Who doesn’t enjoy a spicy drama of dangerous love in an exotic setting—a timeless story told through exquisite dance? The quintessential classical ballet La Bayadère did exactly that, wowing European audiences who were fascinated by the new worlds their empire-building was opening to them. Inspired by contemporary news stories about India in the 1870s, including a high-profile tour by England’s Prince of Wales in 1875, Marius Petipa began sketching out this melodramatic Indian-themed ballet. In the original tale, the noble warrior, Solor, must choose between his true love, Nikiya, the titular “bayadère,” or temple dancer, and his betrothed, the Rajah’s daughter, Gamzatti. The ballet underwent significant Soviet revisions in the 1940s, and it’s from those revisions that most current productions derive.

Stories that rely on being “exotic” for their appeal can lose their charm, and even seem silly, once people become more worldly and can recognize inaccuracies and stereotypes. Because La Bayadère was created and presented by Europeans long ago with little authentic cultural knowledge, twenty-first-century audience members now find many of La Bayadère’s depictions of Indian people, religion, and culture as inappropriate caricatures. We’re not impressed seeing Hindus who crawl on the floor like savage apes, page boys in blackface, and bastardized sacred mudras. When we all have Indian friends, colleagues, neighbors, family members, and opportunities to engage with authentic Indian culture, presenting “India” as an exotic pastiche can no longer be done with integrity or respect.

Seeing the problems, most North American dance companies have shelved (“canceled”) this masterpiece—this classic that contains so much of ballet history and tradition. What a pity, say those of us who believe La Bayadère still has a place in today’s repertory because of its sublime music and timeless choreography. If the problem is the setting of the story, can’t we fix that?
As a cofounder of Final Bow for Yellowface, I have worked tirelessly since 2017 to eradicate yellowface and Orientalism from our ballet stages, replacing them with better reimaginings of classics and new works by Asian artists. My work is the opposite of cancel culture—I believe we should be steeping in our traditions and recognize redeeming qualities in works from the past, while creatively reimagining them for today’s diverse audiences. So, how could we tweak this very human love story—preserving this iconic work? My favorite artistic prompt is “What else could it be?”

Alongside Doug Fullington, Larry Moore, and the immensely talented students and faculty of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, I’ve been working on a forceful and fun answer to that question. Retaining choreographer Marius Petipa’s steps and structure, which Doug meticulously restored from notation available, and Ludwig Minkus’s score, magically transformed by Larry, we have reset the ballet as a backstage melodrama during the Golden Age of the Hollywood musical. Keeping the basic plot but changing the setting is not a radical idea: these days it’s almost impossible to see a Shakespeare play that’s performed in a context that an Elizabethan would have recognized. Unlike paintings or sculptures, works of performance art are alive and always changing.

We hope you’ll agree with us that we lose nothing by trading in the blackface and opium fantasy for dancing cowboys and a Busby Berkeley-inspired dream ballet. We’ve made the ballet about “us” and center our experience as Americans. By doing so, we are able to preserve our beloved dance heritage while being respectful of Indian people and culture—win/win. Isn’t that a better way to tell a story for today?

I’ve always thought Marius Petipa’s choreography for the character dances in his 1877 La Bayadère would look at home on the music hall stage. So when Phil Chan suggested that we collaborate on a reimagining of this revered but problematic ballet warhorse, originally set in a fantasy India, I hoped we’d settle on an early-twentieth century setting. After discussing a variety of scenarios, we landed on a backstage drama—a show within a show—one of the favored narrative structures of American musical theater. Phil immediately identified the congruence between Bayadère’s love triangle of Nikiya, Solor, and Gamzatti and that of Singin’ in the Rain’s Kathy Seldon, Don Lockwood, and Lina Lamont. This led us to our reimagined plot, a comedy(!) featuring an up-and-coming ingenue, her fiancé, and the reigning star of the Silver Screen. Nikki (Phil’s new name for Bayadère’s Nikiya) would be our star on the rise.

The Gershwins’ 1930 musical Girl Crazy, which made stars out of Ethel Merman and Ginger Rogers, has long been a favorite of mine, with its dude ranch setting and terrific musical numbers. I was thrilled, then, that Phil was as game as I was to set most of the ballet’s dances as part of a cowboy-themed film being shot throughout our show. In short order, Bayadère’s opening ritual dance became a “Campfire Waltz,” the “Djampe” scarf number became a “Cactus Dance”—its performers wielding riding crops—and Petipa’s lavish Badrinata festival was transformed into a “Rodeo Parade.” Bayadère’s iconic “Kingdom of the Shades” scene called for special attention and a contrasting approach. We’ve made it the “dream ballet” of our show—an art deco fantasy inspired by the over-the-top creations of Busby Berkeley.

We knew the score by Ludwig Minkus would need to be adapted to deliver the sound world of a vintage musical. This particular combination of symphony orchestra and jazz band is epitomized in the work of Robert Russell Bennett, the orchestrator of choice for most of the era’s tunesmiths. From the beginning, I had the wonderful vintage musical specialist Larry Moore in mind and hoped I could convince him to take on the project and give the score a Robert Russell Bennett treatment. Larry had worked on a reconstruction of Girl Crazy in the ‘90s, and I knew he’d be perfect for Star on the Rise.

To my delight, he was more enthusiastic than I could have hoped, and we spent a happy nine months in 2023 working together as he adapted the score from period sources and sent me scans of his handwritten manuscripts, which I dutifully computer-set to create a full score, parts, and piano reduction. Larry worked from two Imperial-era rehearsal scores, one for two violins and another for piano. We breathed a sigh of relief as we found that Minkus’s waltzes, polkas, and galops transformed easily into tangos, beguines, and Charlestons. The new orchestration for the “Dreamland” scene (Larry’s apt new title for “The Kingdom of the Shades”) was inspired by Bennett’s glamorous settings for the Astaire-Rogers hit film Swing Time.

I’ve approached Petipa’s choreography for Bayadère based on the various ways the steps have come down to us. Nearly all of the ballet’s ensemble dances and a few solos were documented using the Stepanov choreographic notation system in connection with Petipa’s revival of Bayadère in 1900. Nikolai Sergeyev, a dancer in the St. Petersburg Imperial Ballet who later became rehearsal director and an important ballet stager in the West, was the notator. His work is now housed at Harvard University. (The ballet’s mime script, also copied by Sergeyev, and Petipa’s own preparatory notes are held in Moscow archives.) In setting the dances, I’ve followed the notation closely, although we’ve allowed ourselves some latitude in the upper body (and occasionally in the legs and feet) to help place the choreography within our new narrative context.

Some numbers that aren’t notated have been handed down by oral transmission, from dancer to dancer. For these, we’ve consulted the earliest films we were able to locate—usually mid-twentieth century black-and-white excerpts from Bayadère. Here, we’ve allowed ourselves additional freedoms in the staging, particularly where the “traditional” choreography seems not to represent ballet step vocabulary or structure that was common around the turn of the twentieth century. In the case of the adagio from the pas d’action in the final scene, we’ve created new choreography drawing on many inspirations. Likewise, the dances for the fakirs in the opening scene—undocumented and by early accounts demeaning and exoticized representations of Hindu religious thought to possess miraculous powers—have been replaced by choreography for our band of cowboys. For these passages, we looked to other cowboy-themed dances in the American repertory for inspiration, especially those by Agnes DeMille (Oklahoma!, Rodeo) and George Balanchine (Western Symphony). (The cowboy roles are a composite of Bayadère’s fakirs, the young boy students in Petipa’s Badrinata festival scene—this choreography is shared with our young Buckaroos—and the ensemble in Bayadère’s “Hindu” dance.)

We’ve reassigned several dances as well: Pamela Zatti, our Gamzatti character, performs one of Nikiya’s vina (guitar) numbers in the opening scene, its music reimagined as a tango; Nikki performs the “Manu” dance in the “Rodeo Parade” scene, a moonshine jug replacing the milk pitcher of the original; and Pam and Sol (our Solor) dance the leads in the frenzied “Hindu” dance, here rechristened as “Bronco Busters,” another nod to Girl Crazy. The “Lotus” dance in the ballet’s final scene was choreographed by Petipa for 24 student girls and provided us with a particular challenge because our resources didn’t allow for this cast size. Our solution has been to set the dance for six young students joined by six Rancher men from the IU Ballet Department, and we have adapted the choreography accordingly. We’ve also included a non-Petipa dance that has become part of Bayadère’s performance tradition—the 1948 interpolation for a character originally called the “little god,” better known today as the “Bronze [or Golden] Idol.” Finally, with Larry’s encouragement, we’ve replaced the ballet’s apotheosis, depicting Nikiya and Solor flying through the mist over the Himalayas, with an upbeat Charleston finale that befits the uplifting ending of our new story. Structured in the manner of a Petipa coda, the number features the entire ensemble dancing to the strains of a jazzy, reimagined melody from “The Kingdom of the Shades.”

The entire IU Ballet Department, especially its wonderful students, approached this project with generosity, openness, and enthusiasm. I sincerely thank them all.

I saw the notice on Facebook; it had been posted by my friend Mark Horowitz of the Library of Congress Music Division: someone was looking for an orchestrator/arranger to score a ballet in the style of George Gershwin’s 1930 musical Girl Crazy. Well, I thought, I might be good for that. I had spent most of 1989 creating and editing a full score from original orchestra parts for the Roxbury Records recording of Girl Crazy, and I had been working as an orchestrator/editor with my friend Russell Warner for various musicals written between 1900 and 1945. I thought I had a pretty good grasp on what to do.

I contacted Mark immediately on January 23, 2022, and before long, I was in contact with someone I suspect may be one of the few true gentlemen in showbiz, Doug Fullington. There was an interesting situation here: Doug was good friends with my late friend Russell, who had orchestrated a ballet for Pacific Northwest Ballet, and by even stranger coincidence, I had orchestrated one or two sections of that ballet for Russell as the deadline closed in on him.
Several months later, I met Doug’s partner on this project, Phil Chan, for lunch. I must have passed the two interviews because shortly thereafter, Doug sent me a hefty carton of materials for the ballet I would be working on, Ludwig Minkus’s 1877 score for the Marius Petipa ballet La Bayadère. Looking through the materials, my first reaction was “Oy! What have I gotten myself in for?” After watching a production of the ballet, I was happy that Doug and Phil had reimagined this tragic ballet as a comedy.

There’s a large musical distance between 1877 and 1930, and an even bigger distance between 2024 and 1930. Musical styles have changed along with attitudes toward music and how one listens. Today, when one thinks of music from the 1920s, we think of the dance band stereotype—wah-wah mutes, the banjo, syncopated and bouncy rhythms for the Charleston and Black Bottom—but these weren’t necessarily the sounds for theater music of the period. Broadway shows were sophisticated affairs, and the creators of the music provided a sophisticated sound for the scores they arranged. Their backgrounds and musical training were often European. Max Dreyfus, who ran Chappell Music and had writers like Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, and George Gershwin under contract, called most of the shots about published music, its arrangements and its orchestrators. Dreyfus’s orchestrator of choice for shows between 1924 and 1960 was Robert Russell Bennett, who studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris during the 1920s and was principal orchestrator for Girl Crazy. I made him my model for this new version of La Bayadère, now titled Star on the Rise.

My principal challenge was to make a ballet score from 1877 sound as much like a 1930s Broadway musical comedy as possible. The most important orchestral decision was to keep the sound of the major part of the ballet in one musical territory, a 1930s musical comedy, and a different sound for the “Dreamland” (formerly “Kingdom of the Shades”) sequence. Another concern I had was how far Doug would let me go in twisting Ludwig Minkus out of shape? Much of his music was what I would call nineteenth-century ballet froufrou. He had too much reliance on unison sections as well as a limited harmonic palette for my taste, but then there would occur a stunning melody that took your breath away. I couldn’t be condescending and call him a hack, but I never thought he rose to the level of Tchaikovsky or Delibes in their ballet scores.

With the exception of the “Tango di Diva,” where I ventured into parody territory—the new version is a comedy, right? I pretty much scored the music as it existed in the original score. I had decided the sonic world had to be American, not nineteenth-century Russian, but I proceeded cautiously. I did put a bit of Dixieland into one section, and I turned another into a rowdy polka, but I stayed close to Minkus’s harmonies. I considered the orchestration basically a new paint job. There were several spots in the first act where Minkus wrote “exotic” music for his exotic characters, and I felt that had to go. In one case, I rewrote one or two bars of music to remove the peculiar bars that came out of nowhere; our heroine is a sweet young American starlet, not a temple dancer in an exotic India that never existed. In another number, I replaced a curious bit of exoticism with the folk song “Red River Valley.” The movie being filmed in the ballet is a Western musical, and I thought it would be a nice surprise.

By the time I reached the final scene of Act I, I became more aggressive about Americanizing the score; the “Rodeo Parade” owes more to John Phillip Sousa than Ludwig Minkus, and the continuous unison lines in “Bronco Busters” screamed for harmonization to keep the excitement building.

In Act II, I turned one section of music into a beguine as my nod to Cole Porter, and then came the section I dreaded: “Dreamland,” our Hollywood Fred-and-Ginger fantasy. Doug had the great idea of featuring the piano in the orchestra pit, and I had the challenge of turning a score from 1877 into a Hollywood musical of the 1930s. In the pas de deux for the romantic couple, it took me two failures before I decided the way to treat the music was just what writers of the 20s and 30s did to create pop songs from Chopin and Tchaikovsky melodies: keep the tune and rewrite the accompaniment. After that, the “Dreamland” scene was a breeze, and in the “Coda in Swing Time” finale of the sequence, I finally got a chance to pay homage to Jerome Kern’s “Waltz in Swing Time” and write a conclusion I think George Gershwin himself might have envied.

Scene 1. The Rehearsal Hall
Sol, a rising star of the Silver Screen, has just finished filming a scene for the studio’s latest Western-themed musical extravaganza. He asks “Mad” Gavin, the film’s choreographer, to deliver a bouquet of flowers to Nikki, a chorus dancer he loves. Mr. Bramen, the director, observes a rehearsal then selects Nikki for a plum solo role. The proceedings are interrupted by the antics of Sol’s Cowboy cohorts and the arrival of Pamela Zatti, the reigning star of the Silver Screen. With all eyes on Pamela, Mr. Bramen takes Nikki aside and promises her stardom in return for her romantic favor. Rejecting him outright, Nikki is left shaken until Gavin hands her Sol’s bouquet. Later, Nikki stays behind to meet her beau, who surprises her with a marriage proposal. An eavesdropping Mr. Bramen, still bruised from rejection, vows revenge.

Scene 2. On Set: The Cactus Dance
As a new day of shooting commences, Doug Manta, the owner of the studio, greets the cast and crew.

Scene 3. Doug’s Office
Pamela pays a visit to Doug, who reveals the poster for the studio’s next big film. As Sol joins them, Pamela insists that she star alongside him, a partnership sure to extend her waning career. Envisioning the film’s Oscar-winning potential, Doug agrees. Mr. Bramen interrupts and demands to see Doug alone. Wanting Nikki for himself, Bramen reveals the romance between the two young lovers and suggests the studio’s perfect pairing of Sol and Pamela would be jeopardized. Pamela overhears and decides to confront Nikki herself. Threatened by ruin, Doug resolves to fire Nikki.

Scene 4. Pamela’s Dressing Room
Pamela summons Nikki to her dressing room and reveals she is aware of the chorus dancer’s recent engagement to Sol. Pamela plays nice but also makes clear that she, and not young Nikki, will be starring alongside Sol in the studio’s next picture. She offers to bribe Nikki to leave the studio of her own accord, but Nikki refuses. The encounter erupts into a heated altercation, leaving Pamela enraged.

Scene 5. On Set: Rodeo Parade
Filming resumes with a festive rodeo parade. Following the successful shoot, sad Nikki can’t bring herself to celebrate with the others. She consoles herself by playing her guitar and soon begins to attract a crowd of cast members who enthusiastically support her undeniable talent. Suddenly, Doug returns to set, a livid Pamela at his heels. Desperate to keep his biggest star happy, Doug fires Nikki on the spot. Seizing the moment, Mr. Bramen approaches the distraught young dancer and offers to save her career if she will only entertain his advances. Nikki refuses with all the strength she can muster and dashes off set, with Sol, Doug, and finally Pamela in hot pursuit.

Scene 6. Nikki’s Dressing Room
Dejected, Nikki is packing her trunk when Sol arrives to console her. When Doug joins them, they describe to him their hopes and dreams of starring together in a new, glittering film.

Scene 7. Dreamland
Sol and Nikki lead a stunning deco ballet fantasy, their vision of an ideal collaboration.

Scene 8. On Set: The Train Station
Won over by the young lovers’ irresistible enthusiasm, Doug relents, reinstates Nikki’s contract, and lays plans for the studio’s future. As the final day of shooting comes to a close, he surprises everyone with thrilling news that leads to a joyous happily-ever-after.

Phil Chan is a cofounder of Final Bow for Yellowface and the President of the Gold Standard Arts Foundation. He is a graduate of Carleton College and an alumnus of the Ailey School. He has held fellowships with Dance/USA, Drexel University, Jacob’s Pillow, Harvard University, the Manhattan School of Music, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, NYU, and the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris. He is the author of Final Bow for Yellowface: Dancing between Intention and Impact and Banishing Orientalism. He has served as executive editor for FLATT Magazine and contributed to Dance Europe Magazine, Dance Magazine, Dance Business Weekly, and The Huffington Post, and currently serves on the advisory board of Dance Magazine. Chan served multiple years on the National Endowment for the Arts dance panel and the panel for the Jadin Wong Award, presented by the Asian American Arts Alliance. He was a Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor of Dance at Carleton College and was named a Next 50 Arts Leader by the Kennedy Center. Recent projects also include directing Madama Butterfly for Boston Lyric Opera (garnering Best of 2023 in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and Broadway World). His dances are currently in the repertoire of Ballet West and Oakland Ballet. (Photo by Eli Schmidt)

Doug Fullington is a dance historian and musicologist. He earned degrees in music and law from the University of Washington (UW) and has since taught undergraduate and graduate courses for the UW School of Music as a visiting scholar and auxiliary member of the faculty. He was a guest instructor at Princeton University in 2020. Fullington’s work in ballet is focused on nineteenth-century French and Russian source material. A fluent reader of Stepanov choreographic notation, he has contributed historically informed dances to ballet productions around the world, including The Pharaoh’s Daughter for the Bolshoi Ballet (2000), Le Corsaire for Bayerisches Staatsballett (2007), Giselle with Marian Smith and Peter Boal for Pacific Northwest Ballet (PNB, 2011), Paquita with Alexei Ratmansky and Smith for Bayerisches Staatsballett (2014), and Raymonda for English National Ballet (2022). Upcoming projects include staging Marius Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty for PNB in 2025. With Smith, Fullington is the author of Five Ballets from Paris and St. Petersburg (Oxford University Press, 2024). He and Smith are also editing the first critical edition of Adolphe Adam’s Giselle (1841) for Bärenreiter Verlag. Fullington has been a frequent presenter and moderator for the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series and, in 2016, he was a resident fellow at NYU’s Center for Ballet and the Arts and research fellow at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. He has spent 25-plus years with PNB, most recently as assistant to artistic director Boal and as audience education manager. Fullington is also founder and director of the Tudor Choir, a professional vocal ensemble based in Seattle since 1993, and has conducted the Pacific Northwest Ballet Orchestra and Seattle Baroque Orchestra. (Photo by Angela Sterling)

Since his arrival in New York in 1979, Larry Moore’s work has encompassed the theater, choral, opera, concert, and recording industries. Praised by the New York Daily News as “one of the most ingenious practitioners in his profession,” his choral arrangements are published by Subito Music and Boosey and Hawkes. As an orchestrator, his work has been heard in concert with the Philadelphia Pops and Boston Pops and theatrical productions by Goodspeed Opera, New York State Theatre Institute, New Amsterdam Theatre Company, Houston Grand Opera, City Center Encores!, and Broadway. His recording work includes orchestrations and arrangements for numerous soloists and supplementary appendix material for several recordings of classic musicals, including Cabaret, Sweet Charity, and Guys and Dolls. In 2017, he provided new orchestrations for the City Center Encores! production of Cole Porter’s 1930 musical comedy The New Yorkers. Moore’s 1985 restoration of Cole Porter’s lost musical Jubilee has been performed by the New Amsterdam Theatre Company in New York, 42nd Street Moon Company of San Francisco, IU Jacobs School of Music Opera Theater as part of the Cole Porter Centennial Celebration, and BBC Radio-3 as its 1999 holiday broadcast. Well known for his work as a musical theater historian and restorer-reconstructionist, he produced for the JMV Art Preservation Foundation five musical theater recordings for New World Records. For his restoration of the 1925 Rodgers and Hart musical Dearest Enemy, Playbill.com wrote, “Orchestrator Larry Moore . . . is mighty good at unearthing, reassembling, and providing the missing pieces of vintage musical comedies . . . This new recording, I imagine, couldn’t be bettered.”

Marzio Conti began his career as a flutist, debuting at the Salzburg Festival at the age of 20 with the I Solisti Veneti chamber orchestra. He has been considered internationally as one of the exponents of the flute of his generation, playing, recording, and teaching classes for the most important international institutions. He decided to leave his concert activity in the mid-nineties to devote himself entirely to conducting. A student of Piero Bellugi, Conti soon began to be named conductor of several orchestras in Italy and abroad. He has conducted prestigious orchestras around the world, varying from symphonic repertoire to opera; he also often collaborates with leading ballet companies. He has numerous recordings for several international labels. Conti has frequently appeared on television and radio, including international broadcasts, promoting contemporary music in addition to traditional symphonic and operatic repertoire. Since the beginning of his career as a conductor, he has held positions as principal and artistic director in several Italian and foreign orchestras. His last position was director of Spain’s Oviedo Filarmonia from 2011 to 2017, receiving prizes including the Gold Medal Auditorium of Oviedo, considered the highest artistic recognition of the city. Among other things in recent years, he has served several times on the Jury of the Arts in the Princess of Asturias Awards. He has played, conducted, and recorded with some of the greatest soloists, singers, stage directors, dancers, and choreographers on the international scene. Since 2014, he has served as a guest conductor, and was on faculty, at the Jacob School of Music. He became principal guest conductor of the AIMS Festival in Graz in 2017.

Bloomington-based designer and scenic artist Mark Frederic Smith is director of scenic painting and properties for IU Jacobs School of Music Opera and Ballet Theater, where he has worked on more than 150 productions during the past 27 years. Design work for Jacobs School projects includes The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni, The Coronation of Poppea, Hansel and Gretel, Bernstein’s Mass, Anne Frank, and La Finta Giardiniera. His design for Florencia en el Amazonas was featured in San Diego Opera’s 2017- 18 season. In addition to work for Indianapolis Civic Theater, Butler Ballet, Indianapolis Ballet, and Chicago’s Greenhouse Theater, area theatergoers may recognize his designs for more than a dozen Cardinal Stage Company shows, including Les Misérables, A Streetcar Named Desire, My Fair Lady, Oliver!, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Smith earned a Master of Fine Arts in Scenic Design degree from the IU Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance and was a student of former Jacobs faculty C. David Higgins and Robert O’Hearn. Upcoming productions include Sweeney Todd with IU Jacobs Opera Theater.

Ken Phillips served as lighting specialist for the Jacobs School of Music from 2019 to 2021, where he designed the lighting and helped engineer projections for almost a dozen productions, including The Turn of the Screw, which won the National Opera Association’s Division VIII Production Competition Award for 2020. He returned in fall 2022 to work on the lighting design and codesign projections for The Magic Flute. He currently works at the University of Arizona, where he is an assistant professor of practice in lighting design and stage management, as well as serving as production manager for the school of theater. Phillips earned an M.F.A. in Lighting Design and B.F.A. in Stage Management from Arizona and has worked on productions around the country, mostly in opera and musical theater.

Camille Deering has 20 years of experience in the design world. She has had the privilege to work with the Los Angeles Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, Cape Playhouse, New York Theatre Workshop, Corelli Costumes, Tricorne Studios, and costume designer Ann Roth. Her talents then took her to Motionwear, Danskin, and Dansco. Deering’s designs made their opera debut in 2023 with Ainadamar; she also assisted Linda Pisano with costume design for The Nutcracker. Deering will graduate from Indiana University in May 2024 after earning an M.F.A. in Costume Design.

Andrew Elliot is a makeup artist, wig designer, stylist, and cellist. His design and music work can be seen and heard with IU Jacobs Opera and Ballet Theater, Beef and Boards Dinner Theatre, Booth Tarkington Civic Theatre, Actors Theatre of Indiana, Phoenix Theatre, Zach & Zack Productions, Summer Stock Stage, and more. His work as a makeup artist and stylist can be seen locally and nationally in various publications, commercials, billboards, industrials, and editorials. He spent 2020 recreating icons of film, fashion, and theater, which gained national attention, with features in The New York Times, NowThis News, The Indianapolis Star, and Indianapolis Monthly.

Robin Hoover Allen specializes in teaching creative movement classes for young children with a pre-ballet focus. She also teaches elective courses in classical and contemporary ballet as an adjunct instructor with the Ballet Department. Allen is an alumna of IU holding a Bachelor of Science in Ballet Performance with an Outside Field in Human Biology and a Master of Science in Ballet Performance.

Christian Claessens is lecturer in ballet at the IU Jacobs School of Music. He began his ballet training at the Conservatoire de la Monaie. In 1978, he came to New York on scholarship to the School of American Ballet and the American Ballet Theatre School. After graduating, he performed with the Kansas City Ballet and Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre. In 1984, he returned to Europe as a member of the Dutch National Ballet. As a soloist, Claessens toured internationally with Stars of the American Ballet, Stars of the New York City Ballet, Stars of the Hong Kong Ballet, and Kozlov and Friends. In 1991, he cofounded the Scarsdale Ballet Studio with Diana White. In 1999, he codirected the International Ballet Project with Valentina Kozlova and White, both of New York City Ballet. In 1998, he took over the directorship of the Purchase Youth Ballet. He was the director of La Leçon: Christian Claessens School of Ballet in Westchester, New York.

Rebecca Janes is an adjunct faculty member at the IU Jacobs School of Music. After a professional career spanning 20 years, dancing principal roles by George Balanchine, Alonzo King, Dwight Rhoden, Nacho Duato, Marius Petipa, Alvin Ailey, Twyla Tharp, Anthony Tudor, and Sasha Janes, she moved to Bloomington with her family. Before coming to Bloomington, Janes was part of the senior ballet faculty at Charlotte Ballet Academy. She has been teaching for nine years and is also on faculty at the Chautauqua Institution in New York.

Sasha Janes is associate professor of ballet at the IU Jacobs School of Music. He was born in Perth, Australia, and received his formal dance training from the Australian Ballet School. He has danced professionally with West Australian Ballet, Australian Ballet, Hong Kong Ballet, and Dayton Ballet, performing principal roles in works by Jiří Kylián, George Balanchine, Nacho Duato, Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, Marius Petipa, Septime Webre, Anthony Tudor, Dwight Rhoden, Alonzo King, Twyla Tharp, Alvin Ailey, and many others. At the invitation of Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux and associate artistic director Patricia McBride, Janes joined Charlotte Ballet in 2003. In 2006, he was commissioned to choreograph his first ballet, Lascia la Spina, Cogli la Rosa, and has since choreographed several ballets for Charlotte Ballet, including Carmen, Dangerous Liaisons, We Danced Through Life, Last Lost Chance, Shelter, At First Sight, Loss, The Four Seasons, The Red Dress, Utopia, Playground Teasers, The Seed and the Soil, Chaconne, Queen, Sketches from Grace, and Rhapsodic Dances, which was performed as part of the Kennedy Center’s Ballet Across America series in June 2013. The Washington Post called Janes “a choreographer to watch.” He was a participant in New York City Ballet’s Choreographic Institute and has been a guest choreographer for Richmond Ballet’s New Works Festival. He was a principal dancer with Charlotte Ballet for eight seasons before being named rehearsal director in 2007 then associate artistic director in 2012 and adding the title resident choreographer in 2013. In fall 2016, Janes premiered his ballet Saudade for the Jacobs School of Music, where he served as guest faculty. In spring 2017, he premiered his Wuthering Heights for Charlotte Ballet, inspired by Emily Bronte’s classic novel. In fall 2020, he premiered the first two movements of 19 at the Jacobs School.

Glenda Lucena is a world-renowned professional ballet teacher and repetiteur. She brings her insight, excellence, and spirituality into every studio. She has served as ballet master at Miami City Ballet, taught consistently for the Chautauqua Institution, and served as both faculty and repetiteur for the Jacobs School of Music Ballet Department.

Kyra Nichols is professor of ballet at the IU Jacobs School of Music, where she holds the Violette Verdy and Kathy Ziliak Anderson Chair in Ballet. Nichols began her early training with her mother, Sally Streets, a former member of New York City Ballet (NYCB). Nichols became an apprentice and then a member of the corps de ballet at NYCB in 1974 and was promoted to soloist in 1978. In 1979, George Balanchine promoted her to principal dancer, and she worked closely with both Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. She performed numerous leading roles in the NYCB repertoire, including Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto Number 2, Stars and Stripes, Liebeslieder Walzer, and Davidsbündlertänze. She has worked with an extensive list of choreographers, including William Forsythe, Susan Stroman, Christopher Wheeldon, Jacques D’Amboise, Robert La Fosse, and Robert Garland. Nichols retired from New York City Ballet in June 2007 after 33 years with the company, the longest-serving principal dancer in the company’s history. Immediately prior to joining the Jacobs School, she was ballet mistress at Pennsylvania Ballet.

Irina Ter-Grigoryan received her degrees of piano performance, pedagogy, and accompaniment in the former Soviet Union. She served as a faculty member at the Baku State Conservatory and as an accompanist for the Azerbaijan State Theater Opera and Ballet. She was selected from a small pool of musicians to accompany international and regional competitions representing the Soviet Union. During her time in the United States, she has continued her work as an accompanist with the Temple Square Concert Series Recitals in Salt Lake City, Utah; University of Utah; and Ballet West Co.; and as a collaborative pianist at DePauw University. She currently holds the position of accompanist and music director with the IU Jacobs School of Music Ballet Department.

Michael Vernon is professor of ballet at the IU Jacobs School of Music. He studied at the Royal Ballet School in London with Dame Ninette de Valois and Leonide Massine. He performed with The Royal Ballet, The Royal Opera Ballet, and the London Festival Ballet before moving to New York in 1976 to join the Eglevsky Ballet as ballet master and resident choreographer under the directorship of Edward Villella. Vernon served as artistic director of the company from 1989 to 1996. He has choreographed for the Eglevsky Ballet, BalletMet, and North Carolina Dance Theatre, and Mikhail Baryshnikov commissioned him to choreograph the pas de deux In a Country Garden for American Ballet Theatre (ABT). Vernon’s solo S’Wonderful was danced by ABT principal Cynthia Harvey in the presence of President and Mrs. Reagan and shown nationwide on CBS television. Vernon served as the assistant choreographer on Ken Russell’s movie Valentino, starring Rudolph Nureyev and Leslie Caron. Vernon has taught at Steps on Broadway (New York City) since 1980 and been a company teacher for American Ballet Theatre, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Metropolitan Opera Ballet, and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. He has been involved with the Ballet Program of the Chautauqua Institution since 1996 and is the artistic advisor for the Ballet School of Stamford. He is permanent guest teacher at the Manhattan Youth Ballet and has a long association with Ballet Hawaii. For Indiana University, Vernon has choreographed Endless Night, Jeux, Spectre de la Rose, and Cathedral, and has staged and provided additional choreography for the full-length classics Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty. He has choreographed for many IU Jacobs School of Music Opera Theater productions, such as Faust and the world premiere of Vincent.

Sarah Wroth is chair of the Ballet Department and associate professor of ballet at the IU Jacobs School of Music. She began her training at the Frederick School of Classical Ballet in Frederick, Maryland. In 2003, she earned a Bachelor of Science in Ballet Performance with an Outside Field in Education from the Jacobs School of Music. That same year, she joined Boston Ballet as a member of the corps de ballet. With the company, Wroth performed principal roles in works by William Forsythe, Jiri Kylian, Marius Petipa, Jerome Robbins, Helen Pickett, and Mikko Nissinen, and soloist roles in ballets by Sir Frederick Ashton, George Balanchine, and August Bournonville. She has performed with Boston Ballet internationally in Spain, England, South Korea, and Finland. In 2009, she was awarded the E. Virginia Williams Inspiration Award for her unwavering dedication to ballet and the Boston Ballet Company. Wroth earned a Master of Science in Nonprofit Management from Northeastern University in 2015 and retired from Boston Ballet in May 2017.

Maddie Brown
Miguel Calero
Ruth Connelly
Sophia Davis
Joey DeCola
Zoe Gallagher
Natalia Garcia
Jayda Hazelett
Christina Henares
Aram Hengen
Sophia Long
Sarah MacGregor
Michaela Martin Mason
Amanda Norcross
Tierney Solmo
Maddie Tyler
Gabriel Weiner
Zoë van Beever

Christopher Balbuena
Fletcher Barr
Margaret Broadhurst
Elizabeth Burnett
Indiana Coté
Ashlyn DuPree
Kelly Gleason
Annaliesa Gowe
Grace Jaramillo
Brigitte Kossuth
Christina Lewis
Audrey Osburn
Jessica Ousterhout
Lucy Sheppard
Allison Smith
Carson Van Popering

Lauren Batterbee
Eva Bendesky
Claire Bowers
Stanley Cannon
Trey Ferdyn
Bryan Gregory
Ethan Houck
Maya Jackson
Mary Elizabeth Manville
Gates Northrup
Catherine Payson
Josh Randall
Elias Simpson
Lillian Smith
Ella Sperry
Emily Vlasnik

Kaito Aihara
Luke Alcaraz
Ava Beller
Brianna Fuller
Arnon Gafni-Kane
Emily Hain
Sejal Janaswamy
Kale Jette
Emily Jorgensen
Ava Juleen
Cordelia Leff
Ava Maskin
Lola Mayo
Madeline Muth
Elly O’Connell
Julia Outmesguine
Hannah Reiff
Mia Vinick
Sarah Wilkinson
Rebekah WolfsonKilayko
Sarah Yoak
Jared Zeltner