Oklahoma City Ballet’s upcoming production, Shorts, brings together three distinct works that showcase different facets of contemporary dance in a single evening. While each piece stands on its own for its unique styles and compositions, together, they create a program designed to appeal to both longtime ballet enthusiasts and newcomers to the art form.
But that’s not the only draw of Shorts. Oklahoma City Ballet fans are also getting a world premiere set to the music of hometown heroes The Flaming Lips. This marks the first time a professional ballet company has collaborated with the rock band, creating a one-of-a-kind intersection of classical dance and contemporary music.
The program showcases two other pieces: Stephanie Martinez’s vibrant work “Otra Vez, Otra Vez, Otra Vez,” bringing rhythmic dance and a Latin flair to the Civic Center Music Hall, 201 N. Walker Ave., stage. This short will contrast with George Balanchine’s “Divertimento No. 15,” a neoclassical piece performed in a more traditional ballet style.
Oklahoma Gazette chatted with the company’s artistic director, Ryan Jolicoeur-Nye, to discuss this ambitious triple bill that should hopefully have ballet traditionalists, contemporary dance enthusiasts and psychedelic rock fans intrigued.
To start, we wanted to learn more about how these three diverse pieces came together and what audiences can expect from the eclectic spring program.
“When making a triple bill performance, it’s important to create a full meal of different things so that there’s something on the menu that everyone can latch onto,” Jolicoeur-Nye said.
He said the program is educational as much as it is, hopefully, a draw for new ballet fans.
“For dance lovers and people who know the history of dance, an iconic ballet like Balanchine’s ‘Divertimento No. 15’ really speaks to them,” he said. “But potentially the majority of people don’t know Balanchine in Oklahoma, or if you’re not familiar with dance, and that might not be a draw for you to buy tickets. When I was thinking about The Flaming Lips, I thought, first of all, I really love when organizations collaborate locally.”
If there’s one thing that Okies are good at, it’s supporting other Okies. And in terms of music stars, you can’t get any more local than The Flaming Lips.
“And with them being from Oklahoma City, I saw it as a great way to influence people who might not be familiar with dance, or maybe they’ve never bought a ticket before, to come and see the company,” Jolicoeur-Nye said.
Do You Realize
You know The Flaming Lips, right? Oklahoma City’s very own psychedelic rock band? At the very least, maybe you’ve spotted Wayne Coyne’s shock of gray hair moving through the city’s favorite haunts. (I saw him at Cafe Kacao once.)
Since coming together in the 1980s, the group has continued to gain notoriety through the decades with its vibrant performances and alt-rock approach to music, but now its reach extends into a new artistic atmosphere: ballet, for the first time ever.
This marriage between rock and ballet pushes against traditions that have kept the two bodies of art largely separate. While some companies have certainly dabbled with more recent music, The Flaming Lips’ experimental sound represents a dramatic shift from the orchestral scores that typically accompany professional ballet company performances.
At the time I called Jolicoeur-Nye, The Flaming Lips portion of the show, “Do You Realize,” was still in its infant stages, the choreography about to be finished the next week with a first round of rehearsals forthcoming. The band has been involved in the prep work, with Coyne as a collaborator giving Jolicoeur-Nye feedback on his early ideas.
“It’s been a fun process so far,” Jolicoeur-Nye said.
The whole thing started with an idea pitched to the band’s longtime manager, Scott Booker, and one of the band members, then eventually to Coyne.
“We ended up chatting with Wayne, and I gave him a list of songs and some ideas that I was having about the work, and he was really interested and eager, so we kept putting one foot in front of the other.”
The Flaming Lips are known for extravagant, often surreal live shows with neon lights and lasers, fog, confetti, and unconventional props and sets. The stages often look more like Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz than anything else. The band reimagines and expands what music and performance can be.
Here’s an example: When we were still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the group famously pulled off its “Space Bubble” show at The Criterion, performing in giant socially distanced balls. (2021 was certainly a time.) The show made an international splash.
Coyne is a frequent collaborator with artists around the world. In 2018, he created a giant installation called “The King’s Mouth” at the Santa Fe location of the collective Meow Wolf.
The Flaming Lips’ local art complex, The Womb, later became the home base for OKC’s spinoff of Meow Wolf, Factory Obscura. In 2023, an enormous painting Coyne helped create with Damien Hirst was a CODAawards Top 100 winner.
All this is to say that as you imagine such an explosion of art, color and light, you might wonder what fans can expect from the band’s team-up with Oklahoma City Ballet.
“Well, if you’ve ever seen a Flaming Lips concert, you can know that Wayne is pretty whimsical and out there with his ideas,” Jolicoeur-Nye said. “So I think we just want to match the essence of what The Flaming Lips bring to the stage.”
Jolicoeur-Nye was hesitant to give too much away about the show’s look and feel ahead of time.
“The audience can expect to really experience that essence of The Flaming Lips,” he said. “And I told the designers, our lighting designer, set designer and costume designer, that I would like this ballet to resemble a rock concert. What can we do to build this fusion between a rock and roll concert and a theater ballet?”
Some members of the Oklahoma City Ballet’s team are also fans, and it means a lot to Jolicoeur-Nye that Oklahoma City locals are helping build the ballet with a band that has stayed close to home for years.
“Our director of production, Megan Buchanan, has been a Flaming Lips fan since the ’80s,” Jolicoeur-Nye said. “She’s designing all of the sets and concepts. … She’s been pretty instrumental in coming up with the essence of this ballet.”
To Jolicoeur-Nye, this is a combination of rock fantasy and dance that makes perfect sense.
“For me, it’s kind of like cooking. When you take really great food from influences from two countries and fuse them together and you have a really great piece of fusion food, it’s kind of like that … the rock and roll aspect mixed with the ballet dancing that we do, to try to fuse those things together and make something new and interesting.”
The Flaming Lips portion of the Shorts program will close the show as its big finale.
Divertimento No. 15
The opener, however, is Balanchine.
Even if your ballet knowledge is limited to The Nutcracker during the holidays, you probably have heard the name George Balanchine at some point.
It’s not dramatic to say the Russian-born choreographer who became an American dance icon revolutionized the entire art form. He began dancing at age 10 and started choreographing in his teens. Pushing the boundaries of modern ballet with his distinctive neoclassical style, Balanchine produced an astonishing 465 works throughout his career, according to New York City Ballet.
In 1934, Balanchine came to America and co-founded the School of American Ballet and, in 1948, legendary New York City Ballet.
“Divertimento No. 15” is a ballet set to Mozart’s score of the same name — and the only time Balanchine choreographed a work to the composer. The ballet premiered in May 1956 at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut, and is widely considered to be one of Balanchine’s masterpieces.
Jolicoeur-Nye chose the work strategically.
“I think it’s supposed to be a juxtaposition to the kind of gritty contemporary work, so that it’s sort of a palette cleanser,” he said.
While Balanchine choreographed in a way that challenged some ballet norms during his time, with more extreme extensions and positions with visible tension, his work remained rooted in classical ballet and its intricacies.
“I just think it is iconic of the Balanchine style,” Jolicoeur-Nye said of the piece. “I think it really represents the neoclassical style and what New York City Ballet was doing in the time. And it’s elegant. It’s technically challenging.”
Balanchine taught his dancers to be fast and athletic, so much so that their heels hardly touched the ground as they moved expansively across the stage. I asked what else makes “Divertimento No. 15” so unique.
“What makes Balanchine work stand out is just the musicality,” he said. “The musicality is so palpable in his work, and I think that’s what I love about doing Balanchine. It also challenges the dancers to move really quick.”
“Otra Vez, Otra Vez, Otra Vez”
“Otra Vez, Otra Vez, Otra Vez,” choreographed by Stephanie Martinez, is the second piece of the program. It is classified as an Afro-Cuban work and is the second-most recent of the program, premiering in 2019.
“I think it’s got an Afro-Cuban kind of essence, but it really is an eclectic work,” Jolicoeur-Nye said. “It loosely is based off of Picasso’s The Old Guitarist from the Blue Period.”
On her dance company’s Instagram page, PARA.MAR Dance Theatre, Martinez likens the work to the sensation of “sonder,” when you realize that the people you see daily are living complex, full stories of their own alongside you, though you might not always be aware of it.
Martinez is a Chicago-based choreographer who has worked on more than 70 ballets. Classically trained, she often combines different forms of dance in each piece for a singular take on contemporary choreography and bold, diverse dance. In 2019, The Chicago Tribune called her a “chameleon.”
The label fits an artist who continuously transforms herself and her work, adapting to different companies, dancers and cultural influences while maintaining her artistic voice. Her ability to shift between styles while creating cohesive, compelling work places her among today’s most versatile choreographers.
In “Otra Vez, Otra Vez, Otra Vez,” dancers undulate between more traditional poses and contorted modern shapes, punctuated by swinging hips and assertive flourishes. One section finds a dancer paired with a dark hat as an initial partner, the ticking of a clock the musical accompaniment to the dancer’s twists, leaps and kicks until vocals (and another dancer) join them in a sensual duet.
Speaking of the backing, Jolicoeur-Nye said the music is just as important to the experience of “Otra Vez, Otra Vez, Otra Vez.” He called out Chavela Vargas, a Costa Rican-born Mexican singer who was known for her soulful renditions of Mexican ranchera music, specifically.
“It’s sort of like this raspy Latin blues sound that’s just so earthy, and you can’t help but want to move to it,” Jolicoeur-Nye said. “And [the piece is] also mixed with classical music. And so it takes you on a little bit of a — not just an emotional and visual journey, but also a journey of sound.”
I wondered how he arrived at the decision to include the unique piece in the program.
“I presented this ballet in Arkansas, the company I used to run there,” he said. “And I remember going through the process of those rehearsals and watching the dancers latch on to the nuance and the details and the essence of this piece and really attach to the music and also connect with each other.”
Indeed, the piece will find dancers communicating with each other in seductive and intimate pairings and trios as they tell their wordless stories.
“And I just thought [Martinez’s] work is so authentic and honest,” he said, “and it’s something that you can really dive into the fabric of the movement and how it seeps into the music.”
Dancers’ perspective
Having chosen the three pieces and now at the point of putting the performance together, part of what motivated Jolicoeur-Nye’s ordering of the program was a consideration for the company and what they wanted (and required, actually, to do their best).
“One would think that you would want to go ‘Otra Vez’ and then a nice, clean Balanchine, and then The Flaming Lips, and kind of do cookie, cream, cookie,” he said. “But the challenge for the dancers, they have to be really placed in the Balanchine work. And when you do something like ‘Otra Vez’ and you’re moving around and noodling and exploring your joints, and then you have to tighten back up and do a more classical work, that’s the opposite order of what the dancers prefer.”
I, with my two months of adult ballet and no other dance experience, thought that sounded very sensible.
“They’d like to just get the stiff stuff out of the way and then cut loose,” Jolicoeur-Nye agreed.
I asked Jolicoeur-Nye about the other ways the dancers have responded to the stylistic diversity of these pieces.
“Well, for them, I think the diversity is what they love,” he said. “They love to be challenged and move out of their comfort zone.”
Each piece in the Shorts program offers its own test of their skills.
“You have something like ‘Otra Vez’ that’s kind of gritty and authentic … it gives me the feeling of a smoky bar, I suppose, and so they can find a side of themselves in that movement,” Jolicoeur-Nye said.
Even the traditional, more familiar setup for “Divertimento No. 15” has its technical hurdles.
“And then the Balanchine, it’s just deceptively difficult,” he said. “It looks light and effortless, but it really demands extreme control and speed and delicacy and musicality.”
While the night’s grand finale will seemingly be a bit more carefree and less classically structured, the fact that it is new choreography and a premiere to The Flaming Lips are enough of an undertaking.
“I think with The Flaming Lips one, it really is just supposed to represent the joy of dance. And I think with The Flaming Lips one, I’m taking them a little bit on a journey … [a] dreamlike, nonlinear journey through different stages of life, struggle, reflection, rebellion, acceptance, and all of this done through kind of fun and trippy music. So I think the dancers can just sort of let go and enjoy the dance.”
Performances of Shorts are 7:30 p.m. Friday, May 9; 7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 10; and 2 p.m. Sunday, May 11. Single tickets range from $20 to $103 and are available now through Oklahoma City Ballet and Civic Center box offices. Call Oklahoma City Ballet at 405-848-8637 or visit okcballet.org.
This article appears in OKC Ballet Shorts.