Deceit, desire, and death shadow La Sonnambula's masked ball, haunting with the image of a beautiful sleepwalker and the misfortune in her wake.

Balanchine choreographed this work (then called Night Shadow) in 1946, for Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, featuring Alexandra Danilova, Nicholas Magallanes, and Maria Tallchief. He used music by Vittorio Rieti based on themes from several of Vincenzo Bellini’s operas. The ballet was first performed by New York City Ballet in 1960, with Allegra Kent, Erik Bruhn, and Jillana in the lead roles.

Set at a masked ball, the one-act La Sonnambula tells the story of a Coquette, a Poet, and a beautiful Sleepwalker. The story remains mysterious, inviting different interpretations of the characters’ actions and relationships; it is the moods and emotions evoked by Balanchine’s choreography that give the ballet its resonance. Its atmosphere of sinister menace brings to mind 19th-century Romantic ballets like Giselle and La Sylphide, with their haunting stories of doomed love.

A hypnotically alluring piece that captures the haunting, otherworldly music of Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question features a lone ballerina who is held aloft throughout the distinctive dance of subtle mystery.

“The Unanswered Question” is the second section of Balanchine’s Ivesiana, which he choreographed to a series of unrelated Charles Ives orchestral pieces shortly after the composer’s death in 1954. The complex music of this Connecticut-born artist, incorporating extensive use of atonality, clashing meters and quarter-tones, had rarely been performed prior to its use in Ivesiana.

A work that drips with gilded grandeur, Theme and Variations pays tribute to Balanchine’s imperial Russia with its regal structure and sumptuous Tschaikovsky score.

An intensive display of the classical ballet lexicon, Theme and Variations was intended, as Balanchine wrote, “to evoke that great period in classical dancing when Russian ballet flourished with the aid of Tschaikovsky’s music.” Set to the final movement of Tschaikovsky’s third orchestral suite, the score consists of a theme and 12 variations, culminating in a polonaise in the Imperial style. Arguably the most substantial part of the suite, Tschaikovsky himself began the concert tradition of playing this final movement as a separate piece. Balanchine created Theme and Variations in 1947 for Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre), and it briefly entered the NYCB repertory in 1960. In 1970 Balanchine used the complete orchestral suite to create Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3, and Theme and Variations, with a few minor revisions, returned to the repertory as the fourth and final movement of the ballet.

Pithoprakta is a groundbreaking work that merges music, mathematics, and movement into a strikingly original theatrical experience. Composed by Iannis Xenakis in 1956, the score is built on principles of probability and statistical mechanics, translating the unpredictable motion of particles into sound. The result is a dense, shimmering sonic landscape—at once chaotic and rigorously structured.

In its ballet form, Pithoprakta becomes a physical exploration of these same ideas. Dancers embody shifting patterns, collisions, and dispersions, moving as both individuals and as part of a larger, ever-evolving system. The choreography often emphasizes group dynamics over narrative, creating a visual counterpart to Xenakis’s complex musical architecture. Abstract yet deeply immersive, Pithoprakta challenges traditional notions of ballet, offering a powerful intersection of science and art.