Heart’s Desire—Ballet Austin’s Valentine’s Weekend Performance

The Details:

When: February 14-16, 2025
Where: The Long Center for the Performing Arts
Tickets: Available here

This Valentine’s weekend, Ballet Austin presents Heart’s Desire, a captivating trio of celebrated ballets—Polyphonia, Desire, and ZigZag—woven into a single performance that transforms the complexities of love, from longing to fulfillment, into movement.

• On Polyphonia: “When the curtains rise, it’s like being shot out of a cannon,” Christopher Weeldon says of his ballet, Polyphonia, which is the performance that will open Ballet Austin’s show. The music presents “a really complex mathematical problem to solve through movement [and] the choreography is making the music visual and helping the audience to understand this very complex music. Yet, in the end, “it all comes together in the end like perfect clockwork.”

Here are clips of Weeldon discussing his choreography with scenes from New York City Ballet’s rendition of Polyphonia:

• On Desire: The second act of the show brings Austin Ballet’s very own artistic director Stephen Mills’ ballet—Desire. Mills explained that the performance, a duet, that depicts “a very intimate moment for a couple as the woman is deciding whether she is going to stay in this relationship with this man? Or is she going to exit this relationship?” Here’s more about Desire, from Miller:

• On ZigZag: The performance closes with Jessica Lang’s ZigZag, which Mills, Austin Ballet’s artistic director describes as “one of the most fun, upbeat, positive dance works that I've ever experienced.” Mills notes that American Ballet Theater, which is “one of the greatest dance companies in the world” and “revered as a living national treasure,” is the only company to have performed ZigZag …  until now. “So, we feel really, really special to be able to have that distinction of being able to perform it after that company.”

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