Live in Studio A, the company’s intimate season opener at The Martin Center for Nashville Ballet

There are worse ways to begin a ballet season than with George Balanchine. In fact, for Nashville Ballet, opening its 2026–27 season with Live in Studio A felt like an elegant declaration of intent: honor the classical foundation, invite the audience closer, and then make room—generously, ambitiously—for the future. Presented in Studio A at The Martin Center for Nashville Ballet, the program placed viewers near enough to register not only line and lift, but breath, weight, effort, and risk. That proximity changed the terms of the evening. Ballet was not framed as distant spectacle; it became a living conversation between tradition, experiment, and a company clearly interested in showing how both can occupy the same room.

Nashville Ballet’s own description of the program promised an “up-close view” of dance anchored by Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante and surrounded by new works from the company’s artistic team and dancers. The evening delivered on that promise with unusual clarity. Rather than functioning as a sampler, Live in Studio A unfolded like a statement about creative continuity: a canonical twentieth-century ballet opening the door to five distinct choreographic voices, including world premieres by Maia Montgomery, Anneliese Guerin, and Garritt McCabe, and a tantalizing preview of Travis Bradley’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE

Friday, September 11th — 7:30 p.m.

Saturday, September 12th — 7:30 p.m.

Sunday, September 13th — 2:00 p.m.

Thursday, September 17th — 7:30 p.m.

Friday, September 18th — 7:30 p.m.

Saturday, September 19th — 7:30 p.m.

Sunday, September 20th — 2:00 p.m.

Balanchine as a Bright Beginning

Allegro Brillante is often described as a miniature distillation of Balanchine’s style, and in the close quarters of Studio A, its speed and clarity became almost startling. Set to Tchaikovsky, the work asks for fleetness without blur, radiance without sentimentality, and precision that never feels mechanical. Nashville Ballet met the challenge with crisp attack and an appealing sense of musical buoyancy. The dancers’ footwork had the necessary sparkle, but what registered most was the scale of the physical demand. Seen at this distance, Balanchine’s sunny classic becomes less a decorative curtain-raiser than a test of stamina, coordination, and nerve.

As an opener, it was exactly right. Allegro Brillante gave the evening its formal spine: clean, accelerated, and joyfully unforgiving. It also established the theme that would run through the program—that virtuosity is not only a matter of display, but of communal attention. In Studio A, every entrance, every partnering exchange, every breath between phrases became visible. There was nowhere for the dancers to hide, and that visibility worked in their favor.

Devotion in Motion

The world premiere of In Devotion, choreographed by Maia Montgomery, followed with a more inward pulse. Where Balanchine dazzled through architecture and speed, Montgomery’s work seemed interested in gathering energy, letting it pass through the body, and asking what commitment looks like when expressed through touch, proximity, and repeated gesture. The piece offered a welcome shift in temperature after the crystalline brightness of the opener.

In Devotion was strongest when it trusted its own sense of ritual. Its title suggests reverence, and its choreography appeared to search for that quality without becoming overly literal. The result was a premiere that felt less like a finished monument than an honest offering—carefully shaped, emotionally contained, and attentive to the charged space between dancers. In the broader arc of the evening, Montgomery’s contribution helped establish that Nashville Ballet is not merely presenting new work as novelty; it is cultivating choreographic voices from within.

A Portrait Interrupted: The Picture of Dorian Gray

After intermission, the second half began with The Picture of Dorian Gray: A Preview of What’s to Come, choreographed by Travis Bradley and inspired by Oscar Wilde’s novel. Billed openly as a preview, the work wisely did not pretend to be complete. Instead, it offered a glimpse into a larger theatrical world—shadowed, stylish, and psychologically suggestive. Its most effective quality was its appetite. It seemed to want more stage time, more narrative depth, more space for corruption, beauty, vanity, and consequence to unfold.

The ending, with its unmistakable “To Be Continued,” could have felt like a gimmick. Instead, it landed as an invitation. Bradley’s preview suggested a full-length possibility with genuine theatrical promise, particularly if the eventual work leans into the story’s moral glamour and decay. The fragment did exactly what a preview should do: it whetted the appetite and left the audience wanting the next chapter. In a culture often hungry for immediate resolution, there was pleasure in being deliberately left suspended.

Hard Times, Clear Nerve

The fourth work, Hard Times, another world premiere, was choreographed by Anneliese Guerin. Its title carried social and emotional weight before the first movement even began, and the choreography responded with a grounded seriousness that distinguished it from the evening’s other offerings. Guerin’s work suggested pressure: bodies negotiating resistance, individuals shaped by forces larger than themselves, and movement patterns that did not always seek easy release.

What made Hard Times compelling was its refusal to smooth every edge. The piece seemed willing to sit with strain and ambiguity, and that willingness gave it texture. In a mixed repertory program, a work like this can function as a necessary counterweight: after the gleam of Balanchine, the devotion of Montgomery, and the theatrical tease of Bradley, Guerin’s premiere brought gravity back into the studio. It was not merely somber; it was alert, muscular, and questioning.

Let It Groove—and It Did

The evening closed with the world premiere of Let it Groove by Garritt McCabe, and groove it did. After a program that moved through classicism, devotion, gothic anticipation, and hardship, McCabe sent the audience out on rhythm, wit, and communal pleasure. The work had the kind of kinetic confidence that makes a closing piece feel earned rather than merely upbeat. It loosened the room without lowering the artistic stakes.

Let it Groove also underscored the particular value of this format. In a larger theater, its charm might have traveled outward; in Studio A, it seemed to bounce from dancer to audience and back again. The piece benefited from immediacy. Its musicality felt social, its humor unforced, and its momentum infectious. As a finale, it made a persuasive case that joy, handled with craft, can be as artistically serious as darkness.

A Season Opener with Purpose

As a season opener, Live in Studio A succeeded because it understood scale. The program did not try to simulate the grandeur of a proscenium evening in a smaller room. Instead, it used intimacy as an artistic asset. The audience could feel the mechanics of ballet—the exertion, timing, breath, recalibration, and trust—without losing sight of the larger cultural proposition: Nashville Ballet is presenting itself as both steward and laboratory.

That combination matters. In a city whose cultural identity is often defined through music, Nashville Ballet’s opening program made a strong argument for dance as one of the city’s essential live arts—social, immediate, and capable of holding multiple histories at once. Balanchine provided the classical inheritance; the premieres supplied the sense of becoming. The result was not a perfect evening in the sanitized sense, but it was a vivid one: stylish, ambitious, human-scaled, and alive with the promise of more.

And perhaps that is the most encouraging note on which to begin a season. Live in Studio A did not merely introduce a roster of works; it introduced a company willing to stand close to its audience, close to its tradition, and close to the creative risks that keep an art form breathing. If The Picture of Dorian Gray promised “to be continued,” the same might be said of the evening as a whole. Nashville Ballet has opened the door. The season now has our attention.