Sun Nov 15 · 7pm/1pm
Sat Nov 14 · 7pm / Sun Nov 15 · 1pm
Lam Dance Works, the company led by John Lam, presents six works new to Boston: Yury Yanowsky's Bathers, Ken Ossola's Moving Mountains, Jon Ole Olstad's Dust and Water, Robert Stephen's re:connection, Chloe Crenshaw's Synthetica and Ali Cederholm's Cisne. Yanowsky is a former Boston Ballet principal, Ossola and Olstad danced with Nederlands Dans Theater, and Stephen was a first soloist with the National Ballet of Canada.
Sat Nov 21 – Sun Nov 22 · 8pm/2pm
Sat Nov 21 · 8pm / Sun Nov 22 · 2pm
Vancouver's contemporary ballet company makes its Vivo debut with a raw, athletic program featuring a work by artistic director Medhi Walerski — choreography that asks questions most dance doesn't dare pose. One of three international company debuts on Vivo's dance season, and Ballet BC's first Boston appearance.
Sat Nov 21 · 3:00pm
Flamenco dancers Triana Maciel and Nino de los Reyes perform a new programme, PerpetuARTE, some of it in silence, some with live musicians and some against technology — the contrast being the point. De los Reyes comes from a flamenco family and has worked across the form's traditional and experimental wings. Vivo presents it in Roxbury.
Sat Nov 21 – Sun Nov 22 · 8:00pm/3:00pm
Sat Nov 21 · 8:00pm / Sun Nov 22 · 3:00pm
BalletX, the Philadelphia contemporary ballet company of 16 dancers, gives the Boston premieres of three works: Jamar Roberts's Honey, Noelle Kayser's Scales on the Wings of a Butterfly and Marguerite Donlon's Big Wig. The New York Times has called its dancers “among America's best.” Roberts, a former Alvin Ailey dancer, was the Ailey company's first resident choreographer.
Fri Nov 27 – Thu Dec 31
Mikko Nissinen's production of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, Clara's Christmas Eve journey to the Kingdom of the Sweets, with hand-painted sets and more than 350 costumes by Robert Perdziola. The Boston Ballet Orchestra plays under Mischa Santora, and 83 students from the Boston Ballet School join the company on stage.
Wed Dec 2 · 7:00pm
Grand Kyiv Ballet, a touring Ukrainian company, brings Nutcracker: Symphony of Lights, a new staging of Tchaikovsky's ballet in which glowing costumes and immersive lighting design carry the familiar Christmas story. The production's page describes it as a reimagining through “light, movement, and sound” and gives no choreographer or cast; children under 15 must be accompanied by an adult.
Fri Dec 4 – Sun Dec 6
Fri Dec 4 · 7:30pm / Sat Dec 5 · 7:30pm / Sun Dec 6 · 2pm
BSU Dance's annual winter concert, billed as a celebration of "life, art, and dance," brings together choreography by faculty members, guest artists and the department's advanced students. WinterDance is one of two student-based concerts the Department of Dance stages each year, alongside a residency performance with professional artists.
Sat Dec 5 – Sun Dec 20
José Mateo's staging of The Nutcracker, set to Tchaikovsky's score and choreographed by the company's founder in 1988, brings Clara's dream world to life with festive sets and sumptuous costumes. More than a hundred children, ages six to eighteen, dance each year alongside professional guest artists.
Fri Dec 11 · 7:00pm
Talmi Entertainment's touring Nutcracker! Magical Christmas Ballet, now on its 33rd annual tour, sets Tchaikovsky's score with new choreography that mixes classical ballet with puppetry and acrobatics. The company fields a corps of 40 Vaganova-trained dancers alongside 10-foot puppets and nine hand-painted backdrops, and its “Dance with Us” program auditions local children to perform in roles created for them. The production is pitched at families.
From $66
Fri Dec 11 · 7:30pm
Endicott College’s Repertory Dance Ensemble, the college’s student dance company, performs original works by adjunct faculty and guest choreographers in its fall concert.
Fri Dec 11 – Sat Dec 12 · 8:00pm
Fri Dec 11 / Sat Dec 12 · 8:00pm
Subject:Matter, a Boston tap dance company that performs with its own jazz septet, pairs With Far Hand, its second record and a concert dance work of the same name, with the world premiere of Outside, its forthcoming third album, which takes tap into soft shoe and sand dancing. Since forming in 2015 the group has made tap concerts, recordings and community events.
Sat Dec 12 – Sun Dec 20
Tony Williams's Boston reworking of the Nutcracker sets its winter scenes in the present-day downtown and runs Duke Ellington's Billy Strayhorn-arranged Nutcracker Suite against Tchaikovsky's score. Classical ballet anchors it, with tap, hip hop, flamenco and jazz worked through the divertissements. It has played the city every December for more than two decades.
From $29
Sat Dec 19 – Sun Dec 20
Kaaya Vritti’s ensemble performs an original dance-theatre work inspired by the River Ganga and the stories, memories and meanings gathered around her, combining Indian classical and contemporary movement with music, narration and theatrical storytelling. At its centre are promises made before their true cost is understood, and what it means to carry them through. The piece assumes no prior knowledge of the mythology or the dance traditions.
Patron / Preferred / General tiers (amounts not printed)
Sat Dec 26 – Mon Dec 28
Sat Dec 26 · 7pm / Sun Dec 27 · 1:30pm / Mon Dec 28 · 1:30pm
The touring company presents an evening of classical Chinese dance with an orchestra of Chinese and Western instruments and projected backdrops, built around stories and figures the producers draw from five thousand years of Chinese culture. Shen Yun was founded in New York in 2006 and tours several troupes simultaneously.
From $95
Sun Jan 31 · 6:00pm
Boston Dance Theater performs Unfurling, a site-responsive piece made with visual artist Kim Radochia that combines movement, sound and sculptural installation. It draws on "the quiet resilience of plant life" and on the writings of the Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, with dancers moving through the space "like tendrils of growth." Company members stay for a short talkback afterwards.
Thu Feb 4 – Sun Feb 7
Thu Feb 4 · 7:30pm / Fri Feb 5 · 7:30pm / Sat Feb 6 · 1pm & 7:30pm / Sun Feb 7 · 1pm
The Conservatory's commercial dance majors work across jazz, hip-hop, musical theatre and circus, dancing world premieres by guest artists Alex Fetbroth, Asiel Hardison and Reina Hidalgo and by faculty members Jun Kuribayashi and Lindsey Klein. The programme also carries a reconstruction of Bob Fosse's Dancin' Man, which puts a piece of Broadway's choreographic record on a student stage.
Fri Feb 12 – Sat Feb 13
Fri Feb 12 · 8pm / Sat Feb 13 · 2pm & 8pm
The Limón Dance Company's first Boston visit since 2005, in its 80th-anniversary season: José Limón's bright, Chopin-set Mazurkas (1958) alongside a new Akram Khan work — his first made on an American company — inspired by Limón's The Moor's Pavane.
Thu Feb 18 – Sun Feb 28
A mixed bill led by Crystal Pite's Emergence, which sets some thirty dancers swarming to Owen Belton's pulsing score, patterns forming and rupturing like a colony. Jorma Elo's Brake the Eyes, to Mozart, and William Forsythe's Herman Schmerman complete the programme.
Fri Feb 19 · 7:00pm
Grand Kyiv Ballet, a touring Ukrainian company, pairs two Spanish-themed scores. Carmen Suite sets Bizet's story to Rodion Shchedrin's 1967 adaptation for strings and percussion, written for his wife, the Bolshoi ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, and here presents Carmen as “passionate, free, and defiant.” The company adds the world premiere of its own Boléro, danced to Ravel's 1928 score.
Thu Feb 25 – Sat Feb 27
Thu Feb 25 · 8pm / Fri Feb 26 · 8pm / Sat Feb 27 · 2pm & 8pm
Taiwanese choreographer Huang Yi has danced with KUKA, an industrial robot arm, for over a decade; their duet turns the push and pull between humanity and technology into something startlingly tender. Presented with the Museum of Science in its new Public Science Common.
Sat Feb 27 – Sun Feb 28 · 8:00pm/3:00pm
Sat Feb 27 · 8:00pm / Sun Feb 28 · 3:00pm
PHILADANCO!, The Philadelphia Dance Company, was founded in West Philadelphia in 1970 by Joan Myers Brown, and for more than five decades has trained dancers in the tradition of Black American concert dance. The company brings a new work that "honors the company's legacy while propelling it forward." The engagement is sponsored in part by LEAD3R.
Sat Mar 6 · 3:00pm
Boston's Modern Connections Collective dances excerpts from four works by Jenny Oliver, the choreographer who founded the company. The pieces take moments of empowerment as their starting point and work through relationship and resilience. Vivo presents the programme at the Roxbury Community College Media Arts Center rather than downtown.
Thu Mar 11 – Sun Mar 21
George Balanchine's staging of Coppélia, Delibes's comic ballet after E.T.A. Hoffmann: Swanilda grows suspicious of the lifelike doll in the toymaker Coppélius's window that has caught her fiancé's eye, and disguises herself as it to teach him a lesson. The Boston Ballet Orchestra plays the score live.
Fri Mar 12 – Sat Mar 13 · 8:00pm
Fri Mar 12 / Sat Mar 13 · 8:00pm
Reckless Underdog, the newest creation from Victor Quijada's Montreal company RUBBERBAND, is a three-act piece for 12 dancers, each act set in a distinct universe: one drawn from classical ballet, one taking an abstract, minimal approach to movement, and one that takes apart the practice of the break cypher. Quijada founded the company in 2002 to fuse hip-hop with ballet and contemporary dance.
Sat Apr 3 – Sun Apr 4 · 8:00pm/3:00pm
Sat Apr 3 · 8:00pm / Sun Apr 4 · 3:00pm
ZAZ is a performative archive of Hurricane Katrina survivors' stories, built from their oral histories and recorded testimonies. SOLE Defined's dancers make a percussive score from tap, hard-soled shoes, gumboots (the boot dance of South African miners) and bare feet, woven together with speech, singing, rapping and projections that carry the survivors' accounts and set the piece in New Orleans.
Sat Apr 17 · 8:00pm
Boston Dance Theater is a Boston contemporary company under the artistic direction of Jessie Jeanne Stinnett, making ensemble works that pair physically daring movement with visual design and storytelling, and that explore "the complexities of the human experience." Its work grows out of collaboration, and the company returned to the ICA's stage in March 2025.
Thu Apr 22 – Sun Apr 25
Thu Apr 22 · 7:30pm / Fri Apr 23 · 7:30pm / Sat Apr 24 · 1pm & 7:30pm / Sun Apr 25 · 1pm
The Conservatory's contemporary dance majors take on a demanding bill: a world premiere by Aszure Barton, Bob Fosse's Crunchy Granola Suite, excerpts from Pina Bausch's Palermo, Palermo, Akram Khan's Vertical Road and José Limón's There Is A Time. Four of the five are repertory works by choreographers companies build whole seasons around.
Sat Apr 24 – Sun Apr 25 · 8pm/3pm
Sat Apr 24 · 8pm / Sun Apr 25 · 3pm
MOMIX, the Connecticut company founded in 1980 by Pilobolus co-founder Moses Pendleton, performs Botanica, an evening-length piece of visual theater that follows the rhythms of the seasons and the passing of a day through images of the natural world. The dancers work with gravity-defying props, cinematic projections and puppetry, in what the company calls a restorative “herbal remedy” for the senses.
Thu Apr 29 – Sun May 9
Frederick Ashton's Cinderella, his first full-length ballet, set to Prokofiev's sweeping score — the fairy godmother, the fairies of the four seasons, the midnight ball and the abandoned slipper, with the stepsisters played broadly for comedy. The Boston Ballet Orchestra plays live.
Fri Apr 30 – Mon May 3
Fri Apr 30 · 8pm / Sat May 1 · 8pm / Sun May 2 · 2pm & 8pm / Mon May 3 · 3pm
Ailey's annual Boston residency, in its second season under artistic director Alicia Graf Mack: new works, revivals from the Ailey repertory, and Revelations, the 1960 masterwork the company has closed with for six decades. A spring tradition at the Wang.
Thu May 13 – Sun May 23
The season closes with three George Balanchine ballets staged by Suzanne Farrell, one of his muses: The Four Temperaments, his austere neoclassical landmark set to Hindemith and drawn from the medieval theory of the four humours; Mozartiana, to Tchaikovsky's homage to Mozart; and Gounod Symphony.
Thu May 13 – Sat May 15
Thu May 13 · 8:00pm / Fri May 14 · 8:00pm / Sat May 15 · 2:00pm & 8:00pm
Step Afrika!, founded in Washington, D.C., in 1994 by C. Brian Williams, marks more than 30 years of stepping, the percussive tradition rooted in African American fraternities and sororities, with Evolution. The programme pairs new dance works with a piece shaped through the company's long collaboration with South Africa, where it began as a cultural exchange with the Soweto Dance Theatre.
