By Steve Sucato

Premiered in February in Akron, Ohio Contemporary Ballet’s Ballet Unbound now moves to Cleveland at Playhouse Square’s Mimi Ohio Theatre on March 28, 2026. The diverse mixed repertory program of works by Paul Taylor, Heinz Poll, and Nycole Ray will now include the world premiere of Gordon Peirce Schmidt’s timely “From the Street.” 

Set to a piano sonata of the same name (a.k.a. “1. X. 1905.”) by Moravian composer Leoš Janáček that will be played live by international award-winning pianist Jiayan Sun, was commissioned by local Janáček enthusiasts and OCB supporters, Eric and Marian Klieber.  

Schmidt, an award-winning director, choreographer, and producer, has worked with ballet legends Maya Plisetskaya and Rudolph Nureyev, and is a former resident choreographer with Ballet Chicago and Executive Artistic Director of Grand Rapids Ballet. 

In choreographing the new 12-minute ballet, Schmidt says Janáček’s piano sonata presented a challenge to his go-to creative process.

“I don’t create movement until I am in the studio with the dancers,” says Schmidt. “I get to know the dancers and see what I can accomplish with them, and challenge them while also reflecting the music they are dancing and adding some narrative to the work.”

In the piano sonata, Schmidt says he found it to be non-conducive to the creation of a linear narrative. Instead, Schmidt says he looked to the music’s tragic origin story for inspiration.

Janáček composed the piano sonata as a tribute to a carpenter named František Pavlík (1885–1905), who, during demonstrations in support of a university in Brno in 1905, was bayoneted and killed.  

Schmidt saw parallels in that origin story with what had happened recently in Minnesota with ICE’s killing of demonstrators. The resulting ballet incorporates the music’s heartfelt emotions with a non-linear, loose narrative, highlighting a central figure that conveys the trauma of each tragedy.

“Whether you get the story or not isn’t important,” says Schmidt. “What is important is the intent of the music and the dancers’ movement, along with what is going on emotionally inside of them.”

Switching emotional gears, modern dance icon Paul Taylor’s masterwork, “Airs” (1978), is a 25-minute piece performed by four women and three men to the music of George Frideric Handel. Danced in Taylor’s signature movement style, the work conjures images of air and water currents.

Staged by former Taylor company dancer, Susan McGuire, “Airs’” spatial patterns suggest gusts, eddies, and a flow of energy from dancer to dancer. “Paul wanted the dancers to appear as if they were dancing underwater,” says McGuire.

While Taylor’s “Airs” evokes dancing underwater, Poll’s Adagio for Two Dancers” (1973)  evokes the image of a couple dancing under the light of a cathedral window. 

The neoclassical pas de deux, set to composer Tomaso Albinoni’s “Adagio for Strings and Organ in G Minor,” is sculptural and serene.

Rounding out the program will be Ray’s “Opaque,” making its Cleveland debut. The modern dance work draws on a period in Ray’s career when she felt excluded and was experiencing a lack of communication and transparency in the workplace.  

The former Artistic Director of Dallas Black Dance Theatre: Encore!, Ray originally created the work for her company in 2015. Set to music by British composer Max Richter, the 20-minute piece has undergone several changes in the past decade. For OCB performances of it, Ray choreographed a new section, which she says better unifies the emotional arc of the work. In it, a solo dancer, costumed in a stage-filling black skirt, serves as a force that brings together a couple we see earlier in the work, whose attempts to connect were thwarted by unseen forces pulling them apart.

Ohio Contemporary Ballet presents Ballet Unbound at 7 p.m., Saturday, March 28, 2026, at Playhouse Square’s Mimi Ohio Theatre, 1511 Euclid Ave, Cleveland. Tickets range from $12 to $84 and are available online at playhousesquare.org/events/detail/ballet-unbound or by phone at (216) 241-6000.